La imaginación territorial chilena y la apoteosis de la armada 1888-1940. Otra mirada a los límites “naturales”

This article deals with Chilean territorial consolidation within placed within the framework of a cultural history, seen through the “political imaginery” of Chilean élite. Using a literary rhetoric they visualised Chile as an unfinished project. Taking the republican period as reference, the author holds that the notions of Nationhood made by poets and chroniclers from the colonial period were used as benchmarks, and that the relation between the literature and the politics did not die out. The notion is one of popular nationalism, in a style as exposed by Benedict Anderson (1983), who creates imagenery and mostly uses the Chilean Armada as flagship of this imagery. This is a republican nation-building exercise that looses ground on consolidating sovereignty in its outer frontiers and once the capacity of the Navy gives way to new technological means, such as airpower. For the autor the notion of boxed-in Chile, enclosed within four large territorial landmarks (the mountains, ocean, desert and southern channels) was not “natural” and undertaken from the Central Valley as a way to provide meaning.