Civic AndEthnic Conceptions of Nationhood on the Peruvian ChileanFrontier,1880-1930

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CivicandEthnicConceptionsof NationhoodonthePeruvian^

ChileanFrontier,1880^1930Ã

William E. Skuban

California State University, Fresno

Abstract

Using Hans Kohn’s classic distinction between the Western,

political, or civic model of nationalism, and the Eastern,

genealogical, or ethnic model, this article analyses the process

of nationalism during perhaps the most contentious border

dispute in South American history: the Peruvian–Chilean

frontier after the War of the Pacific (1879–1883). This article

argues that while Kohn’s modular dichotomy remains analyti-cally useful in isolating the principles arbitrarily used by

Chilean and Peruvian political elites in their official national

projects, it underestimates the ways in which various sectors of

local society responded to, rejected, or renegotiated these projects.

My fatherland is where my well-being is (Chilean

plebiscitary propaganda, 1925–1926).

Chile unfurls as its highest-flying banner of propaganda

the phrase: ‘My fatherland is where my well-being is.’

Never, except by Sancho Panza, has such a crude

definition of nationality been given. The fatherland is

more, much more, than the ventral satisfaction of eating

well. This phrase means that if tomorrow Chile becomes

completely impoverished, which is not far from happen-

ing, its inhabitants would have to turn into Argentines, or

Turks, in search of their well-being (Peruvian newspaper Justicia! 24 March 1926).

Among his many valuable contributions to the study of nationalism,

perhaps one of Hans Kohn’s most enduring has been the distinction he

William E. Skuban: Civic and Ethnic Conceptions of Nationhood on the Peruvian-Chilean Frontier

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made between what he termed the Western, political model of nationalism,

and the Eastern, or genealogical model. He most often illustrated this

distinction by using the French and German experience, writing at one point

that ‘the rise of the nation-state in France and Germany determined, at least for almost a hundred and fifty years, the course of history of these two

nations and established two conflicting models for the rise and character of

nation-states not only in Europe but also in other continents’ (Kohn 1967:

4). The study of nationalism in Latin America has a much shorter pedigree

than its European counterpart, although Benedict Anderson certainly

galvanised attention to the study of nationalism in Latin America with

his book Imagined Communities in which he provocatively argued that

colonial creole elites in the Americas (North and South) were the first to

elaborate models of nation-states – ‘well before most of Europe’ – and from

there they crossed the Atlantic eastward, a trajectory very much different

than the one Kohn had imagined (Anderson 1983: 50, emphases in

original). Nevertheless, if, as Kohn argues, the French and German

experience provided templates for future nation-state builders, then

analysing the criteria Latin American statesmen used in selecting one or

the other model would go far in explaining the specific character of each

particular nationalism.

The following essay uses Kohn’s dichotomy of nationalism as a departure

point to examine perhaps the most impassioned border dispute in the

history of Latin America, one in which issues of nationalism, conceptions

of nationhood, and the formation of national identity stood out in high

relief. Although many volatile frontier zones have existed in the history of

South America, perhaps none has proved as contentious as that shared

between Chile, Bolivia, and Peru. After defeating Bolivia and Peru in the

War of the Pacific (1879–83), Chile annexed the Bolivian department of

Potosı and the Peruvian territory of Tarapaca. In addition, the Treaty of

Ancon (1884) awarded Chile the right to administer the occupied Peruvian

provinces of Tacna and Arica, just north of Tarapaca, for a period of ten

years after which the inhabitants of those provinces, via a plebiscite, would

choose the nation of their formal citizenship. But the plebiscite never took

place after the ten-year waiting period, nor did it ever take place, as Chilean

and Peruvian statesmen failed to reach a protocol for its execution, though

in 1925–26 their countries came close to conducting the vote via mediation

by the United States.

The Tacna-Arica controversy flared during a period (1850–1950) that

many scholars have identified as the high tide of nationalism, when

programmatic nationalism as a project of official state development may

Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism: Vol. 8, No. 3, 2008

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have reached its zenith. The conflict between Chile and Peru seemingly

followed lock-step with this worldwide march of official nationalism, as

Chilean and Peruvian statesmen, in anticipation of winning a possible

plebiscite, consciously attempted to inculcate distinctive national identitiesin the inhabitants of the region, each side calibrating its appeals in different

ways. As seen in the epigraphs to this essay, Chilean propaganda in the

plebiscite zone featured a highly voluntaristic model of the nation,

suggesting that an individual might rationally identify his fatherland as

simply the place where he has found his greatest well-being. Peruvian

leaders ridiculed this notion, and countered with a much more exclusive

conceptualisation of the nation, one that stressed its ethnic and cultural

roots. Kohn’s distinction between the civic (French) and ethnic (German)

conceptual models of nationalism seemingly captures the logic employed

by Peruvian and Chilean statesmen as they attempted to advance their elite

national projects in the region.

Much of the relatively recent literature on state formation and nation

making in Latin America has focused on how local society accepts, rejects,

or reworks elite national projects (cf. Joseph and Nugent 1994; Mallon

1995; Applebaum et al . 2003). This literature posits that nationhood is

negotiated via the interaction of popular and elite multidimensional projects, based on cultural criteria but aimed at achieving specific political

objectives, and that nationalism is best understood ‘from the double

perspective of the states and local society’ (Eley and Suny 1996: 8; Sahlins

1989: 22). The insights of Antonio Gramsci inform much of this work,

which characterises nationhood as an ongoing, two-way process rather

than simply an imposition of a particular model from above. In the

following sections, I will first sketch the historical contours of the Tacna-

Arica controversy, using several episodes to highlight certain logical

inconsistencies in the Peruvian and Chilean states’ definitions of nation-

hood. I will then conclude by conceptualising the dynamics of a more

processual – rather than modular – nationalism as it unfolded on the ground

in the disputed region.

Civic and Ethnic Models of Nationhood

The Treaty of Ancon ended the war between Chile and Peru, but its Article

III initiated the Tacna-Arica controversy. According to the treaty, after a period of ten years, a plebiscite would decide whether the territory in

question would remain under Chilean sovereignty. The plebiscite, how-

ever, never took place, and with each passing year Peruvian officials

increasingly accused Chile of obstructing the vote to tighten its hold on the


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provinces through a conscious policy of Chileanisation. From the Chilean

perspective, the reason why the plebiscite had not been held was simply the

lack of the requisite protocol – as required by the treaty – to stipulate

various voting regulations. This protocol could only be drawn up throughdirect negotiations between the two nations (Chile 1924: 22–3).

Chile’s long-term strategy in Tacna and Arica would experience profound

shifts throughout these early years of the controversy. At first, Chilean

leaders appeared tentative and made little effort to secure their advantage in

the provinces; as a result, the Chilean population in the region fluctuated

wildly (Archivo Nacional de Chile (ANCh), Fondos Administrativos

Republicanos (FAR) 1897).1 In 1899, however, Intendant Manuel

Francisco Palacios, responding to a Ministry of Foreign Relations request

for ‘facts and documentation necessary to resolve the problems of the

plebiscite and Chileanisation,’ submitted a more comprehensive report

entitled Memorial i Modus Operandi (ANCh, FAR 1899). Palacios first

discussed the intrinsic worth of Tacna, measured in terms of agricultural

potential and deposits of valuable minerals. He stressed the strategic value

of the province as a northern march on the Peruvian frontier, as well as the

long-term commercial value of the province. Finally, Palacios provided the

Chilean state with an exhaustive list of measures vital for securing Tacna and Arica, such as the need to augment the police force and to initiate

various public works projects to attract more Chileans to the region, as well

as the imperative of controlling the schools, press, and Peruvian priests in

the provinces.

After 1900, from the Peruvian point of view, Chile’s new strategy in Tacna

and Arica became known as la chilenizacion, a conspiracy at the highest

levels to construct a Chilean national identity in the region. For Peruvians

the steps of the process seemed precisely choreographed: in 1900, Chilean

authorities closed all Peruvian private schools; in 1910, Chilean leaders

closed all Peruvian churches and expelled their Peruvian curas; in 1911,

scores of Chileans, many of them workers on the Arica-La Paz railroad,

rioted and destroyed the Peruvian press in both Tacna and Arica.

Throughout the period 1880–1929 (known in Tacna as ‘the captivity’),

Peruvian leaders interpreted various incidents of violence, intimidation,

and deportation as signs that Chile would stop at nothing to insure victory

in any possible plebiscite. To counter Chilean efforts, the Peruvian statesecretly funnelled money to Tacna and Arica to subsidise clandestine

schools in private homes, to keep the Peruvian press afloat (until it was

permanently silenced in 1911), to subsidise Peruvian priests, and to fund

patriotic associations and beneficent societies. The Peruvian government,


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from the 1890s on, placed secret delegates in Tacna in charge of collecting

information regarding the progress of Chileanisation and making recom-

mendations on how to preserve the Peruvian identity of the region (Archivo

de Lımites y Fronteras (ALF), Expediente (Exp.) LCHP-1-1 1890).

Both Chile and Peru, then, attempted to construct and reinforce their

national identities in the people of Tacna and Arica in anticipation of a

possible plebiscite. Chile used its monopoly of the press in Tacna and Arica

(1911–25) to extol Chilean national identity as well as the virtues and

advantages of living in a prosperous and forward-looking Chile. When

Peruvian newspapers resumed publication during the attempted plebiscite

(1925), they engaged their Chilean counterparts in a propaganda war that

seemingly employed the different conceptions of nationhood that would be

theorised later by Kohn. Chilean political leaders and propagandists argued

that people, at least in Tacna and Arica, could voluntarily select a

nationality based on criteria such as potential for individual material

advancement, or which nation-state offered the fullest measure of civic

freedom. Put another way, Chilean leaders viewed choosing a nationality

as a rational choice among alternatives, thus the dictum seen as an epigraph

to this essay, ‘My fatherland is where my well-being is’ , circulated widely

in Chilean newspapers and on campaign posters during the attempted plebiscite. ‘What is your fatherland? – the one that has made Tacna great

and pays homage to democracy and liberty,’ trumpeted El Pacıfico, Chile’s

foremost instrument of propaganda in the region ( El Pacıfico 1926b).

In response, Peruvian propagandists advanced a primordial definition of

the nation that bordered on the biological. Consider the following

description of Chileanisation:

To Chileanise these provinces, which form an integral part

of the Peruvian national soul, is like trying to transform an

organism whose entity corresponds to – in spite of the

functional variety of its organs – the harmonious fulfil-

ment of life; it is to go against the most elemental

biological concepts, concepts that fit perfectly within the

social organism ( Justicia! 1926b).

Through their nationalist rhetoric, Peruvian leaders often represented Peruas a community in which culture, tradition, and a specific history became

the most vital determinants of an individual’s identity. For example, during

the attempted plebiscite, Peruvian leaders and propagandists often invoked

the distinctive cultural characteristics of people living in the Andes


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(lo andino) as representative of Peru’s symbolic community. These efforts

reflected attempts not so much to create the image of a homogenous Peru –

for certainly Peruvian elites would object to their nation being represented

as ‘Indian’ – but to ethnically differentiate the Peruvian nation from Chile,a country alien to Peru in terms of its institutions, customs, and deep-seated

traditions. One Peruvian plebiscitary poster featured a woman in highland

Andean dress, seated on the ground and suckling a baby at her breast. She

is gesturing to a young man who possesses unmistakable highland physical

features; the caption of the poster reads: ‘Go son to fulfil your patriotic duty

and vote for Peru.’ The poster, an example of a device used by Peruvian

nationalists in their nation-building efforts, created the impression that

everyone in Tacna and Arica (specifically those in Indian communities)

were part of the Peruvian community, and, furthermore, that voting for

Peru constituted their patriotic duty.2

States embarking on nation-building projects often invoke national

identities that take shape in opposition to an ‘inferior other’. During the

plebiscitary effort of 1925–26, Chilean newspapers in Tacna and Arica

highlighted the virtues of living in a prosperous and forward-looking Chile.

In contrast, they depicted Peru and its leaders as corrupt, retrograde, and

racially inferior. On various occasions the Chilean press describedPeruvians as ‘cholos y negros’ and pictured them in blackface. Portraying

the Peruvian people and nation in racist and denigrating terms became

commonplace in the Chilean press in Tacna and Arica during the attempted

plebiscite. An editorial in the Chilean newspaper El Pacıfico described a

‘shameful’ parade of Peruvians celebrating the arrival of their country’s

plebiscitary personnel in Tacna; the author referred to the Peruvians as a

‘deplorable impression of the human race . . . some one hundred to one

hundred and thirty ugly, sweaty, negroes of skin and soul . . .’ ( El Pacıfico

1926a). Other short-lived Chilean publications, such as El Corvo, often

portrayed the nation of Peru as a black infant. In one issue Chilean

propagandists offered twenty reasons to vote for Chile in the plebiscite,

one being ‘because the Chilean race is more virile, more valiant, prouder,

nobler, and more enterprising than the Peruvian race’ ( El Corvo 1925).

Peruvian propaganda and polemicists, in turn, demonised Chileans as

aggressive, war-mongering, and innately criminal. Writers in Blanco y

Rojo, a monthly publication by irredentist tacnenos living in Lima,

maintained a section entitled ‘ Roterias’ in which they ridiculed el roto,the symbolic figure of rugged Chilean frontier individualism in the north.

In the pages of Blanco y Rojo, el roto became nothing more than an

impoverished alcoholic with criminal tendencies, emigrating northward en

masse to terrorise Peruvians and to threaten the peace and stability of South


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America – all with the tacit approval of Chilean authorities. Peruvian

intellectuals often portrayed the Chilean national character as aggressive

and expansionist, associating Chile with Germany (during World War I) as

they tried to win international sympathy – especially in the United States – for Peru’s plight (cf. Cornejo Cuadros 1919; Garcıa Calderon 1918:

especially 309–16).

As the Tacna-Arica controversy wore on, essentialisation of this type

became commonplace on both sides; yet, this tactic belied the strategic

conceptions of nationhood initially deployed by the contending states. The

spiteful Peruvian assessment of el roto and the condemnation of Chile’s

aggressive international behaviour might be seen more as a critique of civic

respectability rather than race, yet racialist thinking increasingly pervaded

Chilean nationalist propaganda as the controversy evolved. Indeed, Chilean

authorities began to manipulate the category of race in an ambivalent

manner, at times conflating Chilean national identity with race in ways that

ran counter to the civic conception of nationhood their propaganda

advanced in the disputed provinces. This is seen in the subtle way Chilean

nation-statesmen manipulated provincial censuses on the frontier.

La raza chilena

Chilean leaders in December 1923 believed that a Tacna-Arica plebiscite

would soon take place. The year before, Chilean and Peruvian diplomats

had negotiated an Arbitration Protocol that empowered the president of the

United States to determine if and under what conditions a plebiscite should

be held. By the end of 1923, after the legal cases of Chile and Peru had

been filed, Chilean statesmen felt confident about their chances of winning

a plebiscite; this confidence, in part, stemmed from the ongoing close

surveillance of Tacna and Arica conducted by the Chilean state through a

series of provincial censuses. Chile had established an Office of the Census

in Tacna in 1921, and in both 1921 and 1922 the office completed censuses

in the provinces. The director of the Census Office, Tobias Barros,

explained that the 1923 census, coming at a time when a plebiscite

appeared imminent, represented a ‘superior effort’ (ANCh, FAR 1926).

In 1923, census takers followed elaborate instructions that took note of the

race of each subject, as well as the nationality of his or her parents (ANCh,FAR 1924a). To allow census takers to determine the race of their subjects,

the instructions required adherence to specific criteria. The census register,

for instance, listed five possible ‘races’ for the people in Tacna: blanca;

mestiza; indigena; negra; and amarilla. Each ‘race’ had its own set of


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distinguishing features. Consider the criteria for considering a subject

blanca, or ‘white’ (emphases appear in the original):

A small vertical line will be placed . . . opposite the nameof the person who belongs to the white race. For this

classification, the census taker will have to keep in mind

that, in general, Europeans and their relatively pure

descendants are white. Consequently, Europeans, white

foreigners born in other countries of America (Argentines,

Colombians, United States citizens, Brazilians, etc.), and

the totality of Chileans from the South, will be placed in

the white race; also, among the natives (born in Tacna)

there could be some individuals of the white race, but they

are not numerous.

Being as it is very difficult to classify correctly the

population according to race, it is preferable that the

census taker abide by the general instructions just given,

that is, to mark as belonging to the white race Europeans,

white foreigners from other continents, and Chileans from

the South (ANCh, FAR 1924b).

These criteria for determining a person’s ‘race’ conflate Chilean nationality

with a white racial identity and were intended to distinguish Chileans from

Peruvians on the basis of race. Of course, this represented a purely

imaginative, as well as an inconsistent, construction of a racially based,

national identity, as well as a shift to a more exclusive and ethnically based

concept of the nation. According to this logic, since the Peruvian nation

was constituted in its majority by people of colour considered inferior by

the prevailing racialist notions of the age, the Chilean nation and ‘the

totality of Chileans from the South’ should be considered white. This is the

logic of nationalism, which all too often produces oppositional collective

identities in reference to an ‘inferior other’.

In fact, by the 1920s, Chilean statesmen and intellectuals already had

conflated national identity with race. With the 1904 publication of Raza

chilena, Dr Nicolas Palacios influenced thought on race, culture, and

politics in Chile for decades. In contrast to the aforementioned census

racial classification of all Chileans as white, Palacios argued that theChilean race was mestizo, an amalgam of the conquistadores who

colonised Chile and the valiant Araucanian Indians of southern Chile. The

peculiar conquistadores Palacios posited as the progenitors of the Chilean

race, however, were primarily of Visigothic (Germanic) bloodlines, thus he


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concludes that the Chilean race should not be considered Latin at all

(‘la raza chilena no es latina’), and he explains that ‘Latin peoples do not

get along well with Chileans, because we are not of the same nature and

therefore they do not understand us’ (Palacios 1904: 5). Palacios’s ideasenjoyed widespread popularity in the early twentieth century, and his

concept of a unique and exclusive Chilean race as the basis of lo nacional ,

or that which is national, appealed to Chilean statesmen engaged in the

process of nation making. Ironically, it must be noted that on their southern

frontier, Chilean political elites defined the national race in opposition to a

different ‘Indianised other’, the ‘barbarous’ Mapuche (Araucanian) In-

dians, and from 1884 to 1919 they relocated tens of thousands of Mapuche

onto indigenous reservations (Sznajder 2003: 20–1). Chilean statesmen

would deploy similar strategies of exclusion as they attempted to mitigate a

militant working-class movement on the northern frontier, particularly in

the ex-Peruvian provinces of Tarapaca, Arica, and Tacna.

From Worker Solidarity to Nativist Xenophobia

In the early twentieth century a vibrant working-class movement emerged

in the nitrate fields of northern Chile, most visibly in Tarapaca, where

labourers from Chile, Peru, Bolivia, and other nations developed a significant degree of class solidarity that tended to supercede national

differences. United against foreign capitalists (primarily British), this

racially and nationally diverse working-class population constructed a

unique brand of egalitarian, anti-imperialist nationalism (cf. Klubock 2001:

241). As thousands of working-class Chileans moved further into Arica

and Tacna, many brought with them not only a growing awareness of their

common interests as a class, but a growing spirit of internationalism with

workers from all nations in Chile’s far north (Pinto Vallejos 1998,

especially chs II and III).

Beginning in 1907, however, with the massacre of striking nitrate workers

in Iquique, the provincial capital of Tarapaca, that solidarity began to

erode.3 British nitrate companies in Tarapaca, wary of the activism of

Chilean workers, began to dismiss them in favour of presumably more

‘docile’ Peruvian, Bolivian, and Asian workers (Deutsch 1999: 19;

Klubock 2001: 240). This action began to drive a wedge into worker

solidarity in the region, as Chilean workers reacted angrily to thistreatment. Meanwhile, just north in the contested provinces, the Tacna-

Arica controversy entered a more turbulent phase. The Chilean state

stepped up efforts to Chileanise the provinces, the Peruvian state responded

to counteract those efforts, and a more chauvinistic, violent strain of


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nationalism began to emerge on both sides as the final result. A major

outburst of violence occurred on 26–27 May 1911, when mobs in Iquique

assaulted El Club Peruano, the Peruvian Consulate, the newspaper La Voz

del Peru , and various Peruvian businesses in the city. This outburst of nativist violence helped provide the impetus for the founding of the Liga

Patriotica Nacional de Tarapaca (National Patriotic League of Tarapaca),

one of the first of these nativist associations, in a formal sense, to appear in

Chile (cf . Gonzalez Miranda et al . 1994).

Chileans of the middle sectors of society directed the various patriotic

leagues that appeared throughout the northern provinces of the country in

the period 1911–26. These organisations, however, depended heavily on

lower-class workers to form their rank-and-file membership. Scholars who

have studied the formation of these nativist organisations at length have

argued that their objective was ‘to assault with systematic and unrestrained

violence . . . Peruvians and Bolivians resident in those provinces, regard-

less of their social position’ (Gonzalez Miranda et al . 1994: 59–60).

Violence came to Tacna and Arica on 18 July 1911 when scores of Chilean

workers from the Arica-La Paz railroad travelled to Tacna to attend an

evening rally, organised by the labour union Sociedad de Empleados

i Obreros Chilenos, in support of the Chilean cause in the provinces.During the event, participants extolled the virtues of their nation and called

for the unilateral annexation of Tacna and Arica. Attended by more than

2,500 people, the ‘meeting’ spiralled out of control, with a result similar to

that which occurred in Iquique, namely, the ransacking of the Peruvian

press and the social club for the Peruvian provincial elite, the Club Union.

The organisers of the event had asked several distinguished persons to

deliver speeches to the overflowing crowd, and after hearing these

incendiary discourses the attendees went on their rampage, according to

El Comercio of Lima, shouting epithets such as, ‘Down with the Peruvian

press’, and ‘Let’s finish off these cholos’ ( El Comercio 1911). On the

morning of 19 July, Pablo Martens, the president of the newly created

National Patriotic League of Tarapaca sent a telegram to all the members of

the organising committee for the meeting in Tacna, commending the entire

night’s work ( El Pacıfico 1911). Tarapaca, once the sight of a remarkable

elaboration of international cooperation among workers, had become a

centre of nativist politics and a source of inspiration for Chileans in Tacna

and Arica wanting the annexation of their territory by Chile.

The years of the attempted Tacna-Arica plebiscite (1925–26), however,

represented the zenith of xenophobic, nationalist sentiment on both sides.

Like the National Patriotic League of Tarapaca earlier, Chileans established


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nativist associations in both Tacna and Arica.4 These organisations were

composed of private citizens who worked tirelessly for Chile in the

plebiscite. In Arica, Alvaro Oliva directed La Asociacion ‘ Hijos de Tacna

y Arica’, and Filomena Cerda led the principal organisation in Tacna, LaSociedad de Tacna y Arica (cf. Gonzalez Miranda 2004: 143–4; Basadre

1975: 349–50; Palacios Rodrıguez 1974: 166–76; Wilson 1979: 63). The

ligas began as organisations of the popular sectors, led by provincial

gentlemen and dedicated to promoting their nation’s causes, and the

principal Chilean patriotic goal in Tacna and Arica was to secure the

provinces for Chile. Without doubt, these organisations sponsored various

activities that peacefully worked to achieve victory in the plebiscite, but the

potential existed for them to resort to violence (Gonzalez Miranda 2004:

135, 144).

The notorious abuses of the paramilitary ‘Cowboys’, the propaganda

section of the Tacna-based La Sociedad de Tacna y Arica, stood out in

sharpest relief. The Cowboys wore elaborate uniforms and broad-brimmed

hats (hence their moniker), rode well-kept horses, brandished firearms, and

exhibited ‘a distinctly military character’. Many Peruvian survivors of the

era recall the outrages of the Cowboys. For instance, Lindor de la Vega

claimed that it was those ‘Cowboys who wore tremendous hats’ who wereresponsible for numerous murders, disappearances, and robberies in Tacna.

He also recalled that the tactics of the Cowboys included marking the

houses of Peruvians with black crosses of coal tar, or cruces de alquitran

(Manrique Silva 1994: 54–5). Besides intimidating the occupants, the

crosses identified the houses as being owned by Peruvians and therefore

potential targets for future night time raids. Peruvian Isauro Arias

remembered that the paramilitary Cowboys were the ‘lowest and worst

type of people brought into the province by the Chileans, they built the

schools, the roads . . . that is what they did, the labourers [ peones], but they

were evil . . .’ (Manrique Silva 1994: 28). In fact, the energies of a large

pool of recently arrived Chilean workers always seemed on hand to form

the rank-and file of these groups and to be used in various actions against

Peruvians.

What was the relationship between the Chilean state, Chilean organised

labor, and the patriotic leagues in Tacna and Arica? Chilean scholar Sergio

Gonzalez Miranda believes that local authorities, who had much to gainfrom stoking the nationalistic passions of Chilean residents, led these

nativist organisations. This explanation makes sense; after all, these

officials lived among Chilean tacnenos and ariquenos, and in those years

assuming an impartial or neutral position regarding the controversy opened


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one up to charges of being unpatriotic. Gonzalez Miranda asserts that

Chilean state officials at first praised the patriotism of the people who

organised the patriotic leagues, and at one point even helped set them in

motion (Gonzalez Miranda 2004: 144). Indeed, Chilean statesmen surelycould see the benefit of organisations that simultaneously harnessed rank-

and-file workers to the ultra nationalistic Tacna-Arica cause and helped to

vitiate any international working-class solidarity between Chileans and

Peruvians. Political elites in Chile, of both conservative (aristocratic) and

progressive (middle-class) affiliation, supported national projects that

‘sought to suppress working-class radicalism’, just as they advanced a

homogenising discourse of nationalism that reminded working-class

people of the exclusive national identity that they had in common with

Chileans of all other classes (Barr-Melej 2001: 7). And, following through

with that nationalist logic, Chilean statesmen stressed that their nationality

placed them on a superior plane compared to the Peruvians, an ‘inferior’

race of people who still threatened to steal what Chileans took in a bloody

but just war thrust upon them by Peru and Bolivia. A Chilean national

identity, constructed on the basis of a presumed racial superiority over a

recent war rival, emotionally reinforced what Chileans held in common,

rather than what threatened to split them apart.

The ‘Indian Question’ on the Peruvian–Chilean Frontier

Chilean statesmen did not stand alone in following a situational logic in

their attempts to manipulate nationalist discourse during the Tacna-Arica

dispute. As the nineteenth century ended, many Peruvian elites believed

that their country’s devastating defeat by Chile in the War of the Pacific

could somehow be traced to a lack of national unity, in large measure a

consequence of the degraded condition of Peru’s Indian race. ‘The Indian

lacks a patriotic sense’, wrote Peruvian litterateur Ricardo Palma, who

added that ‘to educate the Indian and to inspire in him a feeling for

patriotism will not be the task of our institutions, but of the ages’. Others,

such as Luis Carranza and Javier Prado, disparaged the intellectual

capabilities of the Peruvian Indian; Prado even tried to explain the use of

coca by indigenous people as a result of a frustration borne out of

inferiority (Pike 1967: 12). Many Peruvians in Tacna and Arica during the

controversy, such as Artidoro Espejo, no doubt held those same beliefs.

Espejo, a delegate of the Peruvian state in Tacna (1904–11), reported to hisMinistry of Foreign Relations that ‘the majority of Peruvian farmers [in

Tacna] are Indians, and they have neither God nor country other than their

small plot of land’ (ALF, LCHP-1-8 1910). In the minds of these

intellectuals, and perhaps a majority of Peru’s white, creole population,


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the Peruvian Indian fell beyond the pale of civilisation, and the idea that

Indians could even conceive of the idea of a modern nation seemed absurd.

Yet, Peruvian plebiscitary propaganda in the mid-1920s – when a plebisciteappeared imminent – consciously figured ethnic Andean peasants into its

nationalist discourse. Posters featured serranos with unmistakable Andean

physical characteristics and ethnic wardrobe. Newspapers in Tacna

extolled the virtues of Peru’s Indians, calling their patriotism ‘invulner-

able’, and admiring ‘their instinctive love for Peru’ ( Justicia! 1926a).

President of Peru, Augusto B. Leguıa (1919–30) raised the ante with his

own indigenista rhetoric, proclaiming in 1924 that:

The Indian is . . . the farmer who cultivates the land with

rare skill; the producer of almost all of our riches; the

indefatigable worker in the deadly labors of the mines and,

finally, is almost the only soldier in the national Army.

The Indian, thus, is everything in Peru and, in exchange,

we treat him like a serf . . . This cannot continue (Stubbs

1926: 275).

Of course, a series of Indian and peasant revolts that rocked the southernAndes between 1915 and 1923 and threatened national stability also

influenced Leguıa’s indigenista rhetoric that, in reality, did not result in

many concrete reforms for Peru’s Indian peasantry. Leguıa, a populist who

made a career of cobbling together successful electoral coalitions out of

groups with potentially conflicting interests, recognised that the ‘Indian

question’ represented an issue with which he could satisfy key demands of

socialists, liberals, and genuinely reform-minded individuals who believed

that Peru as a nation could not survive without recognition and some

degree of vindication for its most populous element. Many Peruvians,

though, undoubtedly scoffed at the notion of an Indian family on a

campaign poster representing their nation and plebiscitary hopes. As late

as 1930, the renowned Peruvian intellectual Alejandro O. Deustua

continued to insist that Peru’s Indians ‘had arrived, in their psychic

dissolution, at obtaining the biological rigidity of those beings that have

definitely ended their cycle of evolution’ (Deustua 1930: 11).

The exact nature and extent of the ability of Peru’s Indian peasantry tothink in national terms has been the subject of a polemic that has resurfaced

often in Peruvian historiography. Florencia Mallon, for one, has argued in

various works that as peasants in the central highlands of Peru (Junın)

fought against Chilean invaders during the war, they developed an


398



alternative nationalism that went so far as to posit a broad, visionary project

of how Peruvian society should be organised (cf. Mallon 1983; 1987;

1995). Other scholars have studied those same peasants’ defence of their

communities and concluded that their nationalist sentiment was merelyevanescent, and that once the foreign threat to their lands no longer existed,

neither did any genuine national consciousness.5 A third position, staked

out by Mark Thurner in his study of the Huaylas-Ancash region of Peru,

holds that highland peasant leaders were quite aware of their people’s

relationship with the new imagined community of Peru and possessed a

keen understanding of the reciprocal rights and obligations associated with

it (Thurner 1997).

During the Chilean occupation of Tacna, leaders of indigenous commu-

nities in the southern Andes clearly understood the political and ideological

struggle being waged between Peru and Chile. Prior to the occupation of

Tacna, inhabitants of the Aymara communities of Ticaco and Tarata had

often disputed access to the water of the river Ticalaco. After the Treaty of

Ancon, the Ticalaco, located almost equidistant between the two commu-

nities, served as the effective boundary between Chilean-occupied Peru

and territory that remained under Peruvian jurisdiction. In 1902, drought

conditions incited the dispute once again, and to resolve the matter,community leaders from Ticaco and Tarata met at the irrigation channel to

discuss the proper partitioning of water. Comuneros from both villages

accompanied them, but when their leaders failed to resolve the issue,

tempers flared and fighting erupted. In the past, the comuneros limited

their attacks, using slings to hurl stones at their opponents. On this

occasion, however, taratenos carried revolvers and carbines, and, more-

over, two Chilean soldiers accompanied them. The taratenos eventually

opened fire on those from Ticaco, killing two of them (ALF, LCHP-1-1

1902a).

The incident shocked Peruvian statesmen, fearful that it might give Chile a

pretext to occupy more territory. They immediately sent a representative to

meet with local leaders and resolve the problem to the satisfaction of both

communities. For the people of Tarata and Ticaco, it was perhaps the most

attention they had received from the Peruvian government in a long time,

other than when the long arm of the state reached into the region to tax or to

draft labourers and soldiers. The representative carried letters addressed tothe leaders of both communities from political elites in Tacna who

implored the communities to avoid further confrontations, ‘the conse-

quences of which could affect the interests and rights of our country that

you as good Peruvians should put before all other considerations’ (ALF,


399



LCHP-1-7 1902). Despite this appeal to give absolute priority to the values

and interests of the nation (Peru) over all other interests, many community

leaders refused to yield. One community leader from Tarata, Jose L.

Zegarra, steadfastly refused to compromise, explaining that ‘as the father of a family he could not harm his children by giving Ticaco any more water

than they already have’ (ALF, LCHP-1-1 1902b). Seasonal rains eventually

diminished the urgency of the situation, motivating leaders from Tarata to

visit the Peruvian subprefect. The community leaders spontaneously

expressed to the subprefect that ‘over and above all, they were Peruvians

and they would never contradict the affection and duties that their

nationality imposes upon them’ (Archivo Regional de Tacna 1902).

This episode illustrates the multiplicity of identities on the Peruvian–

Chilean frontier. Peasants in the highland communities of Tacna, contrary

to what Peruvian political and intellectual elites may have believed,

demonstrated a keen awareness of the idea of Peru and their wider identity

as Peruvians; they professed as much before the subprefect by acknowl-

edging their affection for, as well as the patriotic and civic duties they

owed, Peru. Yet, that national identity coexisted with a reservoir of

identities based upon ethnicity, local community, and kinship. Community

leaders from Ticaco and Tarata expected that their customary rights towater from the Ticalaco – rights stretching back to the colonial period and

before – would be respected by the Peruvian state. As Indians they had paid

tribute; after Indian tribute and contributions were abolished, the people of

these highland communities maintained their rights as taxpaying citizens of

a modern nation and, furthermore, they fought to defend their communities

and the larger ‘community of Peruvians’ during the War of the Pacific.

Nevertheless, all of this did not prevent taratenos from taking the field with

Chilean soldiers against their Peruvian brothers in the interest of their

community. Indeed, in times of crisis, ultimate loyalty might revert to the

local community, as it did for taratenos when threatened with insufficient

water for their crops. Taratenos strategically deployed a communal identity

during the crisis, and then reasserted their Peruvian identity as political

leverage on the sensitive frontier with Chile after the danger had passed.

Indigenous political practices such as these protected local interests and

culture, and have been identified and mapped by many scholars throughout

Latin America: by Joanne Rappaport in her study of the Paez in the

southern sierra of Colombia, by Mary Kay Vaughn in her examination of the Yaquis (Sonora) and Tecamachalquenos (Puebla) in Mexico, and by

Brooke Larson in her sweeping analysis of indigenous people throughout

the Andes as they confronted the nation making imperatives of centralising

states (Rappaport 1990; Vaughn 1997; Larson 2004).


400



Conclusion: Nationhood as a ‘Daily Plebiscite’

In his 1882 lecture at the Sorbonne, ‘What is a Nation?’, Ernest Renan

characterised a nation’s existence as a daily plebiscite, and for the

inhabitants of the Peruvian–Chilean frontier this condition nearly rang true(Renan 1882). If the plebiscite had been held, the people of Tacna and

Arica would have decided their own fate and, at least formally, their own

national identity. However, the vote did not take place; according to

General William Lassiter, the president of the US-mandated Plebiscitary

Commission charged with carrying out the plebiscite, nationalistic

passions on both sides – but particularly on the Chilean end – made it

‘impracticable of accomplishment’ (Wambaugh 1933: 2–491). Ultimately,

statesmen from Chile and Peru decided the fate of the people on thePeruvian–Chilean frontier: via the Treaty of Lima of 1929, the two nation-

states agreed on a Solomonic solution – they simply divided the territory,

with Chile retaining Arica and Peru reincorporating Tacna.

Hans Kohn’s distinction between a political, civic, and more inclusive

model of nationalism and an ethnic, genealogical, and more exclusive

nationalism remains useful as a departure point for historical analysis of

national identity formation and nation-building, but it only takes theanalysis so far. By considering the case of the Tacna-Arica controversy,

this study has demonstrated that in their attempts to inculcate national

identities in the people of Tacna and Arica, Chilean and Peruvian statesmen

consciously employed these two models of nationhood in their efforts to

win the vote, yet these efforts were fraught with inconsistencies. The

Chilean state and its official propaganda insisted that each individual

possessed the freedom to choose his national identity and citizenship, a

clearly civic interpretation of the nation that nonetheless seemingly applied

only to Peruvians in the embattled provinces of Tacna and Arica. In a veryarbitrary fashion, Chile’s political and intellectual leaders at the same time

asserted a deterministic, racialist, and exclusive basis for their own nation,

engineered in opposition to the inherently ‘inferior’ people of Peru. For

Chilean migrants in Tacna and Arica, or for Chilean workers in the

provinces, there existed no question of national citizenship; these people

were to be counted as ‘white’ and Chilean.

On the other hand, Peruvian nationalists in their propaganda reified thenation, positing that the people in Tacna and Arica, and their descendants

through the ages, naturally would be Peruvian. On various campaign

posters Peru’s leaders rhetorically appropriated the highland Indian peasant

– whose votes in Tacna would have been vital to victory – as the symbol of


401



their nation, even though many of these elites scorned the indigenous

populations and doubted their ability to understand the very concept of the

Peruvian nation. In fact, during the years of the ‘Aristocratic Republic’ in

Peru, from 1895 to 1919, national identity remained extremely exclusive,and indigenous peoples were often considered outside the pale of Peruvian

civilisation (cf. Burga and Flores Galindo 1991). The history of the Tacna-

Arica controversy demonstrates how the leaders of Peru and Chile

arbitrarily constructed national identities for their citizens, employing

shifting conceptualisations – civic versus ethnic – of the nation according

to the logic of the situation. Kohn understood this conditional and

inconsistent nature of his own dichotomy, pointing out in his paradigmatic

case that ‘neither of the two concepts of the nation-state was followed by the

French or the Germans without ambiguity or equivocation’ (Kohn 1967: 4).

However, if one may invert E.J. Hobsbawm’s original formulation,

examining the process of nationalism only from the ‘high peaks’ of the

state ignores the manner in which people view nationhood at the ‘grass-

roots’ (Hobsbawm 1992: 80). Scholars of nationalism have studied at great

length the methods employed by the leaders of nation-states to impose

from above a homogenising discourse of national identity onto their

subjects. What has been overlooked, until relatively recently, is the way inwhich the people of local society respond to the official nationalist

initiatives of the state. In the case of Tacna and Arica, people on the ground

played an active role in determining the ultimate form of their national

identity and nation-state. The militancy of Chilean workers, and their brief

identification with workers from other nations, not only influenced the

course of internal politics in Chile, but convinced Chilean elites that the

Tacna-Arica issue might – and should – be used as a wedge to break up

working-class solidarity. The leaders and inhabitants of Aymara commu-

nities in the highlands of Tacna also possessed alternative forms of social

solidarity, such as ethnicity, community, and kinship. As Craig Calhoun

succinctly stated, these alternative identities ‘may overlap – or articulate

with each other – to varying degrees in specific situations’ (Calhoun 1997:

29). The water rights dispute between Tarata and Ticaco clearly evidenced

this dynamic of overlapping identities. By deploying the discourse of

nationalism, indigenous leaders riveted the attention of state elites –

including President Augusto B. Leguıa – to conditions in the sierra in an

effort to secure the well-being of their communities. In this way, they too became part of the nation making process in Peru.

Partha Chatterjee, in his objection to Benedict Anderson’s modular vision

of nationalism, once wondered, ‘if nationalisms in the rest of the world


402



have to choose their imagined community from certain ‘‘modular’’ forms

already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they

have left to imagine?’ (Chatterjee 1993: 5). And, while there exists no

doubt that Kohn’s modular system of nationhood, like Anderson’s, possesses great analytical power, nationalism is best understood as a two-

way process that takes into account the cultural and political practices of

the many fragments of local society. In a way, the nation truly is a daily

plebiscite, and in the case of Tacna and Arica, people of the many diverse

sectors of local society understood quite well, and participated in, the

process of nationalism that connected them to that relatively novel

constellation of power that had appeared on their horizon: the nation-state.

NotesÃSome material in this article first appeared in Skuban 2007. The author would like to thank

Honora Howell Chapman for her thoughtful comments on this work, as well as the two

anonymous reviewers of the ASEN for their insightful comments that improved an earlier

draft of this article.1 The first Chilean census (1885) completed in the province showed that 7,446 Chileans

resided in Tacna and Arica; by 1901 that number had declined to 1,676.2 The poster appears in Wambaugh 1933: 1–363.3 This most violent and notorious suppression of striking Chilean workers occurred on 21

December 1907, when hundreds of striking nitrate workers were massacred by Chilean

troops at the Domingo Santa Maria school in Iquique where they had congregated. See

Frazier 2007.4 The Chilean scholar Sergio Gonzalez Miranda has done much work on the formation of

these patriotic leagues. See Gonzalez Miranda 2004; Gonzalez Miranda et al . 1994: 57–69;

Deutsch 1999: 17–23.5 For the view that a genuine sense of nationalism eluded peasants in the central highlands,

see Bonilla 1987.

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William E. Skuban is Associate Professor in the

Department of History at California State University,

Fresno. He is the author of Lines in the Sand: Nationalism

and Identity on the Peruvian–Chilean Frontier (Uni-

versity of New Mexico Press, 2007) and is currently

researching the evolution of nationalism in Chile during

the ‘long’ nineteenth century, 1808–1932.


Documents

Civic AndEthnic Conceptions of Nationhood on the Peruvian ChileanFrontier,1880-1930