The creolization of imperial reason: Chilean state racism in the war of the Pacific

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 El Nuevo Ferrocarril, 30 January 1881, no. 153, p. 2. Hereafter cited within as NF, followed by date and page number. References to this newspaper were collected in the library of the Museo Nacional Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna in Santiago, Chile. All translations from Spanish are my own. 2 The Atacama Desert, lying between the 23rd and 26th parallel on the Pacific coast, had formed the diffuse borderlands between Peru, Chile and Bolivia in the aftermath of Independence. The discovery of nitrate and other mineral deposits, coupled with the global recession of the early 1870s, transformed the Atacama into a valuable territory. The War of the Pacific broke out when the Bolivian president Hilarión Daza levied a tax on a Chilean-owned nitrate mining company, in violation of an 1874 treaty. Peru, which had signed a mutual defence treaty with Bolivia in 1873, refused to pledge neutrality, and so Chile declared war on Peru as a response to its ‘secret alliance’. 3 For centuries, Spanish colonizers and creole elites had been able to gain control of the Mapuche-dominated Araucanía. It was only in 1883, as Chilea was still embroiled in the War of the Pacific, that the region was finally brought under state control; as in the United States and Argentina, this campaign was made possible by the genocidal combination of state armies, railways and firearms. Easter Island, in turn, was claimed by Chile in 1888. At this time, Easter Island was the only South Seas island to remain unclaimed by a European power. Since then, the island has carried mainly symbolic significance for the Chilean nation, captured in the image of the moais (ancient Rapa Nui sculptures), which today decorate everything from Chilean tour guides to advertisements for airlines and telephone companies. 4 At a victory ceremony after the war, the politician Miguel Luis Amunátegui stated that ‘our sailors have given us the empire of the Pacific. Our soldiers have occupied the capital of Peru’. NF, 27 March 1881, p. 3. 5 Shortly after the War of the Pacific the President José Manuel Balmaceda turned against British interests in an attempt ‘Chileanize’ the nitrate industry. However, members of the Chilean oligarchy, in alliance once again with British capitalists, overthrew Balmaceda in the Civil War of 1891. See Zeitlin and Vitale for discussions of the warring factions and interests within the Chilean state at this time. 6 The commercial exhibitions of the nineteenth century were key instances in which Latin American elites enacted an analogous strategy of consumption as a sign of ‘civilization’. Studying the case of Venezuela's Universal Exhibition of 1883, González Stephan shows how elites were eager to transmit their ‘avidity and ability to consume the products of metropolitan industries’ to offset the stigma that came with specialization in ‘raw material’ production (2006: 228). The importance of ‘civilized’ consumption as a strategy of legitimation for Chilean elites only increased after the War of the Pacific, and is explored in Orlove and Bauer (1997). 7 Hereafter as VIM. 8 ‘Zambo’ is a term that has been used in Latin America since Spanish colonial times to refer to racial mixing between black and indigenous people. 9 See Ricardo Donoso's Donoso, Ricardo. 1925. Don Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna. Su vida, sus escritos, y su tiempo: 1831–1886, Santiago: Imprenta Universitaria. [Google Scholar] biography of Vicuña Mackenna. 10 See Pinto, 1998 Pinto, Julio. 1998. Trabajos y rebeldías en la pampa salitrera, Santiago: Editorial Universidad de Santiago. [Google Scholar]. 11 Frazier's Frazier, Lessie Jo. 2007. Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence, and the Nation-State in Chile, 1890 to the Present, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] study also documents how workers themselves, identifying as Bolivians, Peruvians and Chileans, forged a class solidarity in the 1907 strike that has been sidelined by nationalist memory (122).