ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the complex, shifting intersections between gender, racial, and national identities in modern Chile. It shows how the masculine ideals of physique and behaviour projected onto the noble warrior of old have existed in tension with disparaging attitudes towards contemporary Mapuche demanding respect for their rights. The chapter considers the multiple, creative ways in which Mapuche intellectuals and political leaders have engaged with dominant discourses of gender, race and nation in republican Chile. In the early 1900s, as the centenary of independence approached, an intellectual discourse known as decadentismo emerged to counter the official “imaginings” of Chile as a gloriously successful republican experiment. Nicolas Palacios maintained that one of the main causes of Chile’s national crisis, indicated by rising crime rates and widespread alcoholism, was the liberal State’s land colonisation policy, which promoted the immigration of inferior “Latin races".
