“The roto therefore has, although he cannot explain it in detail, nor feel the need to know it, the conviction and the greatest satisfaction experienced by a man who has emerged victorious in the eternal struggle of selection.”
Nicolás Palacios, Raza Chilena (1904)1
In the first decades following independence, Latin-American intellectuals were forced to confront a problem that had no ready precedent: how could nations whose populations were the product of mestizaje (the continuous mixing of Indigenous and European peoples) claim a coherent national identity? The twentieth-century answer was to re-conceptualize the mestizo as the national type. This solution was inherently paradoxical. It celebrated a mixed identity while simultaneously re-appropriating the very European racial hierarchies that had previously denigrated that mixing. Consequently, the mestizo never functioned as a neutral demographic category. It was always a contested site onto which opposing visions of the nation were projected.
Raza chilena, written by physician and nationalist Nicolas Palacios and first anonymously published in 1904 before being republished in 1918, has been identified by some scholars as a foundational articulation of the mestizo as the national type in Chile, in particular.2 Originally composed as anti-immigration newspaper articles, the work argues that Chile's unique mixture of Visigothic and Araucanian peoples has produced a mestizo type, el roto, who is, in the language of "purity," exceptionally homogeneous.3
Raza Chilena combines pseudo-scientific racism with mythological accounts of Spanish history and the Chilean conquest. Limited scholarly attention has contextualized Palacios primarily within early twentieth-century eugenics and nation-building, treating him either as a product of broader racial discourses or as the originator of ideas that endured in the Chilean right from Encina to Pinochet.4 Influenced by racial science, Spencer, Darwin, and German racism, Palacios sought to situate Chile within an Aryan narrative of Teutons and Visigoths, arguing for a "pure" Chilean race that synthesized Indigenous and Germanic elements. Yet this project of arguing for purity through mixedness is, like similar Latin American attempts to construct national racial types, inherently self-undermining.
This article argues that La Raza Chilena should be read as an attempt to resolve the anxiety of racial mixture by redefining purity itself. Through a racialized historical imagination, Palacios constructs a narrative in which mixture produces a national race endowed with biological strength, psychological discipline, and moral cohesion. In this formulation, el roto becomes the repository of Chilean authenticity, while the urban elite, with its European affectations and support for Latin immigration, becomes the true threat to the nation's racial integrity. Class conflict is displaced onto racial and cultural terrain, and popular identity is celebrated only insofar as it is stripped of political radicalism.
To develop this argument, the article is organized in four sections. First, I situate Palacios within the centennial crisis that shaped early twentieth-century Chile. Second, I analyze Palacios’ historical imagination, showing how he constructs el roto as the embodiment of a distinct Chilean race through the mythic Visigoth–Araucanian synthesis. Third, I examine his redefinition of racial purity, focusing on how he presents mixture as the basis for an allegedly homogeneous and superior Chilean race. Finally, I turn to Palacios’s anxieties about the future of the race.
The centennial generation and the “Roto” as type
The centennial of Chilean statehood in the early twentieth century was marked by both public celebrations and profound national introspection, widely referred to as la crisis del Centenario. The country confronted serious structural problems: pronounced wealth disparities and an economy heavily dependent on the unstable nitrate sector, whose profits were largely remitted abroad by British firms. Fluctuations in international demand generated chronic unemployment, while inflationary policies and corruption exacerbated economic insecurity. Concurrently, Chile was grappling with the trauma of the 1907 Santa María de Iquique school massacre, the most violent repression of the labor movement in its history, resulting in an estimated 2,000 victims, mostly striking miners and their families. These events exposed the fragility of the republican order and fueled anxiety about the nation's social cohesion and future.5
Essayists, politicians, and the educated elite produced a substantial body of writing reflecting on a century of independence, questioning its social, moral, and political foundations. Debates over progress, stagnation, and national character circulated widely in newspapers, pamphlets, and political speeches, with chilenidad, what defined Chilean identity, a frequent topic of discussion. As in much of Latin America, the criollo elite dominated Chile's political and cultural life, maintaining a cosmopolitanism that was unapologetically European and grounded in the belief that the nation still required "civilizing."6 The popular phrase "dos Chiles" referred to the gap between the everyday nation and this tiny circle of rulers.7 In Santiago, the upper classes attended el té, ate pâtés at garden parties, watched fencing, and drank fine liqueurs, while the middle and lower classes gathered for la once, drank chicha, and ate empanadas at chinganas or fondas.
In the preceding decade, a generation of social critics had emerged who openly rejected the elite's European obsession. In 1900, the radical senator Enrique Mac-Iver (1844–1922) articulated this critique in The Moral Crisis of the Republic, diagnosing the nation's ills as stemming from the ruling class's lack of public virtue, frivolity, and irresponsible use of wealth.8 Mac-Iver became the leading voice of the Centennial Generation. This “generation” was far from homogeneous. Their political views spanned a wide spectrum, from nationalist figures like Tancredo Pinochet Le-Brun and Francisco Encina, to radical-democratic thinkers like Mac-Iver himself, and socialists like Luis Emilio Recabarren.
A topic of great interest to the centennial generation was the exaltation of the “roto.”9 The “roto” was an insult for the urban poor, used for people that lacked manners or that dressed poorly (“roto” means broken or ripped, in reference to the clothes that “el roto” wears.) By the late nineteenth century it was being reconceived in competing ways. Because of rapid urbanization and the explosive growth of an industrial and mining working class, especially in the nitrate camps of the Norte Grande, the “roto” had become socially visible in ways that provoked reaction among the elites. The potential for the roto to be mobilized along class lines was scary to the elite. Palacios framed his exaltation of the roto as a patriotic defense of the working classes and a response to social injustice, but his position ultimately aligned with an aristocratic and anti-socialist nationalism. For Palacios, what mattered was not the social condition of the roto but its racial character. His book seeks to establish the racial superiority of the roto and to argue for its preservation as a national type.10
Central to Palacios's project is the insistence that el roto constitutes the universal essence of Chilean identity. Above all, Palacios establishes the Chilean roto as a perfectly defined racial entity. He argues that the roto is, without doubt, a distinct race (p. 34). Secondly, the roto is the biological reality of the nation. Even those who do not consider themselves rotos are, in fact, members of this majority (p. 103). This assertion allows him to reject the bifurcated vision of society in which the elite distinguish themselves as a superior race. Palacios explicitly denies the elite's assumption that "the Chilean roto is something like a separate race, inferior in Chile" or that the country is divided into two distinct groups (p. 58). However, Palacios does distinguish the roto from the criollo elite. For Palacios, the roto is distinct (and superior) because he is less Latin. Against the elite's disparaging view of the roto as an "exaggerated latinoid of the urban world," The Roto possesses a purity, a quiet resilience, taciturnity, a distinctive physiognomy and bearing that sets him apart from the Latin character of the upper classes (p. 243).
Above all the central political imperative, for Palacios, was the recognition, protection, and glorification of the roto as the authentic essence of the Chilean nation. He framed the working-class mestizo majority as the moral core of the Republic. The roto should be respected and revered, for the sacrifice that they have made for the nation. (p. 43) The principal danger to the roto, in Palacios' opinion, is that the government is handing over the nation's land to families of a race foreign to Chile's own (p. 31).
The Historical imagination of Nicolas Palacios: Violence and Synthesis
Palacios' conception of the roto's racial composition can only be understood through the fantastical historical narrative he advances. At the core of Palacios’ historical imagination is the pairing of two “warrior” races: the long-suffering, hardy indigenous stock of the Andean world, and the conquistador. Importantly the Chilean conquistador is not any Iberian, but an idealized Visigothic conqueror. Palacios writes: The discoverer and conqueror of the New World came from Spain, but his homeland was the Baltic Sea coast, specifically southern Sweden, now known as Götaland. (p. 35)
To support the claim that the Chilean conquistador is exceptionally nordic, Palacios reaches into the earliest of medieval history in order to argue for the presence of Visigothic racial purity in Spain. He traces Visigothic presence to the fifth century, during the Gothic wars that expanded the Visigothic kingdom to encompass all of Hispania. In the first decade of the sixth century, the Visigoths were forced out of Gaul and into Hispania by the Franks (p. 115). Thereafter, a significant Visigothic population remained in Spain. They had not mixed with what he regarded as inferior Latin races in the Old World as there had been little intermarriage with Iberians, and therefore retained the virtues and traits of the Teutonic race.
The adventurous and martial character of this race attracted it to Latin America. This racial continuity was especially pronounced in Chile. Chile's colonial settlement involved prolonged warfare with Indigenous peoples in harsh Andean climate, particularly in Araucanía, so only the most resilient conquistadors endured. The region remained de facto independent until its military incorporation during the 1860s-1880s, within Palacios' lifetime. For Palacios, this uninterrupted struggle preserved racial vigor among the conquerors and their descendants.
Palacios devotes particular attention to the initial encounter between conquistador and conquered in 1540. Drawing on correspondence between Pedro de Valdivia and Hernando Pizarro, he argues that mestizo children emerged from the earliest moments of the conquest, a development he attributes to “widespread polygamy”. The Visigothic conqueror, whom he claims had practiced polygamy centuries prior to his arrival in the Americas, encountered in Chile Indigenous societies organized around patriarchal forms of full polygamy. He describes Indigenous women as submissive and sexually faithful and maintains that the conditions of conquest placed large numbers of them under the authority of the conqueror. (p. 49)
Palacios' racial narrative repeatedly identifies the roto as the offspring of an Araucan mother and Visigoth father. (Part 1, chapter 1 “el padre de la raza” and “la madre de la raza) He renders all Chileans equally roto regardless of actual degrees of Indigenous ancestry. (p. 37.) The parentage of the race operates at the level of symbolic essence rather than biological proportion: the race collectively possesses one mother and one father, with the submissive Araucan and dominant Visigoth permanently interiorized within the national character.
The Visigoth warrior and the Araucan woman are united not through peaceful exchange but through the sexual dynamics of conquest itself. (p. 82) Their encounter on the battlefield functions as a form of natural selection, where the "best of the best" survive and unite through the violent intimacy of war. In this logic, warfare becomes the mechanism by which racial vigor is both tested and reinforced. Palacios presents the Araucan woman as an object wondrously fertile and readily available. (p. 52) Her body is the passive vessel through which the victorious Visigoth spirit perpetuates itself. Thus, for Palacios, the violent collision of war is transformed into a generative sexual act that produces the Chilean race. It is an origin story that glosses conquest as a natural, even glorious, biological synthesis.
The Chilean “Roto”: Purely Mestizo
Palacios resolves the apparent paradox of a race that is both pure and mixed by redefining purity itself. For Palacios, the racial mixture in Chile did not produce dilution or degeneration; rather, it generated a new ethnic whole that transcended its progenitors and achieved a distinctive purity in its own right. This is not a straightforward hybridity in which parent races blend into an intermediate form. Instead, Palacios insists that the Chilean type is a perfect synthesis between two similar races, under the right conditions (patriarchy, domination.) The resulting roto is pure not because he is unmixed, but because he is the culmination of a selective process that has produced a harmonious, biologically superior entity.
This is fundamentally a fantasy: Palacios must claim that the resulting combination is not merely mixed but complete and coherent, a singular racial type with a unified character rather than a conflicted amalgam. The paradox is sustained only through the repeated assertion that this synthesis is natural, inevitable, and superior to any conceivable alternative. By positioning the Chilean race as both the product of mixture and the embodiment of purity, Palacios attempts to neutralize the anxiety of mestizaje. The mixedness of the roto is not a source of shame or inferiority, but the very proof of his biological distinction and national destiny.
The roto possesses, according to Palacios and instinctual, self-validating knowledge of his own racial triumph. Palacio writes: “The roto therefore has, although he cannot explain it in detail, nor feel the need to know it, the conviction that it is the greatest satisfaction experienced by a man who has emerged victorious in the eternal struggle of selection.” (p. 106). The roto requires no theoretical justification or intellectual elaboration; his confidence in his own superiority is innate, rooted in the very fact of his ancestry and the historical struggles that produced him.
For Palacios, the Araucan and the Visigoth are fundamentally compatible. Palacios privileges Visigothic ancestry above all, repeatedly drawing comparisons between the roto and the vanished Visigoth. Though the Visigoth may no longer exist as a distinct race, it survives in the roto. (p. 96) This continuity is evident in their shared characteristics. He asserts that the two races possess identical cranial morphology, long heads, citing Swedish anthropometrics to prove that Chileans share this "Gothic" trait (p. 200). The two warrior races, Palacios insists, are culturally and psychologically aligned: both are patriarchal societies organized around male authority, both exhibit similar mental and emotional character, and both possess an equal "absorption power" that defines their biological capacity to assimilate and endure (p. 51). These similarities are evidence of their racial affinity; the Araucan and Visigoth, for Palacios, are natural counterparts whose shared strengths enable their perfect synthesis in the Chilean roto.
For Palacios, the exceptional fertility of the Chilean race serves as definitive proof of its biological vitality and the success of the racial synthesis. Unlike incompatible unions, which produce "degenerate, backward, sometimes infertile stock" (p. 41), the perfect combination of Araucan and Visigoth has yielded a vigorous population. Palacios points proudly to the fact that Chilean households produce at least one "retoño" or sprout per year. (part 2, p. 37). In his pseudo-scientific logic, the ability to reproduce prolifically is the ultimate validation of racial purity: the Chilean race is good and healthy because it is fertile, and this very fertility proves that the Visigothic-Araucan union has achieved the biological perfection he claims for it.
Racial anxiety and the future of the race
Paired with his critique of the criollo elite, Palacios' insistence on Visigothic affinity serves a purpose. He seeks to distance the Chilean people from the Latin type he associates with cultural and biological degeneration.
Palacios describes the outward appearance of the roto as deliberately unrefined and unadorned. The roto is "neither refined nor flattering," he writes, and "does not adorn himself with finery or cosmetics"; he is not handsome, nor does he wish to be (p. 112). Instead, his exterior possesses something of the "opaque rigidity of hawthorn". He possesses a deliberate roughness that distinguishes him from the European working classes, with whom he is intended to be replaced and who exhibit a "smooth and shiny exterior of coffee" (p. 112). The Chilean is simply "not a good-looking man" (p. 222). This very lack of aesthetic refinement confirms his authenticity and spiritual purity.
The roto's deliberately unrefined appearance serves, for Palacios, as proof of his patriarchal and distinctly non-Latin racial character. Palacios categorizes patriarchal races by a distinctive physical pattern: both the Chilean and the German possess "ugly men and beautiful women," the very opposite of what characterizes Mediterranean peoples (pp. 224-225). Unlike Mediterranean men, whose more cultivated handsomeness betrays a softer, less disciplined character, the Chilean's conspicuous lack of physical attractiveness confirms his place in a patriarchal lineage where masculine authority is signified by harsh utility and ancestral vigor. The roto's "ugliness" is therefore his racial distinction: it aligns him with the Visigothic heritage and against the Latin degeneracy Palacios so vehemently rejects.
For Palacios, the Chilean roto constitutes an irreducible racial identity. This distinction underpins a fundamental warning: the Chilean people possess a "determined patriarchal psychology" that renders slavish imitation of Latin institutions catastrophic. (p. 250) To adopt the social and aesthetic ideals, moral customs, and structures of Latin peoples is not merely misguided but fatal. The kind of imitation that the criollo elite are practicing threatens to disrupt the organic development of the Chilean race, ultimately halting, nullifying, and destroying it entirely. Palacios thus presents the rejection of Latin norms as a matter of national survival; the roto's unique racial character, forged in the synthesis of Araucan and Visigoth, requires its own institutions and cultural forms rather than transplantation from a fundamentally incompatible Latin civilization.
Despite celebrating the historical synthesis of Araucan and Visigoth as the moment that forged the perfect Chilean race, Palacios now insists that further mixing, both biological and cultural, must cease. Having produced this pure racial type, he fears for its continued purity and expresses profound anxiety about the future of the Chilean nation. For Palacios, the original mixture was a singular, generative act that created a distinct and complete ethnic entity; now that it exists, any additional amalgamation dilutes its perfection rather than enhancing it. Thus, while the founding union of Araucan and Visigoth is celebrated as the origin of racial vigor, contemporary immigration and cultural assimilation represent a mortal threat that must be halted before it disrupts the nation's organic development.
This is the context for Palacios' broader demand for strict biological control: the Chilean race must be insulated from further contamination, particularly by Latin European immigrants whose racial composition differs from the Germanic element he valorizes. Immigration policy, in his view, must serve as a filter for racial purity. As he bluntly asserts, "Only immigrants of German race should be allowed into Chile" (p. 59).
Conclusion
The paradox at the heart of Nicolás Palacios’ Raza chilena (the declaration of a “pure” Chilean race that is, in fact, the product of a single, mythic union between the Visigoth and the Araucanian) offers a way of domesticating the anxiety produced by mestizaje. By locating the source of national vitality in this imagined synthesis, Palacios accomplishes three things. Firstly, he removes the urban criollo elite from the nation’s racial core, portraying their Europeanized habits not as a civilizing beacon but as a contaminating influence that threatens the organic integrity of the Chilean body politic. In doing so, class antagonism is displaced onto a racial register, allowing a conservative nationalism to appropriate the language of popular empowerment. Second, he redefines “purity” not as the absence of mixture but as the completion of a selective, historic synthesis. Finally, Palacios casts the Visigoth-Araucan amalgam as a singular, closed event, and any subsequent immigration (especially from “Latin” Europe) is cast as an existential threat capable of diluting the hard-won racial integrity of the roto.
Notes
1.Nicolás Palacios, Raza Chilena : Libro Escrito Por Un Chileno y Para Los Chilenos, 2a. ed. (Editorial Chilena, 1918), 106.
2. In the second edition Raza chilena is divided into two separate parts. Throughout the article any citation that does not specify a part should be understood as referring to Part I of the work. (If a reference concerns the second half of the text, the relevant part is indicated explicitly in the citation.)
3. Sarah Walsh, “‘One of the Most Uniform Races of the Entire World’: Raza Chilena and the Construction of Chilean Racial Homogeneity,” in The Religion of Life, Eugenics, Race, and Catholicism in Chile (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv262qrqx.8. 83.
4. Sarah Walsh has written extensively about Palacios and the Chilean race (focusing on themes of eugenics and Catholicism in Chile and Latin America) in the English language. Walsh, “‘One of the Most Uniform Races of the Entire World’”; Sarah Walsh, “The Chilean Exception: Racial Homogeneity, Mestizaje and Eugenic Nationalism,” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 25, no. 1 (2019): 105–25, https://doi.org/10.1080/14701847.2019.1579499. In the spanish-speaking world, Chilean scholars have focused on Palacios’ role in the nationalist movement. Miguel Alvarado and Héctor Fernández, “Una Narración Fundacional Para Una Antropología Filosófica Chilena: Raza Chilena de Nicolás Palacios,” Cinta de Moebio, no. 40 (March 2011): 47–63, https://doi.org/10.4067/S0717-554X2011000100003; Miguel Alvarado Borgoño, “La modernidad maldita de Nicolás Palacios. Apuntes sobre Raza chilena,” Gazeta de Antropología, ahead of print, November 2004, https://doi.org/10.30827/Digibug.7276; Horacio Gutiérrez, “Exaltación Del Mestizo: La Invención Del Roto Chileno,” Universum (Talca) 25, no. 1 (2010): 122–39, https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-23762010000100009.
5. Antonio Sáez-Arance, “Entre La Autocomplacencia Y La Crisis: Discursos De Chilenidad En El Primer Centenario,” Historia Mexicana 60, no. 1 (237) (2010): 369–96. 371. The british firms then tried to replace the Chilean workers with Peruvian workers which caused racial tension in the northern areas of Chile. Sandra McGee Deutsch, Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, 1890-1939 (Stanford University Press, 1999). 19-21.
6. Sáez-Arance, “Entre La Autocomplacencia Y La Crisis.” 377.
7. Sáez-Arance, “Entre La Autocomplacencia Y La Crisis.” 376.
8. Sáez-Arance, “Entre La Autocomplacencia Y La Crisis.” 383-385.
9. Gutiérrez, “Exaltación Del Mestizo.”
10. Gutiérrez, “Exaltación Del Mestizo.” 126.
Source
Palacios, Nicolás. Raza Chilena : Libro Escrito Por Un Chileno y Para Los Chilenos. 2a. ed. Editorial Chilena, 1918.
Bibliography
Alvarado Borgoño, Miguel. “La modernidad maldita de Nicolás Palacios. Apuntes sobre Raza chilena.” Gazeta de Antropología, ahead of print, November 2004. https://doi.org/10.30827/Digibug.7276.
Alvarado, Miguel, and Héctor Fernández. “Una Narración Fundacional Para Una Antropología Filosófica Chilena: Raza Chilena de Nicolás Palacios.” Cinta de Moebio, no. 40 (March 2011): 47–63. https://doi.org/10.4067/S0717-554X2011000100003.
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Gutiérrez, Horacio. “Exaltación Del Mestizo: La Invención Del Roto Chileno.” Universum (Talca) 25, no. 1 (2010): 122–39. https://doi.org/10.4067/S0718-23762010000100009.
Sáez-Arance, Antonio. “Entre La Autocomplacencia Y La Crisis: Discursos De Chilenidad En El Primer Centenario.” Historia Mexicana 60, no. 1 (237) (2010): 369–96.
Walsh, Sarah. “‘One of the Most Uniform Races of the Entire World’: Raza Chilena and the Construction of Chilean Racial Homogeneity.” In The Religion of Life. Eugenics, Race, and Catholicism in Chile. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv262qrqx.8.
Walsh, Sarah. “The Chilean Exception: Racial Homogeneity, Mestizaje and Eugenic Nationalism.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 25, no. 1 (2019): 105–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/14701847.2019.1579499.
