Mapuche citizenship: Entangled histories in post-independence Chile

In nineteenth-century Chile, between the 1810s and 1910s, intellectual elites working within multiple discursive institutions (historiography, journalism, literature, natural history, and ethnography) articulated Mapuche citizenship as they "imagined" the Chilean nation-state in the post-independence period. Mapuche Indians had achieved and maintained political sovereignty and independence throughout the colonial period (early seventeenth to nineteenth centuries) and this fact was celebrated in a colonial epic poem La Araucana by Alonso de Ercilla y Zuniga. The poem, and the fact of Mapuche independence, provided a quintessential foundational myth for the new Republic's identity, as it symbolized resistance against the Spanish. However, faced with economic and political pressures to both endorse the young nation's unity and end historical Mapuche sovereignty, La Araucana became a primary site of contention for nineteenth-century members of the Chilean, foreign, and Mapuche intellectual elite. The most visible intellectual elites in the north (Santiago and Valparaiso) attempted to frame a celebratory Mapuche sovereignty as part of a distant past and thus facilitated new representations of the Mapuche as barbarians in the present. Intellectuals from the Universidad de Chile and military in particular debated the role of the Mapuche in the nation by redefining their contribution through the myth of their independence. Parallel to this shift in public representations, the military began an incursion to end Mapuche sovereignty: the euphemistic Pacificacion (1861--1883), a military campaign that ended in the dislocation and death of the majority of Mapuche people. Little known counter-discourses to both the military incursion and representations of the Mapuche as barbaric reveal that the Pacificacion is indeed an important source for understanding current tensions between Mapuche and Chileans. Based on in-depth archival research, I show how two little-known intellectuals: a Chilean living on the Mapuche-Chilean border, Pedro Ruiz Aldea, and a Mapuche intellectual in the post-Pacificacion era, Manuel Manquilef, reformulate the myth of Mapuche sovereignty as partially relevant to the present to create counter-hegemonic discourses against those of the north. Together, these divergent interpretations of the Mapuche place in the nation reflect the intellectual elite's difficulties in confining the myth of Mapuche sovereignty to the past. As such, the myth was, and continues to be, a site through which Mapuche and Chileans discuss the contradictory roles of the Mapuche in the Chilean nation.