Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the Ge ...

Introduction

I was rummaging through the shelves one day at the Archivo Histórico Emilio Held in Santiago, where I did part of the basic research for this project, when I came across a document that caught my attention. It was a letter from Rudolf Philippi, brother of the noted colonization agent Bernhard Philippi, to the historian Luis Montt, written in 1902 and containing a short biography of the painter Carl Alexander Simon. I was more than a little excited to have encountered it, as I had found the sources on Simon to be scarce and controversial and was eager to piece together a more complete picture. Like the majority of the holdings at the Archivo Histórico Emilio Held, the document I turned up was not the original letter. Rather, it was a legal-size ditto sheet with aniline-purple print, produced on a spirit duplicator, of a typed transcription of Philippi’s letter on the typical lightweight high-absorbency paper. Due to the high acidity levels common in poor-quality papers, it had already yellowed and faded considerably and was prone to small tears. The document, eight pages in all, was held in one of a number of many hefty volumes, all bound in a grey buckram hardcover coated with acrylic.