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When
1 – 2 p.m., March 20, 2026
Where
The Center for Latin American Studies is partnering with the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry this spring to host the Charlas con Café Speaker Series – a weekly space to hear lectures from a wide variety of experts and discuss topics relevant to the Latin American region, Fridays from 1-2 pm (unless otherwise specified). Coffee and snacks starting at 12:30pm!
Likantatay emerged as a squatter settlement in the arid poverty belt of Calama mining town in the early 1990s. For a decade, the community survived by siphoning sewage water to sustain their crops—a desperate necessity they viewed as a profound humiliation at the hands of the State. Adding insult to injury, in 2018, the National Corporation for Indigenous Development (CONADI) unilaterally redefined eligibility for development programs, excluding indigenous associations and forcing Likantatay into a protracted legal battle to secure their status as a recognized indigenous "community." Despite meeting all statutory requirements, Likantatay was denied formal recognition by the very institution designed to protect them. Through an analysis of the two-year legal battle that followed, Dr. Carrasco argues that the State employs administrative barriers as a form of "political humiliation" undermining the dignity of indigenous peoples. Likantatay’s predicament is an example of critical environmental justice –not just a fight for resources– but a refusal to accept state-imposed invisibility. Ultimately, their resistance serves as a powerful reminder that dignity and justice are not granted, they are conquered.
Anita Carrasco is an environmental anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology at Luther College, USA. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology with a concentration in applied anthropology from the University of Arizona in 2011. For almost two decades, her research has focused on community relations with the mining industry and the significance of indigenous and industrial water rights in this relationship in the Atacama Desert of Chile. Her ethnography, Embracing the Anaconda: A Chronicle of Atacameño Life and Mining in the Andes, was published in 2020 by Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield. In 2024, the academic publisher Pehuén released a second edition of the Spanish version of her book under the title, El Abrazo de la Anaconda. Crónica de la vida Atacameña, Minería, y Agua en los Andes. The publication of Carrasco's book received funding from the Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Research (CIIR), a respected research center seeking to provide Chile with high-level studies of problems of intercultural relations, with an interdisciplinary, holistic perspective, supporting dialogue and respect for cultural diversity.
Q&A session with community leader, Lila Colamar.