Huincas

views updated

Huincas

Huincas, Araucanian/mapuche word used to refer to non-Mapuche (also said to mean "thief"). Mapuche oral tradition and the construction of the word (pu, from, and Inca) suggest that the term for "outsider" came into use during the decades of Mapuche resistance to the expansion of the Inca Empire in the fifteenth century. The word came into common usage among Spanish speakers in Chile and Argentina in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Creole settlement in the southern frontier zones intensified intercultural contact.

See alsoAraucanians; Mapuche.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Rodolfo Lenz, Diccionario etimológico (1910).

Additional Bibliography

Nacuzzi, Lidia Rosa, ed. Funcionarios, diplomáticos, guerreros: Miradas hacia el otro en las fronteras de Pampa y Patagonia, siglos XVIII y XIX. Buenos Aires: Sociedad Argentina de Antropología, 2002.

Zapater, Horacio. Huincas y mapuches: (1550–1662). Santiago: Eds. Historia, 1997.

                                  Kristine L. Jones