The Secretaría of Mariluán: Mapuche Writing and Power in Chile’s War to the Death

This paper contributes to recent studies of “native intellectuals” and archives in Latin American to show how independent Mapuche groups in southern Chile and western Argentina incorporated Spanish linguistic and textual practices to create their own archives. Rather inhabiting a place as linguistically dexterous intermediaries or go-betweens, Mapuche leaders used correspondence to and from Chilean and Spanish officials and priests as strategies to augment their prestige, legitimacy, and territorial control in relation to outsiders and in inter-Mapuche conflicts. The majority of administrative and ecclesiastical archives maintained by Spain and Chile refract Mapuche cultural, territorial, and political practices through colonial and postcolonial lenses. By examining correspondence written and dictated by independent Mapuche cacique Francisco Mariluán during an early-nineteenth century civil war in Chile, it becomes possible to shed new light on how writing and dictating correspondence to Chilean and Spanish allies and enemies formed a strategy for exercising power linked to the maintenance of Mapuche territorial independence. Historians have begun to examine the corpus of writings produced by leaders of large indigenous confederations in the Pampas and Patagonia during the second half of the nineteenth century. However, the Mapuche in Chile have not received similar treatment. An examination of the large quantity of letters sent by Mariluán during the 1820s offers new possibilities for exploring how independent indigenous peoples inhabited and engaged with the subjectivities of royalist and patriot, subject and citizen, and ally and enemy. Furthermore, the persistence of Mapuche territorial independence during this period helps to the geographical cardinal directions of archive practices, power, and knowledge production in Chile.