Kinship Politics in the Chilean Independence Movement

Abstract

THE importance of the family in Latin American life goes unquestioned. Yet the political history of Latin America has often been written as if great events happened outside the home, while families stayed within it; or as if family influence in politics were too endemic, too unspoken, to have a history. On the other hand, histories of Latin American families have tended to demonstrate the importance of a particular line and of inherited characteristics, without analyzing the responsiveness between kinship and political systems. This essay examines one case during the independence period in Chile, that of elite families who won the right to imprint their values and the practices of kinship politics on the new nation. I am suggesting that the elite's use of family organization in the 1810 revolution altered the structure of authority between Chile and Spain, and at the same time set prototypes of authority between one Chilean and another. By tracing one strand which has been lost from the independence story-the influence of Chile's most important revolutionary family-I hope to show that kinship was involved in critical issues: the disputes over office-holding, the means of revolutionary organization, the substructure of political factions, and the metaphors of revolutionary ideology. Liberal and nationalist interpretations of Chilean independence have presumed that Creoles rebelled against Spain because they experienced discrimination in acquiring offices, and because they mea-