Exotic Islands: Imaginary Landscape Of The Austral Confines (Chiloé Y Chile In The Nineteenth Century)

Abstract

The Provincia de Chiloé served as austral confine of the República de Chile during the major part of the Nineteenth century, and also performed a central role in the region located south of the Mapuche country. The relation between this province and the chilean republic was marked by the distance and the centralism, in the same way than almost all the chilean provinces. In relation to the concrete forms of that distance, and the medium and efects of the chilean centralism, in this paper I focus on the imaginary landscape of the province of Chiloé according to a corpus published and or consumed in the “Mapocho country” (center of Chile), composed by history and geography books, statistics, hidrographyc publications, travel literature and even propaganda. I propose in this paper the hypothesis that such imaginary landscape of Chiloé, of national character, had as core ideas the insularity and the exotism. This core ideas, like if they were an self-fulfilling prophecy, shaped the Chiloé province during the Nineteenth century, to the point that Chiloé ended that century as a “entirely insular” province, and as a marginal province in the context of the three austral provinces (Valdivia, Llanquihue and Chiloé). In contrast with this national image of the Chiloé province, I propose that existed a local imaginary landscape, with origin in the concrete use of the territory, although scarcely registered.

Key words: Imaginary Landscape, Representations, Chilean press, Centralism, Chile, Chiloé, Nineteenth Century