Dignity: A Compelling Notion for Chile

LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN, 12 May 2014

William Alexander Yankes - The Santiago Times

Researcher in early Chilean literature William Alexander Yankes writes on hierarchy and social injustice from the colonial period to modern times.

Human dignity constitutes the throbbing center of the societal wheel. All other issues are its spokes. It could perhaps be said that all the news we read, and a great number of art works produced, center on this both immovable and recurrent premise.

Today’s world is filled with those who claim to support this ideal. Putin is using people as mere pawns while playing a dangerous roulette with the world over the fate of the Ukraine. President Michelle Bachelet announced her intention of fashioning equality out of the entrenched socially stratified Chile. Gabriel García Márquez, recently deceased, left us an enduring wail in his body of work not to forget that man, even the most vulnerable among us, is entitled to live with dignity. And on and on it goes.

What to make of this dizzying and untidy set of circumstances, we may ask ourselves, in a world filled with turbulence where principles are constantly threatened? I propose that we not lose sight of that center of the wheel. This vague metaphor changes into a festering specific in the Chilean case when we attempt to find clarity in our own morally evasive history which leaves wide swathes of society in a permanent legal and cultural limbo: the dignity of the poor, the dignity of the aged, the dignity of women, the dignity of children, the dignity of the handicapped, the dignity of homosexuals, the dignity of the indigenous — who, by the way, owned this land before Europeans stole it from them.

To attain social equality in the 21st century, we would greatly benefit from re-examining a work of literature of Chile’s colonial time in the 17th century. The year 1673 was a moment that was located equidistantly between the Conquest and Independence when the work “Cautiverio Feliz” was penned by a Chilean soldier in the King of Spain’s army.

Thick and repetitive while also erudite and luminous as this text is, it nonetheless preserves a message in the darkness of its more than 600 pages, a profundity that has sadly been a deterrent against being read, discussed and held up as a constant theme of national interest across the generations. It deserves to be. It challenges even those with stamina and curiosity to gain a perspective about the mental positioning that emerges in the form and style of the Spanish language spoken four centuries ago. It is an elegant work and has multi-layered semantic possibilities, characteristics that have virtually disappeared from our modern language. It is invigorating to mine “Cautiverio Feliz” for its hidden treasures. One of the nuggets that deserves acknowledgment in Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán’s text is that man (or woman or Indian) is the possessor of his own dignity, a fact that perhaps not even the indifferent forces of nature can deny.

At a time when the Catholic Church’s Inquisition was on the hunt for forbidden works of the imagination, the author of “Cautiverio Feliz” had to be careful in his telling. But even under the cloud of such ominous threats, the man and writer of this work was courageous enough to expose early social corruption during the colonial era that led to today’s social inequalities. “Cautiverio Feliz” articulates for Chile’s memory the deep-seated cultural matrix celebrating prejudice and class chasms that have been lodged into the collective psyche ever since. This work of literature simply and rather directly exposes the fact that the soldiers that stole the land from the Mapuche became Chile’s first aristocrats (whose actions were triggered by myopia, greed and lack of self-esteem) employing methods of violence, cruelty and misguided religious fervor. These early colonists lacked the advantage of psychology, the science of ecology, an appreciation for the complexity of indigenous cultures (their myths, traditions, ceremonies, speech and respect for nature as the source of life) or a grasp of the patterns of history that we have access to at present. Today we have all the tools to honor the entitlement to social equality — as a human and civic right before the law — that all Chileans deserve.

Time played into the hands of those holding and retaining power by gradually erasing the memory of the ethically questionable method of property acquisition. While there have been individuals who’ve distinguished themselves for their remarkable social contribution — true aristocrats — they have been a luminous minority. Many within this upper echelon have been self-serving aristocrats — actually an oligarchy — as contrasted with those who live by the value of noblesse oblige. Among their descendants today are those who are simply heirs to a social currency that often replaces economic solvency. Time plays in their favor. No historic guilt can be levied on them personally. Today we celebrate their power. We fear it. We admire it. We idolize it. We iconize their position at the top. Today, we choose to forget how they came to be at the summit of the social pyramid. Law protects their peccadilloes. Wealth frees them from pedestrian complications with rules applied to others. The Chilean privileged class has its own hierarchy headed by Colonial-era aristocrats — by name and land possession — followed by those who are recognized as aristocrats solely by their surnames. Then come the oligarchs who are the nouveau riche with aristocratic aspirations whose political powers override the traditional aristocrats. There is also the successful businessman, the arriviste, with his sight set on social climbing. Within this world, their maids go home also to be served by maids of their own. Below this entrenched caste system there are the middle class and the poor who sustain those in the privileged sectors. In the isolation between the Andes and the Pacific recently transgressed by the Internet, we have managed to perpetuate medieval notions of social injustice as if they were enlightened concepts and perfectly adaptable to democratic living. Well, they are not. We continue to suffer from fault lines across our social divisions. These crack our social fabric sending recurrent shudders through our body politics with disastrous effects.

Unlike the European meaning for the same term, aristocracy (where an aristocrat earns such a title either by heroism or by distinguished service to the king), in Chile’s case we’ve honored their thievery, plunder and their slaughter of Indians as the source of pride, subsequent nationalism and emotional patriotism — the amalgam of which points to the source of our identity. A similar historic tapestry has been woven into the social fabric of the United States and many other former colonial countries large and small. Facing this historical truth in what pertains to Chile tells us in no uncertain terms that Chileans grew as a nation from a flawed moral premise.

I make these claims in my upcoming book (to be published by Cuarto Propio), where I propose that we re-examine the genesis of the Chilean nationality and extend to the Mapuches and other traditionally-marginalized Chileans the sense of human dignity to which they’ve always been entitled. Their story is at the center of “Cautiverio Feliz,” a chronicle that should be more widely read in Chile. In this work of foundational literature, the origins of dictatorship are lucidly and courageously identified. Only by facing and accepting our cultural and moral past can we begin to carve a space of dignity for ourselves, for the indigenous population, and for all Chileans.

As a Chilean, I love my country and I dream of contributing to the gentle remodeling of our culture to make it worthy of the natural beauty that geographically surrounds us at every turn of our gaze. Wouldn’t you agree, Madame Bachelet?

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William Alexander Yankes contributes opinion pieces on international affairs, literature and art focusing mostly on US-Latin American topics. He is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, has two master’s degrees and is pursuing a PhD degree in Latin American literature and film. His second master’s thesis is about to be published in Chile as a work of literary criticism where he identifies the origins of Chile’s proclivity for military dictatorships. He was raised in Chile and currently resides in Hollywood, California. Yankes is currently writing a screenplay which tales place n the Pinochet era. www.williamalexanderyankes.com.

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