The Three Rs 227
plaining that in the countryside of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries ‘‘there began to form the Republic and the People of the future.
From the ranchos emerged the men who fought for national ideals, for lib-
erty, for independence, for progress, for civilization.’’ Despite such valor, the
essay notes, ‘‘today, in the large cities, who remembers those humble ranchos
of the past, with their fragile walls that shook in the wind of the Cordillera
[the Andes]?’’
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The author then seeks to impart the importance of the
ranchos in the making of modern Chile: ‘‘When one thinks that skyscrapers
are the descendants of ranchos, one cannot but contemplate with respect and
admiration about the strength of our people, about the glory of our civiliza-
tion, about the cities born in the campos, about the great united and free
patria, working for the present and for the future. Each rancho that remains
in our countryside is a small temple of the past; each skyscraper that rises
over our streets is an altar to the future.’’
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This passage not only underscores
the symbolic importance of lo rural in the nationalist imagination of reform-
ist mesocrats but also captures the impulse for progress (skyscrapers as
altars to the future) that typified progressive nationalist discourse in early-
twentieth-century Chile.
The textbooks examined in this chapter convey to readers images, sym-
bols, and meanings that reinforced the cultural politics and nationalism of
criollistas and reform-minded educators who sought to democratize culture,
spread nationalism in the public sphere, and, by extension, realize a hege-
monic project between revolution and reaction. Such texts divulge con-
structs of patria and lo chileno that suggested to both adults and children that
they, regardless of socioeconomic status, were part of an imagined commu-
nity based on notions of liberty, fraternity, equality, hard work, order, and
progress and shared a patrimony that included a racial dimension. ‘‘Class,’’
on the other hand, is a concept that remains without elaboration in these
reading materials, though contributors to the texts certainly understood the
importance of class in their rapidly changing country. Many contributors
found imaginative ways to discuss society using other terms—‘‘raza,’’ ‘‘cit-
izens,’’ and so on—that did not necessarily carry with them a discursive
imprint of the Left, as ‘‘class’’ did. This underscores the populistic principles
of collectivity and solidarity, as well as the antirevolutionary sensibility, that
permeated reformist discourse in pedagogy.
For reformers, texts such as El lector del obrero chileno, El lector chileno, and El
niño chileno served a vital role as precipitators of consent, though it is impos-
sible to gauge to what exact degree students incorporated and internalized
the ideas and iconography in them. What is certain, however, is that these