Florencia E. Mallon writes a unique history of modern Chile from the point of view of a Mapuche community—a marginalized indigenous people who sustain a politics of difference in relation to the nation-state. Mallon weaves together oral histories of the Mapuche community, archival research, and the community’s reactions to her writing of their contested history. She explores how history is shaped by the political concerns of authors and subjects—the questions writers ask, the subjects they write about, and the way people remember their own history. She shows how political concerns shaped the questions she asked about the Mapuche community of Nicolás Ailío and residents’ multiple perspectives and political visions about their efforts to survive and reconstitute themselves in the face of Chilean state repression. Mallon draws on these multiple perspectives to highlight how different actors in the community make sense of their past and present actions and shows how her writing of this book intervenes in Mapuche constructions of these diverse historical narratives.

Mallon also analyzes the common threads in these divergent perspectives to provide a broader vision of the community’s collective experience of the most significant moments of Chilean history between 1906 and 2001. She highlights the community’s memories of the Mapuche resettlement at the beginning of the 20th century, the loss of land to private investors promoted by state-backed developmentalism, the emergence of class-based rural activism and agrarian reform in the 1960s and 1970s, the brutal repression of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and the resurgence of ethnic-based strategies with the return to civilian rule in the 1990s.

Local Mapuche perspectives about how to narrate the complex combination of resentment, resistance, fear, and solidarity challenge researchers to rethink larger issues in Chilean history. Mallon shows that state policy favored national and foreign colonists as well as entrepreneurs, in general, over the legitimate land rights of the original Mapuche communities. She argues that this policy created Ailío’s expectations about justice and restitution. The residents of Ailío adapted creatively to the state’s conditions of exploitation, reorganizing their systems of kinship and authority to reproduce their identity in a postsettlement context. State policy not only fractured Mapuche territoriality and identity but also attacked the Mapuche’s capacity to preserve their culture and memory. The result was intense poverty and internal debate on how to confront the future. Mallon shows that Ailío community members draw on different interlocking notions of community, depending on the need and context. Sometimes, they organize their strategies of struggle and survival around a class consciousness and identity, at other times, around an ethnic consciousness and identity as a people.

Mallon documents the emergence of contemporary Mapuche identity from a mix of state action and the Mapuche’s own resistant and creative strategies. The ability to innovate and adapt when faced with difficult and uncontrollable situations is a central theme in the history of the community. The talent for adaptation and human connection helps researchers understand how such a demographically small community can have such a large historical presence. The Chilean state establishes structures, institutions, and political discourses within which people must struggle and exist, but Mapuche push the boundaries of these discourses, structures, and institutions, adapting and modifying them to their own struggles and identities. Mapuche peasants adapted and made theirs the postsettlement institutional order instated in 1884, which fragmented traditional lines of authority and forced them into sedentary agriculture. They rebuilt territorial relationships among communities through kinship, exchange of products, and the performance of collective rituals. With the transition to democratic rule, the people of Ailío used the new indigenous law to reorganize their community and acquire new land. They also combined state-generated categories and discourses with their own notions of solidarity and justice. They adapted state-given parameters to their own social, cultural, and family needs. The unity between territorial and cultural revindication, however, did not translate easily into existing political definitions.

Mallon offers an original contribution to the understanding of indigenous politics and memory, negotiations between indigenous people and the state, and the production of history from the margins.