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Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906 – 2001

2006; Duke University Press; Volume: 86; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2006-079

1527-1900

Brian Loveman,

Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America

There are so many good things to say about Courage Tastes of Blood that I have puzzled over how to economize in writing this review. The book is an epochal story of over one hundred years of struggle for land and justice by Mapuche people in southern Chile. In places it reads like a memoir and in others like a novel, but tragically, the tales it tells are nonfiction, or at least as close to nonfiction as a history conceived as “collective ethnography” — based on multiple complex, and often antagonistic, memories — can be (p. 20). Mallon relies on extensive archival research, oral histories, fieldwork, and repeated visits to coastal Cautín province — a place that no longer exists administratively but where I lived with my wife as a Peace Corps volunteer in the mid-1960s — in order to craft a truly powerful microhistory woven within a bigger Chilean national drama. She also relies on her own network of friends, political associates, and experience with the Popular Unity government (1970 – 73) to re-create the sense of hope and hatred, and the confrontation of revolutionary zeal and reactionary violence, that bracketed the presidency of Salvador Allende.First, the facts: For more than a century, from 1861 to the early 1970s, Indian communities in southern Chile lost land to Chilean state military campaigns, state-sponsored colonization of European and Chilean settlers, fraudulent surveys, and usurpation by local non-Indian landowners supported by police, government officials, and judges. From 1862, when Colonel Pedro Godoi reported to General Manuel García on “The Conquest of Arauco,” claiming that “conquest was the wrong word,” since the project involved the “gradual, definitive, and rightful occupation of the territory south of the Biobio River, currently occupied by the Araucanians” (pamphlet, “La conquista de Arauco,” Santiago, 1862, p. 3), indigenous peoples resisted challenges to their autonomy and territory. Resistance took multiple forms, including lawsuits that lasted for generations.Mallon’s story highlights one such local struggle, in the community of Nicolás Ailío, near Nehuentue, located west of Carahue, a site of conflict between indigenous and nonindigenous peoples ever since conquistador Pedro de Valdivia established La Imperial (present-day Carahue) in 1551. In 1553, an Indian army led by Lautaro (who had served as Valdivia’s groom) killed Valdivia and 50 companions at Tucapel; legend has it that they poured molten gold down his throat, though it is more likely that they simply put his head on the point of an Araucanian lance.Mallon’s account doesn’t go back quite that far, but it does skillfully intertwine local events from the early twentieth century, beginning with the history of Chilean state policy toward the Mapuche people, the reciprocal, if asymmetric, impacts of this interaction, and the ups and downs (mostly downs) in the community’s struggle to recover part of its lost territory. Simultaneously, Mallon’s history reveals the erosion of boundaries between “Chilean” and Indian culture and daily life through intermarriage, shared labor in the fields, commerce, evangelical proselytizing (Catholic and Protestant), and migration, as well as the incorporation of Indian people into broader and sometimes competing political movements — both those insisting on class solidarity and those appealing to ethnic and cultural identity.This book stands out for its multifaceted and complex portrayal of the protagonists. This is true for the MIR/MCR activists (with whom the author clearly sympathizes) and some of the indigenous people with whom she became close friends. It is also true for their enemies, the “natural” villains of the piece: the settlers who usurp Indian lands, landowners who exploit Indian labor and take even more of their land, and even some of the military and police of the 1970 – 92 years who inflict direct and terrible vengeance on Mallon’s collaborators (who read, discussed, and helped revise the completed manuscript before publication). Mallon takes seriously the landowners’ anguish and anger at losing their homes and farms to the land occupations of the 1970s. She takes their point of view, though never their side, in such a way that some readers will likely feel compassion, if not empathy, for a family that always lived in the countryside, worked hard, and accumulated several farms and a fortune, only to lose it to Indian peasants in alliance with young, armed revolutionary Marxist activists who, in December of 1970, came to the door at 3 a.m. and announced that they must leave, that the farm now belonged to the Indians. Some may even inwardly cheer the reversal of fortune as the Indian people, abandoned by the young revolutionaries (who “turned into cats’ claws” — disappeared when the repression got bad, p. 140), were brutally repressed by military and police, tortured, and even “disappeared” as the landowner recovered his land by order of the military junta in Santiago in 1974.Mallon’s use of multiple sources and multiple voices — Indians, landowner families, bureaucrats, police, and others — so effectively connects the layered and conflictive ambiguity of everyday local life to national politics that the story that emerges from this account of what was essentially a lengthy battle over one hundred acres of land becomes a dramaturgical, as well as methodological, success. She concludes that while the Mapuche sometimes obtained partial victories, over the long run state policies “not only fractured Mapuche territoriality and identity, but also attacked directly the Mapuche people’s capacity to preserve their culture and memory” (p. 235).While some might quarrel with a book vetted over and over again by many of its subjects, Mallon’s explicit description of the collaborative process and detailed account of many of the contributions to the text by her peasant “coauthors” contributes to a unique, original, and insightful microhistory framed by more than a century of conflict between Indian and peasant communities and agents of the Chilean state. Mallon has artfully captured the interplay between local histories and the national story, the underlayment of ethnic, gender, and class conflicts complicating more universal ideological claims and, perhaps most impressively, the ongoing resistance by local actors to any sort of externally imposed end to this history.