Los vencedores is the translation into Spanish of Guerre et ethnogenèse mapuche dans le Chili colonial, published in Paris in 1998. (The preface by Nathan Wachtel also appeared in the French edition.) Trained as an anthropologist, Boccara emphasizes the fact that the word Mapuche appears in the sources only at the end of the colonial period. He then concludes that the late appearance of the word points to a consequent late emergence of the Mapuche identity. Indeed, Boccara states, when the Spaniards moved into the Araucanía, they did not encounter the Mapuche but the Reche. His aim therefore is to explain how the Reche eventually came to be the Mapuche.
The first part of the book is devoted to the Reche, the second to the Spanish vision of them, and the third to the Mapuche. In the opening sections, Boccara goes back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to...
