Book Smart

Before the Chilean government vanquished the indigenous Mapuche people at the end of the 19th century, heavy forests and abundant rivers, lakes and coastal inlets teemed with resources, everything the Mapuche needed to survive.

“When they were resettled after the military defeat, they were left with a fraction of their original territory and without the skills or tools to farm it appropriately,” Mallon says. Not surprisingly, poverty followed. A common story, but one that history tends to ignore or skim over, she says.

Mallon will introduce that history to the public at a free reading from the book at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, May 2, at Borders West. Her appearance is part of the World Beyond Our Borders series, sponsored by Borders and the International Institute.

Mallon did not take a direct route to her study of the Mapuche. When she began graduate school, she assumed that she would focus on Chilean history. However, events of the day circumvented her plans to study in her home country.

“Since I’m originally from Chile, I thought I might focus on some aspect of that country. But the coup of 1973 made the kind of research I wanted to do — oral history and urban popular history — too dangerous, both for me and for anyone who might have been willing to talk to me. So I worked in Peru and Mexico, but once the transition to democracy began in Chile in 1989, I knew it would only be a matter time before I returned there,” she says.

When Mallon did, she focused her scholarly gaze on the Mapuche. She combined research in national and regional archives with direct conversations with the residents of the town of Nicolas Ailio, one of more than 1,000 land-grant communities into which the government settled the Mapuche between 1885 and 1930. Mallon found that her two research streams fed off of and augmented each other.

“I looked at the other with new eyes when I came back from one. It was especially challenging to follow up clues from the oral interviews in written records, but I was extremely lucky and found what I was looking for in most cases,” she says. “This would then lead me back with new information and questions for my interviewees, and the process would start all over again.”

Mallon says that the community of Nicolas Ailio designated her their official historian. “I had to present my project in the community assembly and answer their questions before they approved my access to their story. As the result of that conversation, we began to have almost constant dialogue. I shared my archival documents with them and they shared their life experiences and personal and community historical narratives with me.”

Mallon wound up with a true dialogue, she says, a negotiation among different points of view and versions of the truth.

“It is also a rethinking of the 20th century Chilean state. By starting from the experiences of the most marginalized members of the society, I put a difference face on the evolution of Chilean democracy,” she says.