The Evolving Image of the Araucanía and Its Conquistadors in Valdivia’sCartas de Relaciónand Vivar’sCrónica y relación copiosa y verdadera de los reinos de Chile

Abstract

In his Tropics of Discourse, Hayden White recalls Northrop Frye's arguments regarding the structure of poetic fictions. According to Frye, there are a limited number of ways in which a storyline can be set in motion: comedy, tragedy, romance, epic, or satire. White, however, extends Frye's ideas to history: a historical narrative will also inevitably take the shape of one of these genres. However, what one historian emplots or configures as a tragedy, another may cast as a comedy or romance. 1 Valdivia's letters use rhetorical devices with the goal of portraying the conquistador as hero and his indigenous adversaries as villains, a scheme that happens to resemble that of the secular and religious romances with which both Valdivia and his audience would have been familiar. This antithetical structure was shaped by Valdivia's need to establish his authority over the land, acquire necessary resources, and attend to bureaucratic matters, concerns that he expressed in the petitions at the end of his letters to the Emperor Charles V. Vivar, on the other hand, exalted the various Chilean indigenous groups to a greater degree in his chronicle. Through the use of rhetorical techniques such as description, dialogue, and narrative amplification, Vivar depicted the indigenous peoples of the Central Valley as fighting valiantly in defense of their homeland for a time. Yet it was the Araucanians who were willing to fight to the death. By elevating the stature of the enemy to this extent, Vivar manages to exalt in true epic form the Spanish conquistadors who ultimately defeated them. A close comparison of key episodes confirms that Vivar's chronicle was one of the sources of Ercilla's famous sixteenthcentury epic poem La Araucana (The Araucaniad).In the spring of 1545, Pedro de Valdivia relinquished an encomienda, consisting of the entire valley of La Canela in the province of Los Charcas