Not Common Lands: Mapuche Territoriality and the Racialized Making of Property in Southern Chile

This paper rethinks a comparative question that has become increasingly influential in global histories of land and capitalism: can Indigenous lands be understood as “common lands”? Building from Tamar Herzog’s argument that possession is not a fixed legal status but a historically contingent practice produced through contestation, boundary-making, and authority (Herzog 2015), I examine how Chilean officials transformed Mapuche territory in Araucanía into alienable property between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than an enclosure of communal land, I argue that Mapuche territory was subjected to a racialized administrative project that recast land as fiscal property, made title contingent on state legibility, and privileged European settlement and agrarian capitalism. This argument is placed in productive tension with Allan Greer’s influential framing of empire, property, and Indigenous dispossession in early North America (Greer 2018). While Greer shows how empires imposed property regimes that displaced Indigenous polities, the analytic language of the commons risks universalizing categories derived from European social history. A Mapuche-centered approach foregrounds land as mapu—a relational ecology that binds social, spiritual, and territorial life—so that dispossession marked a rupture in cosmology, identity, and economic trade. Crucially, dispossession was incomplete. Mapuche communal holdings persisted, generating ongoing litigation that complicated the coherence of private property itself. Their survival reinforces Herzog’s insight that possession remains an unsettled field of negotiation between competing authorities. Drawing on court records and foundational scholarship on colonization and land policy in the former Mapuche frontier (Ruiz-Esquide 2000; Green Rioja 2023), the paper demonstrates how legal practice produced a plural landscape in which Indigenous territorial frameworks and Chilean property law coexisted in tension. Native lands were not enclosed commons; they were sites where the meaning of ownership was actively disputed in courts, decrees, and administrative procedures.