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Society for Comparative Studies in Society and History
Family Metaphors: The Language of an Independence Revolution

Author(s): Mary Lowenthal Felstiner
Source: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Jan., 1983), pp. 154-180
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Family Metaphors:The Languageof
an IndependenceRevolution
MARY LOWENTHAL FELSTINER
San Francisco State University
The language of politics is a language of metaphor. With metaphorslike

"fraternity," "body politic," "parasite," "ship of state," "urbanblight,"
"iron curtain," and so on, politicians and theorists have customarily im-
printed their messages. How seriously should we take this language? What
can historianslearn from it?
The metaphoricalelement in political statements usually gets treated as
trimming,while we look for the contentof the statement-explicit principles,
grievances, demands, projects. Instead, historianscould follow literarycritics
and social anthropologistsin makingdeepersense of symbolic language. We
need methodsfor identifyingthe source, character,andpersuasivefunctionof
political metaphors,criteriafor judging which ones have really counted and
why.
In this essay I suggest four criteria for measuring the importanceof a
particularmetaphor:(1) whether political discourse relied on it, (2) whether
I thank those who generously offered their comments on an earlier draft:Nan Keohane, Doris
Ladd, Joe Illick, Carole Pateman, and above all, John Felstiner. I am gratefulto the Centerfor
Researchon Women, StanfordUniversity, for the Visiting Scholars Program;to San Francisco
State University for sabbatical leave; to Joanie Ovalle for typing; and to Pearl Lake, Lyn
Simmons, John and Sarah Felstiner, and the StanfordInfant Centerfor child care.
1 A promising literatureon the uses of metaphorin political thoughthas appearedin recent
years. Most studies focus on language theory ratherthan on historicalinterpretation;a few use
metaphorsto elucidate history, but without designing criteriato evaluate them. The neglect of
metaphorsby historiansand interpretersof political theory has been pointedout by Elliot Zashin
and Philip C. Chapman, "The Uses of Metaphorand Analogy: Toward a Renewal of Political
Language," The Journal of Politics, 36:2 (May 1974), 292; and by Ted Cohen, "Metaphorand
the Cultivation of Intimacy," in On Metaphor, Sheldon Sacks, ed. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1979), 1, 3. On the lack of criteriafor evaluatingthe effectiveness of a particular
metaphor,see Wayne Booth, "Metaphoras Rhetoric:The Problem of Evaluation" and "Ten
Literal 'Theses'" in On Metaphor, Sacks, ed., 49, 54, 1974. Two collections, mainly of
theoreticalarticles on metaphorby social scientists, are outstandingsources: Andrew Ortony,
ed., Metaphorand Thought(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1979); and J. David Sapir
and J. ChristopherCrocker, eds., The Social Use of Metaphor:Essays on the Anthropologyof
Rhetoric(Philadelphia:University of PennsylvaniaPress, 1977). For a survey of recentpolitical
science interpretations,see Eugene F. Miller, "Metaphorand Political Knowledge," American
Political Science Review, 73:1 (March 1979), 155-70; and H. M. Drucker, "Just Analogies?:
The Place of Analogies in Political Thinking," Political Studies, 18:4 (1970), 448-60.
0010-4175/83/1725-2313 $2.50 ? 1983 Society for ComparativeStudy of Society and History
154

FAMILY METAPHOR AS LANGUAGE OF REVOLUTION 155
such a metaphorconveyed motives and purposesnot conveyed otherwise, (3)

whether it strengthenedits appeal by touching on lived experiences, and (4)
whether it predisposed its community toward new behavior. Metaphorical
language which could do all this-and a great deal could not-calls for
amplificationby historians, to be heard again with its full force.
Let us take a case from the age of republicanrevolutions and from Latin
America-less familiar to United States historiansas a source of revolution-
ary ideology than France, England, or our own country. In the independence
movement that occurred in Chile, as in most Spanish American colonies
during the decade after 1808, advocates often pressed home their most vital
points by means of metaphoricallanguage. Such languageincludedsimiles or
analogies, as well as metaphorsthat assumed a likeness without the need to
state it.
The materialI look for has to be extractedfrom essentially practicaltexts
ratherthan from carefully constructedpolitical theses. There was not even a
printingpress in Chile until 1813, several years after an elected junta began
the business of autonomousgovernment.The political imageryused by "pa-
triots"-the advocatesof independence-appears in privateletters, in a hand-
ful of newspapers,in a few tracts, in travellers'accounts, in diaries, and in the
minutes of the junta and the Congress. Some of these sources have been
published in document collections or quoted in histories.2 The indispensable
study of the period, especially for the English-speakingreader, is Simon
Collier's sensible and sensitive Ideas and Politics of Chilean Independence
1808-1833.3 But a good deal of the political writing remains unpublished,
and the social arrangementswhich may have conditionedits metaphorsmust
be dug out and inferred from testaments, notary records, legal disputes,
official and unofficial correspondence-materials which the historianof ideas
can usually avoid.
I. DID PATRIOT DISCOURSE RELY ON METAPHORS?
Looking at the writings of patriot journalists and activists, I found three

images turningup again and again. These representedAmericancolonials as
2 Some of the major document collections on
independenceare Colecci6n de antiguos peri-
6dicos chilenos, Guillermo Feliu Cruz, ed., 20 vols. (Santiago: Imprenta Cultura, etc.,
1952-66), hereafter cited as CAPC; Colecci6n de historiadores v documentos relativos a la
independenciade Chile, 30 vols. (Santiago:ImprentaCervantes, 1900-1939), hereaftercited as
CHDI;Archivode don BernardoO'Higgins, RicardoDonoso et al., eds. (Santiago:Nascimento,
1946-), hereaftercited as AOH. Standardhistories of the independenceperiod include Jaime
Eyzaguirre,Ideario y ruta de la emancipaci6nchilena (Santiago:EditorialUniversitaria,1957);
Nestor Meza Villalobos, La conciencia polftica chilena durantela monarquia(Santiago:Univer-
sidad de Chile, 1958); Sergio Villalobos, Tradicidny reformaen 1810 (Santiago:Universidadde
Chile, 1961).
3 Simon Collier, Ideas and Politics of Chilean Independence 1808-1833
(Cambridge:
CambridgeUniversity Press, 1967). Collier was not looking for metaphors,but I have made use
of the abundantand brilliantlychosen quotations in his book.

156 MARY LOWENTHAL FELSTINER
rebellious Indians, as oppressed slaves, and as disinheritedsons. I ask what

part each of these images played in revolutionaryideology, what underlying
grievancesit voiced, what desires it stirred,whetherit drew on common lived
experience, and how much it preparedthe groundfor politicalchange afterthe
revolution. What concerns me, in other words, is to discover the range of
purposes these metapborsserved in political discourse.
"Our Fathers the Araucanians"
From the time Napoleon's army overranSpain in 1808, both Spaniardsand
Creoles (Americans of Spanish descent) in the colonies had to decide how
much they owed to Spain. The king was in captivity and by 1810 most of the
colonies had establishedlocal juntas to govern in the interim. When Creoles
in Chile beganjustifying this ad hoc autonomyfrom Spain, they reflected on
theircolonial experiencein termsof Chile's indigenousinhabitants.As Simon
Collier points out, the story of Chile's AraucanianIndiansstaunchlyresisting
the Spanishconquest came into vogue three centurieslater, and proved valu-
able as propagandafor independence.4A secret society advocatingindepen-
dence became known as the LautaroLodge, to honor an Indian leader who
resisted the conquistadors.At patriotcelebrationsCreole women dressed as
Indians. A patriotperiodical was called Cartas Pehuenches after the Indians
of southernChile-an Americanversion of the LettresPersanes.5 Americans
of Spanish descent even began reorientingtheir genealogies by way of meta-
phor. They invoked "our fathers the Araucanians," declared themselves
"the sons of. .. Lautaro," and called Lautaro's people "those dear
brethrenof ours." The patriotgeneral Berardo O'Higgins said to the Indi-
ans, "We are all descended from the same fathers," though his own father
was an Irish viceroy in the Spanish administration.6
The point of invoking the Araucanianswas clear: Creoles too must resist
Spain. But the metaphoralso linked Creoles and Araucaniansas if by blood,
and thus conveyed other messages as well. Patriotsfound these kinshipterms
useful, partly to attractIndian support, but mainly to dissociate themselves
from the Spaniards'exploitation of Indians. The image of common ancestry
also preparedthe groundfor a new stance:in 1811 the first patriotlegislature
ended the legal segregation of Indians, making them "if not privileged, at
least equal," and then let it go at that.7
Imagery such as this-proposing that our fathers the Araucaniansantici-
4 Collier, Ideas and Politics, 212-17.

5 Vicente Grez, Las mujeres de la independencia(Santiago:Zig-Zag, 1966), 55, 62; Cartas
pehuenches (1819), in CAPC, XI (1958).
6 Quoted in Collier, Ideas and Politics, 212, 213, 194, 214.
7 5 October 1811, Sesiones de los cuerpos lejislativos de la Republicade Chile, 1811-1845,
Valentfn Letelier, ed. (Santiago: ImprentaCervantes, 1885-1908), I, 119, hereaftercited as
SCL.

patedour cause-can work on consciousness with the power ErikEriksonhas

attributedto myths. "A myth blends historical fact and significant fiction in
such a way that it 'rings true' to an area or an era. . . . The people affected
will not question truthor logic; the few who cannot help doubtingwill find
their reason paralyzed."8 The "historical fact" in this case was Araucanian
resistanceand conquistadorbrutality.At the same time, I thinkCreoles found
their reason paralyzed by a vision of wicked Spaniards "cutting the throats
of . . . those dear brethrenof ours,"9 for this image erases from the picture
of Spanish colonialism everything except conquistadorbrutality-erases, for
example, three hundredyears in which Creoles (the patriots'real fathers,real
brethren)benefited from Indian land and labor. So this metaphorhad the
effect of collapsing time, making contemporarySpanish officials into con-
quistadors,and distinguishingCreoles from both. The metaphorgave Creoles
an enemy and a hero outside themselves. In that way it helped them go
beyond the ambiguityof theirrelationsto both the indigenousandthe coloniz-
ing peoples.
'From Rigid Slavery to Absolute Liberty"
As soon as the Creole junta of 1810 and Congress of 1811 began making
policy on theirown, propagandistsbegan explainingwhy Chile needed auton-
omy. "Three centuriesof shackles," they said, have made the American "a
slave." "We must become independentif we do not wish to fall back into a
slavery even more fearful and cruel than in the past"; the more Chile "knows
her rights the more she hates slavery." Even after independencewas won,
this metaphorkept appearingin order to convince citizens that whateverthe
governmentmay have failed to do, it had suceeded in breakingwith the past;
the revolutionhad broughtthe people "from darknessto noondaylight-from
rigid slavery to absolute liberty."10
"Darkness" and "noonday light" put across the contrastbetween old and
new regimes, but the metaphorof "rigid slavery" also enabledthe patriotsto
manifest subtlerfeelings, namely, the shame and frustrationof knowing how
Spaniardslooked down on Creoles. If Creoles were not to believe themselves
inherently inferior, they had to show repression of their naturaltalents by
some outside force. It was slavemaster Spain, they kept saying, that had
deliberatelykept Americans ignorant: "They wished to accustom us to live,
resigned to our fate, like slaves," for "without the freedom to think about
political matters . . . man is a slave even at the centre of his being." "
A powerful appeal. Did it capitalize on actualexperiencesof enslavement?
Indeed, there was traffic in African and Afro-Americanlives throughoutthe
8 ErikErikson, Childhoodand Society (New York:W. W. Nortonand
Company, 1950), 285.
9 Quoted in Collier, Ideas and Politics, 194.
10 Ibid., 195, 110, 118, 189.
1 Ibid., 211, 161.

Spanishcolonies at this time. Membersof the Creole elite in Chile knew this
traffic from having participatedin it-as masters. But apparentlythere was
nothing-like fear of insurrectionor of economic devastation-to inhibit
patriot writers from inverting reality for their purposes, for at the time of
independence,African slavery no longer supportedthe Chileancolonial econ-
omy as it did in Brazil, the West Indies, and the United States South. The five
thousand slaves throughoutChile served less for work, as one patriot said,
than for ostentation.12
Was this outright hypocrisy, to make convenient rhetoricout of another
people's inescapable reality? In part, yes, but this rhetoricalso inspiredthe
patriotsto live up to the literal, as well as the symbolic, meaningof liberty. In
1811 the first Congressdeclaredslavery "opposed to the Christianspirit" and
even detrimentalto efficient domestic service; the Congress ended the slave
trade and passed free birthlaws. 13 Of course liberalprinciplealso combined
with practical policy: the government would free any slave who joined the
patriotarmy. Yet the new regime could not enforce the free birth law or get
slaveowners to reliease many slaves for black brigades. And notary docu-
ments make it clear that local slavetradingremained brisk throughoutthe
independence struggle. Though patriots began a civil war for liberty from
"bondage," they were hardly willing to risk antagonizingtheir propertied
compatriotsby abolishing the real slavery in their midst. Only in 1823, after
securing independence,did the governmentprohibitthe institutionof slavery
itself. 14
This usage of the slavery image I take as sleight-of-hand-a skillful way of
persuadingpeople to take a revolutionaryposition. After all, most Creoles in
1810 were entangled in ambiguities:they thought themselves powerful as a
class but powerless as colonials, loyal to Spain against France but loyal to
America against Spain. They wanted to justify their struggleagainst Spanish
controlwithoutlegitimizing any struggleby othersagainstthemselves. It is in
just such a complex situation that metaphorsserve as clarifying filters. If
ordinaryCreoles are, as the patriotsasserted, "slaves" and "Indians," then
who could considerthem as mastersor exploiters?These metaphors,in creat-
12 Estimatesin GuillermoFeli6 Cruz,La abolici6n de la esclavituden Chile: estudiohist6rico

y social (Santiago: Universidad de Chile, 1942), 39-40; quotation from Manuel de Salas in
FranciscoAntonio Encina, Historia de Chile desde la prehistoriahasta 1891, 20 vols. (Santiago:
Nascimento, 1940-52), V, 160-63. The image of enslavement by an empire was invoked
elsewhere at this time by slaveowners advocatingindependence.See DarrellE. Levi, A Familia
Prado (Sao Paulo: Cultura70, 1976), 61.
13 11 October 1811, SCL, I, 133.
14 15 October 1811, SCL, I, 138; I found records of slave sales 1811 through 1823 in the
Archivo de los Notariosde Santiago;see also SCL, I, 151; Feliu Cruz,La abolici6n, 62; William
F. Sater, "The Black Experience in Chile," in Slavery and Race Relations in Latin America,
Robert Brent Toplin, ed. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974), 35-36.

ing moral dichotomies, denied social complexities; in focussing Creole per-

ceptions, they also cut off peripheralvision.
I want now to try and interpretanothermetaphor-the way people of the
time spoke of the political community as though it were a family.
First, to what extent did patriot writers rely on family terms to describe
political relations? Looking through speeches, articles, proclamations, I
found family metaphorspervadingall aspects of patriots'thinking:their rep-
resentationsof grievances, their definitions of political rights, their visions of
a new state. Second, what political motivations did these family metaphors
reveal? Third, what circumstancesmade them persuasive?And, finally, did
such language itself have an influence on family and politics? With these
questions in mind, we can see how metaphoricallanguage-what we usually
pass over to get at the message-illuminates the struggle for independence.
II. WHAT POLITICAL MOTIVES DID FAMILY METAPHORS CONVEY?
A Grievance against "Political Infancy"

What seemed to anger Creoles most was an idea that the Spanishempire had
willfully stuntedAmerican growth. For patriots, the king of Spain was more
an overprotectivefatherthan a remote tyrant. Hatredof exogenous despotism
they reserved for Napoleon, who was colonizing the colonizer. Against the
Spanish monarch and empire the patriots argued something much subtler,
namely, the enervating effects of paternalism.A republicanjournalist, An-
tonio Jose de Irisarri,satirizedthe paternalsolicitude in colonial restrictions:
"Our good king didn't want us to cultivate vineyardsso that we wouldn't get
drunk;or to grow olives or almonds so that we wouldn't stuff ourselves with
fruit . . . or do business with each other, poor Americandevils, so we could
attend ratherto the business of the soul." Spanish officials, a populartract
claimed, "dandle us like children" to "keep us from being free." And with
the Napoleonic invasion, wrote the patriot Juan Egafia, "we were left or-
phans." One patriot journal threatened, "America is coming out of its
infancy." 15
When the fighting ended in 1818, this fundamentalmetaphorcontinuedto
appearin justifications of the revolution. Spain, "fearing our growth, did not
wish to remove the leading-stringsof childhood." Whatever problems the
independentstate might have, "everything, everything, is the result of our
political infancy." The Chilean declarationof independence(1818) justified
autonomy clearly and simply as "the right of a person whose minority has
15 [Antonio Jose de Irisarri],Carta al Observadoren Londres,por Dionisio Terrasav Rej6n
(London: E. Justins, 1819), 27-28; Jose Amor de la Patria, "El catecismo politico cristiano"
(1810) in CHDI, XVIII, 143; Walter Hanisch, "La filosoffa de don Juan Egana," Historia, 3
(1964), 264.

I60 MARY LOWENTHAL FELSTINER
expired."16 Coming of age, in other words, seemed at once a naturaland a

political right.
But we need to understandjust what coming of age meant to the Creoles.
The images patriots used show that manhood connoted power, both sexual
and material. Chile was depicted as waiting expectantlyfor citizens to exer-
cise their manhood on it, for "an enlightened and beneficient hand . . . to
fertilize the country." In Chile, they wrote, "everything is intact. It only
awaits able hands to touch it and discover its fecundity."17Most frequently,
patriotmetaphorslinked the status of subject with that of heir. They implied
thatthose reachingmanhoodexpect a legacy-in this case, the Chileannation
and the power to manage it, both of which remainedin the father-monarch's
grasp.
This thwarted expectation makes sense of the many metaphors of pa-
trimonyin patriotwritings. Monarchyhad turnedcolonials into capitalinstead
of inheritorsof capital. "A colony is no more than an estate, a patrimonyof
the metropolis,destinedto make it rich," complainedone journal,the Aurora
de Chile. "The people are free and independentand are not and cannotbe the
patrimony of any family or person," wrote Camilo Henrfquez, a patriot
journalist. And Manuel de Salas, an educator: "Having sprung from the
breastof naturefree, we have not belonged to the patrimonyof one house, nor
can any authorityon earth adjudicateto one family the generations which
reproduce,succeed and form peoples born with the same liberty as a king."
Against this denial of patrimony, the Santiago councillors promised, "We
shall, in the end, possess a land of our own." The independencedeclaration
definitively laid claim to "this land as our birthright."'8
While Spain saw Americansdestined "by nature"to "vegetate in obscuri-
ty," Americans saw themselves destined by "the very course of nature," to
come of age. "America has separatedfrom Spain even as a ripe fruit falls
from a tree." "The nature of things . . . has worked the change." So when
patriotsjustified independenceas "the right of a person whose minorityhas
expired,"19they were locating it in a growthprocess so natural,so inevitable,
16 El Liberal (1823) and SCL (1825),
quotedin Collier, Ideas and Politics, 198, 189; Indepen-
dence Manifesto, 2 February1818, in William R. Manning,Diplomatic Correspondenceof the
United States concerning the Independenceof the Latin AmericanNations, 3 vols. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1925), III, 902.
17 Manuel de Salas, quoted in Hernan Ramirez Necochea, Antecedentesecon6micos de la
independencia de Chile (Santiago: n.p., 1959), 92-93; Luis Campino, quoted in Meza Vil-
lalobos, La conciencia politica, 314.
18 Aurora de Chile, 30
August 1812 (rpt. Santiago:ImprentaCervantes, 1903), p. 117; ibid.,
8 October 1812, p. 145; ibid., 5 November 1812, p. 161; Gazeta de Santiago (1818), quotedin
Collier, Ideas and Politics, 210; IndependenceManifesto, in Manning, Diplomatic Correspon-
dence, III, 902.
19 Antonio Jose de Irisarri, "Reflexiones sobre la politica de los gobiernos de America"
(1813) in Escritospolemicos, RicardoDonoso, ed. (Santiago:ImprentaUniversitaria,1934), 14;
Gaceta ministerialde Chile, 15 July 1820, quoted in Collier, Ideas and Politics, 182; Manning,
Diplomatic Correspondence, III, 902.

FAMILY METAPHOR AS LANGUAGE OF REVOLUTION i6i
that the constraintsof the empire appearedarbitraryand abusive. Demanding

"our birthright"became the metaphorfor revolution.
Political Rights: "The Property and Honour of Families"

From 1808 to 1814, when Napoleon held captive the legitimaterulerof Spain,
one theoreticalquestiontook on criticaldimensionsin SpanishAmerica:what
is the source of political authority?In Chile, Manuel de Salas speculatedthat
authorityoriginatedin a golden age when families ruled. Then "with time a
family becomes a nation," added Camilo Henriquez. This family-generated
nation contractswith a ruler, and only by this "willingly concludedpact can
anotherman exercise a just, legitimate, and reasonableauthorityover us."
Both parties had to be able to fulfill the contract, Manuel de Salas claimed,
and thereforethe king's captivity nullified it.20
Here was the crux of their theory: when all legitimate authoritybreaks
down, as it did with the Napoleonic invasion of Spain, power must revertto
its original source, from which the social contract itself had emerged. The
guiding principlefor the futuremust derive from this source. Accordingto the
Aurorade Chile, "Misfortunehas interruptedour relationswith the sovereign
and we should for the time being consider ourselves in the primitivestate. In
this state, each head of the family is its naturalgovernor;fromevery districtor
federationof families the magistrate. . . is elected."21 So theoristspictured
political evolution with family rule as the origin of social contract,family as
the stage before nation, family heads as natural governors, federations of
families as electors. The patriots' language shows that, in their minds, the
social contractlinked the sovereign not with individualsbut with the heads of
corporateunits. Their formulationssuggest thatthese revolutionariesintended
something other than individualist democracy to succeed patriarchal
monarchism.
Their very definitions of individual liberty and equality implied an imag-
ined family unit. Patriot assertions went like this: "All men are born equal
and independent," and society startedas "an association of men" by whose
compact "another man can exercise . . . authority";so representativegov-
ernment "draws man closest to . . . the primitive equality in which God
Almighty createdhim. "22 Whatdoes it signify thatall the individualshere are
masculine? We might call this a generic language in which "men" means
"people." But more realistically, we could take this customaryneglect of
women as a clue to political assumptions.In social contracttheory, as Carole
20 Manuelde Salas in Fondo Varios, vol. 812,

pieza 4; Camilo Henriquezin Aurorade Chile,
27 February 1812, p. 9; "Proclama de Quirino Lemachez" (1811) and "Discurso sobre el
sistema" (1812), quoted in Collier, Ideas and Politics, 136, 108.
21 Aurora de Chile, 28
May 1812, p. 63.
22 Camilo
Henriquez(1813) and Jose Amor de la Patria(1810), quoted in Collier, Ideas and
Politics, 159, 138, 146.

PatemanandTeresaBrennanpoint out, "for individualsto be seen as free and

equal 'by nature,' they must to some degree be seen in isolation from (or
separate from) other individuals."23 Patriot ideology hardly suggested that
individualsare separate,free of ascribedroles, "equal and independent."In
patriot theorizing, the individual citizen means the head of a family, and
individual rights is really a code phrase for family rights. When Camilo
Henriquezspelled out "eternalrights" for his readers,they were "the liberty
of our nation" (formed, it was understood,by a compact among men), "the
religion of our fathers," and "the propertyand honourof families."24 These
are the rights of man-man as head of family-for which the revolutionwas
fought.
Desire for Unity: "A Vast Precinct of Brotherhood"
When political writersturnedso often to family images, they may have been
tryingto tap some common assumptionsto which they could liken contempo-
rarypolitics. Their rhetoric, as KennethBurke defines that term, used "lan-
guage as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation."25 In the unsettled
decade after 1808, Creoles in Chile lost the loyalties they had held in com-
mon. For some, promising allegiance to the officials of an occupied Spain
seemed disloyal, while for others, breaking away in Spain's hour of need
smacked of betrayal.Any listing of complaintsagainstSpanishrule could be
counteredby a listing of advantages-legitimacy, order, a sense of cultural
connection. How then were revolutionariesto attracta confused and divided
population toward independence? They did it by linking, in phrase after
phrase, the politics people disagreed about with something they considered
beyond dispute.
As the revolutionproceeded, patriotsdepictedtheirvisions of the new state
by talking in contrasts. Sometimes they distinguished the tyranny of
Napoleonic Spain (Simon Bolivar called Spain a "cruel and senseless moth-
er . . . fearing our growth") from the new Chile ("a loving mother, solic-
itous of all"). More often, patriotsrepresentedthe king as a "father of his
vassals," meaning one who reduced family members to dependents, while
they imagined their own administrationas a generous brotherlyguide.26 In
visions of the future, they laid new stress on fraternalattributes,still holding
fast to the equation of polity with family.
The revolutionariesmust have needed this equationfor the unity it implied.
23 Teresa Brennanand Carole Pateman, "'Mere Auxiliariesto the Commonwealth':Women
and the Origins of Liberalism," Political Studies, 27:2 (June 1979), 184.
24 Henriquez(1811), quoted in Collier, Ideas and Politics, 155.
25 Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall,Inc., 1950), 43.
26 El Liberal (1823), quoted in Collier, Ideas and Politics, 198; Bolivar (1815), quotedin The
Origins of the LatinAmericanRevolutions, 1808-1826, R. A. Humphreysand JohnLynch, eds.
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 262; Aurora de Chile, 8 October 1812, p. 145; El se-
manario republicano, 18 September 1813, CHDI, XXIV, 57.

Factional divisions threatenedthe nation in its genesis, as did sectionalism,

caste differences, powerful neighbors. The war of independencewas a civil
war, with Creole soldiers on both sides. In the confusing first year of junta
government, Manuel de Salas wrote: "I desire only peace and that we live
like brothers . . . and I tremble." Bernardo O'Higgins tried to convert royal-
ist troops by telling them, "you are Chileans, our brethren."When sectional
disunitythreatenedthe new government,the family metaphorwas summoned
against it. "Our brothers, the sons of the same mother"-that was the way
Jos6 Miguel Carreraaddressedthe men of Concepci6n, the southernrival to
Santiago. Patriots insisted that Chiloe, an island held by the Spanish, be-
longed to the "great family of Chileans."27 Presentingthe nationas a family
also conveyed an assurancethat the leaders would take precedenceover the
masses. One patriot told the prestigious Santiago town councillors: "Each
one of you is constitutedfatherof the country, andjoined together, you have
the actual power of the people." Against the dangers of racial dissension,
some spokesmenclaimed, "we are all descendedfrom the same fathers," the
Araucanians,while others said, "we can all indisputablyclaim descent from
the conquistadores."Both statementswere symbolic, since a large proportion
of patriots descended from eighteenth-centuryimmigrants. But the idea of
common descent helped convince Creoles that they were what the junta pro-
claimed them to be, "a nation of brothers."28
When the war against Spain ended, the new state still had to fear European
reprisals, hemispheric rivalries, and continuing civil strife. So its leaders
warnedagainst "the discordthathas divided individualsof the same family."
"Everythingobliges us to draw together, to help and protecteach other, like
individuals of a great family scattered over a vast continent."29 Political
leaders also knew only too well the internal pressures facing an emergent
state, the demandsfrom all sides for a largersharein the newly inheritedland.
What "occurs in despotism between vassals and tyrant," they realized, "oc-
curs in anarchybetween man and man." They broadcastthe vision of Chile as
"a vast precinct of brotherhood" because they hoped the commitment to
fraternitycould offset the dangers of liberty.30
The language connecting family and politics reveals what the patriots
27 [Manuel de Salas],
"Dialogo de los Porteros," 15 October 1811, in CHDI, XIX, 182;
O'Higgins (n.d.), Carrera(1812), Congress (1823), and Gaceta ministerial de Chile (1819),
quoted in Collier, Ideas and Politics, 208, 209, 210.
28 Actas del Cabildo de Santiago duranteel periodo Llamadode la Patria Vieja, 1810-1814,
14 August 1810, 2d ed., J. T. Medina, ed. (Santiago: Fondo Jose Toribio Medina, 1960), 36;
Gaceta ministerial (1819), Henriquez (1812), SCL (n.d.), all quoted in Collier, Ideas and
Politics, 214, 216.
29 Antonio Jose de Irisarri, Historia critica del asesinato del gran mariscal de Ayacucho
(Havana: Casa de las Americas, 1964), 36; El Argos de Chile, 18 June 1818, in CAPC, X.
30 Gaceta ministerialde Chile, 19 June 1819, inAOH, XII, 258; El Centinela(1828), quoted
in Collier, Ideas and Politics, 181.

needed most: to come into their own majority,to empowertheir families not
their monarch, to create out of division and upheaval a unified land.
III. WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES MADE FAMILY METAPHORS

PERSUASIVE?
Theorists of language such as Max Black have suggested that any metaphor
carries to its primarysubject (for example, politics) a secondarysubject (for
example, the family) that expresses "currentopinion sharedby membersof a
certainspeech-community."Metaphorsusing the family, accordingto James
Howe, rely on a community's "complete acceptanceof the family model and
of the roles inherentin the family."31 As an historian, I cannot help asking
exactly what kind of shared opinions, accepted models, "inherent" roles,
have made the family metaphorconvincing.
The challenging analyses of political ideology duringthe Enlightenment-
by Gordon Schochet, Edwin Burrows and Michael Wallace, Philip Greven,
Kenneth Lynn, and others-have tried to identify specific family models as
the sources of political rhetoric.32But there are problems. To verify these
connectionsrequiresa good deal more digging in social history sources. And
in any case, scholars disagree about the extent to which political language
replicates family conditions. On the one hand, Greven and Lynn argue that
the political ideas of North American revolutionariescorrespondedto tem-
peramentsand experiences developed in the family circle; and Burrowsand
Wallace claim that in eighteenth-centuryEngland and North America the
preferencefor contractualover patriarchalrhetoricreflecteda "steady deteri-
orationof patriarchalauthoritywithin the family itself."33 On the otherhand,
31 Max Black, "More about Metaphor," in Metaphor and Thought, Ortony, ed., 28-29;
James Howe, "Carrying the Village: Cuna Political Metaphor," in Social Use of Metaphor,
Sapir and Crocker, eds., 158.
32 Gordon J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought:The AuthoritarianFamily and
Political Speculationand Attitudes, especially in Seventeenth-CenturyEngland (Oxford:Black-
well, 1975), 64-72; Edwin G. Burrowsand Michael Wallace, "The AmericanRevolution:The
Ideology and Psychology of National Liberation," Perspectives in AmericanHistory, 6 (1972),
255-94; Philip J. Greven, Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial
Andover, Massachusetts(Ithaca:Cornell UniversityPress, 1970), 281-82; idem, The Protestant
Temperament:Patterns of Child-Rearing,Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977), 336-39; Kenneth S. Lynn, A Divided People (Westport,
Conn.: GreenwoodPress, 1977), 100-105; see also John J. Waters, The Otis Family in Provin-
cial and RevolutionaryMassachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North CarolinaPress, 1968),
133; Brennanand Pateman, "Mere Auxiliaries," 196-98; MarkHulliung, "Patriarchalismand
Its EarlyEnemies," Political Theory, 2:4 (November 1974), 410-19; FredWeinsteinandGerald
M. Platt, The Wish To Be Free: Society, Psyche, and Value Change (Berkeley: University of
CaliforniaPress, 1969); WinthropJordan, "Familial Politics: Thomas Paine and the Killing of
the King, 1776," The Journal of American History, 60:2 (September 1973), 299-301; Lloyd
DeMause, Foundations of Psychohistory (New York: Creative Books, Inc., 1982), 113-16.
33 Greven portrays militant revolutionary attitudes as a response to fathers who asserted
absoluteauthorityover their sons, while Lynn sees in independenceideology a responseto fathers
who grantedsons autonomy. Greven, ProtestantTemperament,335-61; Lynn, A Divided Peo-
ple, 68-69, 99-100; Burrows and Wallace, "American Revolution," 255.

Schochet says he cannot point to changes in English family structurethat

would explain "a growing emphasisupon contractualreciprocity"in political
ideology. Moreover, the diversity of family models used in political theory in
that era, concludes R. W. K. Hinton, indicatesthat "these models have to be
regarded almost purely as intellectual constructions."34 No wonder most
historians stop short of latching political rhetoriconto family structure.
Deriving metaphorsfrom family experience brings up additionalcomplex-
ities in the Chilean case. There, I think family metaphors worked partly
because they touched on local family issues, and partlybecause they had the
cachet of Europeanimports. I want to examine first the appeal of the family
metaphor as a convention of political thought, passed from one setting to
another,and then its appealin a context wherekinshipdominatedsocial life-
and would have dominatedpolitical life but for the colonial system.
The Appeal of ConventionalRhetoric

The language of politics has often made use of the family: sisterhood is
powerful, brotherhoodof man, founding fathers, mothercountry, fatherland.
The connotationsof these few examples show thatthe most divergentphiloso-
phies have invoked images of the family--images that crop up among most
cultures of the world, among ancients and moderns, conservativesand radi-
cals. In particular,Europeanpolitical theorists of the seventeenthand eigh-
teenth centuries pressed the family analogy into service. On one side, pa-
triarchalistsjustified monarchyand empireby highlightingthe father'scontrol
over his family. On the other, advocates of the social contract, meeting the
terms of the patriarchalists,urged definitive restraintson paternaland there-
fore on monarchicalpower.
Two political traditions,patriarchalmonarchistand contractualrepublican,
met head on in the upheavalsof the North and South Americancolonies. Far
from the European center, the colonials themselves, we are beginning to
discover, were also generatingversions of the familiar imagery. They made
the case for monarchy, typically, the way one Spaniardserving in America
did as he asked, "What else is a kingdombut an extendedfamily in which the
king is the father, for the authorityof kings and fathersareboth emanationsof
divine authority?"Loyal subjects in late colonial Chile defended the empire
in the same way: "Our august sovereign . . . seeing himself more as father
than as master . . . loves his people and makes himself loved by them." The
highest praise for a captain general (governor of Chile) was that he had
34 Schochet, Patriarchalism, 72; R. W. K. Hinton, "Husbands, Fathers, and Conquerors,"

Political Studies, 16:1 (February1968), 66. Evidence for the breakdownof patriarchalauthority
in the eighteenth-centuryEnglish family appearsin summaryin RandolphTrumbach,TheRise of
the Egalitarian Family: Aristocratic Kinship and Domestic Relations in Eighteenth-Century
England (New York: Academic Press, 1978), 288-90; Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and
Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harperand Row, 1977), 655-66.

"governed paternally." Royalists referredto the restorationof FerdinandVII

after Napoleon's defeat as the returnof the "true father."35
But anothertheory had emerged in Europe-in fact, among the colonizing
powers-which derived political obligations not from paternalauthoritybut
from social contracts. Spanish Americans found the case against absolute
monarchyin works of English and Frenchliberalphilosophers,whose books
reached colonial cities, openly or clandestinely, almost as rapidly as they
reached Europeans.36Or they read the Spanish theorist Francisco Suarez,
who claimed that the people have a naturalright to resist abuses of power.
Moreover, the ideas of the NorthAmericaninsurgentsreachedSpanishAmer-
ica-even its southwesterncorner-in translatedbooks, leaflets from mer-
chant ships, reportsin Spanish newspapers. So patriotsin Chile could have
picked up their family imagery from what they read in Suarez (the social
contract is "formed by the coalition of a number of families"), in Locke
(when the son "comes to thatestate thatmade his fathera Freeman,the Son is
a Freemantoo"), or in Paine ("Is it the interestof a man to be a boy all his
life?").37
Enlightenmentinspirationsoccurringin both the Spanish and the English
colonies have been tracedby historians,as have otherresemblances:the ways
Americansin both hemispheresattackedcolonialism, resentedincreasedcen-
tralization, asserted cultural uniqueness, demanded representativegovern-
ment.38What has gone unnoticedis a kindrednessin the political metaphors
of independence. For example, North American rebels habituallyidentified
colonial oppression with slavery, as BernardBailyn documents. And as the
35 Joaquinde Finestrad(1789), quoted in John Leddy Phelan, The People and the King: The
ComuneroRevolutionin Colombia, 1781 (Madison:Universityof Wisconsin Press, 1978), 213;
the otherquotationsare:Luis Campino, in Meza Villalobos, La concienciapolitica, 312; Francis-
co Meneses, in Conversacioneshistoricas de Claudio Gay con algunos de los testigos y actores
de la independenciade Chile, 1808-1826, GuillermoFeliu Cruz, ed. (Santiago:EditorialAndres
Bello, 1965), 24; Viva el Rey, gaceta del gobierno de Chile, 27 November 1815, in CAPC, II,
11.
36 On European Enlightmenment influences, see Collier, Ideas and Politics, 35-43;
Humphreysand Lynch, Origins, 31-51; ArthurP. Whitaker,ed., Latin America and the En-
lightenment(Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1961); Mario G6ngora, Studies in the Colonial
History of Spanish America (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1975), 177-93.
37 Francisco Suarez, Selectionsfrom Three Works(Oxford:ClarendonPress, 1944), II, 365;
Locke quotedin Schochet, Patriarchalism,250; Paine quoted in Burrowsand Wallace, "Ameri-
can Revolution," 215.
38 See Whitaker, Latin America, 53-69; Humphreys and Lynch, Origins, 75-93; Mario
Rodriguez, "The Presence of the American Revolution in the ContemporaneousSpanish
World," Proceedings of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies, 6 (1977-79),
15-24; HaroldEugene Davis, "Ideas in the IndependenceMovementsof Mexico and the United
States," Proceedings of the Pacific Coast Council on Latin American Studies, 6 (1977-79),
1-13; Lewis Hanke, ed., Do the Americas Have a CommonHistory: A Critiqueof the Bolton
Theory(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964); Robert Detweiler and Ramon Ruiz, Liberationin
the Americas: ComparativeAspects of the IndependenceMovementsin Mexico and the United
States (San Diego: The CampanilePress, 1978); RichardB. Morris, The EmergingNations and
the AmericanRevolution (New York: Harperand Row, 1970), 129-157.

searchinganalysis of Burrowsand Wallace shows, they likened the empireto

a family. "No other formulationof the ties that bound the empire was em-
ployed so frequentlyor so deliberatelyor so consistentlythroughevery phase
of the imperialcontroversy." "A call for filial autonomy," accordingto Jay
Fliegelman, was the quintessentialmotif" of the NorthAmericanRevolution.
Burrows and Wallace, Kenneth Lynn, Winthrop Jordan, and others have
examined such formulations as these: the king, "under the characterof a
parent, persists in behaving as a tyrant," citizens of Virginia complained;
Benjamin Franklinargued, "let not Britain seek to oppress us, but like an
affectionate parent endeavor to secure freedom to her children"; Thomas
Paine gave George III only "the pretendedtitle of FATHER OF HIS PEO-
PLE"; Abigail Adams called England "our no longer parentState but tyrant
State"; John Adams asked, "Have not children a right to complain when
parents are attemptingto break their limbs?" and Jefferson observed, "We
were now grown up and felt ourselves strong."39
Colonial children, Americans were saying, may owe loyalty to a parent,
but surely not to a despot-not to suspected ministersand a bankruptParlia-
ment, in the North Americancase, nor to corruptadvisersand the Napoleonic
usurper,in the South American. And above all, no loyalty, as Sim6n Bolivar
insisted in his famous "JamaicaLetter," to the deviantcountrythat "kept us
in a state of permanentchildhood."40
Evidently revolutionariesin both hemispheres grasped the advantagesof
taking up the family formula. But they made it speak for growth and genera-
tional replacementinstead of authority.As adaptedby Chilean patriotsfrom
Europeanwritings, from North America, and from their own royalists, the
family metaphor carried to its audience all the efficacy of conventional
wisdom.
The Appeal of Family Rhetoric in a Family-centeredWorld

The fact that similar family imagery showed up in the English and Spanish
colonies may suggest that it was merely the political jargon of the age. But I
argue that the most effective political metaphorsdraw on lived experiences.
We should therefore look for resemblances between Chileans and North
Americansnot only in their use of languagebut in their family arrangements.
In fact, there is evidence in both places that advancementin tradeand politics
depended on family connections, that elite status derived from family cohe-
39 BernardBailyn, The Ideological Origins of the AmericanRevolution(Cambridge:Harvard
University Press, 1973), 235-46; Burrows and Wallace, "American Revolution," 168ff. Jay
Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority,
1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 3. The Virginians, Paine, and
Abigail Adams quoted in Jordan, "Familial Politics," 299, 301; Franklinin Bailyn, Ideological
Origins, 89; John Adams and Jeffersonin Lynn, A Divided People, 104, 105; see also DeMause,
Foundations, 113-16.
40 "Jamaica Letter," 6
September 1815, in Humphreysand Lynch, Origins. 263.

i68 MARY LOWENTHAL FELSTINER
sion over several generations,and thatthe revolutionarygenerationstrove for

independencefrom fatherly authority.41
A conventional formulationcan move an audience to fresh insight if it
summons political recognition and personal experience at the same time.
Family metaphors built their fund of allusions on Creole experience in
Chile-specifically, on the predominanceof kinship in social arrangements,
on the resentmentof paternalism,and on the defense of nepotism.
While allusions to our Chilean brothersand our American family could
appeal to the experience of any Creole, commonly used phraseslike "birth-
right," "patrimony," and "father of the country" direct us to propertied
families, which in this revolution were the ones that had to be reached first.
The propertiedfamily in Chile dominatedthe lives of its individualmembers,
from baptismthroughmarriageto burial. A family generatedproductionand
consumption,loans and patrimony.It was the locus for education,recreation,
hospitalization, even conspiracy. Nuclear families coalesced into clans
through cousin marriages, economic partnerships,and close residence pat-
terns. In fact, relatives in Santiago lived in such proximity that political
meetings were hardlydistinguishablefrom family gatherings.42The organiz-
ing of the revolutionpassed by word of mouth.
The elite in Chile owed its identity and status to the family system more
thanto anythingelse. Wealthymen of Santiagomade it theirbusiness to keep
colonial resources in the hands of a limited numberof families. The same
system developed all over late colonial Spanish America, as we see in Doris
Ladd's signal work on the Mexican nobility, and in other studies.43As the
41 See
Greven, Four Generations; Waters, Otis Family; Diana Balmori and Robert Op-
penheimer, "Family Clusters: GenerationalNucleation in Nineteenth-CenturyArgentina and
Chile," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 21:2 (April 1979), 231-61; Mary
Lowenthal Felstiner, "The LarrafnFamily in the Independenceof Chile, 1780-1830" (Ph.D.
diss., Stanford University, 1970).
42 Informationaboutgodparents,marriagesamong relatives, residences, and family economic
networkscomes mainly from the Archivo de los Escribanosde Santiago and the Archivo de los
Notarios de Santiago. See Mary LowenthalFelstiner, "Kinship Politics in the ChileanIndepen-
dence Movement," Hispanic AmericanHistorical Review, 56:1 (February1976), 59-61; idem,
"LarrafnFamily," 28-52. On residence patterns, see also Jos6 Zapiola, Recuerdos de treinta
anos (1810-1840) (Santiago:G. Miranda, 1902), 280-309; Carlos StuardoOrtfz, "Vecinos de
Santiago en 1808," Boletin de la Academia Chilena de Historia, 26:60 (1959), 205-21.
43 Studies show similarities in elite family behavior all over colonial Latin America. For
example, Stephanie Blank, "Patrons, Clients, and Kin in Seventeenth-CenturyCaracas," His-
panic American Historical Review, 54:2 (May 1974), 260-83; Donald Ramos, "Marriageand
the Family in Colonial Vila Rica," Hispanic American Historical Review, 55:2 (May 1975),
200-225; John Norman Kennedy, "Bahian Elites, 1750-1822," Hispanic AmericanHistorical
Review, 53:3 (August 1973), 415-39; Arnold J. Bauer, Chilean Rural Societyfrom the Spanish
Conquestto 1930 (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1975); David A. Brading, Miners
and Merchantsin BourbonMexico, 1763-1810 (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1971);
StuartB. Schwartz, Sovereigntyand Society in Colonial Brazil (Berkeley:Universityof Califor-
nia Press, 1973); Phelan, People and the King; Susan Migden Socolow, The Merchants of
Buenos Aires, 1778-1810: Family and Commerce (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press,

Notarial Archives of Chile show, this system included legacies, entails,

trusts, credit, partnerships, and nepotism. Inheritance, including entailed
property, and well-arrangedmarriagesconsolidated large agriculturalhold-
ings. With the development of farm and ranch exports in the eighteenth
century, land increased in value, and profit accruedto any family that could
bring estates together and pass them on from generationto generation.Fami-
lies also securedthe financial statusof theirmembersthroughrevenuesdrawn
from a portionof ruralor urbanproperty,and grantedin trustto relativesor to
a church organization that usually supporteda relative as chaplain. These
liens were a way of transferringmoney from the land to relatives not on the
land. My work in notarial archives also disclosed a family credit system,
whereby loans were regularly made to relatives, and at a rate lower than to
nonrelatives. Family networks managed the rental of properties-for in-
stance, a cleric would rent church propertiesto relatives. And commercial
success, as well, depended on family ties. Eighteenth-centuryimmigrants,
notably the Basques, sent for younger relatives to come as apprentices;fre-
quently sons and nephews travelled abroadas agents for their fathers. These
immigrantsbuilt their enterprises, and eventually their landed fortunes, on
transnationalbusiness networks-with family membersacting as synapses-
in Peru, Spain, and elsewhere. By the second generation, family holdings
might extend into mining, trade, agriculture,and ranching.44
Like advantagesin the economy, access to the bureaucracydependedpartly
on family connections. A petitionerfor office had to presentreportsof merit
to the captaingeneralor the Spanishcourt;these letterssang the praisesof the
petitioner'srelatives as though they themselves were in line for the job. Men
could buy hereditaryoffices and pass them to their sons, and very often when
a man retired,he sold his position to a relative. Access to elected offices in the
university, town council, or church often depended on nepotism; we know
this partlybecause candidateswho lacked such advantagepointed out family
collusion to the authorities.45
As an institutionso centralto elite society, the family was boundto find its
1978); idem, "Marriage, Birth, and Inheritance:The Merchantsof Eighteenth-CenturyBuenos

Aires," Hispanic AmericanHistorial Review, 60:3 (August 1980), 387-406; JacquesA. Barbier,
Reformand Politics in Bourbon Chile, 1755-1796 (Ottawa:University of OttawaPress, 1980);
Doris M. Ladd, The Mexican Nobility at Independence, 1780-1826 (Austin: The Universityof
Texas Press, 1976).
44 On family business networks in Chile, see Felstiner, "Kinship Politics," 60-61; Sergio
Villalobos, "El comercio extranjero a fines de la dominaci6n espafola," Journal of Inter-
American Studies, 4 (October 1962), 537-39.
45 Some
typical petitions for office: Solicitaci6n, 1803, Fondo Varios, vol. 418, pieza 4;
Domingo Amunitegui Solar, La sociedad chilena del siglo XVIII: Mayorazgos i titulos de
Castilla, 3 vols. (Santiago: ImprentaBarcelona, 1901-1904); Relaci6n de examen, 27 April
1790, Real Audiencia, vol. 598, pieza 2; 13 September1790, vol. 1662, pieza 4; vol. 2787, pieza
7. On the importanceof family relationsfor acquiringoffices, see Barbier,Reformand Politics,
109, 192-93.

way into political ideology. The use of family metaphorscame readily to

those for whom kinship networksguaranteedsocial position, for whom dys-
function of the family system-say, denial of a birthright-conjured up im-
ages of real deprivation.
The Problem of Paternalism
Patriotsevidentlyjudged that their contemporarieswould respondwith right-
eous outrage to metaphorsabout the "right of a person whose minorityhas
expired."46 To know whether references to sons outgrowing their tutelage
drew upon actual conditions within elite families, it would help to have
informationas yet uncompiled, such as the averageage of leaving the parental
home, of marriage,of first officeholding, of receiving legacies or otherparen-
tal gifts. A study of eighteenth-centurymarriagesand land transfers, like
Philip Greven's on colonial Massachusetts,or RandolphTrumbach'son En-
gland, could tell us a good deal about the dependencyof sons.
Even without this information,we do know some things aboutelite family
organization which might indicate why patriot language could play on a
horror of prolonged childhood. Some accounts suggest that children were
directedtowardadultroles at an early age. "When they scarcelybegin to talk,
they startto command," wrote an observerin Chile; "a slave or servantis put
at their disposal." The Creole boy, "as soon as he can wear trousers, is
attired in the highest fashion." In a typical portrait, the twelve-year-old
grandson of a colonel wears a miniaturecolonel's uniform, epaulettes and
all.47 Childrenoften ended schooling at age twelve or fourteen,at which time
the parents acquiredhusbands for the girls and nominal offices, regimental
posts, or titles for the boys.
Yet these young adults had to rely on older relatives for their offices and
incomes, dowries and legacies-in fact, for virtuallyall the economic prac-
tices safeguardedby the family.48 When a parentdied, half the legacy, by
Spanishlaw, went to the survivingspouse, who therebyacquiredmuch great-
er resourcesthanthe children. The otherhalf had to be dividedequally among
all the sons and daughters, leaving precious little to any one son waiting to
come into his own. Small wonder that the judicial archives turnup so many
lawsuits broughtby sons against fathers who monopolized the family busi-
ness, or against widowed mothers who lived on in style.
Younger men, in order to get married, negotiated with older men, who
46
IndependenceManifesto (1818) in Manning, Diplomatic Correspondence.III, 902.
47 Felipe G6mez de Vidaurre, Historia geogrdfica, natural v civil del reino de Chile, in
Colecci6n de historiadoresde Chile y de documentosrelativos a la historia nacional (Santiago:
ImprentaUniversitaria,1889), XV, 292, hereaftercited as CHDN;portraitin Jaime Eyzaguirre,
Historia de Chile: Genesis la nacionalidad (Santiago:Zig-Zag, 1965), 394.
48 Socolow gives similarexamples of paternalpower in Buenos Aires in Merchantsof Buenos
Aires. 33-39.

sometimes threatenedto disinherit sons for misalliance, and who controlled

the choices and dowries of marriageablewomen. Genealogies corroborate
what observersnoted-that "fatherspreferfor theirdaughtersthe Spaniardto
the Creole." These fathers often looked down on young Creole men: "Born
in abundance, raised with magnificence, fed with largesse, gratified in all
these things, they grow up unattachedto money," whereas "the Spaniards
are the only ones who get rich quick." Creole families with titles and entails,
as Jacques Barbierpoints out, ran after marriagealliances with Spanishoffi-
cials.49 In these ways the sons and daughtersin Creole families paid the price
of paternalpower.
To feel capable at an early age, yet be held back from positions of responsi-
bility until later-that was the predicamentpatriotsequated with tyrannyin
government. Fathers "rule like kings in their homes," stated the Aurora de
Chile. And the patriotjournalistAntonio Jose de Irisarriforcefully rephrased
the family metaphorin rememberinghis own father, whose "will had to be
the law of his house, and against that legislative, executive, and judicial
despotism all in one, there were no individualguarantees."50
Spanishpolicy made it easy for propagandistssuch as Irisarrito connectthe
disadvantages of the young in families and in the state. For example, the
youngest of the sixteen Spanish governors of Chile in the 1700s was forty-
seven; their average age was sixty. In contrast, the two dozen most active
patriots averaged about age forty in 1810, and most of the vanguardwas
young. O'Higgins was thirty-two, the Carrerabrotherswere twenty-eight,
twenty-five, and eighteen, Irisarriwas twenty-four.They may have felt a kind
of age solidarity. "Don't trust anyone over forty," BernardoO'Higgins was
advised by Francisco de Miranda, the Venezuelan revolutionary.51
The posts these young men held promisedonly slow, small advancements.
Their expectations of inheritancehad to adjustto family circumstances-the
equal division requiredby law, financial difficulties, a lack of entails, and a
surfeit of heirs. Moreover, many of the revolutionaryleaders-the Larrain
brothers, the Carrerabrothers, Irisarri,Mackenna, O'Higgins, Henriquez-
had no children of their own at the time of the revolution. In the equation
49 Chileanelite women tended to marrybetween ages fourteenand twenty-one, and marriages

were arrangedbetween cousins as early as age seven. Thirty-twowas the averagemarriageage of
seventeen titled Creole men whose careers I followed. By law, no child under age twenty-five
could marrywithout parentalapproval;even over age twenty-five, lack of parentalconsent could
mean forfeiting dowry and inheritancerights. Jose MariaOts, Institucionessociales de la Amer-
ica Espaiola en el periodo colonial (Buenos Aires: ImprentaLopez, 1934), 121; quotationsfrom
ThaddausHaenke, Descripcidn del reyno de Chile (Santiago:Nascimento, 1942), 99; G6mez de
Vidaurre,Historia geogrdfica, 289; JacquesA. Barbier, "Elites and Cadresin BourbonChile,"
Hispanic AmericanHistorical Review, 52:3 (August 1972), 416-35.
50 Aurora de Chile, 28 May 1812, p. 63; Antonio Jose de Irisarri,El cristiano errante:novela
que tiene muchode historia, GuillermoFeliuiCruz, ed. (Santiago:ImprentaUniversitaria,1929),
25.
51 AOH, I, 21.

between colony and family they had every reason to see themselves as the
sons without prospects.
The parental origins of patriot leaders may also have disposed them to
identify colonialism with paternalism.Trackingdown the relativesof twenty-
four revolutionaryleaders in Chile, I found that their mothers, wives, and
sisters were generally born in Chile, but not their fathers.52We know far too
little about the influence of women relatives in inspiring revolutionaryde-
sires. Historians have tended to see Creole grievances developing only in
public, all-male institutions-town councils, church, military. But according
to contemporaries,the discussion of grievancesand the organizationof revolt
took place in the salons of educated women like JavieraCarreraand Luisa
Recabarren-that is, in the women's sphere, where relativeshad always come
together.53
Most of the fathersof these revolutionaryleaders, on the other hand, were
born outside Chile, almost half in Spain, and most served in some partof the
colonial administration.In fact, independenceleadersall over SpanishAmer-
ica-Francisco de Miranda,Jose de San Martin,MarianoMoreno, Agustinde
Iturbide-were sons of Spaniards,often of Spanish officials. Many of these
fathershad emigratedfrom the Basque provinces, a region retainingits own
language and family law, and demandingsome autonomyfrom the Spanish
Crown.54
The fathersof the revolutionarygenerationin Chile both representedSpan-
ish power and were subject to it. It was a complex lesson for the sons to sort
out. The Spanish immigrants'successes, which their sons dependedon, and
their setbacks, could both be attributedto Spanish policies. For instance,
Ambrosio O'Higgins, father of the principal independenceleader Bernardo
O'Higgins, arrivedin Chile a bankruptmerchant,was then promotedup the
militaryladderto the very top, the viceroy of Peru, and then dismissed. Other
fathers, too, learned that the Spanish governmentcould betray its servants.
Jose Perfecto de Salas, fatherof the patriotManuelde Salas, lost his position
as chief advisor to the viceroy. His son-in-law, Jose Antonio Rojas, later an
active revolutionary, spent years in Spain trying to vindicate him. Finally,
Salas was kicked upstairsto an office in Spainhe did not want, and died while
52 Birthplacesof mothers of twenty-fourrevolutionaryleaders:Chile (15), Peru (2), Ireland

(1), unknown (6). Of wives: Chile (11), unknown (8), unmarried(5). Of fathers:Spain (10),
Chile (8), Ireland(2), Argentina(1), Peru (1), unknown (2). See Felstiner, "LarrainFamily,"
appendix.
53 Juan Egafia, El chileno consolado en los presidios (1825), AOH, XX, xxi; Grez, Las
mujeres, 54-55; Antonio S. OndarzaO., Donia Javiera Carrera, heroina de la Patria Vieja
(Santiago:EditorialNeupert, 1967), 17-37.
54 On Basques in Chile, see Luis ThayerOjeda, Navarros v vascongados en Chile (Santiago:
G. E. Miranda, 1904); idem, Elementos etnicos que han intervenidoen la poblaci6n de Chile
(Santiago: ImprentaLa Ilustraci6n, 1919); Benjamin Vicufa Mackenna, Los orijenes de las
familias chilenas (Santiago: G. E. Miranda, 1903), I.

travellingthere.55Irisarri'sfather, an immigrantwho gained fabulouswealth,

ended up bankrupt, and his favorite project, the Economic Society of
Guatemala, was abolished by the Crown without explanation.
Many of these fathers had taught their sons both service to Spain and
commitmentto Chile; they had built public works, founded educationalso-
cieties, written books about local history and geography. As ideas for inde-
pendence developed, some patriotleaders (like the Carreraand LarrainSalas
brothers)had the supportof their fathers, while others (like O'Higgins and
Francisco Antonio Perez) faced bitter opposition from fathers who had de-
voted their lives to Spanish service.56
When patriotsrallied aroundthe young BernardoO'Higgins-later hailed
as fatherof his country-something besides his talents may have counted in
his favor. As the respectful but independence-mindedson of a Spanish offi-
cial-in fact, the illegitimate son of the viceroy of Peru-his position
matched, and even elevated, thatof many otherrevolutionaries.57In essence,
the patriots were not turning against their own fathers; they were turning
against what their fathershad accepted, paternalpower in service of a greater
power. They were demanding their birthrightin a society where privilege
went to fathers, to older men, to Spaniards.Thatthe threeoften came together
in one person helped the revolutionariesspeak a common language in their
demands.
Colonial Restrictions on Family Rights

A paternalistjustification for empire must have sounded obsolete as soon as
the balance between colonizer and colonized changed. Colonial allegiance
had depended on the belief of Creoles that their regions were marginalout-
posts of Spanish civilization, and that they needed backupsupportamid seas
of Indians and Africans. But Spain was faltering at a time when educated
men, touched by the Enlightenment,expected more from their government.
The constancy of war and the antics of Spanish ministers had severed the
word Bourbonfrom the concept of reform. "I heardmy fathersay," Irisarri
recounted, "that this America would separatefrom Spain the day the metrop-
olis [Spain] suffered by comparison."58The numeroustrips Creoles made to
55 Domingo AmunateguiSolar, Personajes de la colonia

(Santiago:ImprentaBalcells, 1925),
218.
56 Jose Perez Garcia, Historia de Chile, CHDN
(Santiago: ImprentaElzeviriana, 1900),
XXIII; Robert Jones Shafer, The Economic Societies in the Spanish World(1763-1821) (Syr-
acuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1958), 195-213; Jose Toribio Medina, Diccionario
biogrdfico colonial de Chile (Santiago: ImprentaElzeviriana, 1906), 678; Irisarri,El cristiano,
302-3; Bernardoto Ambrosio O'Higgins, 29 June 1800, AOH, I, 13.
57 BernardoO'Higgins later tried to imitate the
qualities of governancewhich won his father
admiration,even after independence. Samuel Haigh, Sketches of Buenos Ayres and Chile (Lon-
don: J. Carpenter, 1829), 166; Collier, Ideas and Politics, 227.
58 Irisarri,El cristiano, 302-3.

the Spanishcourtto presenttheircases and qualificationshelpedthem unmask

the superiorface Spain turnedtowardthe colonies. It was, one Chileanwrote
home, "a countryof great poverty and quixotry, with a lack of all food and
clothing," and worse yet, "an oversupplyof women andofficers."59 Creoles
began to believe that their frontierland no longer needed paternalprotection.
They were importingwhat they needed, exportingtheirown products,study-
ing at their own university, minting their money; all this was altering their
self-image as minors in the colonial family. If the deference of inferior to
superior was no longer appropriate,then Creoles need not tolerate Spain's
control of their future-a control, the patriotsfelt, that violated inalienable
rights.
For these patriots,the inalienablerightsof the individualhad come to mean
those of the family, particularlyin the matterof access to offices. Creoles all
over SpanishAmerica claimed that they could not acquireoffices as easily as
Spaniards. For example, of the twenty-five captains general in eighteenth-
centuryChile, only one Creole served, in an eight-monthinterim. The mem-
bers of the high court-the Audiencia-were also mainly Spaniards,though
at times Creoles served. Throughoutthe colonies, as MarkBurkholderand D.
S. Chandlershow, only six of the ninety-ninehigh courtjudges had served in
their birthplaces. In Chile, Spain did grant a majorityof its offices in the
church, regiments, and civil service to Americans, but often broughtthese
Americansfrom other colonies-as was the case with most of Chile's Creole
bishops. And men born in Chile got posted to Spain or othercolonies. More-
over, the Crown, with increasingfrequency and severity, prohibitedits offi-
cials from makingmarriageswith local families; after 1801 threepermitswere
refused for every one granted.60
As Creole officeholding in Chile shows, the Crown's purpose in all this
was not so much to exclude Americansfrom office as to precludeinterference
from family influence and pressure. This policy reflected the Spanish Bour-
bon overhaulof colonial administrationin the late 1700s, which amountedto
a recolonizationof the colonies, a rejectionof slackerpracticesallowing local
influence. The archives in Chile tell this story clearly; in case after case, the
captaingeneral and Audiencia intervenedto stop nepotism in the town coun-
cils, the church,the religious orders, the university.Especiallyafter 1808, the
captaingeneralpressed these corporationsto accept his favoredcandidatesfor
59 Jaime Eyzaguirre, "El doctor don Miguel de Eyzaguirre, universitarioy magistrado,

1770-1821," Boletin de la Academia Chilena de Historia, 22:53 (1955), 158. Burrows and
Wallace found a similar shift in the self-perceptionof NorthAmericanswhen materialconditions
changed: "American Revolution," 284-87.
60 Humphreysand Lynch, Origins, 250-60; Gonzalo Vial Correa, "Teorfa y practicade la
igualdaden Indias," Historia, 3 (1964), 87-163; Meza Villalobos, La conciencia politica, 250;
MarkA. Burkholderand D. S. Chandler,From Impotenceto Authoritv:The SpanishCrownand
the AmericanAudiencias, 1687-1808 (Columbia:Universityof MissouriPress, 1977), 134, 91,
96, 110. For detailed examples of Bourbon attacks on local influence in Chile, see Barbier,
Reformand Politics, 110, 113, 187.

office and remove others. If a corporationobjected, he chargedit with valuing

"family relations . . . more than what is right."61
These policies were threatening the use of family collusion-the best
means Creoles had for advancement-at the very time when younger men
needed to rely on family networks more than ever. A marked increase in
population, along with the establishmentof a law school, had expandedthe
numberof aspirantsfor bureaucraticappointment.In Santiago (and similarly
in Buenos Aires, as Susan Midgen Socolow has shown), the parcellingout of
merchants'legacies among growing numbersof childrenhad made the gener-
ation at Independenceless secure than the one before.62Few Creoles in Chile
could afford to buy titles or permitsto entail estates-two ways of guarantee-
ing the family's future. Families which did pay the Crown's price for these
privileges remained royalist during Independence, except for the few with
relatives on the patriot side.63
But the group from which patriotleaderscame, mostly sons or descendants
of merchantsand officials, had to be able to supportthemselves in all the
institutions-military, church, university, bureaucracy-increasingly con-
trolledby Spain. Competitionamong Creoles for these posts ended in lawsuits
and appeals carried to the Spanish court. Some Creoles began to think that
administrativepolicy was the obstacle-not because it excluded Americans
from office, but because it jeopardized the prospects of younger men, and
underminedthe advantagesof family connections.
Official suspicion of nepotism, and official tamperingwith family appoint-
ment systems, stirredup antagonismsthat proved crucial in the decision for
autonomy. The captain general wrote to the king in 1807 that growing sedi-
tion in Chile could be traced to the rage of a family like the Larrainsat the
governmentpolicy againstnepotism. Anotherroyalistobserversaid thatfami-
ly challenges to official interventions "influenced the independenceof the
country."64By 1810 the authoritieswere expressly equatingfamily alliances
with conspiratorialfactions. A hostile witness describedone such faction: "A
party has formed which does nothing but what the canon Larrainand his
brotherFray Joaquinwant; they relay the message of what has to be done to
their brother-in-law Perez, their brother don Diego, their nephew
Ramirez."65It was precisely this kind of relay system thatbroughtinto being
61 Felstiner, "Kinship Politics," 64-66; Captain General Garcia Carrascoto the

King, 27
August 1810, CHDI, IX, 7.
62 Marcello Carmagnani, "Colonial Latin American
Demography:Growth of the Chilean
Population, 1700-1830," Journal of Social History, 1:2 (Winter 1967), 187-91; Burkholderand
Chandler,From Impotence, 115-116; Socolow, "Marriage," 405.
63 Felstiner, "Kinship Politics," 72-73.
64 El presidente de Chile, 12 August 1807, CHDI, XVIII, 96; Manuel Antonio Talavera,
Revoluciones de Chile, CHDI, XXIX, 32, 38-39; Jose Ignacio Arangua in Conversaciones
hist6ricas, Feliu Cruz, ed., 7, 9.
65 Jose Joaquin Rodriguez Zorrilla, 26 August 1810, CHDI, IX, 46-47; see also Garcia
Carrascoto the King, 27 August 1810, CHDI, IX, 17-26; and CHDI, XXV, 235.

an autonomousgovernment. At the first meeting which called for a patriot

junta, almost half of the signatories were related to one another. In fact, a
small genealogy traced aroundtwenty-fourpatriotleaders in 1810 unfolds a
surprisingpattern;although their names differ, many were closely relatedto
each other. A numberwere tied by birthand marriageto the Larrainfamily,
while a second groupcenteredon the Carrerafamily. A small numberhad no
local Santiago family ties; the most famous of these, BernardoO'Higgins,
soon attachedhimself to the Larrainclan.66
Historianstoo rarely think of the family as an agent of social change, as
TamaraHarevenhas pointed out.67 In this case they have missed the kinship
politics self-evident to patriots. Family grievances and ambitionshad grown
into principles, family social networks into political organizations,solutions
of family problems into governmentalchanges. Kinship-basedfactions sur-
faced in the Congress of 1811 (after a coup d'etat by the Carrerasand Lar-
rains), and then dominated the government, the direction of its acts, the
access to its offices.
Patriotimages continuedto draw on the family naturally,for patriotswere
watching it in action. Family imagery, in other words, hit the markfor more
reasons than its conventionality and its availability in respected sources. It
broughtto mind the dominion of kinship in elite Creole society, the obsoles-
cence of fatherlycontrolfor a growing generationand colony, and the capaci-
ties of the family as a political organism. When patriotwriters condemned
prolongedchildhood, when they equatedall thatwas Spanishwith all thatwas
paternal, when they claimed that political authorityand political alliances
"always startedwith families,"68 when they insisted on a familial state, a
"nation of brothers"-in all this, their language spoke from the common
experience of their time.
IV. DID FAMILY METAPHORS PREDISPOSE CHILEANS TOWARD
KINSHIP POLITICS?
Metaphorscan teach somethingbeyond theirevident lesson andexplicit inten-

tion. "A metaphoricalstatement," Max Black wrote, "can sometimesgener-
ate new knowledge and insight by changing relationships" between its
primary and secondary subjects.69 This suggests that political use of the
66 One kinshipgroup includedthe LarrainSalas brothers,Mackenna,Irisarri,Perez, Rosales,
Vicuna Larrain,Martinez de Rozas, Salas, Rojas, Infante, the Errazurizbrothers;anotherin-
cluded the Carrerabrothers, sister and father; those from outside Santiago included Egana,
Henriquez,O'Higgins, Vera y Pintado. See Felstiner, "Kinship Politics," 73-74; and "Larrain
Family," appendix.
67 Tamara K. Hareven, "The History of the Family as an InterdisciplinaryField," The
Journal of InterdisciplinaryHistorv, 2:2 (Autumn 1971), 411.
68 El semanario republicano, 2 October 1813, CHDI, XXIV, 75.
69 Black, "More about Metaphor," in Metaphorand Thought,Ortony, ed., 37; othersmain-
tain that metaphorsmold communitiesand policies. See Howe, "Carryingthe Village," in Sapir
and Crocker, eds., Social Use of Metaphor, 160; Donald A. Schon, "GenerativeMetaphor:A
Perspectiveon Problem-Settingin Social Policy," in Metaphorand Thought,269.

family metaphor,like a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, can fuse the familial

with the political spheres, and thus make them appearinevitablybonded. Did
the patriots after the revolution act on the fusion latent in their rhetoric?
A partial answer might lie in comparing the family ideals projected in
political metaphors-coming of age, brotherhood-with the ideals embodied
in family law afterthe revolution. For example, in colonial parlance,the same
word had defined what bonded a king with his subjects, and a family with its
entailed estates: vinculo, signifying a perpetual, inherited, unbreakablelink.
Liberals after the revolution did associate familial with political abuses, and
so attacked entails as "simulacra of monarchies." The new government
successively abolished all vinculos-monarchy, nobility, and entail-in
which the principle of inheritancewas primogeniture,and the inheritedpriv-
ilege inalienable ratherthan contractual.Moreover, while Spanish law had
requiredunentailed propertyto be divided equally among all heirs, the new
civil codes allowed pacts among the heirs to keep the patrimonyintact.70In
eliminatingprimogeniture,in increasingcontrol by heirs over the patrimony,
new civil laws embodied the fraternalfamily model with which patriotmeta-
phors had attackedpaternalisticmonarchy.
But what had never entered this model never enteredthe laws either. The
furthestreaches of patriotrhetoric, calling up disinheritedsons and national
brothers, screened out the situationof daughtersand sisters and wives. After
independence, as a liberal measure, O'Higgins urged the model of French
legal codes, but that broughtno improvementin the statusof women; indeed,
the Code Napoleon was designed in part to counter any disruptionin the
traditionalfamily. The Chilean Civil Code, the most influentiallaw code in
LatinAmerica, did redefine marriageas a contractbetween individualsrather
than families, which reduced the paternalcontrol so irksome to Creole sons.
But it retainedprovisions of Spanish law which gave the husbandthe right to
govern his wife and children, while it reducedthe father's obligation, strictly
set in Spanishlaw, to dower his daughters.Moreover,before Chile's indepen-
dence, the wife had complete rights over all property she brought to or
acquired during the marriage, except the dowry. Afterwards, family law
collapsed her dowry and other goods into one category, so thateverythingthe
wife owned or acquired passed into the husband's hands.71 The new law-
70 7 June 1826, SCL, XII, 69. The campaign to suppressentails began in 1818, succeeded in
1857. The inheritanceportions of the Civil Code were worked out in 1853. As in Spanishlaw,
parentswere requiredto leave three-fourthsof the estate to their own children. C6digo civil de la
Republica de Chile in Obras completas de Andres Bello (Caracas:Ministerio de Educaci6n,
1954), XIII, 173, 199, 297, 299. Manuel SommarrivaUndurraga,Derecho sucesorio (Santiago:
Nascimento, 1961), 110. The heirs often ran their landed legacies as a single operation.Balmori
and Oppenheimer, "Family Clusters," 245-46.
71 The legal right to govern wife and minors included their litigation, contracts, debts, and
loans. The code did not even bother to provide reasons why women could not exercise these
rights, or manage the interestsof their own childrenif their husbandsdied. Pedro Lira Urquieta,
El c6digo civil chileno y su epoca (Santiago: Editorial Juridica, 1956), 8-65; Vicente Olea
Alvarez, Evoluci6n hist6rica y anailysiscritico de la sociedad conyugal de bienes en el c6digo

makersleft Chilean women with less access to power and patrimonythanthe

Spanishregime had ever left colonial women or men. I dwell on these details
not only because they cannot be found in writings on the transitionfrom
reactionarymonarchyto apparentlyliberalrepublic,but also becauseI believe
that this state of affairs was sponsored by imagery presentingthe family in
masculine terms.
Family law convertedrevolutionaryrhetoricinto reality by relaxing pater-
nalism toward men come of age, by reinforcing it toward so-called depen-
dents, and above all by strengtheningthe family's rightto its own patrimony.
The laws protectedthe great colonial families, so that they were able to keep
the most productiveestates aroundSantiago in their handsfor at least several
generationsafter the revolution (accordingto the 1834 and 1852 registersof
agriculturalincome).72 Far from challenging the system in which family
patrimonydeterminedsocial power, revolutionaryrhetorichad made a case
for it.
We can also see family metaphors making a case beyond the explicit
message by comparingthe rhetoricof nation-as-birthright with the proprietary
behavior of postrevolutionarypoliticians. The patriotway of thinking-that
"parties always startedwith families" and that "with time a family becomes
a nation"-gives away an intrinsicagenda for the future:patriotswantedthe
government to be a patrimony, but one which belonged neither to a single
family in Spain nor to all the citizens as individuals. If we take the hint from
family metaphorsand look at governing bodies genealogically, we find that
groups of relatives did dominate these after 1810. Patriot families like the
Larrainsshowed up in every legislative session, and kinship-boundfactions
usheredin political parties. Some families workedit "so thatno matterwhich
party prevailed," as Diana Balmori and Robert Oppenheimerput it, "the
same group, allied throughmarriage,was in power." From the 1830s to the
1870s, according to Guillermo Feliu Cruz, most of the deputies in Chilean
congresses were relatedto each other and to the administration.73The politi-
cal system the Chilean revolutionariescreatedwas a networkof kinship ties.
Postrevolutionaryleaders, I have triedto show, adjustedfamily inheritance
practices to antimonarchicalstandardsand adjustedpolitical practicesto pa-
civil chileno (Santiago: EditorialJuridica, 1966), 167-77, 192-96. Spanish colonial law con-
cerningwomen's propertyis summarizedin Asuncion Lavrinand EdithCouturier,"Dowries and
Wills: A View of Women's Socioeconomic Role in Colonial Guadalajaraand Puebla,
1640-1790," Hispanic AmericanHistorical Review, 59:2 (May 1979), 280-304.
72 Catastrode 1834, Santiago, ContaduriaMayor, segundaserie;Rejistrojeneral del catastro
formado en el ano 1852 (Santiago, 1855). The income figures in these registerswere compiledby
landownersfor tax assessments, but they do give some sense of the relative position and con-
tinuity of landholders. See also Bauer, Chilean Rural Society, 30-34.
73 See Felstiner, "Kinship Politics," 77; Balmori and Oppenheimer, "Family Clusters,"
239, 251; GuillermoFelid Cruz, Prologo a la obra 'La guerra civil de 1891' de HerndnRamirez
(Santiago: n.p., 1951), 25-26.

trimonial standards. The point is that the metaphorical language which

arousedCreoles to rebellion also predisposedthem to couple whatbelongedto
the family with what belonged to the state.
V. SIGNIFICANCE OF POLITICAL METAPHORS FOR HISTORICAL

INTERPRETATION
The four questions discussed in this essay should provide a method for in-
terpretingpolitical movements throughtheirmetaphors.Applying these ques-
tions in the Chileancase, we see how some metaphorsworkedin effective but
limited ways. On the one hand, they intensified both conscious and underly-
ing desires: "our fathersthe Araucanians"encouragedCreole resistanceand
also dischargedthe oppressors'heritage;Creoles styling themselves as slaves
did bring people to see both Creoles and slaves in a new light. Yet the
Araucanianimage exposed more distinctions between Creoles and Indians
than it laid to rest. And the slavery metaphorcontradictedCreole experience
in a slaveholding society, and thus could not help form a community of
purpose like that formed between family and state. Occasionally a political
movement locates a metaphorwith many sources of power-one which re-
veals deeply grounded motives, alludes to people's lives, and accustoms
citizens to linking public with privateexperience. Family metaphors,capable
of doing all this, proved indispensableto the expressionof patriotgrievances,
principles, and visions.
A serious study of political metaphors means identifying their cultural
contexts. Uncovering the political use of family metaphorsin Latin America
as well as in Europeand NorthAmericamay arguesimply for the accessibility
of kinshipterms in all political languageor for the prestigeof European-based
philosophy. Nonetheless, this long-standing convention takes shape differ-
ently underthe impress of particularforms of inheritance,paternalism,nepo-
tism. Commonly held images-for example, seeing subjects as children-
make their own mark when the childrenare colonies, or colonies of a colony
like Napoleon's Spain. The appeal of family imagery in more than one time
and place needs to be explainedcase by case, as does the appealof the family
itself.
Interpretingpolitical metaphorsalso means embarkingon a series of tasks.
The first is to grasp the world view that made sense of metaphoricallan-
guage-for instance, the fundamental certainty, in Chile and the English
colonies as well, that macrocosmcorrespondsto microcosmand that the best
political arrangementsconform to growth in naturalorganisms. Next comes
the task of unearthingprevalent metaphors (in some cases from the con-
strainedprinting allowed by colonial regimes), and then the task of locating
the social arrangementsthat led theorists to cast political ideas in terms of a
model like the family. Historianswill need to question why significantpoliti-

cal metaphorschanged:74why patriarchyas a model for monarchygave way

to fraternityas an ideal for republicangovernment,and to coming of age as an
image for revolution. Finally, historianscan explore the ways language and
social arrangementsact on one another.In Chile, family metaphorsaccumu-
lated their rich allusiveness because kinship organizedsocial, economic, and
political life, and then organizedthe revolution. In turn, the very languageof
the revolution legitimized family connections as a basis for republican
politics.
It matterswhat metaphorsrevolutionariesuse in achieving liberation, for
the new society may afterwardsfind itself living out the latent content of
revolutionaryrhetoric. The fact that patriotscalled themselves sons, slaves,
and Indiansdid more than symbolize their oppression. Such termsalso segre-
gated victims from exploiters and thus reinforcedCreoles' conviction of their
own blamelessness. Nothing in the patriots'languageforcedthem to see more
thanone facet of theirposition. At one level, images of patrimonyor brother-
hood suggested a rejectionof Creoles' statusas dependents.At another,these
same images implicitly accepteddependencyfor women and the poor. In this
way, the patriots' metaphoricaljustification of independencealso confirmed
their dominance.
Takingpolitical metaphorsseriously does raise dilemmas. Historiansought
to point out how political imagery helped people rebel against some in-
equalities and tolerate or ignore others, how metaphorscreated but also re-
strictedrevolutionarypossibilities. Yet it is anachronistic,even insulting, to
hold those fighting colonialism and monarchismalso responsiblefor the liber-
ations of our own time.
What we can try to see is the way the languageof this revolutionserved its
own purposes. Family imagery succeeded in impressingfeelings of depriva-
tion upon fairly comfortableSpanishAmericans, stirredthe desire to liberate
family patrimony from imperial control while binding the citizens into a
kindred nation, confirmed hierarchiesinherentin the Creole family model,
and legitimized the way families gained a controllinginterestin the state. The
Indianmetaphorcould inspireresistance, the slavery metaphorcould promise
liberation, but then what?-whereas the family metaphorcould convey both
the demandfor naturalgrowthand the crucial sense of continuityfrom past to
present to future.
74 Otherexamples of these tasks appearin the following studies: on macrocosmand micro-
cosm, see W. H. Greenleaf, Order, Empiricismand Politics: Two Traditionsof EnglishPolitical
Thought, 1500-1700 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964); on metaphorsof growth, see
MartinLandau, "On the Use of Metaphorin Political Analysis," Social Researcb, 28 (1961),
338-41; on entrepreneurialmodels in politics, see Zashin and Chapman, "Uses of Metaphor,"
319; on functionsof political metaphors,see MurrayEdelman,Politics as SymbolicAction:Mass
Arousal and Quiescence (Chicago: MarkhamPublishing Co., 1971), 66-70; on changes in
political imagery, see Michael Walzer, "On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought,"
Political Science Quarterly, 82:2 (June 1967), 191-204.


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Family Metaphors: The Language of an Independence Revolution

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The language of politics is a language of metaphor. With metaphorslike

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such a metaphorconveyed motives and purposesnot conveyed otherwise, (3)

I. DID PATRIOT DISCOURSE RELY ON METAPHORS?

Looking at the writings of patriot journalists and activists, I found three

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rebellious Indians, as oppressed slaves, and as disinheritedsons. I ask what

4 Collier, Ideas and Politics, 212-17.

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patedour cause-can work on consciousness with the power ErikEriksonhas

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12 Estimatesin GuillermoFeli6 Cruz,La abolici6n de la esclavituden Chile: estudiohist6rico

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ing moral dichotomies, denied social complexities; in focussing Creole per-

II. WHAT POLITICAL MOTIVES DID FAMILY METAPHORS CONVEY?

A Grievance against "Political Infancy"

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expired."16 Coming of age, in other words, seemed at once a naturaland a

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that the constraintsof the empire appearedarbitraryand abusive. Demanding

Political Rights: "The Property and Honour of Families"

20 Manuelde Salas in Fondo Varios, vol. 812,

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PatemanandTeresaBrennanpoint out, "for individualsto be seen as free and

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Factional divisions threatenedthe nation in its genesis, as did sectionalism,

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III. WHAT CIRCUMSTANCES MADE FAMILY METAPHORS

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Schochet says he cannot point to changes in English family structurethat

The Appeal of ConventionalRhetoric

34 Schochet, Patriarchalism, 72; R. W. K. Hinton, "Husbands, Fathers, and Conquerors,"

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"governed paternally." Royalists referredto the restorationof FerdinandVII

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searchinganalysis of Burrowsand Wallace shows, they likened the empireto

The Appeal of Family Rhetoric in a Family-centeredWorld

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sion over several generations,and thatthe revolutionarygenerationstrove for

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Notarial Archives of Chile show, this system included legacies, entails,

1978); idem, "Marriage, Birth, and Inheritance:The Merchantsof Eighteenth-CenturyBuenos

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way into political ideology. The use of family metaphorscame readily to

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sometimes threatenedto disinherit sons for misalliance, and who controlled

49 Chileanelite women tended to marrybetween ages fourteenand twenty-one, and marriages

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52 Birthplacesof mothers of twenty-fourrevolutionaryleaders:Chile (15), Peru (2), Ireland

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travellingthere.55Irisarri'sfather, an immigrantwho gained fabulouswealth,

Colonial Restrictions on Family Rights

55 Domingo AmunateguiSolar, Personajes de la colonia

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the Spanishcourtto presenttheircases and qualificationshelpedthem unmask

59 Jaime Eyzaguirre, "El doctor don Miguel de Eyzaguirre, universitarioy magistrado,

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office and remove others. If a corporationobjected, he chargedit with valuing

61 Felstiner, "Kinship Politics," 64-66; Captain General Garcia Carrascoto the

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