Abstract

The idea that 19th-century Atacama indigenous people were a muleteering society is prevalent in state administrative sources and observations by the era's foreign travelers. This assertion has tinged, in part, today's portrayals of this member of society from the Atacama's Bolivian period. While national economic activation plans did lead to a boom in muleteering and forage agriculture, this article questions how much of the general population and the indigenous, in particular, got involved in muleteering as a result of the redesign and expansion of republicans trade circuits. To answer this question, we propose an approach that considers all the economic players, adds new hypotheses and conceptual categories, and draws on unpublished documentary evidence.