Land and the Language of Race: State Colonization and the Privatization of Indigenous Lands in Araucanía, Chile (1871–1916)

Abstract

This article explores the vision, process, and reaction to the privatization of Mapuche lands in Araucanía, Chile, from 1871 to 1916. It shows how politicians developed a racial vision for Araucanía between 1871 and 1882 during the final battle with independent Mapuche forces. Chilean government officials and elite societies created land policies that targeted the removal of indigenous populations from fertile lands to expand industrial agriculture by favoring large Chilean-owned estates and partitioning small to medium-sized plots to European settler-farmers. From 1883 to 1896, the Chilean government put its vision into practice, investing in the recruitment of European farmers and reconsidering new laws regarding colonization, land rights, and indigenous settlements. However, after the 1891 civil war, the government retreated from expensive state-building projects. From 1896 to 1916, Chilean small farmers intensified land grabs and, in response, indigenous communities formed organizations to defend their lands. At the core of the conflict were the issues of land and racialized policies that defined land access. By examining laws, government reports, missionary chronicles, and indigenous writings, this article demonstrates the progression of a racialized language that excluded indigenous peoples from their lands, founded in the desire to privatize native lands and accelerate the making of a modern Europeanized nation.

In his 1915 essay ¡Tierras de Arauco!, Manuel Manquilef (1887–1950), then an established Mapuche intellectual and later a politician, described his dislike of government engineers who surveyed indigenous lands. He recounted hearing the fearful yells of the Mapuche, “Engineer! Engineer!” as the surveyors approached a rural community.¹ Manquilef characterized the engineers as lacking in morals and as “the dandys of the town,” who filled their time frequenting questionable establishments while indigenous land claims went unheard.²

Manquilef knew that Mapuche land ownership, either private or communal, would determine indigenous people's relationship with the Chilean state. Engineers knew that land distribution for use by either the state, private enterprises, indigenous communities, or foreign settlements would dictate the future of national progress.³ Manquilef's essay reacted to the foreboding and frustration felt by Mapuche communities as the colonization process intensified, securing them their place as second-class citizens. It captures the tension between cultural legacy and productive destiny that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries over plots of land and how it produced the racialized language that framed regional politics in southern Chile. Even though Manquilef's belated protestations could not restore the large swaths of native lands already taken, his views embodied Mapuche political actors’ proclamation of equal status and their awareness that access to land would determine the extent of political and social equality within Chilean society.

The colonization of Mapuche lands transpired in small waves between the 1850s and 1870s, advanced by unauthorized farm settlements and conflict with the Chilean military. During this time, Chilean statesmen hotly debated ways to advance the colonization of Araucanía and the question of Mapuche inclusion or exclusion as citizens. Between 1871 and 1882, the Mapuche-Chilean conflict intensified, resulting in the 1883 Mapuche surrender, which happened in conjunction with Chile's win over the Peruvian-Bolivian Alliance and the extension of Chilean territory to both north and south. These victories proved a turning point for the Chilean elite: they spurred large-scale government projects throughout the 1880s, including the growth of public education, the Prussianization of the Chilean army, and the colonization of Araucanía, Magallanes, and Rapa Nui.⁴ As the Mapuche defeat became imminent in 1882, government officials formulated a plan that positioned European farmers as ideal settlers capable of converting the so-called tierras baldíos (vacant lands) of Araucanía into productive farms and estates.

This article builds on recent studies of the Mapuche and social, agrarian, and rural histories of the Araucanía region.⁵ It concords with Pilar M. Herr's analysis that the Chilean-Mapuche conflict and the colonization of Araucanía were foundational to Chile's state formation in the nineteenth century and challenges Chilean historiographies that place these developments solely in the Central Valley and the northern mining regions, considering those areas as the cultural and political birthplace of the nation. It also concurs with Claudio Robles's critique of Chilean agrarian studies, which assumes that agricultural units and labor relations in Araucanía simply mimicked the Central Valley hacienda system.⁶ Considering Robles's argument, this study asks what happened to Mapuche lands.

Rather than focus on the Chilean-Mapuche military conflict, which several studies have examined quite well, I instead examine the key laws utilized to privatize Mapuche lands between 1871 to 1916, focusing on how race figured into land access. Like Kelly Bauer, I view public policy not as an outcome but as a “middle space where Mapuche demands and Chilean governance are consequentially contested.”⁷ To understand that “middle space,” I have drawn from multiple archives to paint a cohesive state plan, highlighting disagreements and impasses along the way. Reports by state engineers in Araucanía describe how they enacted state policies on the ground in determining indigenous communal plot sizes and the placement of German settlers. Elite society bulletins show how elite groups steered colonization policies toward their goal of incentivizing modern farms and agricultural estates.

The inclusion of indigenous writings and missionary chronicles provides personal accounts and observations about native land loss and the political divisions among Mapuche leaders regarding private versus communal land titles. Also, while new scholarship by Joanna Crow, Jorge Pavez Ojeda, and Pilar M. Herr has been pivotal in constructing new Mapuche histories, my work, in contrast, probes the impact of Chilean immigration-settler policies on the colonization experience. In sum, my analysis locates policies and developments foundational to the Chilean state-building process in Araucanía that favored those of European descent and socially and economically marginalized the Mapuche, keeping them from equal participation.

While land has always figured as a protagonist in human history, capitalism transformed land from territories of influence to plots of economic value. In the mid nineteenth-century political context, land value and industrial agriculture developed jointly to fuel the industrial economy. Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe has noted that the “primary objective of settler colonialism is the land itself rather than the surplus value to be derived from mixing native labor with it.”⁸ The transition from colonial empires to nineteenth-century nation-states that enclose lands spotlights the entry of land as a capitalist commodity.⁹ For Wolfe, that shift also captures the diverging treatment of black and indigenous labor, due to the latter's hereditary claims to land. Chile's use of colonization laws and processes similar to those of Australia and those of other American nations accentuates the global nature of these nineteenth-century developments, which defined modern understandings of land, labor, and private property.¹⁰

Defining Chilean race politics has been difficult due to “Chile's traditional avoidance of biological conceptions of racial inheritance.”¹¹ As Michela Coletta notes, this is partly due to the Chilean elite's views that education would determine progress, in contrast to the Argentine elite's view that race determined its social order.¹² The historiographies of Argentina's politics of whiteness and the complex racial politics of Peru do not fully capture the history of racial ideas and debates in Chile.¹³ In addition, Chile's literary criollismo at the end of the nineteenth century romanticized the countryside and represented an urban, middle-class response “to the dominance of the Europeanized oligarchy.”¹⁴

This article examines the racial views of the Europeanized Castilian-Basque landed aristocracy that ruled governmental politics from the colonial period to the late nineteenth century and whose interests are best represented in the National Society of Agriculture (SNA).¹⁵ I investigate a period of transition among the elite when bankers and financiers of British and French descent and German manufacturers, exporters, and estate owners entered their ranks. The Chilean oligarchy's European identity helps explain its preference for specific European settlers and their slow acceptance of mixed-race Chilean small farmers as national settlers.¹⁶ As for the Mapuche during this period, they articulated little distinction between Chileans and recent European arrivals, referring to them both as wingkas, meaning the “new Inca” or new invaders, and often describing Chileans (both poor and wealthy) as Spaniards.

The racial component of nineteenth-century land politics is an under-studied but expanding area of research.¹⁷ Most agrarian studies focus (justifiably so) on the people: those doing the colonizing, those doing the farming, and those experiencing the hardships of colonization. In considering land politics, I am primarily interested in the legal and political process of land usurpation and privatization. In addition, I examine how those processes produced local race politics by focusing on their impact on the Mapuche, and on their responses. This article's makes a methodological contribution through a critical examination of the lasting effects of the 1866 and 1874 colonization laws by sketching out their later implementation by colonization agents in Europe and state engineers in Araucanía. Through an engagement with recent scholarship on racial politics in Chile, the article interrogates the racial discourse embedded in laws, reports, and testimonials.¹⁸ I suggest that what characterized Araucanía's land conflict was a racial language that dictated land access and the privilege to farm without conflict. By exploring the ideological and legal framework that defined Chile's modern colonization scheme and the indigenous counternarrative to that vision, this article begins to answer how land ownership at the turn of the last century came to embody Chilean race politics.

The historical time frame of this article (1871–1916) centers on the period when the Mapuche in Araucanía saw their lands appropriated through military conquest and government policies. These events did not take place in concert but in three distinct stages, which is how this article is divided. The first section examines the colonization vision debated among the Chilean elite between 1871 and 1882. In this period, the government decided to claim all colonized lands as fiscal territory, or state lands, requiring indigenous communities to prove five years of effective occupation to receive a land title or have the legal ability to sell their land. When the remaining Mapuche territory was colonized in 1883, as the second section of this article describes, the National Society of Agriculture played a pivotal role in the colonization process by financing a large-scale government program to recruit European farmers. The 1891 civil war marked the downfall of the colonization project, accentuating economic woes and divisions within the elite and resulting in a fiscally conservative government.

The final section of the article begins with 1896, when the government allowed Chilean small farmers in Argentina to receive homesteading rights as national settlers. Another series of laws, passed in 1897 and 1907, expanded land access and motivated thousands of Chilean small farmers to conduct land grabs. Chilean farmers, usually described as squatters (ocupantes) in government documents, targeted Mapuche communities, taking advantage of either their inability to speak Spanish or the willingness of local racist government officials to side with Chilean or European complainants.¹⁹ But, as that section demonstrates, a generation of educated Spanish-speaking Mapuche, at times aided by Capuchin priest allies, organized to defend their lands, while others, like Manuel Manquilef, urged his fellow Mapuche to forego their communal lands in favor of private land ownership. As this final section highlights, the increase of land conflict and the creation of the first Mapuche political organization in 1907 marked the Mapuche's emergence as political actors who challenged the Chilean elite's racial and economic vision for the territory. By exploring the ideological and legal framework that defined Chile's modern colonization scheme and the indigenous counternarrative to that vision, this article begins to answer how land ownership at the turn of the last century came to embody modern Chilean racial politics.

The Colonization Vision and the 1874 Law (1871–82)

In the 1882 annual report to the Chilean congress by Foreign Relations and Colonization Minister Luis Aldunate described the urgent need to colonize the “depopulated southern regions” for “the development of our agricultural progress.”²⁰ Aldunate explained that the SNA had proposed to his ministry the creation of an office of European colonization to recruit farmers “to bring [with them] the [methods of] agricultural colonization to the southern fields.”²¹ The SNA's colonization project was both ambitious and strategic. It envisioned a large-scale government-funded colonization project that would recruit and transport up to 20,000 European settlers a year who would sign five-year contracts in exchange for land. In addition, they projected the modernization of Chilean agriculture aided by scientific studies that would reinforce “the unity and cohesion of our race.”²²

What Aldunate meant by “our race” was subject to interpretation by the government official in charge of European recruitment, as examined later in this article. For decades, the SNA and the congress had resisted the idea of government-funded immigrant recruitment. They instead advocated for an abierto (open) immigration policy that would require minimal government investment and avoid a return to open military conflict with the Mapuche. Beginning in the 1850s, the Chilean government allowed small waves of German immigrants to establish and replenish colonies in Valdivia, Llanquihue, and Osorno in southern Araucanía, with the aim of opening the southern frontier.²³ Yet state advancements in colonizing indigenous territory were mainly acquired through costly open military conflict, influencing many congressional leaders to oppose expansionist proposals.

Opinions about foreign settler recruitment and territorial expansion began to shift in 1871, once government officials began to see land value in a different light. That year, the House of Deputies debated ways to manage the lands captured during the 1867-70 Chilean-Mapuche conflict, in which Chile gained control of the Bío Bío and Malleco regions.²⁴ Col. Cornelio Saavedra, who led the southern frontier offensive and proposed the original project to colonize Araucanía, advocated for state control of occupied lands to an unconvinced Congress.²⁵ It took three additional years before Saavedra's positions were codified in the 1874 colonization law, demonstrating that the debate ultimately proved to be a turning point in molding the Chilean government's colonization plan for the autonomous Mapuche territory.

The issue that convinced Congress to support a new colonization law was the legal conflict over ownership of colonized lands. Prior to 1874, the courts recognized land contracts made between Mapuche individuals and private buyers. Government reports also begrudgingly described the territory as “indigenous lands,” adding racist commentaries about the inability of the Mapuche to exploit the land.²⁶ The state entered into legal conflict with private buyers, railroad companies, and speculators over land titles, due to unclear or contrived arrangements made with Mapuche sellers and leasers. Conflict arising from these arrangements was exacerbated further by speculators who attempted to block government land auctions by claiming land ownership or outstanding debt for the plots to be auctioned, following one-on-one deals made with Mapuche sellers.²⁷ To win legal claims, private land purchasers accused the Mapuche of fraud for selling their land to multiple buyers, or when more than one Mapuche declared effective occupation of the same plot. According to Andrea Ruiz-Esquide, the courts sometimes favored Mapuche claims but could not stop speculators and squatters from usurping land.²⁸ Government officials, frustrated with mounting legal claims by speculators, stated that they were unable to protect Mapuche communities from fraudulent agreements and moved decisively to recognize through the 1874 law all colonized territory as a priori Chilean lands.²⁹

In recognition that the government would need to become more involved with indigenous land claims, the 1874 colonization law expanded the role of the Protectorate of Indigenous People. The Protectorate had been reinstated a decade earlier in 1866, following passage of the first significant colonization law and after the republican government dissolved the office in 1819 as an outdated colonial office.³⁰ This law was part of a group of legal codes that legalized settlement on indigenous lands but also stipulated that indigenous people could receive land titles upon demonstrating five years of effective occupation as either a family unit or a community.³¹ The Protector in this early period was usually a state engineer who wore many official hats. The Protectorate bore similarities to its colonial predecessor, acting like “a father in defense of the Indians,” never losing sight of the conviction that indigenous interests were contingent on meeting the state's primary needs.³² The Protectorate was expected to manage complaints from native communities and mediate on their behalf, but the Protector's standing was dependent on the Minister of Foreign Relations and Colonization and the military commander overseeing the occupation.³³ To hasten the distribution of native lands, the secretary of the Commission of Engineers (CE) took over the Protectorate's work from 1875 to 1883, giving military officials the green light to do as they saw fit with the territory.³⁴ Once the Chilean military fully occupied Araucanía in 1883, the state revived the Protectorate's work as a government office, and it became an institutional fixture affecting the lives of Mapuche communities.

Another development that altered the state's view of indigenous lands was the profitable venture of land auctions. Ruiz-Esquide explains that initial land auctions took place in 1873 but experienced roadblocks due to legal conflicts with speculators, as discussed earlier. The 1874 colonization law gave the state greater jurisdiction over land claims, leading to the first state-organized auction of Malleco lands in 1875, an auction held regularly until the 1890s.³⁵ Coincidentally, the 1875 auction took place in the same year as an economic downturn that decreased agricultural exports and caused the decline of the Chilean peso, meaning that land auctions gave the state much-needed revenue.

The financial crisis did not stop the landed elite from pushing for access to agricultural lands, believing that they could introduce mechanization that would increase productivity and generate new markets.³⁶ Land auctions prompted the development of medium and large estates in the new territories; buyers could purchase unlimited numbers of plots until 1895, and even then limits were not enforced.³⁷ Poor rural Chileans unable to purchase farmland via auctions often squatted, demanding land titles with no success.³⁸ This was in stark contrast to the 150 hectares—amounting to a medium-sized estate—that was given to foreign-born settlers under the 1874 law. Some scholars highlight that Chilean newspaper editorials described regions of the southward agrarian expansion as a “New California,” composed of small farmers.³⁹ While that may have been the dream of a few newspaper editors, government policies prioritized large landholdings for the landed elite, military officials, and foreign settlers, while excluding Chilean and Mapuche small farmers.

The 1874 law undoubtedly privileged the expansion of agrarian capitalism by prioritizing the formation of medium and large landed estates, but it also reinforced racist conceptions about progress, civilization, and modernity. How government officials perceived the Mapuche within (or outside of) the Chilean economy is best exemplified in the language used in an earlier government report. In 1870, naturalists and scientific explorers surveyed Mapuche communities and detailed their diverse economic activities, including herding, metal production, wool, and agricultural products to state officials. They noted multiple large ironworks and silver production workshops with hired employees run by Huilliche Mapuche communities located between the Cautín and Toltén Rivers.⁴⁰ The author of the scientists’ report stated that the Mapuche communities near Chilean merchant communities were more prosperous, attributing their success to racial mixing. He detailed each Mapuche community's phenotype, underscoring which community showed more European features and associating their economic success to their degree of Europeanness. There were many other scientific expeditions to Araucanía in the early 1870s that mapped the territory's geography (especially navigable rivers) and natural resources. As the potential for profit became more apparent, the Mapuche featured in official reports as obstacles to progress, placing their status as a protected community in question. The 1874 law was the legal culmination of removing said obstacles—those who owned the land would now dictate the development of modern capitalist agriculture in the region.

Both Chilean and Mapuche small farmers were excluded from the state's agricultural colonization project, yet government officials treated the two groups differently. The Mapuche had a specific relationship with the land and the natural world that differed from Western perspectives on private property and capitalist production.⁴¹ This difference is made apparent in their cultural name in which mapu means earth and che means people; thus the name Mapuche means “people of the land.”⁴² The Chilean elite's preconceived ideas about indigenous people took root during centuries of Spanish colonial rule, influencing their prejudices and disposition for racial exclusion. Scholars Nancy Stepan and Richard Graham have demonstrated that conceptions about race and nation shifted in late nineteenth-century Latin America, influenced by the emergence of scientific racism.⁴³ Foucault identifies the shift earlier, with the birth of nationalism, under which, according to Ann Laura Stoler's analysis of Foucault's argument on state racism, “a discourse of class derives from an earlier discourse of race.”⁴⁴

Chile was not an exception. Government functionaries and intellectuals viewed Europeans as inherently modern compared to Chilean small farmers, who were perceived as different due to possible racial mixing but even more so to their class standing. Yet, unlike the Mapuche, they were part of the agricultural economy as farmhands and inquilinos on rural estates.⁴⁵ In contrast, the Mapuche were forcibly removed from their land and categorized by state engineers as squatters unless they could prove effective occupation.⁴⁶ The initial exclusion of Mapuche labor from the new economic system shows commonality with the United States’ and Australia's settler-colonial processes—meaning that the existence of a large pool of non-indigenous agricultural workers contributed to the exclusion of native labor.⁴⁷ The decision to distribute indigenous lands to European settlers while initially excluding Chileans from the new economic process reveals the intentionality of the state's racial vision.

Scholars of nineteenth-century Chilean agrarian history, in particular, have looked to European scholarship, mainly British and German, for dialogue, focusing on labor relations, mechanization, and changes in the landed estates.⁴⁸ The value of those historical analyses notwithstanding, Chilean territorial expansionism, land privatization, and its use of settler colonialism place the Chilean historical experience in closer proximity to the laws and economic processes experienced in the United States and Australia. Both countries used settlers and land auctions to transform occupied lands into economically productive units, giving way to a newly forming agrarian society that, from its inception, represented capitalist interests. It is essential to highlight that the privatization of indigenous lands was not equivalent to the enclosure of common lands. The economic process that proletarianized peasants and artisans and removed indigenous populations from their lands was similar, but the racial politics that determined second-class citizenry within the nation was not. As argued by Wolfe, nineteenth-century settler-colonial policy was characterized first by the seizure of land and second by the eviction of native populations from that land, initially excluding them from participating in the wage-labor system. Whether in the United States, Australia, or Chile, indigenous people's entry into the capitalist labor market was a scattered process dictated by specific state policies regarding land and assimilation.

Above all, the 1874 colonization law formalized state ownership of occupied lands. It enabled the government to win in litigation against squatters, regulated state auctions of native lands, set aside land for foreign settlers, and defined settlers as individuals from Europe and the United States. The 1866 colonization law had also declared state ownership of occupied lands but acknowledged the individual contracts with Mapuche sellers that were the source of pre-1874 legal disputes. The centralization of land distribution through government auctions minimized legal disputes, nullifying the Mapuche's negotiating power in the process.⁴⁹

Until the late 1880s, the military oversaw land reorganization and distribution, including land auctions, alongside state engineers. The government also faced increased tensions with its neighboring countries, leading to diplomatic negotiations with Argentina and open conflict with Peru and Bolivia. After claiming victory in both the War of the Pacific (1879-83) against the Peruvian-Bolivian Alliance and the occupation of Araucanía (1881-83), the Chilean government could proceed to the next stage in colonizing the northern and southern territories.⁵⁰ The SNA's 1882 proposal to the Ministry of Foreign Relations and Colonization (MRREE) had predicted Chile's military victory over the Mapuche and mapped a new process for the region. As the next section will explore, initiating the colonization process meant expanding institutions and funding a transatlantic project. It is through that process that the elite's racial ideology was enacted, reconfiguring national race politics.

The Colonization Process (1883–97)

The 1883 Mapuche surrender initiated a new phase in Chilean colonization. In the previous decades, government officials, intellectuals, scientists, and elite societies had presented proposals about what to do with the indigenous territories and how to take advantage of their lands and natural resources. As politicians began to revise past understandings about indigenous land ownership through laws and statutory interpretation, a way of thinking emerged that exemplified nation-building tenets and the needs of the capital-holding elite. From 1883 to 1891, the central government invested in large-scale projects from public education to colonization. While many state officials shared positivist perspectives favoring capitalist economics, their policy goals represented competing views about progress and civilization.⁵¹ The process of land colonization was as much about national advancement as it was about government revenues, which included urban planning and expansion of the railroad system to strengthen the domestic and global markets: a successful process from the Chilean state's standpoint and a setback for native communities.

From Vision to Process

In 1883, the SNA made another significant proposal, this time to the Ministry of Finance. They suggested creating the Society for Industrial Development (SOFOFA), a guild for industrialists to advocate their interests and conduct studies to support their business ventures. Eight of the first 18 SOFOFA board members were members of the SNA, and several others came from hacienda-owning families, highlighting a strong correlation between agriculture and industrialization. As noted in its founding document published in 1884, SOFOFA's primary role was to initiate industrial development. They underscored that “[Chile] must be industrial through its agriculture” because of its fertile lands and to strengthen its ability to compete in the world market.⁵² Their prospectus further stated that Chile “must be industrial per the conditions of its race, intelligence, and strength, apt to comprehend and run any machine.”⁵³ They emphasized Chile's place in an evolutionary societal order that tied racial identity to economic development, seen as one and the same.⁵⁴

In the first decade of SOFOFA's monthly bulletin, the topic of colonization drove its research articles, discussions of investments, reviews of agricultural machinery, and selection of excerpts from government reports. SOFOFA, along with the SNA, had a direct relationship with sections of the Ministry of Foreign Relations and Colonization, including the General Agency of Colonization's offices in Europe and the Inspector General of Colonization in Araucanía. The SNA, for that matter, financed the initial years of the Agency of Colonization in Europe, covering the operation of its offices and transportation costs for European settlers.⁵⁵ SOFOFA emerged as an intermediary for Chilean businesses wanting to hire foreign workers, placing requests on their behalf to Chile's colonization agents in Europe. Both SNA proposals—to open an office of colonization in Europe (1882), and the founding of SOFOFA (1883)—were meant to jump-start a new phase in Chilean settler-colonialism, reaffirming a specific perspective of how to incorporate indigenous lands into a capitalist agricultural economy.

Chile's colonial project took root in the state bureaucracy, as it first set various schemes into motion and later assessed how to manage them. In the early 1880s, the government created new offices dedicated to colonization and moved other offices to streamline decision-making. For example, the General Agency of Colonization in Europe (known as the Agency of Colonization) and the Inspector General of Colonization in Araucanía were placed under the Ministry of Foreign Relations and Colonization. The Commission of Engineers—formalized by the 1866 colonization law—was overseen by the Public Works Ministry from 1881 to 1888 and moved to the Foreign Relations Ministry in 1889. Furthermore, the new provinces and cities in Araucanía established local governments following the Chilean expansion, adding more another layer of authority, such as mayors and judges. Last, in response to the ongoing conflict with Mapuche communities, the state created in 1883 the Indigenous Settlement Commission (ISC) to communicate with the Commission of Engineers regarding indigenous land titles and disputes. Government offices collaborated though memos and ministry directives, at times in concert; at other times, local officials imposed their interests. I read these interactions in government documents as a discord within the accord, meaning that despite the bouts of ego and disputes over recognition the colonization project chugged along and the Mapuche continued to be the focus of that process.

Yet, within the labyrinth of colonization offices, state engineers were effectively at the forefront of the state's land colonization operation, mapping and surveying the land, deciding on whether plots would be available for settlement or offered in government auction, and determining the establishment of railways and towns. According to Teodoro Schmidt (1834–1924), the German-born head engineer who directed the surveying of indigenous lands from 1867 to 1897, the engineers and surveyors’ overarching responsibility was to transform the territory into a “stable culture.”⁵⁶ Schmidt was a university-educated agronomist and engineer contracted in Darmstadt by the Chilean merchant and future politician Vicente Pérez Rosales in 1858 to work on the Catapilco Estate in the Chilean Central Valley. In 1867, the Finance Minister hired Schmidt to set up irrigation systems on recently occupied native lands in Bío Bío and Malleco. That same year, the Interior Minister named Schmidt head engineer to survey lands for state use.

In early 1883, the Commission of Engineers worked on surveying lands in Malleco and would not begin to measure Cautín (southern Araucanía) until 1887. The 1866 and 1874 colonization laws guided state engineers’ work in general terms, giving Schmidt the authority to determine the commission's day-to-day activities until 1889. Chilean colonization agents’ recruitment efforts in Europe, compounded with the fast-moving pace of railroad expansion, pressured the engineers to hasten their progress. The creation of the Indigenous Settlement Commission required the Commission of Engineers to assign engineers to the settlement office to streamline decisions. As was expected of them, the engineers sent maps and lists of surveyed lands ready for auction, settlement, or the granting of indigenous land titles to the appropriate offices for approval. Maps and lists circulated between local and Santiago-based offices, increasing the possibility of disputes that included ignoring the commission's work entirely. For example, in 1883, the Commission of Engineers’ secretary complained that there were still ongoing legal disputes over land plots that dated back to government officials’ decision in 1878 to auction lands initially allocated for Mapuche communities.⁵⁷

Not until 1889 did the government detail a job description for the state engineers. The bylaws for engineers offered detailed rules about the process of surveying lands and the ideology that guided their work.⁵⁸ The bylaw's first article described vacant lands as the state's property, reaffirming the 1874 law that defined native lands as predestined Chilean territory. The third article further characterized vacant lands as uncultivated due to the territory's distance from civilization, emphasizing the need for physically fit engineers capable of making their way through rugged terrain. The fourth article detailed the commission's organizational hierarchy, stipulating a head engineer who would direct two first-class engineers and two second-class engineers, with noted room for advancement. The seventh article defined plot size as an average of 200 to 500 hectares, with exceptions. However, the law instructed engineers to demarcate units of 50 to 200 hectares near planned towns and railways and in areas with high-quality soil, and lots of 1000 to 2000 hectares near the Andes. The eighth article confirmed previous decrees and laws, reiterating that natural boundaries such as creeks, rivers, and forests would be used to delimit properties.

Besides preparing the plots, which included hiring individuals to clear the land, Article 16 tasked engineers with handing over lands to state functionaries, buyers at auction, settlers, and indigenous communities. After detailing engineers’ salaries, billable expenses, vacation time, and land grants for years of service (500 hectares for every ten years), Article 23 specified land use. The government authorized engineers to inspect partitioned lands, because the right of usufruct depended on the land's usage, specifically to “plant wheat, exploit the forests [by] using machinery, raise animals, or work alongside indigenous people.”⁵⁹ In other words, the article empowered the state to evict those not meeting modern agriculture standards.

Government officials expected foreign settlers to lead the modernization of Chilean agriculture alongside large estate owners, but the nationality of the recruits remained contentious. Minister Aldunate's 1882 congressional report warned against introducing to the southern territory a foreign population whose social habits, language, and “aptitudes and necessities” ran contrary to Chilean culture.⁶⁰ He underscored that “such conditions could generate an obstacle to assimilating the more or less perfect settler,” highlighting that assimilation intends to “maintain undisturbed the unity and cohesion of our race.”⁶¹ Government texts expressed concern about racial assimilation, viewing race and national culture as one in the same. Aldunate did not identify which foreign populations would resist assimilation but considering that Germans were the largest foreign settler group and noticeably different, he seemed to allude to them. Nevertheless, Germans who settled in Valdivia and Llanquihue in the 1850s and 1860s were mostly professionals and businesspeople, with only a few laborers and farmers.⁶² In 1882, the Chilean government constructed a new profile of the ideal settler-farmer.

Aldunate preferred the Basque, noting their ability to assimilate, yet the Basque settler strategy quickly fell through, ending in an international scandal with Basque societies in Uruguay accusing the Chilean government of sending settlers to a territory populated by “puros salvajes.”⁶³ Meanwhile, the Office of Colonization decided to grant 40 hectares per settler family, with an additional 16 hectares for every son over ten years of age.⁶⁴ By 1884, the Agency of Colonization emerged as its own political entity as Chilean attachés in Europe became enamored with Prussian state-building, especially military reform, education, industrial and scientific innovations. Its director, Benjamín Dávila Larraín, placed greater focus on recruiting German-speaking settlers in Prussia and Switzerland, perceiving Germans as an advanced race, naturally inclined to scientific thinking and industrialization.⁶⁵ From 1884 to 1887, Dávila Larraín penned propaganda pamphlets and negotiated with government officials to expand their migrant quota to Chile, accounting for the most settler recruitment by the Office of Colonization during his tenure.⁶⁶

Even though Chile failed to reach the anticipated 20,000 settlers a year, the colonization process continued uncurtailed. In Europe, Dávila Larraín launched an aggressive recruitment effort. In Araucanía, government institutions, like the Commission of Engineers, prepared lands for foreign settlement. When Schmidt designed Temuco in 1887, he earmarked surrounding city plots for foreign settlers, accounting for space for landholders to expand.⁶⁷ Indigenous people received significantly smaller plots of land at an average of three to four plots per person. Yet, in 1880, the government stipulated 20 hectares per indigenous colony or family unit, a standard that was reiterated in the 1884 MRREE annual report.⁶⁸ The Commission of Engineers and the Indigenous Settlement Commission circumvented the 20 hectares dictum by assigning land to communities and not individuals, allowing the distribution of fewer hectares per person. Schmidt explained in an 1891 report that between 1867 and 1887, approximately 20 percent of surveyed land was distributed to Mapuche communities, justifying the figure by stating that one-third of the indigenous population simply left Malleco and the other third died.⁶⁹ From 1888 to 1891, Schmidt noted that indigenous communities received 50 percent of surveyed land in the Cautín region. This study cannot confirm whether Schmidt's data is correct; nevertheless, Schmidt inadvertently describes either a change in the survey process or government pressure to settle more indigenous communities.⁷⁰ Regardless, a large portion of Araucanía remained unmeasured when Schmidt wrote his 1891 report, and soon after the colonization project changed directions.

Schmidt's government reports demonstrate Western and growing global understandings about race and colonization from the time. In 1883, in an attempt to influence settler recruitment policy, Schmidt translated a German newspaper article for the Foreign Relations minister that discussed the history of German colonization societies and argued that non-Western territories would benefit from German settlement and scientific thinking.⁷¹ Schmidt's initiatives went unnoticed and he felt disregarded when the MRREE did not consult him for advice regarding the hiring of engineers.⁷² He thought that government officials practiced nepotism by sending him surveyors lacking in training, which slowed the commission's work and made him appear unproductive. In one report, Schmidt quotes Adam Smith, who discerned that professionally trained individuals produced items of better quality and in larger quantities.

For Schmidt, civilization's steady advancement depended on the state's sound business practices. He also applied the criteria of efficiency and usefulness in determining who was deserving of land. Schmidt believed that foreign settlers held superior skills and expressed annoyance at their low immigration numbers and scattered arrival.⁷³ After describing the almost complete removal of the indigenous population from Malleco, Schmidt underscored that indigenous people, like private and capitalist interests, would benefit from colonization. He criticized native peoples and large landowners as obstacles in “the advancement of civilization,” alluding to hacendados as resistant to capitalist innovation due to antiquated economic and social relations, and indigenous people as resistant due to their lack of education.⁷⁴

Schmidt had no control over the deals made by government functionaries with buyers at land auctions, but he and his colleagues did have authority to decide where to place foreign settlers and how much land to grant indigenous communities. The human consequences of those decisions are captured in a Mapuche farmer's testimony:

Look at this beautiful valley. There is our pantheon [and] there my parents and grandparents are buried. Our animals grazed over there, and we had many. Suddenly, the engineer came and said that we should become a settlement and put the line here, taking away most of our soil, [making us] poor. Is our property perhaps less holy than that of the Spanish, or is the Christian law invented only for the [Mapuche]?⁷⁵

The preceding passage, recorded by the Capuchin friar Gerónimo de Amberga (1866–1952), describes the sorrow felt by Mapuche communities. It communicates the state's transgression in dividing familial burial grounds and limiting land ownership, which harmed the community's economic livelihood. The farmer, aware of who he was speaking with, utilized Christian argot when describing his property as holy and the treatment under Christian law as unjust. The Mapuche farmer's description of the preferential treatment given to “the Spanish” (Chileans) captures the unfolding racial order.

Government officials expanded the colonization process in Araucanía throughout the 1880s. Yet, some Congress members began to question the futility of artificial immigration, seeing significant revenue from land auctions but focusing on growing expenses in the European recruitment effort that never reached the projected settler numbers. To offset growing disillusionment, SOFOFA published in 1888 a series of articles by Julio Pérez Canto (1867–1953) that compared and described colonization schemes in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, Argentina, and Chile, among others. The future diplomat insisted that Chile needed to invest in artificial immigration to reap the same benefits as other advanced nations. He concluded that it was not sufficient to send “men to confront nature's brutality and invite them to work,” and argued that the state must prepare, adapt, and modify colonized lands.⁷⁶ He emphasized the historical achievement inherent in “civilizing” Mapuche-controlled territory, distributing the land to foreign colonies, and institutionalizing indigenous property for the state's benefit, difficulties notwithstanding. Throughout the text, he referred to indigenous lands and vacant lands interchangeably.⁷⁷ He cited Paul Leroy Beaulieu's De la Colonization chez les peuples modernes (1886), which underscored British economists’ role in planning the United Kingdom's colonial pursuits, highlighting the Australian case as the most relevant.⁷⁸

Pérez Canto also emphasized the economic benefits of settler colonialism by calculating the income and expenses for the 3,716 settlers who had immigrated to Chile between 1883 and 1888, accentuating their financial gains even though exceptions were made for some income categories.⁷⁹ He showed that foreign settlers had cultivated 4,948 hectares of the 44,820 hectares distributed. To solve that discrepancy, he urged the state to forgive portions of their loans, extend their contractual time to establish an efficient farm from five years to eight, improve records of property limits, and allow settlers commercial freedom. He quoted an 1886 report in which Dávila Larraín stated that Chile needed “knowledgeable individuals to exploit [its agricultural lands] industrially.”⁸⁰ He closed by arguing that Chile's commercial success had resulted from immigration and mixing with civilized populations. “^‘To populate is to govern,’ said an eminent Argentine publicist,” asserted Pérez Canto.⁸¹ “If our government followed in [Argentina's] footsteps, what levels of evolution would be at play in our country!”⁸² However, Pérez Canto's 1888 study could not halt a looming civil war led by a conservative government faction concerned about government expenses and resulting in the ouster of the liberal president José Manuel Balmaceda.⁸³

Following the 1891 civil war, the Commission of Engineers and the Agency of Colonization continued their work. However, new policies to reduce spending gradually affected the colonization offices in Europe and Araucanía. The first warning sign was in 1892 when the state directed Schmidt to measure 310,000 hectares south of Temuco in eight months. As Schmidt explained to the Minister of Foreign Relations, the Commission of Engineers had surveyed an average of 20,000 hectares per year from 1867 to 1892, demonstrating that the new demand was unattainable.⁸⁴ The proposal to measure an unreasonable amount of land may have been due to officials’ inexperience or to a greedy push to expand land auctions, or both. In 1894, the Minister of Foreign Relations expressed concern about the state's ability to follow through with land auctions due to the number of unsettled indigenous communities. He introduced a law to increase indigenous land titles and conduct a census of the native population, but it would take another decade for the law to be acted on. These examples highlight the discord between central and local government officials, as state officials made directives without expanding the number of employees needed to complete such a task.

The gradual defunding of the state's Araucanía enterprise forced the MRREE to change directions. Even though government reports continued to express enthusiasm for foreign settler-farmers, the 1897 MRREE report described the decade-and-a-half venture as a failure. In 1895, Minister Claudio Matte—an early proponent of European settlers—underscored, “The result of foreign colonization in Araucanía cannot be judged by its agricultural efforts but by its general results.”⁸⁵ In a last attempt to salvage the colonization project, he proposed in 1896 a private colonization agreement with French businessman Charles Colson, which fell through.⁸⁶ That same year, the Agency of Colonization halted settler recruitment in Europe.⁸⁷ Meanwhile, in Araucanía Schmidt grew increasingly disillusioned with turnover in the MRREE, which put the commission's work in disarray. He retired in 1897 after 30 years of service, citing frustration with “wavering politics.”⁸⁸ According to Schmidt's calculations, he measured approximately 800,000 hectares during his tenure.⁸⁹ Following the retirement or forced removal of many political figures who led Chile's colonization venture from 1882 to 1897, that chapter of history came to a close. However, the impact of that project never dissipated but was redirected and challenged in later years.

Challenges to Chilean Colonization (1896–1916)

In the two opening decades of the twentieth century, Araucanía experienced an acceleration of land consolidation, causing violent conflicts and legal disputes. It was also at that time that, according to Fabian Almonacid, the reality of what was happening to the land superseded the colonization ideal.⁹⁰ The 1866, 1874, and 1883 colonization laws were foundational in privatizing indigenous lands, even if they were implemented only haphazardly over the years. In the early 1900s, state officials placed pressure on local administrators and engineers to finalize the process, fomenting two reactions. On one hand, government functionaries, annoyed that land colonization remained unfinished, viewed the process as a burden. On the other hand, although land occupations had indeed increased once the government allowed Chileans as homesteaders beginning in 1896, the occupations forced the Mapuche to organize more effectively. They were able to halt land privatizations at times, while ushering in a new cycle in the colonization process. This section places greater focus on exploring what Bauer calls the “middle space”—the space where power is contested—by highlighting the emergence of Mapuche demands and the response by government officials as they attempted to manage legal expectations with social realities.⁹¹

Throughout the nineteenth century, multiple laws and decrees reaffirmed both state control over occupied lands and the prohibition against private individuals purchasing indigenous lands as measures to protect native people from abuse. In that sense, an illusionary social contract emerged in which the government presented itself as the legal protector of its indigenous populations, promising land through settlements. Nevertheless, the slow process of distributing land titles to indigenous communities offered squatters time to claim lands. National settlers appeared in large numbers in the region following the 1896 repatriation law that included plans to resettle the 25,000 Chileans who had emigrated to Neuquén, Argentina. The government offered 80 hectares per male head of family, plus 40 hectares for every son over 16 years of age. The plan, which ultimately gave 948 families 71,715 hectares of land, was suspended in 1898 when the government reduced the grant to 50 hectares but was reinstated in 1912.⁹²

National homesteading prerequisites included proof of citizenship, literacy, a clean criminal record, and status as a male head of household. However, many of the individuals given land were soldiers or company employees new to the region with minimal to no farming skills. In 1907, the government added further requirements such as living on the land for three years, building a home of specified dimensions within a year, and sowing half the land and enclosing the property within two years. The 1907 decree included proof of physical land occupation (meaning squatting) before January 15, 1901, sparking land grabs throughout the territory. By 1912, some 2,236 families owned 135,169 hectares of land as national settlers.⁹³

Faced with the influx of settlers, the Mapuche had to generate new forms of resistance to maintain control over their lands. For the Mapuche, the process of obtaining a land title was arduous and often futile. Eulogio Robles, the Protector of indigenous people in Cautín from 1872 to 1891, underscored that the laws did not protect native people from abuse, since the government had not created the infrastructure to enforce those laws.⁹⁴ Furthermore, local judges, many of them settlers themselves, often ruled on the side of colonists and enforced decisions using the local police, regardless of decisions made by state engineers, the Indigenous Settlement Commission, or the Protectorate.

Following the late eighteenth-century expulsion of the Society of Jesus from Latin America, the Franciscan order had taken up much of it work. In Chile, Italian friars from the order of Friars Minor Capuchin—a religious order of the Franciscans—took to evangelizing among the Mapuche. In 1896, a group of young Bavarian Capuchin friars replaced their Italian brethren, building new missions and boarding schools for indigenous children.⁹⁵ The friars appeared at a moment when the Mapuche needed allies to defend their lands, and the Capuchins were willing to play an intermediary role between the Mapuche and the Chilean state. Longkos (community chiefs) and Capuchin fathers built an understanding in which the friars spoke out and supported their claims, and the longkos urged community members to baptize and send their children to mission schools. The extent to which the friars supported the Mapuche communities and their cause, and Mapuche communities proved willing to go along with what the friars wanted, varied depending on the community.

Forging of Organized Resistance

Father Sigifredo de Frauenhäusl (1868–1954) was the most outspoken advocate in the Church against the injustices committed against the Mapuche. In 1902, he invited longkos from “Putue, Purakina, Marken, Lumalla, Chalupen, Pucura, Trailafquen, Cheski, Puron and Leltune” to visit the Villarrica Mission and learn about its work.⁹⁶ He described the longkos as agreeable to “the need for civilization, Christianity, marriage through the church, [and] the need to receive the Holy Sacraments at the hour of death.”⁹⁷ At the second meeting, however, the longkos reversed the script. They described the abuses committed against them by settlers and judges. Although this was the first meeting of its kind for Father Sigifredo, he would hear and witness many such cases over the years.

In the first decade of 1900, the Mapuche emerged as political actors, due to a combination of intensified land grabs and access to education that allowed them, especially men, entry into the public sphere. The first notable Mapuche political gathering took place in 1907 in Coz Coz near the town of Panguipulli, where Father Sigifredo ran the mission. Mapuche representatives from Chile and Argentina gathered to discuss the abuses committed against them by wingkas. Father Sigifredo invited the young journalist Aurelio Díaz Meza to report on the Coz Coz Parliament proceedings. In describing the parliament's goals, Díaz Meza noted that it was the Mapuches’ desire to live in tranquility on “their land, their ruca (home), and with their animals.” He described the many testimonials he had collected with the help of his 20-year-old translator, José Antonio Curipán, who was the nephew of Longko Manuel Curipán-Truelén from Coz Coz.

The longkos from around Coz Coz described multiple incidents with Joaquín Mera, the large landowner in the area. Mera's brother, Rafael, often did his dirty work by assaulting Mapuche or calling the police to enforce evictions. The longkos emphasized their inability to work on their lands due to the ongoing livestock killings and theft, physical violence, and never-ending court proceedings.⁹⁸ For example, Naguilef Loncón from Llongahue explained that he had allowed the landless Abel Peña to build a small ranch on his land with his wife and two daughters. Peña promised to pay rent and to leave as soon as he could find a better plot, which led to the two men signing an agreement in Valdivia. Loncón later learned that Peña tricked him: the deal in the agreement made Loncón and his Mapuche community Peña's inquilinos.

As Longko José Cheuquefilu from Cayumapu stated:

We go to Valdivia, where we stay ten to fifteen days, unable to speak to anyone because they tell us that we are a nuisance. When we complain to the Protectorate of Indigenous People or the Judge, nothing happens in the courts. They ask that we bring witnesses; we take witnesses [with us, and we] pay for translators, which does not include what we pay to the secretary and, ultimately, they tell us our witnesses are no good. We cannot even pay for justice.⁹⁹

Díaz Meza heard testimony after testimony that illustrated the Mapuche reality of ongoing violence and legal proceedings at the hands of a system that typically ruled against them.

Following the Coz Coz Parliament, the Mapuche experienced no changes in their reality. Father Sigifredo had urged them to make use of institutional channels, but the 1907 law intensified land conflict in the region and engendered distrust between longkos and friars. While some Capuchin fathers continued to champion the Mapuche cause, they never lost sight of their evangelizing mission and civilizing project. The Bavarian friars promoted the work with the Indigenous Settlement Commission, advocating for individual land titles instead of communal landholdings, a notable argument from an order that at its inception opposed property ownership.¹⁰⁰ Friar Gerónimo, for example, felt that the Mapuche had natural abilities as farmers, unlike the immigrants who arrived unprepared to farm.¹⁰¹ Father Sigifredo and other friars aided the settlement commission by visiting homes and urging the Mapuche to formalize land titles. Karl Kohut explains that the settlement commission's attempts were complicated by “both Chileans and Mapuche [who] made the surveyors’ work difficult because they both feared losing their lands.”¹⁰² Kohut notes that some indigenous communities did not receive official titles, benefiting landowners like Joaquín Mera. Once the settlement commission's business came to a close in Panguipulli in 1912, Father Sigifredo focused on running the mission school. He continued to aid Mapuche causes but he became less active and more impatient, describing Mapuche requests as “typical complaints.”¹⁰³

In 1910, a group of educated Mapuche founded the Caupolicán Society in Defense of Araucanía, which was the first Mapuche political organization to advocate actively for their rights. The society's inaugural president was Manuel Neculmán, the first recorded Mapuche primary school teacher, who arrived at Temuco Fort with the Chilean military in 1882.¹⁰⁴ Other members included Mapuche teachers and translators, and Temuco High School graduates such as Manual Manquilef and José Segundo Painemal.¹⁰⁵ The majority of Mapuche boys who attended Temuco High School were the children of Mapuche leaders who supported the Chilean army or whose parents had the means to live in Temuco. The society spotlighted crimes committed against native people and initiated campaigns promoting temperance, education, and opposition to the taxation of communal lands. Through those efforts, its members backed aspects of Chile's civilizing project by advocating the politics of uplift and assimilation to achieve social equality.

The society's political foundation was middle class and conservative but its leaders presented themselves as representing the Mapuche. Mapuche communities took them at face value, putting forward their own claims. According to Foerster and Mendocino, rural Mapuche communities called on the society to publicly denounce abuses. In one instance, in 1913, Painemal attended and spoke at a Mapuche-organized protest in Imperial.¹⁰⁶ The society emerged at a moment when Capuchin friars had pulled away from active participation in the Mapuche cause, filling a political void at a time of increased land conflict.

Also in 1910, Congress created the Colonization Parliamentary Commission to investigate the colonization process in Araucanía. The commission's priority was to review petitions by national settlers, but their work was interrupted when a Mapuche delegation presented their demands, forcing the commission to include their claims in the final report.¹⁰⁷ The commission's 1912 report concluded that there were legal inconsistencies regarding land laws and that underfunding had created personnel shortages, slowing the settlement process. These issues, noted the commission, contributed to the state's inability to monitor land grabs and other conflicts in the region. The report included a graph that classified the types of petitions presented by national settlers and indigenous claimants. National settlers requested an increase in the number of land titles, while the Mapuche in contrast asked for “protection against abuses by colonizing societies and individuals.”¹⁰⁸ The differences in the type of petitions each group introduced highlight the dissimilarity of their situations: one group demanded something they believe was owed to them, and the other, from a position of limited influence, requested protection.

The 1912 report confirmed the concerns expressed by numerous local officials, yet Congress did not follow through with the commission's recommendations. The commission's findings detailed the problems caused by insufficient funding, which had destabilized a colonization effort directed by multiple government offices. As had Eulogio Robles, it pointed out that the colonization laws ultimately did not protect native people from abuse, unwilling as the government was to create the infrastructure to enforce those laws.¹⁰⁹ It is possible that Congress's inaction reflected the interests of sectors of the Chilean elite, since landed families benefited from the lack of supervision. Furthermore, a more distant process ultimately freed Santiago officials from blame. In the end, the commission evidenced more of the same: a well-meaning critique with minimal changes that continued to benefit large estate owners.

The unchanging situation motivated Manuel Manquilef to write ¡Tierras de Arauco! in 1915 to call attention to the injustices committed against indigenous communities. ¡Tierras de Arauco! is a political critique that combines anthropological survey with race politics analysis as policy proposal. The piece opens by framing the Araucanía as belonging to the Mapuche, noting that Chileans had stolen their lands through trickery, broken treaties, and the spread of alcohol. He went on to criticize communal lands, arguing that they inhibited Mapuche assimilation into Chilean society. Manquilef shared Friar Gerónimo's belief that for the Mapuche to integrate politically and economically into Chilean society, they needed to become small landowners benefiting from the same legal protections as Chileans. He proposed replacing the paternalistic state with a patron-client system, similar to that of Ancient Rome, that would institute harmonious class relations between large and small agricultural landowners. He viewed the patron-client system as “necessary for societies formed by diverse cultures.”

However, unlike Ancient Rome, the modern nation-state required uniformity built on the national elite's hegemonic illusion of racial and cultural unity. Jennifer Clark best sums up the limits of cultural continuity for indigenous populations within the modern state, noting that indigenous assimilation in the “spirit of democratic equality” did not allow for “community independence.”¹¹⁰ Manquilef was aware that the continuity of Mapuche culture was at stake and intertwined with land and class systems quickly taking form in the region. He presented an alternative to a national racial politic that denied the Mapuche protection of their land and culture while denying the existence of racist policies that forced them into second-class status. Manquilef's honest description of the state of regional conflict and the duplicitous implementation of Chilean laws did not dissuade him from upholding aspects of Western economic and social systems.

Local officials and Bavarian friars participated in the early twentieth-century campaña reduccional (community land-grant campaign) that registered Mapuche households to accept community land grants through the Indigenous Settlement Commission. However most lower-level officials and friars, and Manquilef himself, believed that private property—rather than communal lands—would place the Mapuche on equal footing. In ¡Tierras de Arauco! Manquilef advocated for land enclosure, arguing that open lands were the cause of widespread livestock theft. He thought communal lands deprived the Mapuche of the opportunity to own more land. On average, Mapuche families received three to five hectares as part of communal land titles, compared to the 40 to 150 hectares given to settlers. Manquilef thought state engineers and the Indigenous Settlement Commission prioritized communal landholdings as a means to distribute less land to the Mapuche, an opinion shared by many observers.¹¹¹ He argued that individually owned plots would give the Mapuche the right to sell the land, if they chose to, and provide the state with the ability to “transform the Indians as soon as possible into country estate workers.”¹¹² He critiqued communal lands as “contrary to civilization” and as “communist doctrine impossible to put into practice.”¹¹³ Manquilef linked private property to the patron-client system, underscoring that such an economic arrangement would benefit the patron and “the Indians would at least become its good workers.”¹¹⁴ In other words, Manquilef undeniably endorsed capitalist class relations in Araucanía but with a slight twist.

Manquilef made apparent his support for Western progress in a subsection titled “Ways to Kill Indians” that seemingly references Captain Richard Pratt's 1892 speech “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” Pratt, who founded the Carlisle Indian School in 1879 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, aimed to “civilize” native people by immersing them into “white society and [rejecting] anything Indian.”¹¹⁵ Manquilef's high school director and employer, Tomás Guevara, cited Carlisle in Educación indígena (1902), where he proposed creating Carlisle-like institutions that would “turn the Indian into a useful cultivator in the fields, where they can benefit from their efforts and the love that they hold for their customs and the soil of their ancestors.”¹¹⁶ Manquilef's text offers an alternative to Pratt's position, advocating the replacement of the plural identity with an atomized Indian identity by promoting education and private property.¹¹⁷ For Manquilef, the problem was communal landholdings. Unlike Pratt and Guevara, he did not envision the disappearance of Mapuche culture through the dissolution of communal lands but instead the growth of a culturally diverse society through equal access to land and education. He proposed “killing” aspects of Indianness such as communal landholdings, while promoting the continuance of Mapuche cultural rituals and familial structures.

Manquilef's writings illustrate what Florencia Mallon describes as Manquilef's “double consciousness,” which fought to reconcile the colonizer's world of individual capitalism with his Mapuche-informed cultural and political practices, even when the two worlds collided around him.¹¹⁸ A year after the publication of ¡Tierras de Arauco!, Manquilef became the Caupolicán Society's second president, following Neculmán. As word spread about his new position and publication, the Araucanian Catholic Congress in Santiago organized a speaking engagement for Manquilef to discuss his support for private property and the breaking up of communal landholdings. Furthermore, his alma mater, Temuco High School, published an excerpt from ¡Tierras de Arauco! in its school newspaper El Estudiante, titled “El último cacique [The Last Cacique],” focusing entirely on the topic of individual land ownership.¹¹⁹

Eventually Manquilef's public promotion of dissolving communal lands generated a rift within the Caupolicán Society.¹²⁰ For longkos and Mapuche communities, Manquilef's polemics regarding land distribution and organization were an attack on their land claims. The possibility of breaking up communal lands opened the door to losing more land, they thought. Even though Manquilef inherited the title of longko of Pelal, he did not live consistently on the land; his education gave him an urban-based career, and he eventually became a congressional deputy. The nature of the intra-Mapuche debates is unknown, but Manquilef was forced to step down as the Caupolicán Society's spokesperson. Regardless of Manquilef's eventual turn toward governmental politics, he remained active in Mapuche political circles throughout his life.

Manquilef's prose reflects his lived “double-consciousness,” seen in his conflict with the Caupolicán Society. Yet his opinions were an anomaly—outside of the typical Mapuche experience. In 1916, Manuel Aburto Panguilef, an Anglican-educated Mapuche, founded the Araucanian Federation to fill the void of Manquilef's lost leadership, which had placed the society in disarray.¹²¹ Unlike Manquilef, Panguilef was politically rooted in his rural community and centered class conflict over class harmony. When Manquilef, in his capacity as state deputy, submitted a law to Congress “for the division and privatization of communal lands,” it sparked outrage from Mapuche comuneros who questioned his cultural identity.¹²² While the fusion of rural class politics with the Mapuche land struggle took hold in the 1920s, one can pinpoint 1916 as the moment when Mapuche land discourse reoriented toward class politics, seen in its eventual alliance with the Chilean Communist Party. It also signaled the emergence of a Mapuche political discourse that distanced itself from the middle-class Mapuche promotion of assimilation and social uplift. The Araucanian Federation was the starting point at which the Mapuche reinitiated a confrontational approach to land seizures. They were unwilling to be passive political actors, opening a new stage in which the Mapuche centered their cultural legacy in their land claims.¹²³

Conclusion

Land value is generated by the political economy and the social imaginations of its inhabitants. Yet the consequences of how land value and ownership were enforced by the Chilean government and its landed elite illuminate a racialized land policy that was deemed necessary for building the modern nation. As this article shows, the years 1871 to 1916 proved to be a defining period, when the vision for and the process and reaction to Chilean land policies laid bare the political and racial language that justified its colonization schemes. The 1866 and 1874 colonization laws were pivotal in shaping the legal language of the Chilean colonial nation.

However, it was the National Society of Agriculture's 1882 proposal that propelled the Chilean government to transform its vision for Araucanía into a government-led project. In that period, the efforts by colonization agents and state engineers in merging land value and race politics mirrored the ideological raison d’être that positioned European settlers as ideal. The European farmer emerged as the embodiment of modernity, while government officials questioned the usefulness of Mapuche farmers and herders. In the end, many European settlers and Chilean homesteaders proved to be lousy farmers. The Mapuche, who had accumulated agricultural experience through contact with Catholic priests and nearby farmers before the colonization of their lands, proved to be the most able. Yet the curtailment of their lands forced many to abandon their old professions in search of employment as estate or urban workers.

The series of government decrees between 1896 and 1912 that allowed Chilean nationals to petition as settlers escalated land grabs across Araucanía. Within that period, the Mapuche reorganized and began to articulate a political discourse of land and civil rights. Although tensions materialized between the state-educated and the rurally based Mapuche, a counternarrative nevertheless emerged that contested the state's hegemonic claim in dictating land access. The Mapuche who organized and wrote publicly on the matter knew unequivocally that race dictated government decisions about land distribution. From that perspective, this article identifies pivotal shifts in Chile's colonization program while centering the racial politics that informed it.

Further research on this period of history is needed to paint a fuller picture of the region's transition from indigenous-controlled lands to a Chilean province, yet this article offers a framework to research and comprehend what happened to Mapuche lands. It places itself alongside up-and-coming scholarly works that challenge the notion that race was an insignificant factor in the construction of the Chilean nation by demonstrating that the legal explanations for the privatization of indigenous lands in Araucanía were made through a language of race.