Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the German Settlement of Lake Llanquihue
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Writing a National Colony: The Hostility of Inscription in the Ge ...

Chapter 1:  Writing the Colony
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A second anecdote, narrated by Vicente Pérez Rosales, may serve to disrupt this allegory of Germanocentric agency and give an example of yet another inscriptive practice frequently deployed by Pérez Rosales and other coauthors of the colony in order to control its meanings. Vicente Pérez Rosales had been appointed—to B. Philippi’s chagrin (R. Philippi, “Rectificación” 103)—as the local colonization agent28 in charge of the advancement of the settlement; his prime objective was to facilitate a significant increase in the number of immigrants to Lake Llanquihue. The following anecdote from the early years of the German settlement in Valdivia, taken from the memoirs of Vicente Pérez Rosales, exemplifies how the host of writings about the projected colony could be manipulated in order to change the distribution of themes. During the first years of organized immigration, a number of crimes were reported in the newly formed German community, among them a murder,29 a rape, and a grave-robbing. In order to contain the potential damage that news of those crimes could do to the flow of immigrants, Pérez Rosales took the following course of action:

Since the imagination can easily foresee the effect that so concise and painful a letter might produce in Germany on anyone planning to emigrate to Chile, I spared no effort or sacrifice to keep such news from reaching its destination without some palliation; while steps for the punishment of these crimes were being taken, expecting that the first letters to be written were bound to be profoundly discouraging, I let it be known that an opportunity for direct communication with Hamburg had arisen and that I wanted any correspondence to be handed to me as soon as possible. This was done; a great bundle of letters passed from the hands of my worried children—because the settlers called me their father—into one of my bureau drawers, where I left it to await a more suitable occasion for forwarding it to its destination.30 (Recuerdos 120; Times 331)

Apart from objections one might voice at the sheer immorality of confiscating whole batches of personal correspondence, one has to concede Pérez Rosales a shrewd understanding of the discourses constitutive of the colonizing project.