Ends of the World, Water Crisis, and Mythical Imaginaries in Shumpall by Roxana Miranda Rupailaf

In Latin America, the figure of apocalypse has been reappropriated and hybridized in contact with indigenous cosmovisions that offer other ways of understanding the end and temporality. Their knowledge and myths, far from being mere relics, represent current ontological alternatives that propose other horizons of meaning from which to resist the anthropocentric parameters of the current socio-environmental crisis. If historically mermaids and other mythical beings such as the Shumpall have allowed us to narrate and figure the agency of water, and the complex and close relationship of human beings with aquatic worlds, how to rethink these imaginaries and this vital link between humans and water in the context of the pressing drought and the gradual disappearance of this vital liquid from the territories? I will focus here on Shumpall (2011), a collection of poems by the Mapuche-Huilliche writer Roxana Miranda Rupailaf, to begin to think about this question.