Javier Etchegaray

My research explores Chiloé’s colonial Indigenous communities, and my upcoming manuscript studies Indigenous participation and self-representation in judicial proceedings during the eighteenth century as a way of interrogating processes of social identity formation in Chiloé. I am interested in analyzing colonial corporate community formation and reproduction beyond discrete ethnic lines in this borderland region, following processes of ethnogenesis structured along tributary, geographic, occupational, and foral/customary lines.

I incorporate GIS methods as a central part of my research. I am interested in working with, and teaching, GIS exclusively using open-source datasets and software. I offer my services producing commissioned cartography; please write to me if you are interested in collaborating.

My recent publication in the Colonial Latin American Review titled “Desde los principios de aquella misión, y tiempo inmemorial: the indios de la compañía as an alternative path towards Indigenous community formation in Chiloé, 1626-1767,” follows the historical trajectory of the indios de la compañía, a group of Indigenous auxiliaries who performed labor for the Jesuit Order in Chiloé between 1626 and 1767, as a way of exploring a localized process of Indigenous community formation in a borderlands region. Please write to me if you would like me to send you a copy of my article. Recientemente traduje mi artículo al castellano; no dude en contactarme para pedir una copia.

I am beginning to design a second research project focused on wheat production, and by extension bread baking, in colonial Chile as sites of cross-cultural interaction and social identity formation. I will be looking at wheat harvests—in rural sectors—and bakeries—in urban areas—as spaces where Indigenous, mixed-race, and African-descending subjects, in various degrees of freedom and unfreedom, interacted and subverted Spanish cultural notions regarding foodways.