“Our Sons who Defend the Honor and Integrity of the Patria”: Using Military Sources to Rethink the “Indian Problem”

My paper will analyze the representation of indigenous people in documents produced by or for the military and will examine how these sources affect our understandings of indigenous participation in state-formation in the early 20th century. These sources include individuals’ military service records, testimony of conscripts and officers in military justice proceedings, and petitions by indigenous people regarding military service and abuses committed by military agents. Looking at the many conscripts who self-identified or were identified by the state as indigenous prior to the Chaco War, I will challenge the assumption that indigenous people were not included in military service until the war. Military sources also allow scholars to examine the efforts of state agents to convince “illiterates and individuals of the indigenous race” of their “duty” to serve in the military. Petitions written in the name of indigenous communities reveal how former conscripts used their service to make demands on the state, like the case of Sebastian Huanca, who invoked his military service in a 1915 petition that asked the Minister of War to curb abuses by local authorities. This paper will argue that these quotidian administrative sources challenge some of our historical understandings of the “Indian Problem,” which have mostly been based on legislative debates and the writings of elite intellectuals.