Barr-Melej P. Reforming Chile: Cultural Politics, Nationalism, and the Rise of the Middle Class (ENG)

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72 Nationalists

out calling for the elite’s destruction. He was not a revolutionary by any

means. The book, of course, is not titled ‘‘Oligarquía o democracia.’’ To

Pinochet, building a democratic Chile entailed the decomposition of aristo-

cratic power, rather than the destruction of a social sector from which the

founders and consolidators of the republic emerged. The transition from

oligarchism to democracy, Pinochet suggests, is merely a matter of political

and social will on the part of reformers: ‘‘At the beginning of the nineteenth

century, our country felt it necessary to break the chains of slavery and

wished to become a republic, and it became a republic. At the beginning of

the twentieth century, our country now feels the necessity to become a

democracy, and it will become a democracy.’’

∏≤

Pinochet and other progressive nationalists—and, to some extent, con-

servative nationalists—expressed concerns similar to those that circulated

among the embryonic Left’s intellectual leaders during the Parliamentary

Republic. They, too, were troubled by the oligarchic establishment’s intran-

sigence and were concerned about their country’s productive future. But

whereas progressive and conservative nationalists called for a more preva-

lent sense of nacionalidad, the intellectual leader of the early-twentieth-

century Chilean Left, Luis Emilio Recabarren, critically assessed what both

Palacios and Encina called the ‘‘sentiment of nationality.’’ This is not to say

that Recabarren did not envision a ‘‘national’’ project but rather that he was

aware that nationalism was a cornerstone of antirevolutionary discourses.

The Proletariat and the Patria

Nationalism, as we have seen, was ingrained in the political dialogue of the

Parliamentary Republic. Palacios, Pinochet, Venegas, and Encina expressed

nationalist principles and appealed to sentiments of nationality to rally

support for their agendas, and all ﬁrmly believed their criticisms and ideas

were in country’s best interest. Luis Emilio Recabarren, however, thought

otherwise. Although his Socialist Workers Party (POS) called for some of the

same policies proposed by leading nationalists, including obligatory pri-

mary education, Recabarren recognized that a major pillar of Chilean na-

tionalist thought was an antirevolutionary conviction. In contrast to the in-

ternationalist ideas of Marxists, nationalists profess that the nation, rather

than a class, is the principal unit of analysis, identity, and historical develop-

ment. Thus, Recabarren understood nationalism as a bourgeois ideology

that perpetuated an oppressive capitalist system. But Recabarren was a com-

Nationalists 73

plex man and found some redeeming value in what he considered truly

‘‘patriotic’’ service on behalf of the working class.

Consumed with the social question, intellectuals of the revolutionary Left

were active writers and publishers during the era of parlamentarismo. Born in

1876, Recabarren, whose publications far outnumber those of any other

Chilean Marxist of his time, began publishing columns in working-class

newspapers in Santiago—La Tarde and La Democracia—during the last decade

of the nineteenth century. In 1901, his opinions appeared in El Trabajo of

Iquique and by 1905 dotted newspapers in the cities and towns of Anto-

fagasta, Casablanca, Chañaral, Concepción, Coquimbo, La Unión, Lebu,

Nueva Imperial, Taltal, and Tocopilla. In 1906, Recabarren was elected to the

Chamber of Deputies but almost immediately was dismissed from his seat.

He went on to found the POS in 1912, which became the Chilean Communist

Party (PCCh) in 1922, and ardently fought for working-class interests until

his surprising suicide in the capital in 1924.

Given Radicalism’s commitment to gradual social evolution rather than

revolutionary change, as well as the oligarchy’s failure to confront the social

question by way of direct state action, Recabarren and others on the left

assumed a cynical posture toward the nationalist rhetoric that emanated

from the middle and upper reaches of society. It is apparent from Recabar-

ren’s published works that while signiﬁcant intellectuals embraced national-

ism after the turn of the century, the ideological artiﬁce did not enthuse

Chile’s Marxist leadership in any profound way, at least during the ﬁrst two

decades of the century. By the 1930s and the Popular Front era, however,

nationalist rhetoric and principles ﬂowed from the Left as part of frentismo’s

antioligarchic and anti-imperialist discourse in what was a very different

national context.

In 1910, amid the celebratory atmosphere of the centennial, Recabarren

indicated that he not only was without nationalism but was without a na-

tion as well. In the folleto, or pamphlet, ‘‘Ricos y pobres’’ (The rich and poor),

he explains, ‘‘I look at the past through my thirty-four years and I cannot

ﬁnd in all of my life one circumstance that convinces me that I have had a

patria or that I have had liberty.’’

∏≥

As a defender of the lower classes, Re-

cabarren believed—and rightly so—that he and his movement were outside

the patria’s conceptual borders, as they were envisioned and established by

the elite. Pinochet argued a similar point about the marginalization of the

lower classes in Oligarquía y democracia, as did Venegas in Sinceridad. Yet it

would not be inconsistent to conclude that Recabarren was also frustrated

by progressive nationalists such as Pinochet and Venegas, who easily could

74 Nationalists

have been construed as promoters of bourgeois hegemony. This point is

buttressed by the fact that Recabarren, tired of middle-of-the-road politics,

had split from the more moderate Democratic Party, which, under Concha,

had formed from a rib of the PR.

In the leftist press, Recabarren published very few articles that address the

concept of nation or patria.

∏∂

One piece, published in a 1909 edition of the

newspaper El Trasandino of the town of Los Andes, contends that elite- and

bourgeoisie-sponsored celebrations of independence were simply charades.

The other, a poetic commentary titled ‘‘A mi patria’’ (To my fatherland),

expresses bitter resentment toward what the patria has and has not done for

the popular classes. Both deserve some attention here. The El Trasandino

article appeared during the dieciocho (Independence Day, September 18) fes-

tivities in 1909 and resonates with estrangement from lo nacional. Here, Re-

cabarren castigates members of the working class who joined in the celebra-

tion of ‘‘bourgeois’’ rule. On the issue of class-based oppression, Recabarren

states that nothing changed with independence: ‘‘The working class lived

through centuries of Spanish slavery and tyranny, and when Chile sounded

what was called the hour of liberty . . . it was only for the bourgeois and

moneyed class, but in no case was it for the people who continued being a

slave of the new class that set itself up as the government of Chile.’’

∏∑

More-

over, when discussing working-class festivity, Recabarren ﬂatly remarks that

revolutionary intellectuals feel a ‘‘profound weight when we see the working

class participate in a celebration that is not its own and feel merriment for a

so-called national independence that has brought no real liberty for the pro-

ducing people.’’ In short, ‘‘the people, in reality, have nothing to celebrate.’’

∏∏

The misery of working-class living and labor conditions, according to Re-

cabarren, conferred a certain absurdity to any celebration of ‘‘independence.’’

Recabarren’s ‘‘A mi patria’’ is a much more complex and acrid assessment.

Adopting the voice of a worker and with a ﬂair for verse and a sardonic tone,

he offers a long list of questions, each beginning with the phrase ‘‘How can’t

I love you, my patria.’’ What follow are dark reﬂections on working-class life:

‘‘How can’t I love you, my patria, if now at my mature age, I carry with love

the chains of capitalist exploitation, putting up with salaries that are not

enough for food, nor to dress, and putting up with being treated like a beast,

all to resign myself like my holy Catholic religion commands. . . . How can’t I

love you, my patria, if you teach me to be generous, when you make me give

my labor to the patrón [landowner], to the businessman, to the authorities,

immortal glories of the patria.’’

∏π

The patria, constituted and perpetuated by

the exploiting classes, is the antithesis to justice, Recabarren contends. Fur-

Nationalists 75

thermore, his prose suggests an awareness of nationalism’s growing popu-

larity in the public sphere, and he challenges blind love for the patria by

referring to speciﬁc aspects of the social question. Regardless of his dis-

position in ‘‘A mi patria,’’ Recabarren did endorse a precise utilization of

patriotism.

Though Recabarren afﬁrmed in ‘‘Ricos y pobres’’ that he was a man with-

out a patria—as were all proletarians—he nevertheless made reference to a

particular form of patriotic service in the folleto ‘‘Patria y patriotismo.’’ In

this widely cited essay, he implies that Marxists alone were engaged in a

patriotic endeavor to right social wrongs and improve the lives of workers:

‘‘That is the labor we call patriotic, and working for the disappearance of

vices is how we give utmost proof of our real patriotic love, perhaps quietly,

but more real and effective than those who shout a lot about patriotism.’’

∏∫

Recabarren, in essence, equates patriotism with a will to alleviate the predic-

aments of the working class. Indeed, he suggests that workers are the real

patria, and, accordingly, correcting their circumstance is the hallmark of

genuine patriotism. For most, the distinction between patriotism and na-

tionalism is admittedly difﬁcult to discern, and much of it boils down to a

semantic factor; what some Chileans dubbed ‘‘patriotism’’ before World War

I was called ‘‘nationalism’’ during and after the conﬂict. That aside, Recabar-

ren reasoned that two basic patriotic or nationalist currents prevailed in his

day: one that served the interests of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, and

another that evoked unambiguous obligation to the ‘‘producing people.’’

The coming decades, however, saw divergent conceptions and applications

of nationalism among middle-class reformers and defenders of the oli-

garchic establishment, and Recabarren’s understanding of the ideological

landscape certainly bears interpretive weight when one considers the anti-

revolutionary convictions of both groups.

What once was a somewhat undifferentiated nationalist impulse had, by

the presidential election of 1920, branched into ‘‘progressive’’ and ‘‘conserva-

tive’’ variants that were espoused by social interests locked in direct competi-

tion over power. Both forms of nationalists agreed that Chile’s industrializ-

ing economy should more or less be protected from foreign interests, but

the Alessandri-Barros Borgoño clash demonstrated that progressive and

conservative nationalists agreed on little else. In essence, the most rancorous

election of the Parliamentary Republic exposed nationalism’s pliancy. This

book revisits the 1920 presidential race—a pivotal juncture in modern Chil-

ean history—at a later time. Middle-class reformers who were purveyors of

progressive nationalism believed that actualizing their ‘‘national’’ vision in-

76 Nationalists

volved shaping the cultural sphere in accordance with their cultural and

political values. It is to the manifestations of their ideology in literary cul-

ture and public education that we may now turn in the remaining chapters.

By way of short stories, novels, essays, public debate, ministerial directives,

and textbooks, reformers introduced their compatriots to a fundamentally

different way of thinking about the Chilean nation and its cultural core and

did so in pursuit of hegemony.

Describer un paisaje o interpretar un estado

de alma es, en el fondo, lo mismo si el escritor

lo ha visto con sensibilidad artística.

mariano latorre, Autobiografía de una vocación, 1954

Rewriting Chile ≥

Criollismo and the Generation of 1900

Celebrated Chilean novelist José Donoso once said that a writer does more

than answer questions. He or she asks them.

∞

Authors are not merely wit-

nesses to society who wisely expose what others may not see but actors in

society whose inquiries spark personal or collective inquest and introspec-

tion. In the literary environment of early-twentieth-century Chile, the archi-

tects of the genre known as criollismo both asked and answered two interre-

lated questions associated with the nation and culture: What is Chile? Who

are Chileans? Criollismo created a fundamental break in Chilean cultural

development when it questioned the value of narratives that rarely ventured

from the pursuits of the privileged few. As conveyors of a reformist sen-

sibility and progressive nationalism, the criollistas called the elite’s legitimacy

into question by weaving a populistic and more ‘‘national’’ narrative that

focused on lower-class people who exempliﬁed chilenidad and were worthy of

a country’s admiration. One criollista, when reﬂecting on his artistic motiva-

tion to uncover the authentic Chile, observed, ‘‘A profound love for the

disinherited made me write with sincere emotion, and if something I have

done is worthwhile, I owe it to those with uncompensated heroism.’’

≤

As a

rising middle class staked claims in society, culture, and politics, criollismo

pronounced that the aristocrat no longer would be the locus of the nation,

as a juridically and culturally constituted entity; high society was simply not

78 Rewriting Chile

worthy of dominion and prestige. In other words, by undermining the posi-

tions of the elite’s literature and the elite in literature, criollismo offered a new

portrayal of national life—a democratized one that challenged the legit-

imacy of the Parliamentary Republic’s aristocracy and oligarchic establish-

ment by devaluating their cultural precepts.

≥

Meanwhile, the criollistas, many of them with familial ties to a sector of

small landowners in the center-south, did not afﬁrm inspirations of pro-

letarian revolution by undermining liberal ideals of order, progress, and

democracy. The genre’s short stories (cuentos) and novels delicately impart a

code of conduct for the lower class as the social question intensiﬁed and

unionization touched the countryside during the Parliamentary Republic;

the truly Chilean laborer is respectable and assiduous and remains unmoved

by the ideas and catechists of revolution. Most urban and rural workers may

not have been reading criollismo, but middle-class reformers as well as more

afﬂuent and conservative readers certainly were, and the genre reinforced

both sectors’ views of worker radicalization. In essence, criollismo may be

considered both antioligarchic for its delegitimization of high society’s pre-

eminence and antirevolutionary for its representations of labor—a dualism

congruent to the sociopolitical position of reformist mesocrats and one that

sheds light on the important link between culture and class. Broadly speak-

ing, then, the genre’s founding cohort of intellectuals, members of the so-

called literary Generation of 1900, demonstrated inclinations and imparted

convictions in line with those expressed by reformers of and outside the

Radical Party who sought to remake Chile.

∂

The criollistas exhibited the penetrating inﬂuence of European ‘‘natural-

ist’’ writers and the rigor of Comtean positivism by approaching literature

with a scientiﬁc disposition. Theirs was a project of documenting what they

discerned as day-to-day aspects of life—qualities, attitudes, passions, con-

cerns, hatreds, loves, problems—present within Chile’s social underbelly be-

tween the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Some criollistas, such

as Baldomero Lillo, wrote widely popular stories about miners and urban

workers, but most of the genre’s contributors concentrated on rural themes

and campesinos, to whom the authors ascribed cultural worth and national

signiﬁcance. One of criollismo’s main personalities is a campesino horseman,

or huaso. This criollo cowboy emerged in Chilean culture as a complicated

representation of a service tenant (the inquilino de a caballo) common to the

Central Valley’s archipelago of haciendas. Small property owners and any

rural person with a horse were sometimes called huasos during our period of

interest, though such usage was less prevalent. Regarded as a bumpkin by

Rewriting Chile 79

urban Chileans of the nineteenth century, the huaso típico (or stylized huaso)

became a prominent example of chilenidad, a cultural symbol, and a national

character by the Popular Front (FP) era in large part owing to the literary

exploits of the criollistas.

∑

In light of criollismo’s ideological weight, not only should we understand

the genre’s content and style, but we should also examine the personal

histories of its crafters, their basic cultural and political principles, and what

proved to be a receptive audience. This analysis must begin with a discussion

of the nineteenth century’s intellectual atmosphere—an exclusive space of

and for the wealthy and educated few—that ﬂourished during the Portalian

Republic. The foundations of Chile’s national literary culture lay in the

coalescence of what has been called the ‘‘movement of 1842’’ and the subse-

quent ‘‘realist’’ movement (1860s to 1890s). It will become apparent that

although criollismo offered new aesthetic, thematic, and ideological per-

spectives to the reading public, it nonetheless upheld a cardinal rule of

most postcolonial Chilean literature: stylistic inspiration could come from

abroad, but subject matter was to be Chilean. ‘‘Chilean,’’ of course, meant

different things to different people in the nineteenth and twentieth cen-

turies, and this discrepancy informs our story.

Literature and Nation-State Formation

Chile’s independence from Spain in 1818 brought with it the prodigious task

of creating a country from a colonial region. After more than a decade of

intraelite political conﬂict, the conservative Portalians emerged victorious in

1829. Four years later, a new constitution established the structural founda-

tions of a relatively stable political system. In cultural circles, intellectuals

recognized the importance of domestic literary production in the ongoing

process of building a nation-state and initiated the composition of a ‘‘na-

tional’’ literature and a Chilean intellectual tradition. In the words of José

Victorino Lastarria, one of the leading intellectuals of the mid-nineteenth

century, ‘‘no nations in the entire world have the imperious need that Ameri-

cans have of being original in their literature.’’

∏

For this reason, many young

intellectuals from afﬂuent families became enthused during the late 1830s

and early 1840s with the ‘‘romantic’’ literary trend in Europe, which, by that

time, was in its twilight. The late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century

romantics, especially those in France, were theorists of nationalism who held

that literature was ‘‘deﬁned by its national afﬁliation and should embody the

80 Rewriting Chile

unique characteristics of the nation. The underlying premise of the literary

nationalists was that humanity is naturally divided into homogeneous, but

distinctive groups marked by a unique set of values and concerns and by a

distinctive ‘national character.’ ’’

Chile’s movement of 1842—a diverse group-

ing of intellectuals and statesmen that included Lastarria, the widely cele-

brated Andrés Bello, José Joaquín Vallejo (known as ‘‘Jotabeche’’), Francisco

Bilbao, Eusebio Lillo, and Guillermo Matta—accepted romanticism’s func-

tional deﬁnition of literature (though Bello preferred the neoclassical style)

and sought to describe the ‘‘realities of the country.’’

∫

Although many of its

members were not Portalian conservatives, the movement of 1842 reinforced

the state-based patriotism of the Portalian Republic.

The ﬁrst years of the Manuel Bulnes presidency (1841–51) were ‘‘favorable

for the letters,’’ Lastarria observed. ‘‘Those years saw a certain intellectual

movement come to pass in an unimpeded and comforting way.’’

Ω

Lastarria

(1817–88), a liberal, accomplished lawyer, historian, leader of the country’s

positivist school, and ﬁction writer, took advantage of this creative aperture.

In the tradition of leading nineteenth-century intellectuals, the Rancagua

native entered public life at a young age, joining the Interior Ministry at

twenty-six. Later, at age thirty-two, he was elected to the Congress. Lastarria,

as Allen Woll notes, was the ﬁrst intellectual to discuss the country’s need

for a ‘‘national’’ literature based on Chile’s historical experience. Lastarria’s

often-cited friendship with exiled Argentine Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

in the 1840s and polemical conﬂicts with the more conservative Bello at

midcentury served to strengthen his vision of a modern nation.

∞≠

One of the nation’s ﬁrst cuentistas (storytellers), Lastarria possessed an

‘‘ardent desire, very common in new nations, to earn a place alongside other

civilizations and hold their head up proudly before European philosophers’’

and for Chilean literature to be, above all else, ‘‘useful and progressive.’’

∞∞

Though committed more to historical, political, and philosophical endeav-

ors, Lastarria published examples of ﬁction and historical ﬁction that gar-

nered critical acclaim, such as his ﬁrst short story, ‘‘El Mendigo’’ (1843), and

later ‘‘Rosa’’ (1848). Both cuentos have independence battles as settings and

concentrate on the heroic Creoles’ struggle against royalists. ‘‘El Mendigo,’’

ﬁrst published in the progressive newspaper El Crepúsculo, is a love story that

unfolds in the capital. Its protagonist is a Creole veteran of the Battle of

Rancagua, which was fought in April 1814 between Chilean troops under

O’Higgins and General José Miguel Carrera and forces loyal to King Ferdi-

nand VII. Lastarria tells the story of what amounts to Creole valor and

nostalgia, but he also includes passing references to the emerging country’s

Rewriting Chile 81

beauty. His descriptions, for example, of the Mapocho River and shepherds

leading their ﬂocks on the sides of San Cristóbal Hill anticipate criollismo’s

penchant for depicting the landscape. The cuento ‘‘Rosa’’ ﬁrst appeared in the

newspaper El Aguinaldo and likewise relates to the process of nation found-

ing and nation building by tying sentimental characters to the Battle of

Chacabuco and the declaration of independence from Spain. Given that the

independence campaigns were led by enlightened Creoles, Lastarria’s stories

tend to display an elite-centered interpretation of national struggles and

national life. (Politics on the national level, moreover, also emerged as an

important theme of Chilean romanticism, which only fortiﬁed the move-

ment’s tendency to cast ‘‘elite’’ themes as ‘‘national’’ ones.)

The Lastarrian and movement of 1842’s perception of literary production

as a central tenet of nationality established the intellectual foundations for

criollismo’s later emergence, but the criollistas offered a different interpreta-

tion of lo nacional in their ‘‘national’’ literature. As romanticism waned at

midcentury, Chilean practitioners of another European cultural innovation

produced works that also inﬂuenced the criollistas. Writers found inspiration

in the penetrating realism of the Frenchman Honoré de Balzac’s social novel

and emulated his style with aptitude and precision between the 1860s and

the turn of the century. Alberto Blest Gana (1830–1920), the greatest novelist

of nineteenth-century Chile, is generally credited with bringing Balzacian

style to Santiago in the form of his 1862 novel Martín Rivas. Although it did

not revolutionize criollo literary culture, the realist movement certainly

molded it, opening the way for the ‘‘naturalism’’ of the criollistas, who drew

much from French writer Émile Zola, among others. In other words, Chil-

ean realism, aside from its inherent merit, was as a stylistic bridge between

the movement of 1842 and criollismo’s Generation of 1900.

Literary ‘‘Realism’’: Alberto Blest Gana and Martín Rivas

Domingo Amunátegui Solar, aristocrat, Liberal, and intellectual of the early

twentieth century, called Chilean realism ‘‘a faithful portrait of society.’’

∞≤

certainly is not surprising that a man like Amunátegui, a member of an

afﬂuent family of Basque immigrants, would make such an assertion. The

novels of Blest Gana and other realists rarely ventured from urban settings

and the experiences of relatively afﬂuent protagonists—Amunátegui’s ‘‘so-

ciety.’’ Like the generation of writers that preceded it, the realist movement

was committed to the exploration of Chile’s early national experience and