Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906-2001 (review)

It is difficult to imagine a more apropos representation of the long and exacting but inspiring history of the Chilean Mapuche community of Nicolás Ailío than the worn and stoic face of don Armando Ailío, whose image appears on the front cover of Florencia E. Mallon's insightful book. With methodological and analytical dexterity, Courage Tastes of Blood explores the century-long and complicated relationship between the Mapuche of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean state. It reveals, as Mallon explains, how that indigenous community "survived against overwhelming odds" (p. 21) and intervened creatively, if unequally, "in the politics and process of the Chilean nation as a whole" (Ibid.) amid a continuous struggle involving land, identity and community in the Araucanía region.

Taking the name of its first cacique, the community of Nicolás Ailío came into being shortly after the turn of the century as a notably insufficient reducción, or land-grant community, upon the Chilean state's incorporation of the so-called southern frontier. For more than half a century the community then fought but failed to retain lands coveted by an emerging non-Mapuche landowning elite who took advantage of the national government's ambivalence toward indigenous communities. Already poor and becoming poorer, the people of Nicolás Ailío appealed to the state, engaging in litigation within the framework of Chilean law. This strategy proved futile but contributed to what became a community tradition of litigation in the name of justice. It also buttressed Nicolás Ailío's sense of community.

The governments of Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei (1964-1970) and Marxist Salvador Allende (1970-1973) offered new opportunities and posed new challenges for the people of Nicolás Ailío. The promise of agrarian reform spurred Mapuche communities into action to recover lost land but, in the case of the Allende years, the people of Nicolás de Ailío had to come to terms with a land-reform process—sanctioned by the state or pursued in a more radical way by the MIR, or the Movement of the Revolutionary Left—that challenged their community and ethnic identity. In other words, the leftist revolutionary idea of "class" cut across the lines of ethnicity and community. Thus, the people of Nicolás Ailío who fought for land and justice could either join leftist revolutionaries in multi-ethnic class struggle and tomas (land invasions) or continue the community's tradition of engaging the legal system as an ethnic community. This strained intra-community relations, as one would expect. Community members did not get the opportunity to settle this point of contention; the military coup of 1973 did it for them.

The Pinochet regime (1973-1990) put a quick end to agrarian reform and, as part of its neoliberal program, cancelled titles to Mapuche community lands. Impoverishment followed, as did an exodus of community members forced to find work elsewhere. Moreover, some in Nicolás Ailío directly experienced the cruel repression of a paranoid dictatorship. One might hastily assume that with the land titles' dissolution, the migration of some workers and intimidation would have weakened Nicolás Ailío's collective resolve. Yet, in Nicolás Ailío and other Mapuche communities a pan-Mapuche movement took root. By the 1990s and democracy's reemergence, the Concertación reversed the pinochetista policy that negated Mapuche land titles. Just as they had at the turn of the century, the people of Nicolás Ailío got land through legal channels created and overseen by the Chilean state. Not all was well, however. Some members left the community to form Nicolás Ailío II by way of a separate land grant. The division seen during the Allende years—between those committed to working...