This book is the result of more than twenty years of research regarding the photographic material that the Capuchin evangelizers disseminated about the Mapuche world in their efforts to disseminate their work and raise funds to sustain it.
The book brings together more than two hundred photographs and includes an introduction and two articles that contextualize Capuchin work in the region since the mid-nineteenth century. The texts allow us to understand the role that photography played in a context where the Capuchins intended to “evangelize” and the State to “civilize”, but both institutions sought to transform the Mapuche and empty him of his economic, social and cultural practices.
It is a bilingual Mapudungun-Spanish edition, which is part of the commitment of the Universidad de la Frontera to revitalize the Mapuche language. In addition, the book has a prologue from the Jorge Pinto National Prize for History, for whom the work is of “extraordinary interest in understanding the moment when the Chilean State arrived in the region and some of the complexities that accompanied this process.”