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49 Chapter Two Domesticating Indians Juan Ignacio Molina’s Compendio de la historia civil del reyno de Chile (1795) Los Araucanos son en sus comarcas los enemigos más comunes, más intrépidos, y más irreconciliables de la España. [The Araucanians are in these regions the most common, most intrepid, and most intransigent enemies of Spain.] Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal, Historia de las dos Indias I. “La nación chilena”: Molina and his “bárbaros” Oviedo y Baños’s Historia de la conquista y población de la provincia de Venezuela , the focus of the preceding chapter, deals with one particular place on the map of Spain’s eighteenth-century viceroyal periphery. Chile represents an even more distant and contested point on that map. Initial Spanish efforts to conquer Chile in the sixteenth century were an expansion of Francisco Pizarro’s Andean expedition, and the Peruvian conquest was both an inspiration and a cautionary tale for Spaniards endeavoring to expand their conquest southward. The Araucanians who inhabited that region were one of the few groups that had managed to remain outside of Inca imperial control, and their spirited resistance to conquest was the stuff of legend.1 When Spaniards first encountered the Araucanians in 1546, the European invaders were handily defeated. But Pedro de Valdivia arrived from Peru four years later, leading a Spanish advance to the BíoBío River and founding the fortified city of Concepción.2 With these victories the Spaniards appeared to have been successful in bringing the Araucanians under control and began employing them as forced labor in Spanish gold mines. However, in 1553 the Araucanians reinitiated armed resistance that would continue sporadically until 1882.3 Because of its strategic location on the periphery of the empire and because of the ongoing conflict with a local indigenous population that proved difficult to subdue in any definitive way, Chile commanded a great deal of imperial interest during both the Hapsburg and Bourbon periods.4 It became home to a number of Jesuit and Franciscan missions that complemented (and sometimes 50 Domesticating Empire competed with) military efforts to secure the Spanish frontier. In the eighteenth century the BíoBío River still served as it had since the sixteenth century to mark the border between Araucanian territory and that of the Spaniards.5 But in Chile, perhaps more than any other place in the Spanish Empire, the discursive boundary between savagery and domestication was not clearly drawn. Eighteenth-century Araucanians inhabited a complex middle ground, as the Jesuit writer Juan Ignacio Molina demonstrates in his Compendio de la historia civil del reyno de Chile, a history of Chile from 1546 to 1787.6 Interspersed with a chronologically organized account of Spanish efforts to conquer Chile are numerous chapters devoted to Araucanian customs, religion, and governance. In the Compendio de la historia civil, Molina in effect claims new territory for the Araucanians by domesticating them.7 That is, he rewrites their savagery by recasting military feats as virtuous and pragmatic acts of civic engagment and diplomatic oratory. As Hapsburg imperial strategies for dealing with Indians were being re-envisioned through a Bourbon imperial lens, Molina retouches earlier portrayals of the Araucanians produced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reimagining his subject in response to the ideological imperatives of his own moment.8 Through a reading of how the indigenous inhabitants of Chile were represented to eighteenth-century criollo and European readers in the Compendio de la historia civil, we can trace Molina’s project: to introduce to his readers a new kind of Indian protagonist, characterized not by brute savagery but rather by reason, political pragmatism, and rhetorical eloquence.9 This reading affords us an opportunity to broaden the scope of Enlightenmentera thinking on racial and cultural difference and to consider Molina’s Araucanians as an example of how New World Indians operated in a particular natural, social, and political context.10 The eighteenth century saw a significant demographic shift as the Amer­ indian population began to recover after having been decimated during the preceding two centuries. This resurgence in population coincided with the transition from the Hapsburg to the Bourbon dynasty, and a corresponding shift in imperial administrative practices. Responding to enlightened critiques of bloodthirsty Spanish conquistadors and to their own economic and political interests , Bourbon officials created new structures for consolidating and exercising authority in the Spanish borderlands in hopes of “replacing war with commerce , colonists and diplomacy.”11 In...

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