José Manuel Zavala, PhD in anthropology from the University of the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III, has specialized in the study of the relations between colonial societies and indigenous peoples, in particular the Mapuche people of Chile and Argentina. His works on the Hispano-Mapuche parliaments, developed in collaboration with the co-authors of this work, have reconsidered a way of understanding the colonial dynamics and the insertion of the indigenous societies in these. He is a member of the Department of Historical Sciences of the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities of the University of Chile. He also has been professor-researcher of the Catholic University of Temuco and visiting professor of the Universities of Paris III and Rennes II, and is a member of international research teams in Chile, Spain and the United States.
Gertrudis Payàs is a professional translator and interpreter, trained at the University of Geneva and at Westminster (ex Polytechnic of Central London)University. She holds a Ph. D. in Translation Studies from the University of Ottawa. Her doctoral dissertation, published in 2010 (Iberoamericana Vervuert), on colonial translation history in New Spain, has been followed by a series of publications dealing with the role of translation and linguistic mediation in the Araucanian context. She teaches at the Universidad Católica de Temuco and is a member of the Interethnic and Intercultural Research Group (NEII) at this university as well as of the Alfaqueque Research Group at the University of Salamanca, in Spain.
Tom D. Dillehay is the Rebecca Webb Wilson University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Religion, and Culture and Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Latin American Studies in the Department of Anthropology, Profesor Titular de la Escuela de Arqueología de la Universidad Austral de Chile, Puerto Montt, and Adjunct Professor at several other universities in Latin America. He has carried out numerous archaeological and anthropological projects in Peru, Chile, Argentina and other South American countries and in the United States. His main interests are migration, the long-term transformative processes leading to political and economic change, and the interdisciplinary and historical methodologies designed to study those processes. He has published twenty-four books and more than four hundred refereed journal articles and book chapters. He currently directs several interdisciplinary projects focused on long-term human and environmental interaction on the north coast of Peru and on the political and cultural identity of the Mapuche people in Chile. Professor Dillehay has received numerous international and national awards for his research, books and teaching. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.