Abstract

It is common to find in state administrative sources and in epoch observations of foreign travelers the idea that the indigenous society of Atacama of the 19th century was ¨muleteer¨. This assertion has determined, in part, the way that nowadays we characterize this social actor during the Bolivian period of Atacama. Even though, muleteer and agriculture of forage experimented by then a growth linked to the national project of economic activation, in this article we question how much population in general and the indigenous in particular got involved in muleteer as result of the redefinition and expansion of republican cross-border commercial circuits. In order to answer this question, we propose an approach that considers all the economic actors, adds new hypotheses and conceptual categories, and uses unpublished documentary evidence.