Biography
Biography
My specializations are Modern Latin America; gender, ethnicity and class; and indigenous history. My Research and Teaching Interests include Latin American History, 19th and 20th centuries, especially Mexico, Peru, and Chile. Ethnicity, gender, and colonialism; oral history and testimonial literature; Native-state relations.
Education
Ph.D., Yale
M.A., Yale
B.A., Harvard
Books
Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906–2001
Florencia Mallon. Courage Tastes of Blood: The Mapuche Community of Nicolás Ailío and the Chilean State, 1906–2001. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.
Until now, very little about the recent history of the Mapuche, Chile’s largest indigenous group, has been available to English-language readers. Courage Tastes of Blood helps to rectify this situation. It tells the story of one Mapuche community—Nicolás Ailío, located in the south of the country—across the entire twentieth century, from its founding in the resettlement process that followed the military defeat of the Mapuche by the Chilean state at the end of the nineteenth century. Florencia E. Mallon places oral histories gathered from community members over an extended period of time in the 1990s in dialogue with one another and with her research in national and regional archives. Taking seriously the often quite divergent subjectivities and political visions of the community’s members, Mallon presents an innovative historical narrative, one that reflects a mutual collaboration between herself and the residents of Nicolás Ailío. Mallon recounts the land usurpation Nicolás Ailío endured in the first decades of the twentieth century and the community’s ongoing struggle for restitution. Facing extreme poverty and inspired by the agrarian mobilizations of the 1960s, some community members participated in the agrarian reform under the government of socialist president Salvador Allende. With the military coup of 1973, they suffered repression and desperate impoverishment. Out of this turbulent period the Mapuche revitalization movement was born. What began as an effort to protest the privatization of community lands under the military dictatorship evolved into a broad movement for cultural and political recognition that continues to the present day. By providing the historical and local context for the emergence of the Mapuche revitalization movement, Courage Tastes of Blood offers a distinctive perspective on the evolution of Chilean democracy and its rupture with the military coup of 1973.
When a Flower Is Reborn: The Life and Times of a Mapuche Feminist
Florencia Mallon. When a Flower Is Reborn: The Life and Times of a Mapuche Feminist. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.
A pathbreaking contribution to Latin American testimonial literature, When a Flower Is Reborn is activist Rosa Isolde Reuque Paillalef’s chronicle of her leadership within the Mapuche indigenous rights movement in Chile. Part personal reflection and part political autobiography, it is also the story of Reuque’s rediscovery of her own Mapuche identity through her political and human rights activism over the past quarter century. The questions posed to Reuque by her editor and translator, the distinguished historian Florencia Mallon, are included in the text, revealing both a lively exchange between two feminist intellectuals and much about the crafting of the testimonial itself. In addition, several conversations involving Reuque’s family members provide a counterpoint to her story, illustrating the variety of ways identity is created and understood. A leading activist during the Pinochet dictatorship, Reuque—a woman, a Catholic, and a Christian Democrat—often felt like an outsider within the male-dominated, leftist Mapuche movement. This sense of herself as both participant and observer allows for Reuque’s trenchant, yet empathetic, critique of the Mapuche ethnic movement and of the policies regarding indigenous people implemented by Chile’s post-authoritarian government. After the 1990 transition to democratic rule, Reuque collaborated with the government in the creation of the Indigenous Development Corporation (CONADI) and the passage of the Indigenous Law of 1993. At the same time, her deepening critiques of sexism in Chilean society in general, and the Mapuche movement in particular, inspired her to found the first Mapuche feminist organization and participate in the 1996 International Women’s Conference in Beijing. Critical of the democratic government’s inability to effectively address indigenous demands, Reuque reflects on the history of Mapuche activism, including its disarray in the early 1990s and resurgence toward the end of the decade, and relates her hopes for the future. An important reinvention of the testimonial genre for Latin America’s post-authoritarian, post-revolutionary era, When a Flower Is Reborn will appeal to those interested in Latin America, race and ethnicity, indigenous people’s movements, women and gender, and oral history and ethnography.
Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru
Florencia Mallon. Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru. University of California Press, 1995.
Peasant and Nation offers a major new statement on the making of national politics. Comparing the popular political cultures and discourses of postcolonial Mexico and Peru, Florencia Mallon provides a groundbreaking analysis of their effect on the evolution of these nation states. As political history from a variety of subaltern perspectives, the book takes seriously the history of peasant thought and action and the complexity of community politics. It reveals the hierarchy and the heroism, the solidarity and the surveillance, the exploitation and the reciprocity, that coexist in popular political struggle. With this book Mallon not only forges a new path for Latin American history but challenges the very concept of nationalism. Placing it squarely within the struggles for power between colonized and colonizing peoples, she argues that nationalism must be seen not as an integrated ideology that puts the interest of the nation above all other loyalties, but as a project for collective identity over which many political groups and coalitions have struggled. Ambitious and bold, Peasant and Nation both draws on monumental archival research in two countries and enters into spirited dialogue with the literatures of post-colonial studies, gender studies, and peasant studies.
History Courses
- History 241- Modern Latin America, 1780-1930
- History 242 – Modern Latin America, 1898 to the Present
- History 441 – Revolution and Conflict in Modern Latin America
- History 557 – Mexican Revolution
- History 600 – Advanced Seminar in History
- History 730 – Proseminar in Latin American History – Nineteenth-Century
- History 730 – Proseminar in Latin American History – Twentieth-Century Historiography
- History 753 – Seminar in comparative World History – “Gender and Colonialism”
- History 829 – Research Seminar in Latin American History
- History 982 – Seminar in Latin American Area – Native-State Relations
- History 982 – Seminar in Latin American Area – Oral History and Testimonial Literature