The Cry of the Renegade ─ Politics and Poetry in Interwar Chile

On October 1, 1920, the city of Santiago, Chile, came to a halt as tens of thousands stopped work and their daily activities to salute the funeral procession of José Domingo Gómez Rojas, a 24 year old university student, poet, and municipal clerk. Nicknamed "the firecracker poet," Gomez Rojas was a member of the student federation, the FECh, which offered assistance to the poor and dispossessed. FECh's leaders were accused by the government of being advocates for the destruction of the social order and subversives who had the insolence and temerity to question national policy making, and Gomez Rojas' death while in custody turned him into a political martyr.

This microhistory examines the context within which Rojas' arrest, imprisonment, and death unfolded and the experiences of many of the men he counted as friends, comrades, colleagues, mentors, and pupils. Long before 1968, Raymond Craib shows, university students and workers were active political collaborators. In interwar Chile, members of the Chilean Workers Federation (the FOCh), the Socialist Workers Party (the POS), and, clandestinely, the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W., or Wobblies), among others, marched side-by-side with students from the FECh. At the FECh's club increasingly radicalized university students, as well as former students, workers, and worker-intellectuals, gathered together to talk, read, and find common cause. Anarchism resonated among a wide range of political, social, and cultural radicals: anti-colonialists, transcendentalists, labor organizers, and socialists, among others. Nor was anarchism always already at odds with other currents on the Left, a big tent that included communists, socialists, and anarchists. The death of Gomez Rojas was a pivotal moment in the persecution of subversives and the political consciousness of Chileans and others on the left internationally, particularly on politicized student and workers in this period and the creation of the Chilean Socialist Party in 1931.

Covering a period from July to September, 1920, this is a colorful and accessible story of anarchists and aristocrats, students and teachers, poets and prosecutors, and cops and Wobblies that explores the man and his times, as well as the myth and memory that came to surround him. University students in Santiago would hold annual memorial gatherings honoring Gomez Rojas, Chile's Popular Front government, elected to power in 1936, would invoke his name, and in 1983, a movement within the Catholic University against the dictatorship of Agusto Pinochet named itself the José Domingo Gómez Rojas Movement. Across the decades of the twentieth century Gómez Rojas's name has appeared with regularity in the Chilean press, in novels within and beyond Chile, and on anarchist websites.

Raymond Craib is Associate Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author ofCartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes and co-editor ofNo Gods No Masters No Peripheries: Global Anarchisms.