Warning: This essay contains spoilers for the 2023 film, Los Colonos (The Settlers)
Tierra del Fuego is an apt setting for a film that considers the lasting violence of settler colonialism. On the land, trees die and fall and, because of the dearth of biota—a gift from the cold climate—many simply remain as an undigested graveyard of bleached white wooden bones across the landscape. The ground these trees rest atop is dotted with peat bogs—expanses of decaying matter, not quite water nor solid land, with vast underground networks of layered plants that provide a muddled record of life on the surface above. The past is nowhere past and here, at the bottom of the world, that truth is laid plain.
At the turn of the 20th century, Tierra del Fuego's landscape acted as the frontier of a budding Chilean nation that sought to deepen its hold on its far southern expanse. Director Felipe Gálvez Haberle's feature-length debut film Los Colonos (The Settlers) follows the bloody journey of a small team of settler and Indigenous frontiersmen as they search for a path east through the Andes Mountains and Argentina to export the "white gold"—wool—grown by their latifundista master, Don José Menendez (Alfredo Castro). The film opens with sheep grazing beneath eerie blue glaciers, a serene scene that is quickly disrupted by the offhanded murder of a worker who had sustained an injury, rendering him as a liability. This world is both yawning and cramped, for as the characters travel the vast open spaces of southern Patagonia, their encounters with other groups become immediately intimate and haunted by menace.
Much of the air of menace emerges from the men of violence the film follows. Lieutenant Alexander MacLennan (Mark Stanley) is a bombastic Scottish soldier who fought for the British Crown in Egypt before becoming a hired gun in Chile. Bill (Benjamin Westfall), a Texan written somewhat flatly as a hateful hayseed, fancies himself a knower of "Indians" thanks to his experiences warring against the Comanches and Apaches back home in the United States. The global frontier appears as fungible, a movable feast shifting according to the dictates of empire: these men bring with them an appetite for killing honed on other frontiers, with other natives of other lands, and imagine themselves to thus understand this alien world. In a way, they do perfectly.
The third man in the protagonist party, the reserved and watchful Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), provides the first few chapters of the film with their dramatic tension. "I know men like him," said Bill after MacLennan chooses Segundo as their third for their mission. "Half-Indian, half-white. You never know who they're gonna shoot." Segundo, who has come south from the windswept island of Chiloé, quickly comes to understand that the settlers' developing ranching economy depends on the savagery they wield against the Indigenous Selk'nam peoples.
The early portion of the men's journey is depicted as somewhat manic and loopy, like the colonial madness of the lost party in Werner Herzog's Aguirre, Wrath of God. An encounter with a group of Argentine soldiers surveying the border-to-be reveals the artifice of such boundary-making, as the two parties drukenly rave under the stars to pass the time. The anti-Indigenous violence arrives on screen as a sudden and horrifying shock. As the band of three moves east, Segundo must choose whether to participate in this project of extermination, as a Chilean, or to remain faithful to his Indigenous heritage and interrupt it.
Segundo just wants to make enough money to buy himself a horse. Part of the appeal of the frontier, for those settlers who populate it, is the promise of a fresh start. For them, the inhospitable landscape provides a gateway for escaping the stuffy confines of the metropole, or of any home, and allows the possibility of becoming a new man with a new title, a new horse, a new gun and the ability to use it.
Racial hierarchies remain salient—to be white is to rule over Indians—though within that hierarchy it seems as if, as an English colonel who the men encounter in Argentina suggests, "We're at the end of the world. Things are a little looser here."
But not quite. The three travelers' encounter with the colonel ends with Lieutenant MacLennan revealed as a lowly private and a dramatic reassertion of the Old World's hierarchies in the New. The frontier offers the promise of the blank slate, but the promise is illusory. Instead, all that propulsive forward motion into other people's lands brings with it the vestiges of the departed societies, piling up wreckage and bodies at the feet of its agents of progress.
The film's final chapter skips forward seven years after the expedition's exploring and pillaging has come to a close. Don Menéndez's wool operation has become successful, the violence that established it common lore, and he a grandee of the province. High Eurocentric culture has arrived on the former outpost. As his family practices piano and sings in English, their prominence implied in both this performance and their playing host to a representative of Chilean President Pedro Montt's administration. The bureaucrat arrives on a fact-finding mission to document—and incorporate into the nation's official registers—the troubling stories of anti-Indigenous violence that have emerged from the country's south. The representative tells Don José that national unity is premised upon the ability of everyone in the nation to live together—"Chileno, mestizo, Indigeno"— and therefore depends on the project's redress of these genocidal acts.
Segundo has taken up with an Indigenous woman, Keipja (Mishell Guaña), who had been in the service of the band of English frontiersmen. In the years since their involvement with the settlers' southern expeditions, the couple has retired to Chiloé and lives in remote seclusion. Where Segundo's relationship with the project of southern settlement was vexed—he followed fortune south, and found brutality instead—Keipja's is more straightforward. She saw her people killed by the settlers, and was herself kidnapped and forced to work as a liaison between her abductors and the southern natives they brutalized. At the film's close, Keipja and Segundo are conscripted by the bureaucrat to make a propaganda silent film that aims to forge the face of a new and broad-minded Chilean state, one that hopes to incorporate the stories of all its diverse constituents into a unified national project. Can it? How can Keipja's story possibly be made to fit with this civil servant's? With that of Don José? What shared destiny does the kidnapped share with her kidnapper?
In 2010, I traveled through Tierra del Fuego, following Lonely Planet guides to discover the region's calving glaciers and sheer rocky outcroppings, wandering its eerie fields full of those gleaming skeletal trees. In the intervening century, Chile and Argentina's southern frontier had been transformed into a picturesque haven for adventure tourism. One of the most common populations I encountered, among the Americans, Germans, French, and Argentines, were young Israelis who had just emerged from their two years of mandatory military service. The Euro-Chilean settlement of this frontier at the bottom of creation had made it into a refuge, a restful repose—alongside Southeast and South Asia, and elsewhere in Latin America—for those policing the borders of a still-active imperial frontier across the Atlantic.
Amid Israel's genocide of Gaza, settler colonial studies has come under fire from conservative and centrist pundits decrying it as mere academic fashion, overly Manichean, and ultimately obscuring more than it reveals. Yet the question at the heart of Los Colonos is a confounding one: given all that has transpired to build the nation-states we today inhabit—and the world system they comprise—what now? Settler colonial studies emphasizes the lasting structures of domination created in the process of settlement, such as those that leave José Menendez and his associates masters of Chile's south, and the Indigenous Selk'nam who traditionally inhabited the place desolate.
As inhabitants of the Americas, we all sense this history to some degree, as the countries that populate the hemisphere today were built on dispossession and genocide. Yet simply remembering this structure of violence is not the same thing as adequately grappling with how those histories redound today. The last chapter of Los Colonos dramatizes this tension by exploring nation-states' moves to innocence. Yet no mythologizing can absolve them of the monstrous histories of their making, nor provide redress for those communities upon whose bloodied backs the states were built. Easier perhaps to ignore, or indeed to revel in, the imperial debris, as MacLennan does in a sort of brutish recapitulation of Blood Meridian's Judge Holden. Segundo, like The Kid, allows himself to become wrapped up in—and frozen by—these contradictions.
How, then, do we, the descendents of these genocidal imperial legacies, live together in the wreckage? It is not an idle question anywhere in the post-imperial world, not least in Chile. The Selk'nam were just granted federal recognition as one of Chile's Indigenous peoples last year. Yet relations between the country and its Indigenous inhabitants remain troubled. Just north of where Los Colonos is set, a longstanding Mapuche resistance to incursion from both state and private foresters has exploded in recent years into semi-open revolt, and Chile's current leftist administration has continued its predecessor's declared state of emergency in the region of Araucania, where militarized police forcibly assure calm. Anxieties from the undigested violence of Chilean history continue to haunt. Expanded rights for Chile's Indigenous nations in its proposed progressive constitution in 2022—rights already recognized in differing degrees by the governments of Bolivia, Ecuador, and the United States—were met with much gnashing of teeth. The perceived threat Indigenous autonomy poses to a social order built on white settler power was one of the major reasons for the reformed charter's failure.
The nation-state imbibes structures of violence that it then perpetuates, marking some populations for comfort and others for early death. The frontier refers to a geographic zone, but also connotes a set of relationships between the colonos and the peoples already inhabiting that zone. As the frontier closes, however, the zone's social relations do not dissipate. Instead, they reach forward, backward, ever outward, and swallow the whole of their society.