Contested Nation: The Mapuche, Bandits, and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Chile

Abstract

In seven clear and concise chapters, Pilar Herr weaves together a wide array of primary sources—official correspondence, consular reports, travel writing, documents on the parlamentos (peace negotiations), political constitutions, intellectual writings, newspapers, and more—to tell the history of Chilean state formation and how this affected and was affected by the Mapuche, “an umbrella term for several indigenous groups of Chile's southern frontier who speak the same indigenous language” (p. 4). Focusing primarily on the 1810s through to the 1830s but dipping into the second half of the century toward the end of the book, Herr's overriding argument is a simple but very important one: we cannot understand Chilean state formation without looking at what was happening in Araucanía (primarily the actions of bandits and Indigenous inhabitants), and we cannot understand the history of Chile's southern borderlands region without looking at local people's interactions with the fledgling republican state.In the early nineteenth century the Mapuche were an independent people; they “owned their territory and politically and economically managed their own affairs” (p. 111). By the end of the nineteenth century they had been “conquered”—or “pacified,” according to many official sources of the time—by a postcolonial Chilean state that was firmly committed to a centralist and expansionist nation-building project. As told by Herr, this was a relatively successful project, at least from the perspective of the country's economic and political elites, and Chile became known, across the Americas and beyond, for its institutional stability in the nineteenth century. A centralized political framework that rejected Indigenous autonomy was not a predestined outcome of the 1810s and 1820s, however. This latter view of history, which is elaborated by several scholars, such as Florencia Mallon and Pablo Mariman, is not explicitly engaged by Herr, although her book helpfully emphasizes Indigenous political agency and the ongoing contestation of Chilean state policy.While elite rhetoric is at the center of the story narrated in Contested Nation, Indigenous Mapuche voices appear throughout, albeit sometimes fleetingly or indirectly due to the criollo-dominated nature of the archival material available to researchers: for example, Francisco Inalikang, who acted as interpreter to the Argentine general José de San Martín; Francisco Mariluán, who established epistolary exchanges and indeed friendships with several Chilean officials; caciques encountered by the Polish scientist Ignacio Domeyko and quoted in his 1846 travel memoir Araucanía y sus habitantes; and Mapuche leaders involved in the parlamentos (presuming that the records of such peace negotiations accurately incorporated their statements). Herr is careful to note the internal diversity of Mapuche society during this period—meaning that it is difficult to generalize about their attitudes to mainstream Chilean society or their strategies regarding how to integrate into it (or, indeed, how to resist such integration)—and she usefully draws on the work of Mapuche historian Carlos Contreras Painemal, which reproduces and interrogates the peace treaties of the nineteenth century (and the colonial era) in order to promote contemporary Mapuche territorial claims and a return to a different way of doing politics.While Herr draws on Painemal's work, she does not directly engage with the political project underpinning it or refer to other Mapuche academics who are working on similar or related histories, such as Jimena Pichinao, Héctor Nahuelpán, or the above-cited Mariman, all of whom contributed to the pathbreaking collection of essays Historia, colonialismo y resistencia desde el país mapuche, published by Ediciones Comunidad de Historia Mapuche in 2012. Contested Nation would have benefited by dialoguing more extensively with this growing body of scholarship, but there is no doubt that Herr's book makes an important contribution regardless. Certain concepts (such as the “frontier”) and terms (such as “second-class citizen”) could have been probed in more depth and the analysis of the ambiguity and complexity of Mapuche-Chilean relations thus further enriched, but Herr's rigorous empirical research, and the way that she brings it together in a cohesive and highly succinct account, make this a valuable monograph. It will be useful to scholars and students working in many different areas of Latin American history, not least borderlands history, Indigenous-state relations, banditry, and Chilean political history.