European dressed in “Indian”: The disguise of indigenous women in the post-war of La Araucanía-Chile in the early twentieth century.

Abstract

In the present article two photographic pieces published in the magazine Tic-Tac in 1914 in the Region of the Araucanía, in the south of Chile in the context immediately after the military occupation of the territory inhabited by the Mapuche people..In the content of these images appear two women, identified as French, wearing traditional costumes of Mapuche women, corresponding to portraits of press produced in professional studies. We are interested in understanding the role of this staging at the beginning of the century, for this, the visual and gender codes are analyzed , under the hypothesis that these photographs reflect a look of the indigenous woman as an exotic figure, objectified as an erotic fantasy by patriarchal, colonial and white-Creole society, but they also contain contradictorily an imaginary of the femininity of the white woman whose role in the emerging local society will be to generate sons and daughters that allow the racial “whitewashing” of the new conquered territory.