The Mapuche in Modern Chile: A Cultural History

Abstract

The author of this book studies the representation of the Mapuche people from the military occupation of their land (1861–1881) until the present. As the author herself explains, “Alongside an analysis of Mapuche political activism, the following chapters investigate the multiple, contesting ways in which Mapuche and Chilean artists, writers, and intellectuals have grappled with the country's history of internal colonialism” (p. 4). She does so by “deal[ing] with poetry more substantially than any other form of cultural production, but [by] also incorporat[ing] popular music, photography, theater, testimonial writing, ethnographic studies, and literary criticism” (p. 4). Another major concern of the book is state cultural policy toward the Mapuche, which is intimately connected to political or socioeconomic reforms. The author “bring[s] to the forefront some of the key shifts in cultural policy so as to expand our understanding of Chilean state discourses on the ‘indigenous question’” (p. 4). She also “scrutinizes changes to the teaching curriculum at both local and national levels,” as well as government policies relating to museums and national monuments (pp. 4–5). This book, in other words, is an analysis of images and words as discourse, with the aim of resolving the following questions: What did military conquest mean for the Mapuche and Chilean military officers, beyond the obvious economic, political, and territorial consequences? What did compulsory primary education in the early twentieth century mean for the Mapuche? In what ways did they engage with national debates about schooling and with broader state discourses of civilization and modernization? What type of education did they seek? What did discourses of indigenismo (since 1940) mean for Chilean and Mapuche intellectuals?The author's analysis “focuses mainly on the relationship between indigenous Mapuche identities and Chilean national identities,” building upon the historiography of race and nation in Latin America to “explore not only how Mapuche people have challenged dominant national imaginaries in Chile, but also how they have participated in the construction of these imaginaries” (p. 10). The author shows how the discourse of mestizaje (cultural and racial mixing), instead of granting the Mapuche people an increased presence within Chilean society, allows for the ignoring of their existence, putting contemporary Mapuche identity in doubt or denial. Crow also highlights “Chilean intellectuals who have recast official discourses of mestizaje so as to reinforce the presence of indigenous peoples in Chile, and—more significantly—to assume their own indigenous heritage” (p. 11). Furthermore, the book examines the “complex intersections between class and indigenous identity in Chile,” exploring not only the Left's problematic subsumption of the Mapuche within the peasant masses—a theoretical move that effaces indigenous cultural particularity—but also contrary attempts to robustly “link programs of social and racial vindication without diminishing the significance of either” (p. 11).In chapter 4, Crow examines these issues for the 1960s and the early 1970s. There is evidence, for example, that President Salvador Allende and his main advisers understood the specificity of the Mapuche being (the identity of the Mapuche in the ontological sense) as different from the Chilean peasantry, whereas other intellectuals (not the Allende government advisers) ignored this difference, influenced by an evolutionary and developmental paradigm. During this period, according to the author, “Mapuche culture became increasingly visible . . . despite, in conjunction with, or indeed sometimes as a direct result of government initiatives” (p. 17). She concludes that Allende “acknowledged that the Mapuche had a distinct culture and history, and he engaged with some of their demands in this regard, but not all and not always,” an ambiguous conclusion that does not resolve the contradiction between recognition or ignorance (or nonrecognition) of the specificity of the Mapuches' issues (pp. 147–48). But this ambiguity is also the result of the fact that the question of Allende's stance toward the Mapuche has not been fully resolved by scholars.This work reliably follows the documentary evidence and develops a scholarly apparatus for addressing Mapuche cultural history, though, of course, it does not exhaust the literature, especially the most recent (which is constantly growing). Crow's methodology is sound and is presented in clear language. This book is important for its attempt to make a cultural history and for its attempt at objectivity, the author maintaining emotional distance from her subject. The book will be of interest to specialists, students, academics, and activists, Chilean and Mapuche, in the fields of history and various human sciences.