An interview with Sarah Walsh, author of “Hero’s Legacy: Martial Strength and Race in Republican Chile”
Sarah Walsh is lecturer in history at the University of Melbourne. She received her PhD in Latin American history from the University of Maryland, College Park. She specializes in the history of human difference (race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality) in Latin America, with an emphasis on the role that science and memory play in identity construction. You can read her article “Hero’s Legacy: Martial Strength and Race in Republican Chile” in HAHR 104.3.
Interview by Rebeca Martínez-Tibbles
1. What got you interested in republican Chile?
The Roto Chileno statue itself was actually the starting point for my interest in the republican era. During a research trip for my first book, I ran across the memorial while wandering around downtown Santiago. It was clear that the monument was supposed to be important, based on its size and placement in the plaza, but it had this sort of strange and abandoned quality. It made me wonder why it was there and what it was supposed to represent. That led me to an incredibly rich history of Chilean nationalism and warfare that characterized the late republican era.
2. What research methods did you employ to study the construction of Chilean identity through the Roto Chileno war memorial?
I’m probably a fairly traditional historian in this respect, in that I start by looking for archival materials. In this case, it was fairly easy to determine with the internet that the sculpture part of the Roto Chileno memorial was constructed by Virginio Arias. That led me to the archive at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Santiago, El Centro de Documentación Angélica Pérez Germain. The CEDOC MBNA has an incredible collection and that includes a rather extensive file box full of news coverage related to Arias across the entirety of his career. That material formed the basis of this article.
3. What challenges and opportunities were presented by using a monument and other artworks as sources to study the history of republican Chile?
The biggest challenge for me is deciding what part of the story seems most relevant for other historians. In previous work about another memorial site, I’ve examined archival material about the construction process (deciding on the site, selecting sculptures, ongoing maintenance, correspondence between city officials and the public). In this case, I wanted to focus on the history of the sculpture, its creator, and the responses from the art community in particular. That gave me the opportunity to consider the broader transnational scope in which art is produced and how the same piece can have different meanings in different contexts, just as the Roto Chileno did. That creates the opportunity for this article to be helpful for historians of other Latin American nations as well as those who may be studying issues related to diversity and inclusion in other settler societies.
4. How does the Roto Chileno war memorial marginalize Indigeneity in Chile? How does this reflect the larger ideologies governing Chilean nationalism during the late nineteenth century?
The main way that the memorial marginalizes and sidelines Indigeneity in Chile is through its celebration of the roto identity, which was understood as a mestizo identity at the time. The roto was characterized in a variety of late nineteenth-century literature as an “everyman” Chilean who, by virtue of the incontestable reality of European colonial dispossession and sexual assault, was mixed race. As such, the racial legacy of colonial trauma and violence were built into the more contemporary celebration of Chilean military might and success. The celebration of the War of the Pacific in particular also suggested that so-called “pure” Indigenous Chileans no longer existed, as it ended the same year as the occupation of the Araucanía, a concerted state-led effort to dispossess Mapuche peoples and incorporate their territory. The combination of actual state-sanctioned violence, and celebration of it, served to further erase actual Indigenous Chileans and their lived experiences or political concerns from the national imaginary and population.
Turning to Chilean nationalism, then as now it depends on the myth that the pueblo chileno is a racially homogeneous group. As mentioned, that group is mixed race and characterized as effectively white, if including some Indigenous ancestry. In the context of the postwar moment that the Roto Chileno spoke to, this distinction and insistence on white supremacy was important to distinguish and elevate Chile relative to its neighbors, particularly Bolivia and Peru (the very opponents in the military conflicts the memorial celebrated). Chilean political leaders and public intellectuals insisted that it was their proximity to “authentic” whiteness that led to their military victories over nations perceived to be more Indigenous. White supremacy also served to explain Chile’s tradition of democratic governance and increasing economic power in the region. Racial superiority, democratic traditions, and a strong economy more closely linked with white-majority nations all served to bolster the broader claims of Chilean nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century.
5. What is the legacy of the Roto Chileno war memorial today in Chile?
What’s funny about my answer to this question is that it is quite contradictory. On the one hand, the legacy is virtually nothing. On the other, it’s a central force for understanding Chilean culture and society. In terms of it not being very notable, we can look at the Día del Roto Chileno that’s been celebrated since 1839. Though the date has shifted around a bit, it now is celebrated every January 20. While the longevity of this holiday suggests it being impactful, the celebration is concentrated in Barrio Yungay and is not an official public holiday. Similarly, there are at least three other memorials to the Roto Chileno throughout the country, all using versions of the original Arias sculpture. From what I can tell, they were constructed after the one in Plaza Yungay that my article showcases. There are also a handful of plazas dedicated to the Roto Chileno as well. But days of recognition and mostly overlooked memorials don’t necessarily indicate a robust legacy. After all, even the Wars of the Confederation and Pacific have mostly faded from public memory.
However, the fact that these military conflicts, public celebrations, and memorials have disappeared into the bedrock of the foundational belief in Chilean racial homogeneity and superiority is also the legacy of the Roto Chileno memorial. One of the reasons I wanted to do this article was to think about how white supremacy operates in Latin America, as whiteness tends to be conceptualized as a more complex category in the region: essentially, that Latin American whiteness can’t claim the supposed purity of whiteness in places like Australia, Canada, New Zealand, or the United States. Nonetheless, the shape of that supremacy remains much the same. For example, the contemporary legacy of Chilean white supremacy that the Roto Chileno memorial substantiates helps to contextualize the failure of the recent attempt at a new constitution, which was characterized as being too informed by supposedly petty complaints from Indigenous peoples, and the sharp rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric that has taken hold in both media coverage and political debates since at least 2010 when Haitian migrants arrived after a devastating earthquake.
6. Read anything good recently?
I’ve just come back from a research trip in Chile and Paraguay, so I’ve gotten to do some fascinating reading of primary sources from two different intentional communities that moved to those countries (one in the late nineteenth century, and another in the mid-twentieth). Related to that research, one of the secondary sources that I quite liked was Stefano Micheletti Dellamaria’s Los Italianos de Parral: La colonia antes de Colonia Dignidad (2021). That was about how the land that the Chilean state eventually gave to the German migrant community Colonial Dignidad in the early 1960s had previously been set aside for an Italian migration scheme after World War II. While the Italian settlement at Parral was almost an immediate failure due to a lack of viable farmland and potable water among other issues, Colonia Dignidad has an even more notorious reputation as the site of rampant child sexual assault and torture of political dissidents. What’s interesting here is that the state effort to create and sustain both of these groups can be partially explained by the ongoing legacy of the Roto Chileno in that the migration scheme was designed to further whiten the Chilean population while also physically occupying land that had once belonged to Indigenous peoples.