Chile is a fractured nation. Spanish/criollo and indigenous violence and division are the root of the nation's birth. Such is the essence this master's thesis distills from Cautiverio feliz (1673), a chronicle-novel written by Francisco Nunez de Pineda y Bascunan. His story begins with a battle with the indigenous. It unfolds as an eyewitness account of the warm hospitality given him while held in their captivity. This act of diplomacy was reflective of the harmonious indigenous social structure and attachment to the land. This memoir is also a portrait of the colonial regime's excesses and blunders. It was written long after the author / narrator / protagonist was released from captivity. Its time frame is set almost equidistantly between Chile's Conquest and Independence.

This study reveals that in Cautiverio feliz (crafted as a letter to the king) Bascunan persuasively urges the Crown to stop both Spanish / criollo corruption and to end the protracted wars of conquest in the "homeland of Chile" ("patria Chille" Cf:238). This century-long conflict instilled acrimony and injustice which forged a flawed sense of patriotism, thus failing to galvanize the Spanish empire's colonial project. Bascunan's expose is autobiography, chronicle, history and ethno-history; it is a strategic work of the imagination, ever-vigilant of the Inquisition's censorship, while modeled after the narrative and the poetic masterpieces of both Miguel de Cervantes and Alonso de Ercilla, respectively. It is -- arguably --

the first modernista novel in the Hispanic hemisphere. Cautiverio feliz identifies the military as a foundational institution bent on excluding the indigenous from participation in the national discourse. It memorializes the social upper stratum's land-based privileges connected to military credentials. The military's tentacles of power would hover over the civilian leadership, thundering its dismissal of the laws of the land and of an arduously fought for democracy by seizing government as a military dictatorship, thus instituting, instead, a repetitious pattern of violence which in the recent past deployed its force and atrocities toward its own people. A military vigilance of oligarchical interests rumbles even into the present. Bascunan yearns to become a member of this elite, albeit by the same means he abhors.

This study recognizes Cautiverio feliz as a work of literature articulated to alter the course of colonial history and to create enduring institutions in Chile as well as across Hispanic America. ix.