Abstract

WASSERMAN, Fabio. Debates por la identidad: representaciones de los pueblos indígenas en el discurso de las elites letradas chilena y rioplatense, 1840-1860. Cuad. Sur, Hist. [online]. 2007, n.35-36, pp. 209-234. ISSN 2362-2997.

The aim of this article is to contribute to the knowledge of the process of the making of collective identities in Hispanic America after the revolution of independence. It focus on a subject of that process that could anachronically be called the indian question, that is to say the place given to the native groups in the development of the criollo society. The object of the analysis is formed by the representations of the indigenous people found in the discourse of the Chilean and Río de la Plata elites in the 1840s and 1850s. This choice comes from the fact that while both were societies with important interethnic contacts, their elites elaborated a divergent rhetoric and different images about the indigenous groups, that also influenced in several ways in each process of identity construction. While in the Plata there was an extended negative perception of these groups, in Chile some positive representations of the local indigenous -the Araucanos- were incorporated. This divergence brought a series of interventions and debates on both sides of the Andes Mountains that are the nucleus of this paper.

Keywords : Debates; Identities; Indian Question.