-start w/thank yous: Center for Values, Ethics, and the Law in Medicine, especially Jacqueline Savard for organizing, REGS colleagues for their support

-what I’ll do in my presentation: discuss some highlightsfrom an article I’ve been drafting for publication for 20-30 minutes, then open things up for discussion

“One of the Most Uniform Races of the Entire World”:Raza chilena and the Myth of Chilean Racial Homogeneity

Javiera Barandiarán’s 2012 article, “Researching

Race in Chile,” evaluated the success or failure of

Chilean social scientists to measure racial

discrimination in Chilean hiring practices. She found

that any information the studies generated regarding

systematic or institutional racism were often overlooked,

ignored, or reinterpreted as indicative of class-based

discrimination by Chilean researchers. She pointed to the

findings of one 2007 study in particular as being

illustrative of this pattern. “Chile is not a country

with significant racial groups as may be the case of

other Latin American countries such as Bolivia, Peru or

Brazil. The percentage of indigenous population in Chile

is small. The type of discrimination we are looking at

may indeed be related to historical factors of inequality

of opportunities rather than subjective racism. (Bravo,

1

Sanhueza, and Urzúa 2007, 21)”1 Barandiarán concluded that

social class trumped all other types of social or racial

difference in Chile. Chilean researchers did not find

racial discrimination in the job market because they did

not see racial difference among Chileans. The article,

therefore, called for new attention on Chilean race

thinking and ideology to better understand why Chileans

prefer to see class rather than race.

Nicolás Palacios’s Raza chilena: Libro escrito por un Chileno i

para los Chilenos [Chilean Race: A Book Written by a Chilean

for Chileans] (1904) helps to explain this phenomenon.

Raza chilena is well known among Chilean scholars and has a

notorious reputation. The text was central to the Chilean

National Socialist Party’s rhetoric and many academics

studying Chile consider Palacios’s legacy to be one of

racism based on little more than hopeful fantasy. As

such, the 700+ page monograph is often only discussed in

relation to something else. Most scholars feel that Raza

chilena is useful only insofar as it demonstrates a

particular zeitgeist of the turn of the twentieth century,

1 Javiera Barandiarán, “Researching Race in Chile,” Latin American Research Review 47, no. 1 (2012): 164.

2

meriting little scholarly attention of its own.2 However,

Palacios’s vision of harmonious race mixing resulting in

Chilean racial homogeneity was a powerful trope that

seeped into many facets of Chilean culture over the

course of the twentieth century. Barandiarán’s article

demonstrates just how commonplace the notion of Chilean

mestizo identity has become and demonstrates why more

careful attention must be paid to works like Raza chilena.

This article will explore how Palacios’s work folklorized

2 I have not found any entire monographs in either English or Spanishthat discuss Palacios or Raza chilena. There are, however, various articles, book chapters, and essays that mention either (or both). See: Alvarado and Fernandez, “Una narración fundacional,” 47-63. Miguel Alvarado Borgoño, “La modernidad maldita de Nicolás Palacios. Apuntes sobre Raza chilena,” Gazeta de Antropología 20 (2004): 1-9. CristiánGazmuri R., “Decadencia del espíritu de nacionalidad,” in El Chile del Centenario, Los Ensayistas de la crisis, ed. Cristián Gazmuri R. et al. (Santiago de Chile: Instituto de Historia, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2001). Pedro Godoy P. and Gustavo Galarce M., Día de sangre: Nicolás Palacios y el genocidio de Iquique 21.12.1907, (Chile: Universidad Arturo Prat, 2007). Thomas Miller Klubock, “Nationalism, Race, and the Politics of Imperialism: Workers and North American Capital in the Chilean Copper Industry,” in Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History: Essays form the North, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 231-267. Ariel Peralta Pizarro, Idea de Chile, (Concepción, Chile: Ediciones Universidad de Concepción, 1993). Only the articles by Alvarado Borgoño and Fernández attempt a full scale analysis of Palacios’s work. While similar in content to José Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica: Misión de la raza iberoamericana, Raza chilena has received comparatively little study by Chileanists or Latin Americanists though it preceded Vasconcelos’s monograph by two decades. This is especially true in English language sources. José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica: Misión de la raza iberoamericana, (Madrid: Agencia Mundial de Librería, 1925).

3

and obscured indigenous peoples in Chile which served to

erase racial difference among Chileans.

Nicolás Palacios: The Man Behind the Myth

mention this section

give dates of 1854-1911 (birth/death)

served in Chilean military as field medic during

War of the Pacific (1879-1883)started to come up

with racial ideology in encounters with Peruvians

as doctor in mining country saw effects of foreign

economic exploitation

“El roto chileno”: Palacios’s Vision of the Chilean Race

Part of the reason why Raza chilena has been seen as

strictly racist, rather than informative of a larger

narrative about Chilean racial ideology, was that it was

written primarily as an anti-immigration polemic. Working

at the Chilean mines especially informed his strong

belief in Chilean exploitation at the hands of foreign

intervention. Palacios wrote that his book was meant to

counteract, “…that campaign of disgrace brought about by

the Government which has placed an iron-clad resistance

to the fulfillment of the national colonization law, and

4

which is bringing to the lands of the Nation families of

races different from our own.”3 The Chilean government had

instituted a number of programs and policies in the

second half of the nineteenth century to encourage

European immigration, often aimed at Spanish, Italian,

and French immigrants.4 They were meant to populate

regions of the country that were considered vacant with

Chilean nationals to prevent encroachment by nearby rival

Argentina. They were also considered a means of

civilizing the Chilean nation by injecting European blood

in large quantities into the population. Of course all of

these programs overlooked the fact that indigenous people

inhabited the supposedly vacant lands.5

Fundamental to Palacios’s objection to southern

European immigration was that he believed Chileans formed

a distinct race that merited protection. “This fact of

great importance for us, and which has been verified by 3 Palacios, Raza chilena, 31. “…aquella campaña de desprestigio trajo como consecuencia el que el Gobierno haya puesto una invencible resistencia al cumplimiento de la ley de colonización nacional, y queesté entregando las tierras de la Nación a familias de raza extraña ala nuestra.”4 Gabriel Salazar and Julio Pinto, Historia Contemporánea de Chile II: Actores, identidad y movimiento (Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones, 1999), 78-81.

5 Frazier, Salt in the Sand.

5

all of the observers who have met us, from Darwin to

Hancock, the leading men of Chile seem to ignore.”6

Annoyed by Chilean government support of southern

European immigration, Palacios turned to the expertise of

scholars to support his claims that Chileans formed their

own distinct race and that the race ought to be

preserved. Raza chilena was concerned then with proving that

Chileans were a distinct and unique race that required

protection from the interference of, and intermixing

with, unwanted outsiders.

Protecting the Chilean racial legacy was especially

important because Chile presented a unique opportunity to

study how race mixing could be beneficial. Palacios

claimed that, “Two or three generations more and Chile

will be able to count as one of the most uniform races of

the entire world.”7 The contention that race mixing could

produce desirable racial uniformity was unique, if viewed

from the perspective of North Atlantic eugenic models.

6 Palacios, Raza chilena, 34. “Este hecho de gran importancia para nosotros, y que ha sido constatado por todos los observadores que noshan conocido, desde Darwin hasta Hancock, parecen ignorarlo los hombres dirigentes de Chile.”7 Palacios, Raza chilena, 56. “Dos o tres generaciones más y Chile podrá contar con una de las razas más uniformes del mundo entero.”

6

Eugenicists of the same period in the United States,

Great Britain, and Germany were first and foremost

interested in achieving racial purity through efforts to

keep races separate.8 However, within the context of Latin

American eugenic philosophies, Palacios’s ideas fit into

a much broader spectrum.9 Though some eugenicists in Latin

America encouraged efforts at whitening the population,

this was almost always based upon some notion of race

mixing. Inspired by the strong positivist influence in

Latin America, many eugenicists believed that the key to

progress and civilization was the creation of a racially

homogeneous population that would work together because

racial uniformity indicated cultural perfection which was

vital for industrial strength.

Araucanian Visigoths: Chilean Racial Origins

Though Raza chilena assumed the obsolescence of

indigenous Chileans going forward, it did not omit their

racial contribution to the Chilean population in the

past. Chilean uniqueness, the fact that there was even a

8 Stern, Eugenic Nation.

9 Marisa Miranda and Gustavo Vallejo, Darwinismo social y eugenesia en el mundo latino (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI de Argentina Editores, 2005). Stepan, “Hour of Eugenics”. Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica.

7

Chilean race at all, was predicated on the existence of

indigenous heritage in the population at large. As such,

Palacios spent a great deal of his book explaining the

origins of the Chilean race. He argued that Chileans were

the result of a specific mixture of Araucanian indigenous

and Visigoth European ancestry. He also stipulated that

both of these groups were racially pure themselves

because their racial characteristics were stable and

long-standing.10

Though he championed mixed racial heritage, it is

probably not surprising that Palacios favored Chilean

European ancestry throughout Raza chilena. However, this was

not the European ancestry one might expect of people

living in South America. Rather than seeing Spain as the

racial homeland, Palacios stated that Chilean blood came

from Northern Europe. He argued that the Spanish subjects

who came to Chile during the colonial period were from a

10 Alvarado and Fernández, “Una narracion fundacional,” 49. “La raza chilena es el derivado de la contaminación mutua de lo que Palacios considera dos razas primitivas, en el sentido de fundantes, además depuras, no por el hecho de ser naturalmente superiores a otra razas sino más bien porque ‘poseyeron cualidades estables i fijas desde un gran número de jeneraciones anteriores’.”

8

specific ethnic subgroup within Spain. The explorers that

came to Chile were,

…the direct descendants of those blonde barbarians, warriors and conquerors, that in their exodus to thesouth of the European continent destroyed the Roman Empire of the west. It was these Goths, prototype ofthe Teutonic, Germanic or Nordic race, that conserved the almost total purity of their caste, thanks to their pride in their stock and the laws that, for various centuries, prohibited marriage with conquered races.11

Palacios believed that the Europeans who arrived in Chile

were the descendants of the Visigoths that spread

throughout Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries.

Claiming this lineage was no coincidence. It tied

Chileans to the more seemingly more productive Anglo-

Saxon races of northern Europe and implied their racial

superiority over both southern European immigrants and

11 Nicolás Palacios, Raza chilena: Libro escrito por un chileno i para los chilenos (Valparaíso, Chile: Imprenta i Litografía Alemana, 1904), 4. “…descendientes directos de aquellos bárbaros rubios, guerreros i conquistadores, que en su éxodo al sur del continente europeo destruyeron el imperio romano de occidente. Eran esos los Godos, prototipo de la raza teutónica, jermana o nórdica, que conservaron casi del todo pura su casta, gracias al orgullo de su prosapia i a las leyes que, por varios siglos, prohibieron sus matrimonios con lasrazas conquistadas. Por los numerosos retratos o descripciones que conozco de los conquistadores de Chile, puedo asegurar que a lo sumo el diez por ciento de ellos presentan signos de mestizaje con la razaautóctona de España, con la raza ibera; el resto es de pura sangre teutona, como Pedro de Valdivia, cuyo retrato es tan conocido.”

9

other Latin American nations. Clearly, race mattered even

in a mestizo national myth.

While it was easy for Palacios to prove Visigoth

purity and longevity, that was a bit more difficult for

Araucanians. To do this, he contended that Spanish

colonists practiced polygamy with native women. “The

Chilean race, like everyone knows, is a mestizo race of

the Spanish conqueror and the Araucanian, and it came to

the world in great numbers from the first years of the

conquest, thanks to the extensive polygamy that the

European conqueror adopted in our country.”12 To be clear,

Palacios’s notion of polygamy was very specific.

Polygamous relationships were the result of protracted

warfare in the region for a substantial portion of the

colonial period. Essentially, Spanish women did not

accompany Spanish men to the region and the men took

native women as their wives. Palacios also stipulated

that polygamy only occurred between European men and

indigenous women. Because no new immigrants were arriving

12 Palacios, Raza chilena, 34. “La raza chilena, como todos saben, es una raza mestiza del conquistador español y del araucano, y vino al mundo en gran número desde los primeros años de la conquista, merced a la extensa poligamia que adoptó en nuestro país el conquistador europeo.”

10

to Chile, the mixing process occurring between

Araucanians and Visigoths could be considered “pure” in

its own right.13 Of course, he neglected to address how

indigenous men fit into this scheme.

Blonde, Pink, and Hairy: Chilean Racial Phenotypes

Even though Raza chilena emphasized racial homogeneity

among Chileans, Palacios spent a great deal of time

discussing the different phenotypes that resulted from a

mixture between Visigoths and Araucanians. Studying

Chilean phenotypes served to obscure more virulent racism

contained in the text. Palacios discussed how all

Chileans were racially the same, even when phenotypically

different, and effectively elided racial difference

present in the Chilean populace. In particular, it hid

the fact that Palacios himself privileged European

features over indigenous ones. He wrote, “The conquerors

of Chile were blonde in almost their totality, and those

who were not showed their Germanic heritage in their

elevated statures.”14 In addition to being blonde and

13 Palacios, Raza chilena, 43-44.

14 Palacios, Raza chilena, 201. “Los conquistadores de Chile eran rubiosen su casi totalidad, y los que no lo eran presentaban el signo germano de su elevada estatura.”

11

tall, Palacios noted the following characteristics as

indicative of Visigoth heritage: “fallen” eyebrows, wavy

or curly hair, blue eyes, light skin, and (for men) lots

of body and facial hair.15 Much like eugenicists in other

parts of the world, Palacios catalogued phenotypic traits

to demonstrate racial identity, but he typically insisted

that phenotype did not denote internal racial

composition.

However, the phenotypic features of Araucanians

received significantly less coverage in the text

demonstrating an implicit ambivalence toward indigenous

racial traits. “In so far as the Araucanians, the traits

of their physiognomy are well known for all of us.

Genuinely American mongoloid, as some call it, it is

rather uniform in its size and its features.”16 Later in

the book, Palacios eventually gave a description of

Araucanian traits, but as part of a larger section in the

15 Palacios, Raza chilena, 199-200.

16 Palacios, Raza chilena, 210. “En cuanto a los Araucanos, son para todos nosotros bien conocidos los rasgos de su fisonomía. Netamente americana mongoloide, como la llaman algunos, es bastante uniforme ensu talla y en sus facciones.”

12

monograph dedicated to mestizos. According to him pure

Araucanians no longer existed, so there was no need to

give them their own section. Indigenous ancestry was

being folded into mestizo identity.

As such, Palacios was compelled to explain how race

mixing in Chile occurred to create a homogeneous race

that still manifested a large amount of phenotypic

variety.

A mixed race from another two [groups] as dissimilaras the Gothic and the Araucanian, presents the characteristics of both combined to give the most varied proportions. From the [Chilean] of Araucanianphysiognomy, seeming almost pure, to the blonde [Chiean] of well marked Germanic aspect, the gradations are as numerous as one could imagine. However, there exists a very numerous intermediate type with the combined traits of its two progenitors, without it being easy to say which of the two is dominant.17

Palacios pointed out that the large number of Chileans

that shared the same phenotype demonstrated the racial

homogeneity of the race as a whole. While some Chileans

17 Palacios, Raza chilena, 212. “Raza mestiza de otras dos de aspecto tan desemejante como la gótica y la araucana, presenta los caracteresde ambas combinados den las más variadas proporciones. Desde el roto de fisonomía araucana, al parecer pura, hasta el roto rubio de aspecto germano bien marcado, las gradaciones son todo lo numerosas que puedan concebirse. Sin embargo, existe un tipo intermediario muy numeroso con los signos combinados de sus dos progenitores, sin que sea fácil decir cual de los dos es el predominante.”

13

might manifest more European or indigenous features, they

still carried within them the same racial heritage as any

Chilean. After all, Chileans were not actually Europeans.

They would always carry with them some marker of their

American ancestry. “The white Chilean is always more pink

and with the characteristic tint of Araucanian pigment.”18

Not Created Equal: Race Mixing and Racism

While Palacios’s high regard for race mixing

obscured racism directed at indigenous people in Chile,

it did not hide his racism toward other groups. In

particular, he saved some of his harshest vitriol for

people of African descent. This is not terribly

surprising since he claimed that there were very few

African descended people in Chile; so few as to make

their influence on the racial make-up of the population

negligible. This he attributed to the fact that very few

slaves were brought to Chile because of their high cost

and because those slaves that were brought to the region

were severely punished for any “genetic impulsiveness.”19

18 Palacios, Raza chilena, 219. “El chileno blanco es siempre más rosadoy con el tinte característico del pigmento araucano.”

19 Palacios, Raza chilena, 57.

14

Presumably, this position made it far easier to hold such

a low opinion of African descended people. Vilifying

Afro-Latinos also reaffirmed that Chileans were white in

comparison to other Latin American nations, particularly

Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia.

Even so, Palacios was nervous about possible

contamination from Afro-Chileans. It was essential that

any African heritage in Chile be wiped out in its

entirety. He argued that, “It will not be too much to

remind here that black blood has a power of absorption

that is much more than white. Thus, while not one trace

of white [blood] remains at the fourth unilateral

generation with black, when in the mestizo 6.25% of white

blood remains…”20 Palacios believed that African heritage

had a unique ability to be absorbed into the larger

population and eventually disappear, much like indigenous

heritage.21 However, this depended upon correct race 20 Palacios, Raza chilena, 57-58. “No estará demás recordar aquí que la sangre negra tiene un poder de absorción mucho mayor que la blanca. Así, mientras del blanco no queda ningún rastro a la cuarta generación unilateral con el negro, esto es, cuando aun queda en el mestizo un 6.25% de sangre blanca…”

21 Novoa and Levine, Man to Ape, 129. Vicente Quesada (Argentine) “Tio Blas” believed that Afro-Argentines and criollos were slowly being absorbed into the population while Indians were being extinct.

15

mixing. African heritage could only disappear when mixed

with white blood. If African descended peoples living in

Chile reproduced exclusively with each other, the stain

of their blood would not be reduced but magnified as

their mestizo heritage would ultimately fade away over

generations. As such, Palacios exhorted all Chileans with

any African heritage to marry the lightest Chileans

possible until they were no longer distinguishable from

the mestizo majority.22

Palacios’s racism was not restricted to African

descended people. In what might be considered surprising

to some, he also had a very low opinion of Latin

descended people, the: Spanish, French, and Italian.

While many of his intellectual opponents advocated for

favored immigration statuses for these groups because

they shared similar cultural backgrounds as Chileans,

Palacios emphatically denied the connection. He contended

that, “The Latin race really shows a singular

predisposition to remain immobile in the old ways and a

certain repugnance in appropriating the last step in the

22 Palacios, Raza chilena, 221-222.

16

mental evolution of the human species.”23 While African

descended people might taint the Chilean race with

impurity, threatening the potential for racial

homogeneity, Latin descended people would cause mental

stagnation in addition to racial degeneration.

It should come as no surprise that Palacios felt

this way about southern Europeans. As a self-professed

Darwinist, he was most likely familiar with the

uncharitable opinion most North Atlantic eugenicists had

of Latin descended people. In a new sort of Black Legend,

Spain was an example of how racial empires failed in the

hands of the weak willed. An excellent example of this

sort of thinking appeared in Francis Galton’s Hereditary

Genius (1869). When explaining why Spain had lost its

empire and had fallen so far from its original grandeur,

Galton argued:

The extent to which persecution must have affected European races is easily measured by a few well-known statistical facts. Thus, as regards martyrdom and imprisonment, the Spanish nation was drained of free-thinkers at the rate of 1,000 persons annually,for the three centuries between 1471 and 1781; an

23 Palacios, Raza chilena, 89. “La raza latina muestra realmente una singular predisposición a permanecer inmóvil en los antiguos métodos y cierta repugnancia en apropiarse el último paso dado en la evolución mental por la especie humana.”

17

average of 100 persons having been executed and 900 imprisoned every year during that period. […] It is impossible that any nation could stand a policy likethis, without paying a heavy penalty in the deterioration of its breed, as has notably been the result in the formation of the superstitious, unintelligent Spanish race of the present day.24

This condemnation of Spain helps to explain why Palacios

sought a Spanish heritage that was coterminous with the

Inquisition. Chilean settlement began in 1540. The

Spanish conquerors that came to Chile left Spain before

the race had completely degenerated. Thus, Palacios

disavowed any real connection with contemporary southern

Europe at all.

The Reception and Legacy of Raza chilena

Raza chilena might merit nothing more than a footnote

if the myth it created about Chilean racial identity was

relegated to the esoteric realms of the Chilean

intelligentsia. However, it was a polemic that received

an incredible amount of press coverage, both positive and

negative. Chileans of all stripes learned about

Palacios’s racial ideology from media coverage. For

example, a book review appeared in La Revista Católica as

24 Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius: an Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (London: Macmillan, 1869), 359.

18

early as 1905. The reviewer lauded Palacios’s work. “Very

rarely, and perhaps never until today, has a work more

scrupulous, suggestive and patriotic than this one been

written in Chile, therefore it can be said that it

produces an enormous good for the Chileans who love their

country.”25 This author believed that Palacios’s book was

a patriotic achievement establishing Chile as one of the

modern nations of the world by virtue of its homogeneous

racial character.

In one of the many obituaries written about Palacios

upon his death in 1911, a different author praised the

myth Raza chilena created. The writer claimed that Palacios,

“…gave us that which no one, not even the founding

fathers could give us, our rehabilitation as Chileans, as

a homogeneous race and only engendered by the fusion of

another two good and virile lineages: the Goth and the

Araucanian.”26 Clearly, in only seven years, the notion of

25 Anonymous, “Bibliografia: Raza chilena,” La Revista Católica, August 5,1905, 49. “Pocas veces, y quizás nunca hasta hoy, se había escrito enChile una obra más concienzuda, sugestiva y patriótica que ésta, la cual, por consiguiente, está llamada á producir un bien inmenso en los chilenos amantes de su patria.”26 A. Aguirre Sayago, “El Dr. Nicolás Palacios,” Revista Medica Chilena, June 1911, 191. “…darnos lo que nadie, ni aun los padres de la patriapudieron darnos, nuestra rehabilitacion como chilenos, como raza homojénea i única enjendrada por la fusion de otras dos de bueno i viril abolengo: el godo i el araucano.”

19

Chilean racial homogeneity had gained ground. With no

racial obstacles to overcome, Chile was in prime position

to become one of the foremost nations of Latin America.

Esteem for Palacios and his text continued to rise

even after his death. On the first of January 1926, a

statue commemorating his work was erected at Cerro Santa

Lucia in the center of downtown Santiago. The opening

event was covered by the national daily newspaper El

Mercurio and was attended by then president Emiliano

Figueroa Larraín and a number of state ministers.27 El

Mercurio printed this story on the front page demonstrating

that by the mid-1920s Palacios was recognized as one of

the leading Chilean intellectuals of the age. However,

not everyone agreed with this monument to Palacios’s

achievements. In his biography appearing in the Diccionario

Histórico y Biográfico de Chile (1931), the article included this

information about Raza chilena and Palacios’s monument:

There is more delivery than truth, more lyricism than science. It deserved applause and diatribes. Mr. Miguel de Unamuno wrote a passionate and virulent judgment against him…It concluded in this

27 Anonymous, “Se inauguró ayer el monumento al autor de Raza Chilena,” El Mercurio, January 2, 1926.Diccionario Histórico y Biográfico de Chile 458

20

way, ‘It is not shameful that such a book was written, but it is shameful that there were people who took it seriously.’ And some admirers took it soseriously they did not back down in their commemorative offerings until they succeeded in the erection of a public monument in memory of the author of Raza chilena, which turned out anti-esthetic.28

While some Chileans at the time disagreed with his ideas,

the myth of racial homogeneity and general European

heritage in comparison to other Latin American nations

remained.

This was partially because Raza chilena became one of

most important foundational texts regarding Chilean

racial identity.29 While this monograph might have

disappeared with the passage of time, its myth of

Chilean racial distinctiveness was incorporated into

the work of another Chilean intellectual, Francisco

Antonio Encina. Encina was one of Chile’s most 28 [Diccionario Histórico y Biográfico de Chile 1931 457-458] “Hay más declamación que verdad, más lirismo que ciencia. Mereció aplausosy diatribas. D. Miguel de Unamuno escribió contra él un juicio apasionado y virulento, reproducido en El I. del 4 y 5 de agosto 1909. Concluía en esta forma: <No es lo vergonzoso que se haya escrito semejante libro, sino que lo vergonzoso es que haya habido quienes lo hayan tomado en serio.> Y tan en serio lo tomaron algunos admiradores que no cejaron en sus ofrendas conmemorativas hasta conseguir la erección de un monumento público en recuerdo del autor de Raza Chilena, que resultó antiestético.”29 Miguel Alvarado and Héctor Fernandez, “Una narración fundacional para una antropología filosófica chilena: Raza chilena de Nicolás Palacios,” Cinta moebio 40 (2011): 54.

21

important academic figures, having written the twenty-

volume Historia de Chile: de prehistoria a 1891 (1940). Though he

did not include Palacios’s ideas in the exact form they

appeared in Raza chilena, Encina’s text was widely

disseminated among Chilean school children and

popularized most of what Palacios argued in his

monograph.30 It is perhaps this development that

explains why so many Chileans today believe that they

are a racially homogeneous nation with very little

racial difference. Palacios’s argument, filtered

through Encina and passed down over generations, has

now acquired gravitas and respectability due to the

passage of time.

When sociologist Barandiarán assessed Chilean

attempts to measure racial discrimination she came away

with the conclusion that Chileans prefer to understand

difference through the lens of class rather than race.31

As Chileans became universally mestizo they were also

30 Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, “Nicolás Palacios,” in Reforma y nacionalismo en Chile (1910-1931), Memoria Chilena, accessed 1/29/2014 http://www.memoriachilena.cl/602/w3-article-97363.html.Klubock, “Nationalism, Race, and Politics,” 236-237.

31 Barandiarán, “Researching Race,” 169.

22

whitened, regardless of their phenotypic appearance,

thanks to Palacios’s work. It is why so many Chileans now

self-identify as both white and mestizo. It also helps to

explain why so much scholarly literature on Chile is

focused on labor and class issues. Those are the only

social differences Chileans have been taught to see.

23