Juan Rafael Allende, “El Pequén” and the carnivalesque features of Chilean popular literature of the 19th century

Summary

In the rich but little researched tradition of the popular literature of Chile, the figure of the poet and playwright Juan Rafael Allende Astorga (1848-1909) brigthly shines in the XIX century. In this paper, a presentation of a festive nature of his literary production during the 1880's is made; it is expressed in the very popular volumes of poetry under the nickname of “El Pequén” (a local kind of hawk) and in his newspaper of cartoons “El Padre Padilla”. Against the grain of the stiffness and anglicism of the bourgeoisie that characterized his epoch, Allende associated his festive spirit to the democrative struggles, and in particular to the birth of the Democratic Party, a new approach to practical politics facing the concrete and material needs of the laborers and Chilean “rotos” (the deprived) as of 1887. The spirit of the elite was for Allende the one of a forced and hypocritical Lent imposed on the common people. The way to challenge that world was the publication of “Carnaval” as an elation of their values through banquets, eroticism, feasts and subversion. This spirit runs through a large extent of Allende's literary discourse to the point of allowing from his view of a topsy-turvy world to understand the public behavior of President José Manuel Balmaceda and the elite of Chile.