Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante is a person and scholar who belongs to the Mapuche People. He grew up in Tralcao, a rural village in the River Region of Valdivia in southern Chile. He studied Philosophy and Social Sciences at the Universidad Austral de Chile (1980-1985), obtained his MA at the University of Oregon (1995-1997), and earned his PhD in Hispanic Studies at Cornell (1997-2001). He taught at Harvard University between 2001 and 2009. Since 2009, as Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, he has taught Latin American and indigenous literatures, media and cultures at The University of Texas at Austin. He recently published his second single-authored book, Acoustic Colonialism: Acts of Mapuche Interference (Duke UP, 2025). He is a founding member of the Comunidad de Historia Mapuche (CHM), a collective of indigenous, Mapuche researchers based in Temuco, southern Chile. Previously, through the CHM, he co-edited two collections of essays on colonial violence, Awükan ka kütrankan zugu Wajmapu meu: Violencias coloniales en Wajmapu (Ediciones Comunidad de Historia Mapuche, 2015) and Ta iñ fijke xipa rakizuameluwün. Historia, colonialismo y resistencia desde el país Mapuche (Ediciones de Historia Mapuche, 2012). The latter, the first book produced by the Mapuche collective, brought together fourteen Mapuche authors to examine multiple dimensions of Mapuche history, in which the concept of colonialism serves as the axis of debate and reflection on historical, political, cultural and territorial issues. In 2007, Professor Cárcamo-Huechante published his first book, Tramas del mercado: imaginación económica, cultura pública y literatura en el Chile de fines del siglo veinte (Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio), and co-edited a volume of essays entitled El valor de la cultura: arte, literatura y mercado en América Latina (with Alvaro Fernández-Bravo and Alejandra Laera, Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2007). He has published articles in prestigious academic journals. He is also a member of the editorial boards of such refereed journals in the United States and in Latin America, as Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, Latin American Literary Review, Chasqui, and Taller de Letras. Between 2019 and 2022, he served on the Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). In August 2012, Professor Cárcamo-Huechante won the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award, the University of Texas System Board of Regents’ highest teaching honor; and, during the 2013-2014 academic year, he was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. Professor Cárcamo-Huechante is currently a Fulbright Specialist, serving a three year term (2024-2027).
Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante
