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

The significance of a microhistory depends on what it represents. A well-chosen case study can offer a window onto a wider world and broader historical processes. It might be typical or atypical in revealing ways. Or it might be chosen because it played a pivotal role in a larger history or was emblematic of how an important person experienced that history. This book demonstrates the power of a well-chosen case study to illuminate a larger historical canvas and revise our views of major historical issues.

The indigenous Mapuche communities of southern Chile were so diverse in their characteristics and experience that Mallon initially decided to study four of them. The community of Nicolas Ailío, the subject of this book, was famous during Salvador Allende's "Chilean Revolution" of 1970–1973 as the protagonist of one of its earliest and most contested tomas [land seizures], which became a political cause celèbre for both Left and Right and was viewed by both as a symbol of the revolutionary process that they wanted to advance or reverse.

Mallon begins her book with the dramatic 1970 land seizure, but then places it within a much longer and larger history of Mapuche land loss and deprivation. The Mapuches, Chile's largest indigenous group, resisted conquest for three centuries, but since the 1880s, like the Native Americans of the U.S. West, they have lost land and power to European immigrants, local entrepreneurs, and corrupt or racist politicians. The first half of her book is the prehistory of the land seizure, an account that draws on extensive research in local and national archives, as well as on oral histories, to trace the usurpation of community land and consequent poverty of the "generation without shoes." For Mallon, Nicholas Ailío offers an extreme case of a more general Mapuche experience, which explains its leading role, pioneering a path that other Mapuches then followed. The second half of her book explores the consequences of this toma. It begins with three years of "fleeting prosperity" as an agrarian reform cooperative in the vanguard of Allende's rural revolution, which the Pinochet dictatorship repressed and dismantled. It ends with the community's division and acquisition of new state-subsidized land in 1996/97, after the restoration of democracy and passage of a new Indigenous People's law intended to make amends for past wrongs and create a more equitable base for Mapuche integration into Chilean society.

Historians of Latin America will be particularly interested in Mallon's account of a community whose land seizure catapulted Allende's "democratic road to socialism" prematurely into a radicalized agrarian reform that initially advanced the "revolutionary process," but ultimately contributed to the conditions that led to Pinochet's violent military coup of 1973. Mallon chillingly recounts the severe impact of the coup on the Mapuche, along with the story of the cultural revival of the 1980s that saved the Mapuche as a people, even as neoliberal policies were undermining their communal landholdings. Historians of Chile will also be interested in the way that her microhistory revises the standard history of Chile while confirming the emerging new view of Mapuche history as integral to Chilean history, as well as in her account of the tensions between ethnic and socioeconomic constructions of Mapuche peasant identities.

Readers of this journal will be most intrigued by Mallon's innovative methodology, in particular what she terms her "dialogical method," which has two dimensions. It refers to "a dialogue between the archive . . . and human memory" (9): Mallon brought historical documents to the community, and their responses to them helped shape her book. But it also describes her "deepening dialogue" with her Mapuche subjects in all phases of her research, conceptualization, analysis, and writing of this book, which she credits with transforming her study in multiple ways (14...