‘Drying Their Tears’: Women’s Petitions, National Reconciliation and Commemoration in Post-Independence Chile

Abstract

Public gratitude for good deeds can never be more justly awarded than when the blood of heroes is sacrificed for the Liberty of the Nation. The widows and mothers of the victors of Chacabuco deserve the recognition of the Government, for in them lives on the memory of the brave who extinguished tyranny; but the State’s lack of funds cannot provide a worthy compensation.¹

In February of 1817, just as the winter snows were melting, Argentine and Chilean soldiers braved the high passes of the Andes and defeated the Spanish army at Chacabuco on the Chilean side. The dramatic nature of this campaign captured the imagination of contemporaries, as the government decree quoted in my epigraph shows, and it came to dominate commemorations of Chilean independence. But remembering and forgetting go hand in glove. Most subsequent narratives of independence reduced over a decade of civil war to this one battle and the complicated allegiances of participants to a dichotomy between active male heroes and their supportive yet passive wives and mothers. First, the official history favours a particular chronology that begins with Chileans’ initial efforts at self-governance in 1810, continues with the interruption of those efforts by a Spanish ‘reconquest’ of Chile in 1813, and culminates with the Battle of Chacabuco in 1817.