In a straightforward and highly readable military account, the author shows the devastation of the War of the Pacific, which lacked military innovations and utilized mostly traditional tactics. [HLAS Contributor: Erick Langer]

Arpilleras are picture-like crafts made of cut-out cloth the size of a serving tray; the hangings from Isla Negra are among their precursors. During the Pinochet regime, people in the shantytowns used the technique to address their social and political problems. Eventually, thanks to Catholic nonprofit organizations, the arpilleras found their way to the international market. Through a series of interviews, Adams traces the entire journey of arpilleras in Santiago beginning in 1984, when André Jarlan, a French priest working in La Victoria, was assassinated, and, notes the social, political, intellectual, and economic implications of the craft. Arpilleras served a number of purposes from protest statements to market commodities. Study includes notes, bibliography, index, and b/w photographs. [HLAS Contributor: Félix Ángel]

This ethnography provides a comprehensive study of the Rapa Nui native peoples in Easter Island, Chile. An illuminating history of the island and the colonial relation between the Chilean mainland and the island provides the context to understand how nation-building is enforced and reproduced on this remote and isolated corner of Latin America. The author argues that Rapa Nui identity for those descended from the original island inhabitants is articulated at a number of different levels. These include the local or insular, the Chilean national, the regional Polynesian, and the transnational level that has reached the island in an era of globalized communications and finances. As global ideas of multiculturalism and indigenous rights are assimilated and deployed by the Rapa Nui, their relations with the Chilean nation-state are transformed to validate and incorporate the sense of community and tribalism which is the bedrock of Rapa Nui society. Delsing establishes the importance of tourism and the commodification of Rapa Nui transnationally, as it has permitted the strengthening of the local culture, as well as greater economic autonomy and political self-determination. [HLAS Contributor: Isabel M. Scarborough]

This study traces the origins of the New Song (Nueva Canción) movement in Chile, drawing on interviews with movement participants and scholars as well as archival research. McSherry examines the movement through the disciplinary lens of political science, particularly a Gramscian theoretical framework, arguing that the New Song movement leaders were organic intellectuals who worked to challenge the elitist Chilean dominant classes by forging genuine bonds with working-class and other popular class actors. [HLAS Contributor: Michael O'Brien]

Each reader of Neruda's poetry would no doubt assemble a different list of Neruda's "essential" poems. However, most readers will probably find that Mark Eisner's collection includes many of their favorites. The translations, the majority of them prepared especially for this volume by Eisner and other accomplished poet-translators, are excellent. Some are signed by two, or even three, translators who have worked together. There is a brief introduction by Eisner. [HLAS Contributor Carol Maier]

This article argues against conventional scholarly wisdom that the kultrún, the drum central to the shamanistic practices of the Mapuche indigenous group of southern Chile and Argentina, is African in origin. Salvo's evidence largely consists of similarities in construction between the kultrún and other Afro-diasporic membranophones in Brazil and Cuba, and in "Senegambia." He also points out the lack of precolumbian archeological evidence for the kultrún, and structural similarities between the binaries of Mapuche cosmology and (unspecified) Senegambian cosmologies. This original and counterintuitive argument is sure to prompt a critical analysis from anthropologists and historians of Mapuche culture. [HLAS Contributor Michael O'Brien]