312 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 10 illus., notes, bibl., index

Amid the low rumble and rhythmic bustle of this urban environment, there emerged from within Chile's burgeoning middle class a nationalist reform movement with far-reaching political and cultural implications. During the first half of the century, as oligarchs anxiously sought to prevent the corrosion of their power and working-class groups armed themselves with revolutionary concepts and combative rhetoric in a highly conflictive ideological arena, influential people of the middle class negotiated an intermediate position between the sociopolitical forces of Right and Left. They endeavored to sculpt a nation distanced from the predominance and pretentiousness of aristocrats, safeguarded from proletarian insurrection, and a Chile in which their ideas and values formed the collective mentalité. At the heart of this movement were intellectuals, educators, bureaucrats, and politicians who articulated an agenda of cultural politics and elaborated a nationalist imagination that altered Chile's cultural landscape, infused politics with a new constellation of images, symbols, and meanings, and influenced how many Chileans thought about themselves and their nation.

This book examines the rise of the middle class and the confluence of culture, politics, and nationalism in a rapidly changing Latin American society. It focuses on the perceptions, voices, and actions of liberal reformers who contributed in significant ways to the shaping of modern Chile during the five decades spanning the founding of the Parliamentary Republic through the Popular Front (Frente Popular, or FP) presidency of Radical Party leader Pedro Aguirre Cerda (1938-41). Its principal purpose is to illustrate and interpret the intricacies of a political-cultural project as it was being manufactured by elements of a class intimately tied to the varied consequences of capitalist modernization. Doing so necessarily entails positing important questions that have not been addressed, much less formulated, about twentieth-century Chile and, arguably, its least studied social constituency: the urban middle class, or "mesocracy" (mesocracia, a term used in Chile for much of the century, underscores the middle stratum's social importance by suggesting authority, legitimacy, and posture). What political concerns and aims motivated middle-class reformers, and why were those concerns and aims unique to their social layer? Why and how were such ideological underpinnings manifested culturally? What role did nationalism play in early-twentieth-century Chile's public sphere in general, and the middle-class milieu in particular? What impact did reform-minded nationalists have on politics, culture, and identity? Were Chilean "mesocrats" simply consorts of the traditional elite, as some would have us believe? Were they, instead, genuinely antioligarchic and committed to far-reaching reform? The chapters hereinafter approach the cultural and political ideas and practices of middle-class reformers by way of literary culture and public education. Both cultural environments—one artistic and aesthetic, the other official and programmatic—are equally important in this story and together impart a multidimensional view of a movement contrived by Chileans who saw themselves as centurions of culture and "authentic interpreters of nationality [and] the national spirit."[1]

Through political will and efficient organization, middle-class reformers with either direct or informal ties to the Radical Party (Partido Radical, or PR), a political body founded by "radical" liberals in the mid-nineteenth century, became the dominant interest group in national affairs by the end of the 1930s. Their ascendance, however, did not come quickly or easily. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, an upper class composed largely of wealthy landowning and mine-owning families maintained control over the political system. But while the mesocracy expanded and the PR increased its representation in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies after the War of the Pacific (1879-84), reformers came to wield a considerable amount of power in the area of cultural production and reproduction, as aristocrats demonstrated only moderate interest in matters of domestic culture. Members of the middle class soon commanded the literary marketplace as the culture industry matured, and public education at the bureaucratic and classroom levels became their nearly exclusive domain by the second decade of the twentieth century. These cultural environments also constituted political environments in which middle-class reformers expressed the fears, hopes, and ideas they shared about such things as class conflict, social solidarity, liberal democracy and democratization, and the "Chilean race."

Such culturally active reformers expressed deep-seated concern about what they deemed obvious symptoms of national decline. Fueling such worry was the "social question," or the problem of worsening living and working conditions in the country's mining centers and major cities, especially Santiago and the port city of ValparaÁso, and the associated proliferation of working-class radicalism. Chile's anarchist and communist movements were in nascent states during the earliest years of the twentieth century, but reformers nonetheless were keenly aware of the possibility of social revolution and viewed the social question as a powder keg for just such an explosion. To make troublesome matters worse, reformers surmised, the upper class remained unresponsive to the social question despite harboring anxieties about insurrection, propagated a certain institutional inertia that stifled broad-based government-sponsored reform, and was simply aloof from the nation's autochthonous culture and cultural needs. Thus, through narration, debates, and policies, mesocrats with cultural capital in literature and pedagogy addressed aspects of the social question, strove for the ultimate decomposition of the elite's power, and propelled their own national project based on reformist cultural and political ideas that were enveloped in a nationalist discourse with strongly liberal democratic overtones. These nationalist reformers, in short, exploited culture's dualistic essence as a mechanism of liberation and authority in the name of inclusive democracy and the patria (fatherland or homeland). While doing so they broke new cultural and political ground upon which subsequent movements, including Salvador Allende's Popular Unity (Unidad Popular, or UP) of the 1960s and early 1970s, erected their national projects.

This study does not portend to be a definitive examination of the middle class, nor does it discuss in detail all the social actors who contributed to the country's cultural and political life during and immediately following the Parliamentary Republic. Rather, it seeks to discern how certain Chileans understood the world around them, why and how they charted and navigated courses in response to it, and how those responses shaped the history of twentieth-century Chile. Accordingly, attention is focused on those Chileans of "middle" standing with greatest cultural and political power between the 1890s and early 1940s: reformers who stood firmly between revolution and reaction. It must be noted here that as Chile's sociopolitical landscape continued to diversify in the 1930s, the loyalty of many middle-class people (including Allende's) came to rest in the organized Left, and the budding Socialist Party in particular. But recognizably "middle-class" Marxists remained in lesser positions in the culture industry, the political system, and in the broader national context during the period under consideration. That is not to say that historians should only study people with the greatest power, leaving the rest behind as inconsequential or, at least, less interesting. On the contrary, we should be sensitive to the undertakings of the powerful to understand better the opportunities, challenges, and dilemmas faced by the less powerful and powerless.

Class, Culture, and Hegemony

In my effort to establish an analytical and interpretive framework that may help us understand the rise of the mesocracy and the cultural politics and nationalism that permeated it, I have found great utility in thinking about "class" and "hegemony" as historical processes. It is more than reasonable to assert that in the twentieth century no other identity marker proved more compelling among Chileans and more pervasive in their political culture than the idea of class. On the surface of things, the relationship between class divisions and political ideologies broke down, in general terms, as one might imagine in a "textbook" sort of way during the first half of the century. That is to say, the upper class remained traditionalist despite its party variation (namely, its division into Liberal and Conservative camps), though some deserters joined the reformist cause; the bulk of the middle class was reformist, cautious, and concerned with furthering its own social and political power; and members of the increasingly radicalized popular classes found leadership in men with middle-class pedigrees who had chosen the path of social revolution (Luis Emilio Recabarren and Allende, for instance). This relationship between social circumstance and ideology lends a degree of insight into the importance of class in the present examination.

The historian E. P. Thompson offered a most succinct, insightful, and adequately malleable definition of "class" in his 1963 trailblazing study on the making of the English working class. He explained that "class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs… . Class consciousness is the way in which the experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms."[2] Class, then, is not a static "thing" but rather an unfolding drama of consciousness, organization, and activity that is expressed and reproduced culturally. Thompson eloquently conveyed the significance of culture in the construction of class by noting, "I am convinced that we cannot understand class unless we see it as a social and cultural formation, arising from processes which can only be studied as they work themselves out over a considerable historical period."[3] In the context of twentieth-century Chile, I am, accordingly, convinced that we cannot begin to comprehend social and cultural formations without addressing class and, specifically, the middle class's station between the elite on the one hand and the working class on the other. As literary critic and educator Angel Rama reminds us, classes with distinct "cultural ways" have found themselves in "a struggle won or lost on the chessboard of history."[4]

Latin America's middle classes coalesced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—some later than others depending on national contexts—as sectors indelibly linked to capitalist modernization and "classical liberal" projects that fostered international trade, domestic commerce, and internal migration. These factors created the necessary conditions for the proliferation of middle-class professions in such areas as governmental bureaucracy, accounting, small business, teaching, journalism, and so forth. Yet, when considering the Chilean case, defining who composed the middle class is a complicated endeavor because "class," as Thompson and Rama indicate, is not merely a socioeconomic category but a cultural one as well. In early-twentieth-century Santiago, for example, it was not entirely uncommon to see the progeny of the upper class take jobs as journalists, teachers, or bureaucrats, join the PR, and, in general, immerse themselves in, and contribute to, a characteristically mesocratic cultural milieu. In this changeful urban setting, genealogy did not necessarily correlate with a distinct lifestyle, ideology, or identity; many mesocrats-by-choice shared with mesocrats-by-station certain cultural tastes and ideological sympathies that, in many ways, differed significantly from those of aristocrats. A mesocrat's being in the world, then, was not solely the function of economic activity and a comparable social standing; it also was tied to cultural norms and a cultural outlook. That is not to say that middle-class Chileans, especially notable professionals, never circulated in high society's cultural medium (a good number of social climbers could not have wished for anything better). In short, it may be argued that locating and identifying a mesocracy during this period by, say, examining employment data or breakdowns of occupations in census reports would not take into full account the pliability of "class" and, for that matter, the significance of culture and cultural practices in the elaboration of classes and identity.

Long before the appearance of Thompson's widely praised work, Antonio Gramsci noted in 1920 that a class, "just as it has thought to organize itself politically and economically[,] … must also think about organizing itself culturally."[5] Gramsci's argument for culture's pertinence in the organization of classes was a departure from prevailing Marxist thought. As Raymond Williams explains, in pre-Gramsci Marxist ideology "no cultural activity is allowed to be real and significant in itself, but is always reduced to a direct or indirect expression of some proceeding and controlling economic content, or of political content determined by an economic position or situation."[6] Marx stipulated that social being (or class) above all shaped consciousness—whether political or cultural. Gramsci, however, essentially argued that culture is an integral component (and not merely a shallow reflection) of social being. He took this very convincing analysis a step further by underscoring the importance of culture in the building of hegemony. Originally formulated by Lenin and Russian Marxists before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and furthered by an incarcerated Gramsci in the 1920s and 1930s, the concept of hegemony has exerted a great deal of historiographical influence in recent years as the conventions of orthodox Marxist historiography have faded.[7] Gramsci exploded Marxism's "base/superstructure" correlation, which subordinated culture to social being, by arguing that culture, like politics and economy, is a critical component not only of class but of hegemony, or the direction of a social group realized through coercion and consent at all levels of interpersonal organization.[8] Williams added to Gramsci's formulation of hegemony by arguing that "a lived hegemony is always a process. It is not, except analytically, a system or structure."[9] Thus, "we have then to add to the concept of hegemony the concepts of counter-hegemony and alternative hegemony, which are real and persistent elements of practice."[10] It was, moreover, Gramsci's contention that a "war of position"—that is, the aggregation of battles between class-based interests seeking to preserve, topple, or realize hegemony—would largely be waged on the field of culture.[11] On a more general level, it is significant for the Chilean case that Gramsci attempted to explain why and how a bourgeois hegemonic project had successfully mitigated class struggle in early-twentieth-century Italy, thus derailing what once was a promising proletarian movement. As we shall see, culturally and politically active elements of Chile's middle class pursued an alternative hegemony that, aside from undermining the preeminence of the oligarchic establishment, sought to suppress working-class radicalism. Collectively, the above formulations of class and hegemony, originally conceived by Marxist thinkers who had working classes and proletarian struggles in mind, resonate in this study of Chilean society's middle sector and its complicated relationship with competing class interests.

The Politics of Prose

Writing in 1915, one Chilean reformer described art as a "social reality" that "can be the source of the elevation of character and harmony in the collective organism." He went on to explain that "the formation of a national art, or at least the stimulation and cultivation of the artistic faculties of the race, is a labor that is eminently nationalist."[12] As this statement indicates, at the center of every modern culture are artistic creations—paintings, sculptures, novels, short stories, poems, and the like—that carry with them meaning and intent. It therefore stands to reason that such cultural products may reflect ideological currents and interpretations of prevailing conditions in a society at a moment in time. In literary culture, art takes form as words, which, far from being definite and unchanging, convey opinions and perspectives conditioned by, and indicative of, social, cultural, political, and economic circumstances. Of most interest to us here is the relationship between art and ideas and, specifically, that of literary culture and political ideology.

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Chilean literature underwent significant shifts in style, content, and function, as new market and cultural conditions gradually created an expanded readership. This era saw the specialization of the intellectual enterprise throughout Latin America, as fiction writers, poets, or literary critics came to earn professional livelihoods. As Argentine literary scholars Beatriz Sarlo and Carlos Altamirano explain, there appeared an "interaction between the writers and the market starting with the moment in which the production and distribution of the book was converted into a branch of the general production of goods."[13] Rama, moreover, notes that this "period of modernization brought a stronger emphasis on specialization, a more rigid division of intellectual labor . . . appropriate for societies that now confronted demands for various kinds of complex knowledge."[14] The prevalence of relatively affordable paper-bound books, higher literacy rates, and greater demand spurred by a literature-hungry urban population signified that literary culture was moving further away from its earlier, exclusive purpose as a diversion of and for the elite. Novels, poetry, short stories, and newspaper serials were increasingly being written and read by intellectuals, civil servants, accountants, journalists, teachers, politicians, and businesspeople of a middle class eager to define and fortify its own cultural presence in society. The most widely read and praised fiction trend of early-twentieth-century Chile was criollismo ("creolism"), a predominantly middle-class genre that combined stylistic and thematic sensibilities inspired by European naturalist writers allied to the liberal cause, especially the celebrated Frenchman Émile Zola, with native—or criollo—settings.

Criollismo emerged at the turn of the century as a cultural creation with ideological overtones. Contributors to the genre, including members and fellow travelers of the PR, revealed a nationalist, reformist, and populistic disposition in works that placed lower-class Chileans in the cultural and national limelight and pushed the aristocracy out of it. In a manner similar to that of important English, Irish, and Argentine intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s, Guillermo Labarca Hubertson, Mariano Latorre, Luis Durand, and other criollistas saw nationness in the countryside, among campesinos (country folk) whom the urban elite essentially thought of as bumpkins.[15] The genre's contributors believed that chilenidad ("Chileanness" or "Chileanity") was not an inherent quality of the cosmopolitan elite; rather, it was ingrained in such figures as the huasos, or horsemen service tenants, of the Central Valley's sprawling haciendas, who shared a more wholesome and genuine existence, or so the criollistas sustained. By divulging the (supposed) characteristics and day-to-day experiences of society's underbelly, and by negating high society's cultural and national distinction, the criollistas contributed to a middle-class reform movement that included the popular sector in a national and nationalist project. But any change was to occur on terms set by reformers, and there were limits to the lower class's political options in this newly reimagined community.[16]

The process of discerning a discourse of cultural and sociopolitical consequence in a literary medium does not come without some methodological and theoretical pitfalls. What, for example, may a collection of fictional short stories and novels filled with hundreds of plots and protagonists tell us about the contours of a reformist ideology rooted in the middle class? Leo Lowenthal, a sociologist of literature, observed that "literature is a particularly suitable bearer of fundamental symbols and values which give cohesion to social groups, ranging from nations and epochs to special social subgroups and points in time… . Literature tells us not only what a society was like in a past age, but also what the individual felt about it." Analyses of literature may therefore reveal "those central problems with which man has been concerned at various times, permitting us to develop an image of a given society in terms of the individuals that composed it."[17] For our purposes here, should we then perceive literature as an artsy expression of ideology? If so, would art then cease to be art and simply become aestheticized politics?

In his theory of the "transindividual subject," Lucien Goldmann drew a direct correlation between an author's position in society and the type of literature that he or she yields.[18] Although it is tempting simply to interpret an author's literary production as an expression of his or her subject position, we must be wary of such a static and undynamic relational certainty. Pierre Bourdieu tells us that investigators often sloppily choose samples of a literary movement that express class-based interests and ideas, putting aside more marginal authors whose works may cast doubt on a direct author-class nexus. Bourdieu also states that strategies and trajectories of authors tend to be independent and differentiated among those of similar social origin.[19] However, Bourdieu may be overly swift in his rejection of the author-class nexus. Certain tendencies are, in fact, discernible within a given genre that may link, on a "macro" rather than "micro" level, more than one author to a class and class interests. Such links may not be overt and thus beckon excavation. In their works, the criollistas demonstrate commonalities that not only are stylistic and structural but also political and functional. In essence, this book's treatment of criollismo assumes the middle ground between Goldmann and Bourdieu, where art can be for art's sake and art can be for politics' sake. As Gramsci observed when writing on culture and ideology, "given the principle that one should look only to the artistic character of the work of art, this does not in the least prevent one from investigating the mass of feelings and the attitude towards life present in the work itself."[20]

Although scholars have produced many important contributions to our understanding of modern Chilean literature, criollismo's ideological morphology remains unexplored. The few existing references to criollismo, which demonstrate the genre's aesthetic commitment to themes and settings associated with the lower classes, emphasize that its proliferation signaled the emergence of a new urban type—the professional writer—who was a product of economic modernization and social change. Indeed, this is an important aspect of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century literary culture, but sidestepped in such studies is criollismo's place in a middle-class reform movement with hegemonic intent and a new vision of the nation and its culture. This book, therefore, treats criollismo not only as a literary form with a peculiar style but also as a collection of historical texts that disclose an agenda of cultural politics anchored by an emerging nationalist imagination.

Ideology and Cultural Politics: Lessons from the Classroom

The elaboration of the culture industry and the diversification of cultural production paralleled significant developments in pedagogy, which, like literary culture, was a medium for the cultural politics and nationalist principles of middle-class reformers. As Chile's bureaucratic state expanded to meet the demands of a modernizing society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, public education became an important part of governance, as was the case in other Latin American nations, North America, Britain, and continental Europe. The mesocracy's leverage in Chilean public instruction dates from the final years of what is often called the Portalian Republic (1831-91), named after its principal architect, the trader Diego Portales. A sharp increase in education spending during the presidency of Josâ Manuel Balmaceda (1886-91) produced a need for more teachers and ministerial bureaucrats. Middle-class personnel, many of them Radicals, filled such posts in large numbers, thus establishing a reformist presence that guided public instruction for many decades. For the historian, early-twentieth-century Chilean pedagogy is a rich depository of ideas and practices that were strongly "mesocratic" and reformist in character and was a cultural space in which leading reformers, including Aguirre Cerda and a young Arturo Alessandri Palma, implemented a cultural political agenda and espoused nationalist principles.

The rise of an increasingly politicized Chilean working class and the persistence of oligarchic power convinced reformers of the Parliamentary Republic that cultural democratization in the form of compulsory primary instruction and the spread of an inclusive nationalism among students were pedagogical imperatives. In public debate over the amplification of public education, reformers gave shape to a strongly nationalist discourse when criticizing traditionalists allied to the Catholic Church, who objected to the secularization of pedagogy through the expansion of state-executed schooling, and others outside religious conservatism (especially Liberals of the Parliamentary Republic establishment) who were critical of Radical reformism. Meanwhile, the diffusion of nationalism in the classroom, reformers thought, would inculcate workers, their families, and other Chileans with cultural and political demeanors that would contribute to the mesocracy's hegemonic project and the perpetuation of liberal democracy. Indeed, Basil Bernstein notes that in any society "the structuring of knowledge and symbol in … educational institutions is intimately related to the principles of social control."[21] Among the concepts and constructs propagated in decrees and protocols issued by Chile's education bureaucracy was a mestizo (mixed-blooded) racial identity, which reformers employed to champion unity during this period of heated social conflict.

In general, historians of Chilean education have not examined pedagogical manifestations of nationalism, though the middle class's important place in the evolution of public education has been documented. Discussions of Parliamentary-era debates over a proposed law of obligatory primary instruction, for example, do not locate and explore a nationalism that informed that dimension of reformist cultural politics. No study, moreover, traces the evolution of policies and protocols governing nationalist teachings in Chile that were formulated and implemented, in large part, by middle-class reformers between the turn of the century and the 1940s. Such guidelines demonstrate that reformers actively and imaginatively employed public schooling as a conduit for a nationalist sensibility that permeated the middle class's milieu; they wielded the cultural capital associated with an elevated status in the pedagogical bureaucracy to manipulate the construction of a collective identity. E. J. Hobsbawm, in his widely read book on nationalism, calls such manipulation "ideological engineering." Its success, he explains, is directly related to the capability of the state's bureaucracy to touch the lives of all or most citizens in a uniform manner.[22]

A Historiographical Path Less Traveled

How middle-class reformers interlaced cultural politics and nationalism for hegemonic ends is a complex issue that has gone without investigation. More broadly speaking, scholarship on Chile's mesocracy, its cultural history, and nationalist impulse is scant. Notable non-Chilean historians have, in general, devoted their intellectual energies to subjects other than the middle class since Chile's history began drawing considerable academic interest in the 1950s and 1960s, and Chilean scholars also have applied their intellectual energies elsewhere owing, in large part, to changing sociopolitical circumstances during the course of the twentieth century. All the while, the study of Chilean nationalism has taken a course that, it may be argued, diminishes the utility of "nationalism" as an analytical category.

John Johnson's 1958 study Political Change in Latin America identified, for what may be the first time in "foreign" scholarship on the region, the presence of powerful middle sectors whose constituents expressed and executed far-reaching progressive agendas based on principles of democratization and inclusion. Johnson credits middle-class movements for promoting domestic economic development, fostering literacy by expanding public education systems, and pursuing the construction of modern welfare states. His positive assessment of twentieth-century Latin America's middle layers did not go unchallenged. Frederick Pike, in his article on class relations in Chile published in 1963, essentially argues that the middle class was but an appendage of the elite, was bereft of its own cultural attributes, and shared high society's opprobrious view of the lower classes.[23] Pike reached this conclusion by identifying members of a nineteenth-century "middle class" who, after striking it rich as mining entrepreneurs, merged socially, politically, and culturally with Liberal and Conservative aristocrats. These nouveaux riches, he further explains, were the same "middle class" people who, in the early twentieth century, demonstrated the "tendency to shun the lower mass and embrace the aristocracy" while developing "very little consciousness of themselves as members of a distinct class." In fact, Pike found it "extremely difficult to detect opinions, customs, and value judgments in Chile that are demonstrably middle class."[24] It will become clear that Pike's "middle class," quite simply, is not necessarily the same middle class explored in the following chapters, though some offspring of the nineteenth century's social climbers, including notable educators and a prominent criollista, contributed to the mesocracy's hegemonic project. The present study seeks to demonstrate that middle-class reformers were fundamentally antioligarchic without breaching the parameters of democratic demeanor; they successfully expanded a recognizably mesocratic cultural domain, forged a nationalist discourse that celebrated the lower class, and, at least symbolically, included Chileans of lesser status in an imagined community.

Pike's skepticism of middle-class dynamism was soon shared by a generation of Marxist historians of Latin America influenced by the emergent dependentista paradigm who believed that fundamental change could only be realized through social revolution, and certainly not by way of middle-class liberalism. As David Parker explains, moreover, very different portraits of Latin America's middle layers were painted by the 1970s. Aside from those like Pike, who viewed mesocrats as consorts of the elite, some argued that middle sectors demonstrated both progressive and traditionalist tendencies over extended periods—progressivism in their struggles against oligarchies (good) and traditionalism when they sought to consolidate their hard-won sociopolitical gains (bad).[25] Yet another group of scholars more convincingly explained such an apparent duality by arguing that older, established middle sectors gravitated toward authoritarian principles, while emergent middle layers maintained a decidedly progressive mentality.[26] One gathers from such investigations that, despite their progressivism and discourses of democratization, Latin America's middle classes were either incapable or unwilling to enact wide-ranging and long-lasting change in their respective societies; democracy faltered, and poverty and injustice persisted either by defeat, design, or default.

Aside from Pike's article, historians interested in Chile have not explored these and other important issues related to the mesocracy. When appraising the body of literature published by non-Chilean scholars, we find important studies on the political and intellectual foundations of the nation-state; works related to economic issues, especially themes associated with development; valuable contributions to our understanding of rural society; significant studies on the working class; and other examinations that do not directly address the middle class's pivotal role in modern Chilean history. It may very well be the case that an overriding sense of Chile's historical exceptionalism—probably shared by more non-Chilean than Chilean scholars—accounts for this historiographical lapse. The country's unusually stable political system in the nineteenth century, the prevalence of a thoroughly integrated landed aristocracy, its world-renowned nitrate boom, and the dramatic (and ultimately tragic) course of its particularly successful working-class movement are lightning rods for academic interest, overshadowing the urban mesocracy and its significant place in Chilean society and history. Another factor, however, may be more consequential when assessing why the Chilean middle class (and other Latin American middle classes) continues to receive little attention: a latent contempt for liberalism. To Pike and other historians, middle-class liberals, by virtue of ties to the liberal elite, simply buttressed an ideology that, when practiced in Latin America, was a pillar of aristocratic power and a sham. In sum, it remains clear that the middle class—a decisive social, political, economic, and cultural presence in national affairs since the Parliamentary Republic—has not received the historiographical attention it warrants among historians outside Chile.

A similar problem characterizes the scholarship of important Chilean historians of the mid- and late twentieth century, whose works have largely steered clear of society's middle stratum. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historical investigation was in the hands of upper-class Chileans who wove grand narratives about colonial society, the struggle for independence, and the country's unique experience with "constitutional authoritarianism" during the Portalian Republic.[27] Great men, politics, and international and civil wars dominated the thematic stage. The revered historian Diego Barros Arana, for example, expressed little interest in matters outside of elite politics.[28] This is completely understandable given that politics was almost exclusively in the elite's hands until the late nineteenth century. By midcentury, however, important sociopolitical and cultural developments, including the democratization of public education, had transformed the composition of the country's academy and, in turn, Chilean historiography. "History" changed from being an elite's avocation to a profession of trained scholars, many of them from the middle class.

There emerged from outside the elite such scholars as Jorge Barría Serón, Julio César Jobet, and Hernán Ramírez Necochea, three of Chile's leading Marxist historians, who burst onto the academic scene in the 1950s and 1960s as university professors with interests related to the evolution of the working class and its sociopolitical institutions. Their influential books on the radicalized labor movement shifted, to a certain degree, the locus of Chilean historiography from the elite to workers, thereby leapfrogging the middle class as an object of historical study.[29] It must be stated here that these and other leftist historians also harbored suspicions of liberal democracy, the political expression of capitalism. This translated into their less-than-positive opinions of a notably liberal democratic middle class, though some Marxists scholars—especially those with ties to UP—held more favorable, or at least tolerant, views of political liberalism. In the years leading up to the election of UP candidate Salvador Allende in 1970, then, Chilean historiography took on a somewhat Marxist hue.[30] After the 1973 military coup that toppled Allende and the "vía chilena al socialismo," an influential cadre of younger Chilean historians on the left found little purpose in continuing to write blow-by-blow narratives of a defeated working-class political project. Scholars such as Gabriel Salazar judged the works of Barría, Jobet, and Ramírez as reductionist and unable to relay the compound experiences of "el bajo pueblo." They sought to escape the constraints of a "top-down" analysis by focusing on the day-to-day lives—the social history—of the popular sectors.[31] They, too, sidestepped the mesocracy. In short, when assessing the long-term trajectory of Chilean historiography, we see that while thematic and methodological perspectives shifted within the academy, the middle class largely remained in the dusty corners of historical inquiry.

Studies of Chilean nationalism, like those on the middle class, are few. Ernst Halperin and Carl Solberg offered two of the earliest assessments of it in the mid-1960s and early 1970s. Halperin approached the topic in his Nationalism and Communism in Chile (1965) by looking at economic policy and issues related to development. Chilean nationalism, Halperin explained, was developmentalist and anti-imperialist; it could be detected in the public policy of the Popular Front (a Radical-led coalition of the Center and Left) in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the Christian Democrat administration of Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964-70), and the program of the Left's Popular Action Front (Frente de Acci¢n Popular, or FRAP). Halperin, therefore, essentially confined his investigation of Chilean nationalism to the economic realm.[32] The analysis offered by Solberg examines the relationships between immigration and nationalism in both Chile and Argentina between 1890 and 1914. His 1970 study, though certainly more elaborate than Halperin's, nevertheless echoes Nationalism and Communism in Chile by asserting that Chilean nationalism "concentrated primarily on economic problems."[33] Although Solberg focused on reactions to immigration that emerged from society's middle strata, his study's temporal span ends exactly when middle-class Chileans asserted themselves in national affairs to a greater degree. Solberg, therefore, missed the era in which nationalist ideas rapidly matured. Moreover, Solberg did not consider the existence of competing nationalisms within each country and chose instead to formulate a comparative exercise involving two seemingly uniform nationalisms, one "Chilean" and the other "Argentine." Nationalism's rich complexity is, therefore, largely left untapped, though his study certainly provides a more robust analysis than Halperin's.

In more recent years, Chile's experience with military dictatorship has led historians in and of that country strictly to equate nationalism with authoritarianism, thereby denying the existence of alternative nationalisms.[34] I am suggesting here that recent scholarship on Chile recognizes nationalism as a singularly elitist and fundamentally antidemocratic sensibility, which justifies chauvinism, belligerence, and intolerance on the grounds of national salvation and renovation. One gathers, furthermore, that Chilean nationalism's historical trajectory may be traced from Jorge González von Marées's National Socialist Movement (Movimiento Nacional Socialista, or Nazi Party) of the 1930s to the horrific Directorate of National Intelligence (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, or DINA) of the 1970s and is best symbolized by the stern look on General Augusto Pinochet's face.[35] To be sure, this describes a nationalism that was especially real to the many thousands who faced the atrocities of dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s. It does not, however, describe all species of Chilean nationalism. Historians have not ventured to ask if a criollo variant of what Hobsbawm has called "democratic-revolutionary nationalism" developed in Chile's crowded ideological arena.[36] Was Chilean nationalism naturally bereft of the Enlightenment's liberal commandments? Is it possible to identify an early-century "progressive" nationalism—an alternative nationalism that challenged the oligarchy's power, offered a democratized vision of the imagined community, and defended the precepts of liberal democracy?

This book is organized as follows. Chapter 1 examines urban social transformations brought on by the export economy and the early phases of industrialization, the amplification of electoral politics and sociopolitical contestation, the rise of middle-class reformism, and the cultural practices of the elite during the Parliamentary Republic. It seeks to orient the reader within the changing environment of Chile's troubled belle epoque. Chapter 2 presents a schematic history of Chilean patriotism and nationalism and then embarks on an interpretation of early-twentieth-century nationalism(s) in that country. Keeping in mind class interests and the malleability of nationalist discourse, it explores the articulation of two strains of nationalism and, in general, seeks to orient the reader within the densely wooded and somewhat foggy forest of Chilean nationalism.

Chapter 3 opens this book's discussion of middle-class literary culture, nationalism, and cultural politics by focusing on the first generation of criollistas (ca. 1900-1920), its rewriting of what may be called the "national narrative," and the accompanying phenomenon of rural aestheticism in Chile's urban space. Chapter 4 examines the historical trajectory of criollismo and the steady diffusion of criollista ideas in the public sphere from about 1920 to the Aguirre Cerda presidency. It argues that nativist imagery had become an important component of opposing political discourses by the 1930s and that the Radical-directed Popular Front was particularly attracted to the national narrative introduced by literary criollismo's progenitors.