Pilar M. Herr, "Contested Nation: The Mapuche, Bandits, and State Formation in 19th-Century Chile" (U New Mexico Press, 2019)

New Books in Indigenous Studies · Feb 18, 2020 · 56m

Pilar M. Herr’s new book Contested Nation: The Mapuche, Bandits, and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Chile (University of New Mexico Press, 2019) places the independent Mapuche people and pro-Spanish Pincheira bandits at the heart of Chile’s nineteenth century. During the 1820s, while criollo elites struggled openly between themselves to form a stable, constitutional central government and define the meaning of citizenship, they agreed that the southern third of Chile formed an integral part of their newly-imagined nation.

This claim, Herr argues, erased the Mapuche people, who had…