Embattled Identities: The Chilean Araucanian versus the Peruvian Inca

In 2003 two Chilean teenagers sparked a diplomatic incident between Chile and Peru when they spray-painted one of the ancient stone walls of Cuzco. Local people came out on the streets (with banners that denounced the ‘destroyers of Inca culture!’) and demanded the harshest punishment possible for the guilty parties. Peruvians often criticise their southern neighbours for harbouring racist attitudes towards them; Chilean governing elites are renowned for imaging their country as less Indian (and consequently more ‘civilised’) than Peru. My paper traces the history behind such a process of nationalist ‘othering’, focusing on historical writings and newspaper reports published during the late nineteenth century (just prior to and during the War of the Pacific). It examines an under-explored angle of the historical animosity between Chile and Peru, namely Chileans’ appropriation of a glorious indigenous heritage of their own (the heroic Araucanian warrior) to counter Peruvian narratives of Inca greatness. It also shows how Peruvian nationalists simultaneously endorsed and subverted this image of indigenous Chile.