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

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El amor a la patria es un rasgo vigoroso

y acentuado de nuestro carácter nacional.

alberto cabero, Chile y los chilenos, 1926

Prose, Politics, and ∂

Patria from Alessandri

to the Popular Front

Carlos Valdés Vásques, a young Chilean musician with artistic tastes rooted

in rural folk culture, appeared in urban theaters during a nationwide tour in

1930 and proved to be a sensation in a metropolitan environment that had

become estranged from campesino lifeways since the mid-nineteenth cen-

tury. Dressed as a huaso, with his characteristic poncholike chamanto, black

riding boots, silver spurs, and ﬂat-brimmed hat, Valdés strummed his guitar

and sang zamacuecas, folk songs of the Central Valley countryside. In atten-

dance at one Santiago performance was a critic for the conservative and pro-

oligarchy daily newspaper El Diario Ilustrado, who apparently found more

than technical merit in Valdés’s spectacle. The artist, he wrote, ‘‘[made] us

remember that we are Chileans’’ and that ‘‘if there were many people in

Chile like Carlos Valdés Vásques that were concerned with what is ours, we

could aspire to create a solid race, rooted in tradition, truly Chilean, truly

criollo.’’ The reviewer went on to state, ‘‘Now is the time to begin a difﬁcult

task: to dignify this music, make everyone understand it, realize its miracles

that make us proud, and for the country to adopt it and reject the intrusive

tango and the petulant fox-trot.’’

∞

Valdés’s representation of ‘‘huaso culture’’

was, in the observer’s mind, indelibly linked to a peculiar existence that

104 Prose, Politics, and Patria

resonated with chilenidad. The urban elite of the 1930s, it would seem, were

beginning to look fondly upon popular traditions that would have made

turn-of-the-century patrons of Gath y Chaves or members of the Union

Club grimace with embarrassment, though wealthy landowners certainly

appreciated and valued their rural socioeconomic base. Criollismo’s imagery

had gradually become ingrained in the public sphere over the course of three

decades. Aside from the reformist application of the genre’s aestheticism,

there emerged an equally ruralesque response from the traditional elite,

who, like other political interests of the 1930s, desired to be seen as legit-

imately chileno in light of changing sociopolitical and electoral conditions.

On a warm evening in January 1939, associates and friends of the ruling

Popular Front (FP)—the political alliance of the Radical, Socialist, and Com-

munist parties that rose to power in 1938—gathered at Santiago’s Caupolicán

Theater for a special gala sponsored by the Alliance of Intellectuals, an or-

ganization that included Pablo Neruda, Vicente Huidobro, and Pablo de

Rokha. In an article announcing the event, the newspaper Frente Popular

noted, ‘‘The program has been studied and prepared in order to give the pre-

sentation as much popular signiﬁcance as possible. Thus, all of the artists

who will participate in this true celebration of criollo grace are only the most

representative and distinctive of our environment.’’ What and who were

deemed most representative of lo criollo? ‘‘The Four Huasas and their gui-

tars,’’ the newspaper explains, and ‘‘the huasos of Chincolco competing in an

elegant rodeo arena.’’

≤

For its organizers and those in attendance, what Frente

Popular called a ‘‘great folkloric act’’ served to construct and strengthen

a symbolic link between the governing coalition and the lower classes it

claimed to valorize and represent. It also underscored frentismo’s nationalism

and anti-imperialism during an era in which Latin American governments

were rethinking their nations’ place in the world. The presence of the ‘‘hua-

sas,’’ furthermore, suggests that lower-class women (certainly not women

aristocrats!) exhibited elements of the national soul, and one criollista active

in the 1920s and 1930s had much to say in this respect.

The two spectacles described above, as well as others explored in this

chapter, suggest that by the 1930s literary criollismo had inﬂuenced—at some

consequential level—the ways an array of Chileans imagined their nation

and viewed its cultural idiosyncrasies. Owing to the interpretative dimen-

sion inherent in ﬁction literature, competing social sectors came to under-

stand criollismo in different manners and expressed those understandings in

their corresponding nationalist political discourses. More than one social

Prose, Politics, and Patria 105

constituency looking to legitimize its sociopolitical agenda did so by incor-

porating interrelated notions of lo rural and lo chileno. Political leaders and

intellectuals from left to right reasoned that the more criollo they sounded or

seemed, the more respectability and power their respective movements

would garner. What could be more criollo than exhibiting close ties to the

campo and campesinos? Despite the fact that different groups employed

rural-oriented nationalist imagery to varying degrees, the production of

criollismo largely remained within the intellectual purview of middle-class

santiaguinos after the election of President Arturo Alessandri Palma in 1920.

The rapid expansion of the sociopolitical power of middle-class groups after

Alessandri’s victory accompanied an explosion in the number and variety of

criollista works circulating in the cultural marketplace, as criollismo solidiﬁed

its place as the country’s leading ﬁction genre.

A second generation of criollista intellectuals, including Luis Durand,

Marta Brunet, and Joaquín Edwards Bello, merged in their works the aes-

thetic sensibilities of Guillermo Labarca, Maluenda, Latorre, and other

members of the Generation of 1900 with more active characters and di-

alogue with greater substance. Their narratives, which are diverse and wide

ranging, place huasos ahead of most other pastoral ﬁgures as protagonists

that embody chilenidad; these huasos are poised and pragmatic. As we shall

see, the huaso’s popularity as a national and cultural character expanded

rapidly in the 1930s. Indeed, during the presidency of Radical Party (PR)

leader Pedro Aguirre Cerda (1938–41) criollismo’s rural imagery and the cow-

boy construct were heralded within an ‘‘ofﬁcial’’ nationalist discourse, one

that essentially codiﬁed progressive nationalism as the guiding nationalist

sensibility of the opening years of the FP government.

≥

Criollista literary production and the widespread use of nationalistic repre-

sentations of rural society in the 1920s and 1930s did not come to pass in a

vacuum but instead were concurrent processes of broader sociopolitical,

economic, and demographic transformations that continued to alter life’s

rhythms for the vast majority of Chileans. Such developments constitute

integral parts of this unfolding story about the country’s (symbolic and

linguistic) ‘‘vuelta a la tierra,’’ or ‘‘return to the land,’’ as one periodical called

it.

∂

Thus, as we examine criollismo from Alessandri’s ﬁrst presidency through

Aguirre Cerda’s FP administration, we must remain conscious of the impor-

tant changes in society that exerted some inﬂuence on the genre in terms of

thematic emphasis and cultural-political intent, as well as how criollismo was

perceived and applied in Chile’s public sphere.

106 Prose, Politics, and Patria

The Turbulent 1920s

Alessandri’s victory in the presidential election of 1920 gave new vigor to a

reform movement that had grown tired of the Parliamentary Republic’s

legislative inertia and structural chaos. Aguirre Cerda ascribed historical

meaning to the shifting tide in Chilean society, noting that the ‘‘old regime’’

was ‘‘abandoned once and for all.’’

∑

Radicals were vital members of the Lib-

eral Alliance (AL), the political coalition that brought the relatively young

Alessandri, a dissident Liberal, to power by defeating the Conservatives and

traditionalist Liberals of the National Union (UN). Hopes among reformers

for a more effective government and the ampliﬁcation of Chilean democ-

racy, however, were dashed before Alessandri was able to complete a full ﬁve-

year term in ofﬁce. The intensiﬁcation of class conﬂict, the ouster of Ales-

sandri in 1924, the president’s resignation in 1925, the resignation of an

ineffective successor in 1927, the four-year dictatorship of Carlos Ibáñez del

Campo, and the proclamation of a short-lived but inspiring ‘‘Socialist Re-

public’’ in 1932 made the ‘‘long’’ decade of 1920–32 the most turbulent in

Chilean history between the civil war of 1891 and the 1960s. All the while,

most criollista intellectuals expanded the scope of their cuentos and remained

committed to expressing their politics and nationalism through the sub-

tleties of narration.

Alessandri, who was elected senator from Tarapacá in 1915 after serving in

the Chamber of Deputies, was a gifted public speaker and political orga-

nizer. With his party split, Alessandri’s bulk of support came from the Radi-

cals, but only after Radicalism’s old guard, led by Enrique Mac-Iver, became

convinced that the Liberal’s rhetoric was in line with Radical principles.

∏

When he entered ofﬁce, Alessandri immediately went about rewarding Radi-

cals for their warm support during the 1920 campaign. He offered Armando

Quezada Acharán, president of the PR and friend of Alessandri since both

were in law school, the ofﬁce of interior minister (the top cabinet position).

Quezada, however, declined the appointment. His decision opened the way

for an up-and-coming Radical, Aguirre Cerda, who soon assumed the post.

By 1922, however, Radicals and other members of the AL, including the

Democrats, had chosen to pursue their own agendas. The alliance slowly

crumbled, as did Alessandri’s presidency.

The political environment of 1920–24 in many ways mirrored that of 1886–

91, when the Balmacedists faced strong opposition from oligarchs in the

government’s legislative branch. Alessandri’s win in 1920 over UN candidate

Luis Barros Borgoño exempliﬁed both the possibilities and limitations of

Prose, Politics, and Patria 107

the parliamentary order. The Parliamentary Republic witnessed the most

rapid diversiﬁcation and ampliﬁcation of the political arena in Chilean his-

tory to that time, while it also perpetuated an oligarchic power base that

Alessandri’s dissident Liberals and the Radicals found hard to crack. In large

part, Alessandri and his AL supporters encountered stiff opposition in the

Senate, where the UN used its majority to put up legislative roadblocks. The

administration’s most notable legislative failure was its proposed labor code

and social security provision (Código del Trabajo y Previsión Social). The

joint measure was introduced in the Congress on June 1, 1921. Led by Ladislao

Errázuriz Lazcano and Rafael Luis Gamucio, the UN tenaciously battled the

measure in the Senate, and Alessandri responded with complaints about his

opponents’ obstruction of ‘‘justice and social redemption.’’

The AL’s efforts

and Alessandri’s vocal support could not overcome the reality of party poli-

tics; the labor code and social security measure faltered.

Growing rifts among members of the AL further complicated policy mak-

ing. After the AL won majorities in both houses of the legislative branch in

early 1924, Radicals gradually withdrew their support for Alessandri. A frac-

ture occurred during the 1924 nationwide congressional contest, when Ales-

sandri broke a long-standing presidential tradition by engaging in campaign

activities on behalf of the AL. Alessandri, like Balmaceda, was accused of

abusing executive power. Criticism came not only from UNistas but also

from many Radicals who found Alessandri’s electoral antics unattractive.

Radicals, as previously noted, enjoyed control of the Chamber of Deputies

and certainly did not want to see meddling by the executive branch despite

Alessandri’s intentions. By mid-1924, Radicals were openly criticizing the

administration. Thus, UNista obstructionism was, in retrospect, only one

part of Alessandri’s political problems. The eventual loss of Radical support

doomed the so-called Lion of Tarapacá.

A sharp economic downturn after World War I certainly did not help

matters for Alessandri’s administration. As Harold Blakemore explains, the

accumulation of large nitrate stocks in consuming countries and Germany’s

development of a synthetic alternative exacerbated Chile’s postwar depres-

sion.

∫

Public demonstrations increased in mining centers, Santiago, Val-

paraíso, and other urban areas as economic hardship worsened. The govern-

ment’s ofﬁce of labor reported a total of 66 strikes involving 23,529 workers

in 1919. In 1920, the number of strikes swelled to 105 and strikers to 50,439.

Ω

By comparison, there were only 17 strikes involving 10,490 workers in 1913.

Although the populistic Alessandri called for the amelioration of the social

question, there was a limit to how much labor unrest his government would

108 Prose, Politics, and Patria

tolerate. In 1921, less than six months after Alessandri took ofﬁce, govern-

ment troops killed more than forty unemployed workers at the nitrate

oﬁcina San Gregorio, southeast of Antofagasta in the province of Tarapacá,

after being ﬁred upon by a union leader.

∞≠

The military’s bloody response

only strengthened Recabarren’s and the Chilean Left’s opposition to ales-

sandrismo, which they believed was an oligarchic wolf in a reformist sheep’s

clothing. Radicals, however, remained relatively quiet about the massacre in

light of the fact that Aguirre Cerda was interior minister at the time. In

addition, when Héctor Arancibia Laso (the Radical who headed Alessandri’s

campaign in 1920) ran for the senate seat in Tarapacá the same year of the

San Gregorio incident, he simply—and rather diplomatically—stated that

both workers and the state were to blame for such ‘‘painful deeds.’’

∞∞

Arancibia had taken Alessandri’s side, the move would have been perceived

as an endorsement of state-directed violence, while throwing support be-

hind Recabarren’s position would not have squared with the PR’s anti-

revolutionary rhetoric. The Radicals, quite simply, desired to maintain their

position on middle ground.

On September 5, 1924, military leaders responding to the ‘‘serious political,

social, and economic conditions of the post World War I decade, and the fail-

ure of the government to ameliorate them,’’ toppled the Alessandri govern-

ment.

∞≤

Alessandri sought refuge in the U.S. embassy in downtown Santiago

and soon ﬂed the country. ‘‘My pain is that of all Chileans,’’ he solemnly

stated after resigning under pressure.

∞≥

The resourceful Lion of Tarapacá

managed a brief comeback in March 1925, during which he chose a young

colonel, Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, to serve as minister of war. Alessandri

opted to appoint a special commission to write a new constitution instead of

reconvening the Congress, which was closed during the coup of 1924. The

document was ﬁnished by the spring of 1925, was promptly approved in a

national plebiscite, and remained intact until the military coup of Septem-

ber 1973. The 1925 constitution greatly expanded the power of the executive

branch at the expense of the Congress, though the legislative branch was not

left crippled. The new constitution did not represent a return to the Por-

talian system but certainly altered the state’s institutional foundations.

Alessandri’s return to power also entailed a violent crackdown on workers

in the northern nitrate zone. In June 1925, soldiers opened ﬁre on more than

twelve hundred demonstrators at La Coruña, killing and injuring scores.

Artillery barrages destroyed working-class dwellings. Memories of San Gre-

gorio ﬂashed through the minds of many. It has been suggested that Ibáñez

was the mastermind of the massacre at La Coruña and that Alessandri tried

Prose, Politics, and Patria 109

to prevent the incident. Alessandri did, in fact, ask Ibáñez to resign over the

massacre, but the minister of war refused. In the face of Ibáñez’s steadfast-

ness, Alessandri promptly resigned for the second time in less than two

years. His government was succeeded by the brief civilian administration of

Emiliano Figueroa Larraín before Ibáñez seized power in 1927, inaugurating

Chile’s ﬁrst military dictatorship since independence. Alessandri, of course,

developed a deep hatred of Ibáñez: ‘‘The country ended up in the hands of

an irresponsible dictatorship of a man who was replacing the constitution

and laws with his sovereign will, like all dictators.’’

∞∂

Although some re-

formers were pleased to see Ibáñez implement sweeping changes in public

education and the expansion of public works, his heavy-handed dealings

with unions and the opposition movement in general drew the ire of many

Radicals. Some, such as Aguirre Cerda, were brieﬂy exiled, but others man-

aged to remain politically active.

∞∑

Moreover, the criollista Guillermo La-

barca, who served as minister of justice and public instruction under Ales-

sandri, loudly and clearly stated his opinion of ibañismo. The Radical called

the Ibáñez administration a ‘‘tyrannical regime’’ and said the dictator’s sup-

porters derogatorily referred to Radicals as ‘‘socialists’’ (he took this as an

insult even though Radicals often lauded their ‘‘state socialism’’).

∞∏

The Great Depression’s devastating effects on Chile’s economy and vio-

lent street demonstrations doomed Ibáñez’s regime, which ended in the

leader’s exile in 1931.

∞π

A ﬂurry of short-lived governments followed, includ-

ing the so-called Socialist Republic of 1932 led by Air Commodore Mar-

maduke Grove. After decades of political marginality, leftists, including no-

table military ofﬁcers of middle-class stock, took advantage of an unstable

situation after Ibáñez’s departure, but their success was ephemeral. The So-

cialist Republic survived for little more than three months, during which no

lasting revolutionary policies were implemented. Yet the Socialist Republic

had consequential effects on the body politic. The Liberal Party (PL), for

example, made a sharp turn toward the right in light of both the Socialist

Republic and the subsequent founding of the Socialist Party of Chile (Par-

tido Socialista de Chile, or PS) in April 1933.

Stability Returns?: Politics and Society in the 1930s

After more than a year of political tumult after Ibáñez’s ouster, Alessandri

returned to Chile from exile and announced his candidacy for the presiden-

tial election of late 1932. The Radicals, who increasingly became concerned

110 Prose, Politics, and Patria

about the threat of social revolution during and after the Socialist Republic,

were quick to hail Chile’s return to ‘‘democracy’’ and immediately declared

their support for Alessandri, who also gained the backing of his PL and the

Conservative Party (PC). This unexpected but understandable political tri-

umvirate coalesced to combat the candidacies of PS candidate Grove and

Chilean Communist Party (PCCh) leader Elías Lafertte. Alessandri received

more than 54 percent of the nearly 340,000 votes cast, while Grove and

Lafertte shared roughly 20 percent. Alessandri, though armed with the pop-

ulistic and reformist rhetoric of his ﬁrst administration, soon demonstrated

that his second government would be more conservative and would, in fact,

be the oligarchic establishment. His swing mirrored that of his party and did

not come as a surprise to the Left, which remembered Alessandri’s ties to the

massacres at San Gregorio in 1921 and La Coruña in 1925. The most impor-

tant political consequence of Alessandri’s ideological shift was his loss of

Radical support (again) at midterm.

The Chile Alessandri governed in the 1930s was, of course, not the Chile of

his ﬁrst term. The Left, divided into mutual aid societies and relatively small

parties during the ﬁnal years of the Parliamentary Republic, had matured

into well-organized Socialist and Communist parties. The non-Socialist Left

immediately felt Alessandri’s heavy hand. When he assumed the presidency,

Alessandri set out to extinguish the possibility of another coup. Tired of

ousters and short-lived governments, Alessandri’s allies in the Congress

passed a measure granting the president ‘‘extraordinary powers’’ to deal with

his enemies on the left. He used presidential authority from April to Octo-

ber 1933 and December 1933 to June 1934 to close newspapers and jail leaders

of the PCCh and the Chilean Workers Federation (FOCh).

∞∫

In response, the

Radicals, led by party president Aguirre Cerda, approved a resolution at

their 1933 convention calling for the repeal of the executive’s extraordinary

powers. Although Alessandri did not appreciate the gesture, he nonetheless

maintained relatively cordial relations with the PR until 1934.

Amid demonstrations and violent clashes in Santiago, Valparaíso, and

Concepción that involved both leftists and members of the newly estab-

lished National Socialist Movement (Movimiento National Socialista, or

MNS), Radicals called on Alessandri to implement an economic reform pro-

gram stipulated in their party’s platform. The Great Depression was at

hand, and the social question deepened. Sensing the PR’s lack of support,

Alessandri immediately ordered the resignation of all Radicals in his cabi-

net.

∞Ω

The subsequent cabinet was Alessandri’s ﬁrst without PR representa-

tives. Furthermore, Radicals increasingly had become uneasy with partici-

Prose, Politics, and Patria 111

pating in a government that included Conservative luminary Gustavo Ross

Santa María, who, as Alessandri’s ﬁnance minister, implemented austerity

measures to combat high unemployment and a robust budget deﬁcit. By the

late 1930s, Chile’s macroeconomic situation was much improved, but the

Alessandri administration seriously compromised living standards among

the working poor when, as part of Ross’s program, it devalued the national

currency in order to bolster agricultural and industrial export production.

This, of course, made food, clothes, and other common products more ex-

pensive for Chileans of meager means and was construed by the administra-

tion’s detractors as a get-rich-quick plan hatched by and for the elite. Mean-

while, the reformist and leftist press called Alessandri and Ross ‘‘oligarchs,’’

‘‘reactionaries,’’ and ‘‘antidemocratic,’’ and they bestowed upon Ross the

honorary title of ‘‘minister of hunger.’’

The growing split between Radicals and Alessandri opened the way for the

PR’s eventual entrance into the FP. Conceived in 1934 by the Third Interna-

tional in Moscow in response to European fascism, the Popular Front strat-

egy was played out in a unique way in Chile. Founded by Communists in

early 1936, frentismo took on a Socialist hue after the larger PS joined soon

after. The Left sought to include reformist elements in order to build an

electoral majority and immediately looked to the PR for support. In March

1936, the Radical Assembly of Santiago, estranged from alessandrismo and

inﬂuenced by the entrance of Spanish and French reformist parties into

similar coalitions, decided to run party members on the FP’s slate in the

upcoming congressional election (Alessandri’s Liberals and Conservatives

won control of both houses). The ﬁnal breach between the PR and the

alessandristas occurred on May 23, 1937, when, after a brief return to the

government, Radicals pulled out of the president’s cabinet, never to return.

That same day, PR boss (and future president) Gabriel González Videla

called the FP a national movement in ‘‘defense of democracy.’’

≤≠

The PR, the

most experienced and powerful party within the FP, immediately claimed

leadership of the coalition. Héctor Arancibia Laso, the Radical who spear-

headed Alessandri’s 1920 campaign, was elected to head the FP in early 1936.

With Radicals in top positions, the coalition’s candidate for the presidential

election of 1938 naturally came from within the PR camp. In April 1938,

Aguirre Cerda, a lawyer and teacher who had served in both Alessandri

governments in varying capacities, was named the FP’s presidential candi-

date.

≤∞

He immediately took to the campaign trail against the alessandrista

candidate, Ross.

Aside from the PR-alessandrismo divorce, one of the more interesting polit-