This paper analyzes the social conditions of the Chilean-mestizo and, at the same time, illiterate population that migrated to La Araucanía throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Considering the logic of the oligarchic regime in the colonization of the territory, it explores the mechanisms through which literacy and state bureaucracy operated as devices at the service of the construction of socioeconomic inequalities. It is argued that an important part of the modernization project of La Araucanía rested on the power of writing: a legal and bureaucratic order that accompanied the occupation army, civil and military authorities, and those who, together with them, would soon become large landowners. Added to this were other mechanisms of exclusion, such as low-quality democracy and electoral clientelism. Between this imposed order and those excluded from the modernization project—the Chilean-mestizo population and the Mapuche—state and non-state agents mediated the dissemination of writing and reinforced exclusion through bureaucratic means, communicational control, and the social and labor dependency of the illiterate.
