Answering the Social Question: Chilean Eugenics and Nation Building

• In Event: Histories of Health, Rights, and Nation in Chile and Bolivia: Resolving “Emergencies” and Negotiating Exclusion and Inclusion in Twentieth Century Nations

Abstract

In Chile, capitalist economic expansion and dislocations caused by military conflicts stimulated migration and rapid urbanization in the first decades of the twentieth century. In the wake of these events, Chilean politicians, social reformers, and health professionals believed that modernity had caused catastrophic social and moral turmoil. Progress seemed to carry with it an impressive amount of potential health risks, like syphilis and tuberculosis. Eugenicists in Chile proposed to solve these, and many other, social problems by improving the health of average Chileans through the application of eugenic principles. This paper explores how Chilean eugenicists sought to create a modern, patriarchal social structure that affirmed Chilean racial uniformity and uniqueness to address health issues caused by modernity. It also demonstrates how favoring class difference over other types of social difference, such as indigenous identity or gender, served to pathologize indigenous Chileans while erasing their existence as a separate racial category. By examining newspaper articles, theses, and monographs, this paper demonstrates how many Chilean eugenicists felt that the key to a healthy society was one steeped in racial homogeneity and gender patriarchy. In doing so, it illuminates how the politics of health intersected with that of race, class, and gender.

Author

• Sarah Walsh, University of Sydney