Paradoxes of the Museification of the Past in Nineteenth-Century Chile: The Case of the Coloniaje Exhibition of 1873

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I would like to thank FONDECYT-CONICYT (Project 11160445) and the Universidad Alberto Hurtado for supporting my research.

During the second half of the nineteenth century in Latin America, various national and international exhibitions were organised to showcase the modernity and progress of the continent's nations. These events were complex and heterogeneous. Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, in his study of Mexico ‘at the world's fairs’, notes that the Latin American exhibitions generally featured diverse displays: ‘From art to science, from commercial advertising to statistics, from landscape paintings to architectural structures’.¹ Aiming to capture the idiosyncrasies of the new-born republics, international exhibitions offered important occasions for highlighting and legitimising new national images. For instance, Álvaro Fernández Bravo observed that in Argentina exhibitions constituted true ‘laboratories where the nation's iconography was deployed’ to rewrite ‘the national legends, reinventing history and observing specific forms of self-representation’.²

For Latin American elites, the undertaking to represent their countries as bastions of economic and social progress co-existed with the desire to project and review their pasts. Events such as Argentina's National Exhibition of Córdoba in 1871,³ Peru's National Exhibition of 1872⁴ and Chile's National Exhibition of Arts and Industry in 1872 included specific sections in their miscellaneous exhibition settings dedicated to the display of objects, documents and images that were used to evidence the republics’ origins, thereby enabling citizens to trace the nations’ descent from ‘infancy’ to the present.

Against this backdrop, in September 1873, Santiago's old Palace of the Colonial Governors, located in the Plaza de Armas, was the site for a unique spectacle. Named the ‘Esposición del Coloniaje’, this event set an important precedent for the establishment of the historical collections that would eventually lead to the construction of the National Historical Museum in 1911.⁵ Unlike the heterogeneous international and national exhibitions studied by authors such as María Silvia di Liscia and Andrea Lluch,⁶ Beatriz González Stephan and Jens Andermann,⁷ and Tenorio Trillo,⁸ the Coloniaje Exhibition was fundamentally a retrospective exercise that sought to reconstruct the colonial era. It adopted a critical perspective of the colonial period while celebrating the nation's origin and shaping citizens’ sense of belonging.

The event, promoted by politician and historian Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna (1831–86) during his tenure...