An Imagined Race and its Architectural Defense. Modernism and Racial Discourse in Chile 1938-1941

This article explores some of the ways in which modern architecture was involved in the construction of a racial imaginary in Chile during the government of Pedro Aguirre Cerda, from 1938 to 1941. It attempts to reconstruct how the concept of ‘race’ was used by Aguirre Cerda’s state program ‘The Defense of the Race and the Good use of Free Time,’ and by Jorge Aguirre Silva, its leading architect. By situating architectural discourse alongside medical science, physical education, and eugenics in the development of Aguirre Cerda’s program, it attempts to show how its architecture was influenced not only by European modernism, but also by a local version of hygienism, eugenics, and a form of nationalism based on the production and protection of an allegedly homogenous race. In his late book El sur de los Andes: cómo renace un pueblo en el mensaje de su arquitectura y poesía (The South of the Andes: How a People is Reborn in the Message of its Architecture and its Poetry) of 1988, the Chilean architect Jorge Aguirre Silva confessed a ‘constant obsession’ with finding an appropriate response to the question: “what is the image of our country?” (Aguirre Silva, 1988, p. 11). He pondered about the traits that, in all the individual differences of its people, “bring us together as a race and unite us spiritually with a deep sense of Nationality [emphasis added]” (Aguirre Silva, 1988, p. 14). The problem of national identity seems to have cut across an important part of his life and his career. As a sort of identity anxiety, he often tried to connect architecture, landscape, and the arts with the consolidation of national unity in nationality. Three years earlier, in his book Hitos en Santiago: Esplendor y decadencia

In his late book El sur de los Andes: cómo renace un pueblo en el mensaje de su arquitectura y poesía (The South of the Andes: How a People is Reborn in the Message of its Architecture and its Poetry) of 1988, the Chilean architect Jorge Aguirre Silva confessed a 'constant obsession' with finding an appropriate response to the question: "what is the image of our country?"(Aguirre Silva, 1988, p. 11).He pondered about the traits that, in all the individual differences of its people, "bring us together as a race and unite us spiritually with a deep sense of Nationality [emphasis added]" (Aguirre Silva, 1988, p. 14).The problem of national identity seems to have cut across an important part of his life and his career.As a sort of identity anxiety, he often tried to connect architecture, landscape, and the arts with the consolidation of national unity in nationality.Three years earlier, in his book Hitos en Santiago: Esplendor y decadencia en su arquitectura y paisaje (Landmarks in Santiago: Splendor and Decadence in its Architecture and Landscape), he regarded the importance of urban landmarks in this matter attentively (1985).In his view, they simultaneously represented and shaped the habits of a nation's peoples, thus significantly defining what it meant to be Chilean and actively forging what he often referred to as 'national character.'In the book, he writes about Plaza Italia, the San Cristóbal Hill, and perhaps most conspicuously about the Santa Lucía Hill, which had become part of the construction of the myth of national unity when, in 1888, the painter Pedro Lira represented its top as having been the site of the foundation of Santiago.Aguirre Silva includes this painting in the book but does not discuss it.Furthermore, and perhaps unsuspectedly, the image in the book is not a reproduction of the finished painting but a preparatory study.In Lira's well-known painting, the Spanish Conquistador extends his hand pointing towards the future site of Santiago, a gesture that emphasizes the Hill's infrastructural role as a privileged site of conquest.Conversely, the Cacique's hand points towards the ground: presumably indicating his land and its cultural significance.Printed in Aguirre Silva's book, however, the painting exhibits no pointing gestures: both Pedro de Valdivia and the Cacique's hands are blurred.This pictorial erasure wipes away the epistemological incompatibility of both characters.And it is perhaps in this deletion that we see more clearly Aguirre Silva's difficulty in conceiving a definitive 'image of our country.'Only by blurring difference from identity something as race and national character could be produced as foundations for national unity.While the resistance to address this incompatibility may be tied to Aguirre Silva's personal anxieties, it is also symptomatic of more widespread and structural instances of cultural repression.was an ambitious plan geared towards the management of the working class' leisure time that was underpinned by the concern 'to fortify the race' and increase the population with "ethnic elements that maintain the unity of nationality" (Subercaseaux, 2007, p. 61).It focused on strengthening "the physical vigor" and "the moral health" of impoverished populations by providing them with means to escape social diseases and improving their physical condition (Subercaseaux, 2007, p. 61).It involved the provision of entertainment, sports, and medical facilities nationwide, as well as widespread sanitary control and physical, civic, and hygienic education.In the short-term, it considered the construction of 'Neighborhood Clubs' in major cities and districts, coupled with a long-term plan to build 'Resting Homes' and 'Resting Parks' in the countryside, seaside, and mountains throughout the country (Presidencia de la República, 1940, pp. 33, 51).Aguirre Silva, in partnership with his friends Enrique Gebhard and Gabriel Rodríguez, designed many of these facilities and built three, including the most visible one, The Model Home Defense of the Race, renamed Home Pedro Aguirre Cerda after the president's demise.He was appointed to lead a group of architects, artists, and advisors from several disciplines, who would give this program institutional and architectural form. (1)  Himself an educator, Pedro Aguirre Cerda (1879-1941) rose to power marshaling the motto 'to govern is to educate,' aiming to fight poverty by radically improving access to public welfare services.As the first elected president representing the Popular Front, his administration carried out extensive efforts to integrate the lower and middle classes by beginning state-industrialization, economic protectionism, and promoting the autonomy and expansion of the state apparatus.By providing the urban poor with leisure infrastructure and sanitary housing, Aguirre Cerda likewise sought to address the 'social question' of the late late 19 th century, which had increasingly stripped liberal and conservative oligarchies -dominating the country since its independence-from their political legitimacy.The Defense of the Race program advanced some of these measures, while at the same time responded to contingent political and social contexts.In the wake of the 1939 Chillán earthquake, the onset of the war in Europe, and longstanding levels of poverty across the Chilean population, unity in "the pride of being Chileans" became a strategic message of the presidential platform (Presidencia de la República, 1941, p. 3).Thus, the message (1) When talking to Alfredo Jünemann about the program, Aguirre Silva said: "I was the advisor who organized the activities that would conform the Defense of the Race, knowing that my lack of experience and knowledge were inscribed in a duty that I couldn't possibly develop.I told the President, and he told me 'look, you are responsible, you have to look for your own advisors,' and I had to do it in areas for which I didn't have sufficient knowledge" (Jünemann Gazmuri, 1996, p. 55).
of the Defense of the Race program acquired the undertones of non-partisan unity, as "a social program removed from any political, social, or religious sectarianism" that had to be "eminently patriotic" (Presidencia de la República, 1940, p. 31).In this context, race became shorthand for the unity of the country as well as for a purported "dissolution of the class-struggle" (Presidencia de la República, 1940, p. 27).
Still, neither Aguirre Cerda's championing of national unity nor his public pledge to fortify the race were unheard of in 1939.They echoed initiatives like president Arturo Alessandri Palma's 'Law of the Defense of the Race,' that in 1925 raised the fight against the "degeneration of the race" to a state obligation (Decreto Ley 355, 1925, p. 1).During the late 19th century, social hygiene and eugenics began to be articulated as a problem of governance, under the emergence of a model of liberal modernization that increasingly sought to control and regulate floating populations who simultaneously represented a risk to material progress and a 'reserve army of labor' for the country's growing economy.A process that in cities involved the organization of productive forces by installing an 'urban orthopedics' based on bio-social segregation enforced through moral discipline and biological sanitation (Leyton et al., 2015, p. 8).The task was first carried out by small agencies within ministries, such as the Institute of Hygiene and the Superior Council of Hygiene, formed after a cholera outbreak in 1886, or by independent philanthropic institutions like the National Association of Education or the Chilean League of Social Hygiene, among many others (Riobó & Villarroel, 2019).During the first decades of the 20 th century, the problem increasingly began to be assumed by the State with the creation of specialized state institutions, leading to the creation of The Ministry of Hygiene, Assistance, Social Prevision and Labor in 1924, renamed Social Welfare Ministry in 1927, and Ministry of Public Salubrity in 1932(Ibarra, 2016b).By 1939, key figures within the Departments of State were actively discussing eugenics as a means of social control and the promotion of productivity.Eduardo Cruz-Coke and Salvador Allende, for example, Secretaries of Health of Alessandri and Aguirre Cerda respectively, both understood social hygiene as a hinge between the body and an apparatus of production or consumption, and spoke about the biological makeup of workers as a national resource to be controlled, managed, and enhanced. (2)Following these lines, and furnishing the board with an array of advisors that included doctors, physical educators, and eugenicists, (3)   (2) Consider this line in Cruz-Coke's book Medicina preventiva y medicina dirigida, published in 1938: "the machine that has to be repaired with more urgency in our country is man; but not any man, our worker, still healthy, still recoverable of an affection that is just beginning and whose health is the main positive element of the wealth we could make use of" (as cited in Cárcamo Gebhardt, 2015, p. 206).A more 'negative eugenics' would take place around debates on sterilization in which Allende played an important role.See Sánchez Delgado, 2017.For a much debated and discredited account on Allende's more radical eugenics see Farías, 2005.(3) Among others, there was Joaquín Cabezas, director on the Institute of Physical Education; Lucio Córdova, director of the School of Hygiene; Joaquín Orellana, administrator of the National Stadium (created a year earlier); Gregorio Schepeler, director of the Boy-Scouts in Chile; and Rosa Ester Barra, a connoted educator that formed the first congress of women educators.It is also worth noting that the second vice-president of the program, chosen unanimously, was Francisco J.Díaz, a retired army general that founded the first Nazi association in Chile, recognized by Adolf Hitler himself.According to some sources, Hans Betzhold, the author of Eugenesia, which promoted the creation of a Chilean Übermensch, also participated in the committee, although it remains unclear the extent to which his ideas might have been seriously considered.See Sánchez Delgado & Cárcamo Gebhardt, 2018, p. 63.

Aguirre Cerda's 1939 program was an attempt to give national visibility to what he considered a project for the construction of a stronger nation by invigorating its most vulnerable elements.
Architecture and urbanism themselves had been central to the progressive medicalization of society from the late 19 th century. (4) At least since the urban reforms of Vicuña Mackenna in the 1870s, both disciplines were associated with discourses of social hygiene and moral propriety.Through measures of sanitation and security that included reorganizing the city around cordons sanitaires and 'hygienic parks,' canalizing urban water streams, and incorporating sewage systems, architecture and urbanism were understood as methods of population management with a significant role in the modernization of cities.Likewise, modernist architects had played a part in the spread and advancement of these discourses.For instance, in 1909 Ricardo Larraín Bravo -with whom Aguirre Silva designed his first building-wrote La higiene aplicada en las construcciones (Hygiene Applied to Constructions), condensing ideas around healthy urbanism and architecture circulating around the centennial (some heavily influenced by scientific racism), and became an authority on the subject, later advancing programs to battle high rates of infant mortality and (4) Aguirre Silva himself was no stranger to these developments.His grandfather, the doctor José Joaquín Aguirre had been the first president of the Hygiene Institute, playing an important role in public disinfection and the legislation of hygiene, and his father, also a doctor and a military, had studied in France and Germany and followed his father as director of the Medical Department of Santiago's Penitentiary before becoming director of the Juan de Dios Hospital in 1922.
designing the first hygienic workers' housing complexes in Chile between 1911and 1918(Larraín Bravo, 1909, 1937).By the 1920s, issues regarding urban hygiene and public salubrity were widely recognized as integral to the profession of architecture (Ibarra, 2016a, p. 153).

By the end of the 1920s, a new generation of architects was championing the introduction of ideas from European modernism as a way of addressing the increasingly dire social situation in Chilean cities. Enrique Gebhard and Waldo
Parraguéz, both students from the Universidad de Chile and militants in the socialist party, founded the magazine ARQuitectura in 1935, which by the third issue incorporated their colleague and close friend Jorge Aguirre Silva.The magazine published modernist texts by Gropius, Le Corbusier, Giedion, alongside fiery editorials advocating for a stronger involvement of architecture in the social question.The first issue included a manifesto that promoted "the integral-rational organization of collective life," the general separation of urban functions, and a "bio-social sense of dwelling" that was to emanate "directly from the physio-psychological life of the collectivity, expressed in its manunit" (as cited in Torrent, 2013, p. 134).Often exposing the alarming living conditions of conventillos (shanties) through photography and statistics, by the fourth issue the editors had incorporated eight doctors, who worked in hygiene and statistics, as stable collaborators and correspondents.Interestingly, this 'man-unit' that the authors often referred to was never explicitly defined but rather simultaneously produced as an abstraction, a product of statistics, and more importantly, as belonging to a race that needed reinforcing. (5)  Hygienic discourse and eugenics circulated within architectural discourse as much as through state institutions and philanthropic organizations (Ibarra, 2016b;Mondragón López, 2015).Moreover, in this architectural environment, race circulated embroiled in debates on modernism, minimal housing, and urbanism, conflating European modernism with a local version of eugenics that had put forward a very specific racial perspective.In this sense, Aguirre and his colleagues entered the debate on eugenics at the same time they entered modern architecture: race and modern architecture occupied the same discursive devices and were articulated by similar polemics in similar media.The 'unit-man,' object rather than subject of this discourse, was imagined as both the inhabitant and the product of an environment, of a spatial context that could be designed and modified.As it is often pointed out, unlike European versions, Latin American eugenics usually combined hereditarian determinism with a transformed Lamarckian determinism of environment according to which milieu was a factor (5) An instance of this can be seen in the second number, in which they published photos of Santiago's conventillos (shanties) by Antonio Quintana and an article on the "Statistics of the Conventillo," by Carlos Charlín that showed the anti-hygienic situation of 120.000 people in a city of 700.000 inhabitants, through a comparative approach that analyzed statistically surfaces of green areas in the city, surfaces of the workers' homes, number of families living in scarcity, number of necessary housing units, etc.In 1936, statistics were also used to convey the problem of hygiene in conventillos by Alfredo Johnson, who also joined the magazine that year, by using the term mala vida, or 'bad life,' and describing the situation as a "weakening of the race, that will come instigated by disease, malnourishment, and vice."See Mondragón López, 2010, p. 271;2015, p. 33. as determinant as heritage to preserve the consistency of race.Thus natural selection was combined with rational selection: through regulation of the environment, heredity could be modified or strengthened so as to improve the race by incorporating adaptations to the biological constitution.Considered a 'positive eugenics,' these discourses focused on preventive measures and hygiene to preserve what Aguirre Cerda deemed the 'racial reserves' of the country (Presidencia de la República, 1941, p. 41).Architecture, as an instrument of environmental manipulation, occupied a privileged space within the project of defending a national race.
The Defense of the Race program was aimed precisely at this, the widespread provision of salutary environments where physical and cultural education could be imparted to enhance the biological makeup of the population.Among the buildings Aguirre Silva and his friends Enrique Gebhard and Gabriel Rodríguez designed for this purpose, were a Resting Park in the skirts of the San Cristóbal Hill, a Resting Park and Home in the Bosque de Santiago, a more modest one in the hills between Santiago and Valparaíso, a Neighborhood Club located on the site of the Santiago racetrack named Hogar Hipódromo Chile, and the Defense of the Race Model Home.The latter's comprehensive architectural brief included cinema rooms, auditoriums, classrooms, several sports fields, a gymnasium, an outdoor pool, a lagoon, an aquarium, an herbarium, a children's home, play areas, a restaurant, a cafeteria, a ballroom, and even a milk bar.In the booklet published to promote the program, this vast complex is described as "a national institution destined to create new human values through large and modern programs of physical education, sports, recreation, social and cultural work in all the aspects of the human personality" (Presidencia de la República, 1940, p. 33).
The buildings themselves were designed as healthy machines to organize the psycho-biology of manunits by distributing them in different programs and activities, arranging them according to biological criteria like age and gender.The Model Home was located in the middle of Cousiño Park in downtown Santiago; supported by columns, it enabled the park to continue uninterrupted beneath its volumes.It was designed with ample windows for well-lit interiors and multiple terraces to be used as solariums and resting areas.Moreover, the whole building was immersed in a forest of pre-existing trees and a landscape project designed by German landscape architect Oscar Prager, who had been associated with the City Beautiful Movement in California (Viveros Letelier, 2019).Prager designed a square forest garden that surrounded the building and replaced older introduced species with native and ornamental ones.The attention to the landscape was further carried onto the Model Home's interiors, where large-scale photographs of the Andes mountains, forests, and alamedas taken by Antonio Quintana lined the building's walls.The purpose of intensifying contact with nature, fresh air, sunlight, and the surrounding landscape, followed the directions imparted not only by Le Corbusier and Gropius but also by local hygienic discourse and Larraín Bravo in his Hygiene Applied to Constructions (Hecht, 2016, p. 134).In addition to photographs, each room was decorated with mottos like 'the better you use your free time, the more useful you are to your homeland' (Presidencia de la República, 1940, p. 62).The building was equipped with a centralized heating and An Imagined Race and its Architectural Defense.Modernism andRacial Discourse in Chile 1938-1941 Pedro Correa Fernández MATERIA ARQUITECTURA #20 | December 2020 hot-water system, air conditioner in the auditorium, a telephone central, a public announcements central, an internal phone system, and electric clocks, among other technologies of environmental comfort, regulation, and supervision (Presidencia de la República, 1940, p. 62;1941, p. 24) (6) "In a dialectical jewel of social history," Salazar argues, the masters began to idolize the mestizo, but with a statue of Greek proportions, for "they could 't conceive of anything beyond their European imaginary" (Salazar Vergara, 2012, pp. 126 and 225).
compatible enough to produce a uniform new race he identified as mestizo, which, at the same time, he used interchangeably with 'white' (Walsh, 2015, p. 615).Palacios imagined a prototypical Chilean that combined the fierce and vigorous but womanly traits of a defeated people like the Araucano, and the sober, intelligent, and manly character of European conquistadors -in his mind, more Germanic than Latino.He considered most 'foreign' racial influences dangerous and debilitating, especially those of Latino, African, and Jewish origin, and claimed the Chilean race had begun weakening with the rise of the aristocracy in the 1830s.Reacting against political oligarchy and its negative image of the working class, he saw the plutocracy that ensued the new fortunes made in the saltpeter mines, the French sensibilities of the elites, and recent policies of immigration as direct threats to national identity and the integrity of our racial stock.But the Chilean race, according to him, also had a future, a potential that lied in "restoring the soul of the race" (as cited in Subercaseaux, 2007, p. 45).
Palacios conflated nation and race in ways that had remarkable endurance during the rest of the century (Walsh, 2015, p. 633).When Pedro Aguirre Cerda spoke of "the homogeneity of our race," he was noticeably rehearsing some of Palacios's arguments. ( 7 By (7) Consider for instance a letter he sends to Alfredo Duhalde Váquez, his Secretary of State: "we will reach my pursued goal that the social components are effectively convinced of the convenience of duly appreciating each other; in a way that makes the man of wealth recognize the homogeneity of our race, its intelligence, and its kindness.And that modest individuals recognize too that in the accommodated classes there are understanding elements that are willing to help them with their culture and patriotism, so that in this way class rapport is verified and so its indestructible union in the longing for national progress that we must attribute to every Chilean [emphasis added]" (Aguirre Cerda, 2001, pp. 136-137).
connecting race and progress, he was further reproducing some of the theses Palacios had obtained from European eugenics; namely the notion that race, and not reason or material progress, was the engine of civilizational history (Subercaseaux, 2007).Following Gustave Le Bon and Georges Vacher de Lapouge, Palacios envisioned national race as the biological component that would determine the social psychology of a pueblo and with it, the spirit and destiny of a nation.In hindsight, it is not too surprising that Aguirre Cerda's project of national unity was based on such notions of uniformity and progress.As Bernardo Subercasseaux has shown, Palacios's myth was functional to political discourse because "it invented a tradition that extends the myth of the exceptionality of the country; because it created a sort of ethniccultural citizenship that was wider than the actual political citizenship" (Subercaseaux, 2007, p. 47) 'stark,' 'unadorned,' 'sober,' 'rational,' 'vigorous,' 'hygienic,' etc.) paralleled the one used to describe the other. (8)  (8) Bernardo Subercaseaux (2007) summarizes the traits of the prototypical Roto as Palacios understood them as: having a warrior sense, braveness, sobriety, love for the homeland, severe domestic morality, rejection of ornaments or frivolities, laconic character, and predominantly patriarchal in psychology.French and Latin influences were to him especially harmful as they would "feminize the race."(Aguirre Silva, 1988, p. 11).And although his difficulty to conceive a clear image of Chile was no doubt inscribed within a longstanding myth of racial unity, his story provides one trace of a silent genealogy of racism in Chile, one of many possible historical narratives for the same conflicted present. ( 9 m (9) When he wrote and taught students about 'nationality,' he was rehearsing arguments of Hernan Godoy's 1976 El carácter chileno (The Chilean Character), a book that argues that Chileans, as a whole, were determined mainly by geography (the Andes, the dessert, and the Pacific), and by the Mapuche prolonged resistance to the Spanish empire, which would have produced miscegenation, an unrestricted obedience towards authority, and the engrained love of Chileans for their country.See Prieto Larraín, 2011, p. 22; and the interview with Fernando Campino (who participated in Aguirre Silva's studios) in Jünemann Gazmuri, 1996.