The Cry of the Renegade: Politics and Poetry in Interwar Chile, by Raymond B. Craib

Abstract

Raymond Craib’s second monograph captures the reader’s attention right from the first line: ‘The body of the firecracker poet wound its way through central Santiago.’ It was 1 October 1920 and the ‘firecracker poet’ was twenty-four-year-old José Domingo Goméz Rojas. He had been arrested on charges of subversion in late July, along with many other university students. He spent two months in police custody and died shortly afterwards in Santiago’s asylum. According to Craib, tens of thousands of people took part in his funeral procession. Craib’s book is not a biography of Goméz Rojas: it is, as the historian Natalia Sobrevilla says of her work on Andrés de Santa Cruz, president of the short-lived Peru–Bolivia Confederation (1836–9), ‘much more the story of the place [and time] he inhabited than a tale of the man as an individual’ (The Caudillo of the Andes: Andrés de Santa Cruz [2011], p. 1). Through the detail of the exploits and persecution of Gómez Rojas and scores of his fellow activist intellectuals, such as Casimiro Barrios and the brothers Juan and Pedro Gandulfo, Craib expertly delves into multiple, interweaving histories of Chile during the inter-war period: student organising; the anarchist movement; state violence; immigration and labour laws; the ‘social question’; Santiago’s prison system; and Chile–Peru relations. Drawing on a vast range of primary source materials—including letters, memoirs, newspapers, literary journals, novels, poems, prison records, memoirs, police reports, law decrees and parliamentary debates—he probes the internal diversity of Chilean anarchism, its limitations (vis-à-vis ethnicity and race, for example) and its place within the broader left-wing movement. Craib elucidates the significance of new legislation such as the Workers Housing Law and the Residency Law of 1918; his study also spotlights the anti-alcohol campaigns, living conditions in the tenement houses, high mortality rates (deaths exceeded births in 1920) and the Spanish influenza epidemic. Particularly illuminating is the discussion of collaboration, friendship and marriage between Chileans and Peruvians, alongside the better-known history of Chileans’ racism towards Peruvians, which is poignantly illustrated here by cartoons published in the magazine Sucesos (1902–32).