The racialized trope of the history of Argentina as one of “civilization vs. barbarie” with civilization and modernization ultimately triumphing, has been unfortunately persistent, despite efforts to dismantle it. Carolyne E. Larson's timely edited collection of essays on the Argentine state's systemic and well-planned destruction of its native Mapuche peoples in the late nineteenth century not only successfully dismantles this trope, but also places Argentina's indigenous peoples at the center of this tragic, and necessary, story. The ten contributing scholars, whose fields range from history to Spanish literature, archeology, sociology and anthropology, seek to de-heroize the Conquest of the Desert and to reintegrate the Mapuche indigenous peoples’ rightful place in Argentine history, literature, and culture in the process.

Larson's introduction presents the three main themes: “indigenous peoples and nation-state formation, borderlands and settler colonialism, and interdisciplinary dialogue” (11). Her first chapter lays the “official” historical foundation for the edited volume, which as Larson argues, “shaped contemporary responses to the conquest and also steered its legacy in Argentine society and memory for generations to come” (18). The ensuing chapters expand on these themes through both a disciplinary and thematic approach. For example, in Chapter 4 Ricardo Salvatore explores the meaning of having living Indians in the Museum of La Plata (a natural science museum). His chapter explores the ethics and complexities of what it meant for evolutionary anthropologists to have Indians taken as prisoners during the conquest and made to live out their lives as experimental specimens at the museum. Researchers catalogued their customs, stories, and beliefs. What seemed on the surface to be a way to record indigenous ways of life had a darker purpose. That purpose, or reality, was that most researchers, including museum directors, were “collectors and amateur archeologists [who] expressed their desire for Indian tribes to ‘disappear’ from history” (114).

Disappearing is exactly what Chapters 2 and 5 explore in detail, specifically the genocide of the indigenous peoples of Argentina. One of the underlying themes of the collection is a reckoning with precisely how the Conquest of the Desert simultaneously catapulted Argentina into modernity by finally “taming” the desert and by literally destroying its indigenous inhabitants, in spite of the glorification that contemporary Argentines themselves wrote about this period, and the mixed legacy resulting from it. Chapter 6 discusses the meaning of the desert in Argentine literature. At the heart of Jennie Daniels's analyses of several works of literature over time is the reimagining of the desert and its inhabitants as others. Indians disappear. Gauchos become whitened. And by the twentieth century, the city becomes much like the earlier desert: dangerous. “Not only may the desert be within the citizen, but where these children of the desert, the working classes, are concentrated in the city, the urban becomes a new representation of the dangerous desert” (164). The desert in Argentina, then, is a metaphor for understanding its own history of inclusion and exclusion.

Scholars interested in indigenous studies, borderlands studies, state-formation and Argentine history will find much to admire in this book. A minor critique is the repetition of names, dates, and events surrounding the conquest across many of the essays, which can be a bit distracting to the reader. More important, however, is that this volume raises the Argentine indigenous peoples from their historical ashes and places them at the center of the narrative, where they belong.