Rural areas of post-independence Latin America, often beyond the control of emerging nation-states, drew tales from urban elites and European travelers of perilous country roads stalked by rapacious bandits and lawless indigenous peoples. Pilar M. Herr examines some of these peripheral spaces and communities in nineteenth-century Chile, seeking to connect them with nation-state formation. Each of the five body chapters in the book focuses on a different piece of Chilean nation-state formation. Some chapters pertain to the central state (including examinations of legal and constitutional history, as well as elite ideas about race and citizenship), and others to the rural periphery (these chapters explore the banditry of the Pincheira family, Mapuche alliances with the Spanish Empire and the Chilean government, and parlamentos).
Herr's work on the Pincheira montonera offers a thought-provoking and tantalizing account of banditry in the borderlands of post-independence Chile. Herr locates the Pincheiras in a shifting, ambiguous space between Spanish royalist forces, Pehuenche allies, and the incipient creole state. Also notable here is Herr's fine-grained analysis of Chile's early constitutions and other legal documents, and particularly her analysis of colonial and nineteenth-century parlamentos. The chapter on parlamentos is the heart of the book; Herr's argument about the shifting meanings of these summits between Mapuche leaders and Spanish (and later, Chilean) authorities stands out as the most nuanced and compelling offered. The contention that parlamentos demonstrate changing understandings of Mapuche sovereignty, as Spanish practices that acknowledged the Mapuche as “equal partners” gave way to Chilean ones that coded the Mapuche as “second-class citizens” (96), makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how Mapuche groups navigated Chile's independence transition through their interactions with the new Chilean state.
The individual chapters in this book are deeply interesting, although there are some missed opportunities here to draw stronger ties between them. Connecting themes such as banditry, borderland studies, criminality, and indigeneity, which figure in the introductory chapter as framing concepts for the study, appear inconsistently in the other chapters. This ultimately limits Herr's ability to use those ideas to tie her chapters together. Finally, it is a bit surprising how absent Mapuche voices are here. This may be an overly picky critique, given Herr's conscientiously outlined focus on Mapuche actors and actions in direct connection to Chilean nation-state formation. She makes clear that her study examines the Mapuche “as an essential element of how and why state formation in Chile developed” (4), rather than focusing on internal Mapuche politics or history.
Even so, without more robust context and source material, especially from Mapuche voices, the Pehuenche Mapuche actors here read more two-dimensionally than do their Spanish and Chilean counterparts. It would be helpful to engage with anthropological, sociological, ethnohistorical, and other historical research on Mapuche communities to work toward understanding the early nineteenth century through Mapuche lenses, however imperfectly possible that might be.
In sum, this book makes a valuable contribution to literature on nation-state formation in nineteenth-century Chile. Herr's analyses of parlamentos and the Pincheira montonera challenge traditional boundaries of where and how nation-state formation happened, and shift our gaze from the capital city to the rural expanses southward. Despite some missed opportunities that may well laid outside the scope of the author's intentions, this is a useful and admirable volume that will interest scholars of nineteenth-century Latin America, and it will appeal to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students as a unique and often exciting examination of a fledgling nation-state trying to find its footing.
