From 1960 to 1963, the University of Concepción, on the Pacific coast of Chile, several hours south of the capital of Santiago, hosted a Taller de Escritores, a Writers’ Workshop. Three classes of approximately ten students were each given a salary for a period of months in which they could devote themselves to full-time writing, with only the obligation to share their progress in the workshop sessions. Some of Chile’s most important writers received the grants, including the poet Enrique Lihn, the novelist José Donoso, and the playwright and filmmaker Raúl Ruiz. Other important writers, from poet Gonzalo Rojas to playwright Sergio Vodanovic to Fernando Alegría, participated in the supervision of the program.
The years of the Writers’ Workshop, in the early 1960s, were ones of cultural ferment and Cold War intrigue. Cuba’s revolution at the beginning of 1959 had upended regional and global politics, spurring discussion and desire for a broader Latin American political, economic, and cultural liberation. Cold War powers competed for the allegiance of writers with offers of inclusion and prestige. The Soviet Union built organizations through local Communist parties and international partners; the United States had several governmental bodies to facilitate cultural and academic exchange, including the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom.Footnote 1 Private foundations, like the Rockefeller Foundation, complemented government efforts, investing in exchanges and in university programs throughout the region. Postrevolutionary Cuba also created opportunities for writers to publish and participate in its revolutionary process through the prizes, juries, and events it offered via the Casa de las Américas.Footnote 2
The timing of the Workshops at Concepción, and the fact that two of the classes had financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, might seem to situate them within a network of US-aligned Cold War interests. After all, scholars have demonstrated that writers’ workshops were often entangled with US Cold War diplomacy. Paul Engle, the long-serving director of the leading Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa (and later its International Writing Program), fundraised for programs on the grounds that they would advance US interests by exposing the writers of the world to civic individualism and Americanism. “The young writer is not merely a student,” he wrote in 1959, soliciting a grant:
Far more than any other person of talent, he creates the image by which a country sees itself, and the image by which other countries also see it. This double purpose is well served at the University of Iowa because writers come here from all regions of the United States, often after early work at other colleges, and from most areas around the world. In the last few years, we have had students from Ireland, Japan, Formosa, South Korea, the Philippines, Canada, England, Sweden, all of whom go back to their native lands with their view of the United States greatly enhanced because they have found a place for their talent in the University of Iowa, in the heart of the Midwest.
As a material demonstration of its potential to contribute to US national security, the International Writing Program at Iowa (founded by Engle and his wife, Hualing Nieh Engle) received overt support from the US Information Agency, as well as a small grant arranged by a CIA case officer who was an Iowa alum. The Iowa model, Eric Bennett has argued, was supported so that it could thrive and then spread by the Rockefeller Foundation and the US government, establishing conditions under which American fiction could be institutionalized and deradicalized, encouraging a focus on interiority that would lead away from the calls for social transformation that had been more common in the “Popular Front” culture of the 1930s.Footnote 3
Such interests were certainly at work in Chile. The Chilean branch of the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom, for example, fought for control of the board of the country’s professional organization of writers, the Sociedad de Escritores de Chile, in the late 1950s and early 1960s.Footnote 4 Furthermore, the closest analogue to the workshops at Concepción was the Centro Mexicano de Escritores (CME), established in Mexico City in the early 1950s. The Rockefeller Foundation supported it for many years, hoping that it would lead to greater pan-American understanding. For more than fifty years, the CME offered primarily Mexican writers (along with a few from the United States and occasional visitors from other parts of Latin America) grants that allowed them to dedicate themselves to writing full-time for a year. Mexico’s most famous writers—from Juan Rulfo to Carlos Fuentes—wrote quintessential works while on “Rockefeller” grants. In the early 1960s, the CIA grew interested in the potential of the CME, both through the Congress for Cultural Freedom and directly. According to CIA documents, the spy agency hoped to use the CME to provide writers with “an alternative [to Communism] based on a free exchange of view [sic] and one which, in the final summation, is pro-West.” The directors of the program in Concepción visited the CME and hoped to build contacts with it over time.Footnote 5
Other than the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, the workshops at the University of Concepción were the Rockefeller Foundation’s only other investment in an institution to support creative writing in Cold War Latin America. Circumstantially, they might appear to have been a case of intended cultural manipulation for Cold War ends. But the record tells a significantly more complex story, in which professional goals had to contend with an environment shaped by the politics of the Cold War. Drawing from the previously unconsulted papers of its director, the writer Fernando Alegría, as well as other collections in Chile and the United States, this article argues that the workshops in Concepción are better understood as terrains of potential Cold War contestation rather than direct instruments of Cold War cultural diplomacy.Footnote 6 There were many layers of both personal and institutional interests at play in their creation. The Taller was made possible by the university’s goal of making itself a partner in the developmentalist project of the Rockefeller Foundation and the US government. The left-wing culture of many of the writers involved, however, soon led university officials to see their behavior as a threat to those very same goals, contributing to its short life. Understanding the interests at work in artistic projects is an important part of the cultural history of the Cold War. But we cannot replace history with conspiracy by drawing straight lines of influence through the jagged lives of writers and other artists. As this article shows, the writers made what they wanted of the workshop model, including several who tried to put their writing—and the workshop model itself—into practice in a process of social transformation in the years after the closure of the program at Concepción.Footnote 7
The first institution that shaped the Taller de Escritores was their home: the University of Concepción. The city of Concepción was founded in 1550 at the mouth of the Bío Bío river, where it marked the boundary between Spanish and Mapuche control. By the nineteenth century, it was a modest port and military outpost. In the 1870s and 1880s, coal deposits in nearly Lota, Coronel, and Lirquén introduced a small industrial economy (and a small industrial proletariat) into the regional dynamics. At the same time, professional societies formed as the city grew.Footnote 8 In 1917, a group of the city’s professionals decided that the region needed a university to support scientific and cultural development. In the absence of federal support, the local bourgeoisie and professional societies began to raise funds from donors.Footnote 9 They founded the University of Concepción in 1919 as the first private university in Chile.
The university was built on the physical model of the University of California, Berkeley, including a campanile at the center of campus.Footnote 10 The university’s first and long-serving rector, Enrique Molina, was a Freemason, and many of the university’s first generations of professors were, too. Masonic clubs—established in Chile’s port cities during the nineteenth century through contact with foreign merchants—emphasized the progress of humanity through science and culture, and in Chile strongly overlapped by the end of the nineteenth century with participation in the middle-class and anticlerical Radical party.Footnote 11 The Masonic influence was visible in the way Molina conceived of the university’s role in sharing forms of human culture—both scientific and humanistic—with the public. By 1924, the university was stable enough that Molina established a magazine of arts and culture, Atenea, whose Greek themes suggested the classical, humanistic, and belletrist orientation of the university’s self-conception.Footnote 12 This coexisted with the practical side: schools of Dentistry, Pharmacy, Industrial Chemistry, and Education that served the needs of regional development. Always in need of funds, in 1921 the university began fundraising by selling raffle tickets. Over time, this became a stable source of funding for the university, and the Lotería de Concepción, founded by Molina, the principal national lottery in Chile.Footnote 13
After thirty years as rector, Molina retired in 1956. He was replaced by David Stitchkin Branover. Stitchkin had trained in law at the University of Chile and taught law at Concepción, and likewise had an interest in literature and theater. Like Molina, Stitchkin was also a Mason, and continued Molina’s orientation toward liberal humanism. Stitchkin had ambitious plans for the university. Its provincial setting, private status, and distance from the capital of Santiago meant that state funds were not available. So, in order to serve local needs, he turned to international sources of funding. Stitchkin was very active in pursuing relationships with the US foreign aid bureaucracy known as the International Cooperation Administration (ICA, the predecessor to USAID, the US Agency for International Development), the Rockefeller Foundation, and, a few years later, the Ford Foundation and the Alliance for Progress. He presented Concepción to them as a continental leader whose private status and similarity to US universities made it an ideal partner and a safe “investment.”
Thus, the University of Concepción, with a humanistic intellectual culture and a practical orientation toward regional development, encountered the next set of institutions that came together to make the Taller de Escritores: the foreign aid auxiliaries of the United States in an era of “development.” Both the ICA, which was responsible for technical and foreign assistance for most of the 1950s, and the major US-based foundations were interested in building capacity in universities in Latin America. (ICA became USAID after Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961.Footnote 14 ) From the perspective of the US government and its major foundations, foreign aid—and investment in improvements in universities—was justified by the needs of the Cold War. “A contest, ranging across the whole ideological spectrum, is being fought for the minds of the young Chilean intelligentsia,” reads one ICA document from 1960. “An intellectual and cultural climate, well disposed to our ideas and way of life, must be created … We must expose the young Chilean intelligentsia, who tomorrow will be the leaders in their own country, and to some extent, in the hemisphere, to the American approach during their formative years.”Footnote 15 Foundation and government investments in Chilean universities, as well as grants for students and professors to study in the United States, were components of this strategy.
The US considered the “American approach” to have basically two characteristics. It was, naturally, anticommunist. “With passing years, if the local universities are not greatly improved, the disparity between what these countries have in the way of schools and what exists in other areas will become greater than it is now,” reads another foreign aid document from the same period. “This will add to their sense of frustration and add fuel to the fires of those who advocate violent and thorough-going economic and social changes.”Footnote 16 The US believed that the Soviet Union was seeking to influence technicians and professionals, and that it had to do so, as well.
At the same time, the US also considered its aid to be practical and progressive, but in a paradoxically conservative way. Historically, Latin America’s elites had gone to Europe for graduate training. But US officials were convinced that training in European universities tended to be oriented toward theory, while (North) American universities, especially its land grant universities, were focused on practical knowledge and its application to solving social problems.Footnote 17 It was this approach that US officials thought would better serve Latin American developmental needs. In providing funds to make that possible, one consequence of Cold War cultural diplomacy was to reorient graduate education in Latin America from Europe toward the US. This would, US aid officials thought, “[further] the growth of the dynamic institutions required in order for progressive economic and social changes to be made.”Footnote 18 Few US aid officials thought of themselves as politically reactionary; they believed that they were helping countries to develop in a harmonious and peaceful way, rather than along what it considered a disruptive, Marxist path. But they directed funding towards existing institutions, and anticipated that cooperation and alignment with the US-led order would result. Many—both at the time and subsequently—have identified this behavior as part of softer side of US imperialism, but US imperialism nonetheless.Footnote 19 The historian Adrián Gorelik has captured the attitude of the foundations as “reformist expansionism.”Footnote 20
ICA’s work to establish and finance university-to-university contacts were supplemented by the major US foundations. The Rockefeller Foundation, chartered in 1913, had been active in Latin America since the 1920s. Personnel often moved between the major foundations and agencies in the government. In 1955, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, in calling for programs that would meet the needs of the “underdeveloped” countries, warned that they “are borrowing ideas and aspirations and have examples of more ‘advanced’ countries before their eyes; but they lack capital, trained leadership, an educated people, political stability, and an understanding of how change is to be digested and used by their own cultures.”Footnote 21 The Ford Foundation, which established its program in Latin America in 1959, also focused on higher education. “I am persuaded,” wrote a Ford Foundation consultant after a tour of the region in 1960, “that no single area of action open to the United States and its philanthropists in Latin America is more promising per dollar than the effort to lift the level of its higher education.”Footnote 22 This was the idea that Stitchkin tried to sell to the US aid agencies and foundations: the idea of Concepción as an engine for regional growth, university reform, and, through it, democratic development.Footnote 23
The basic sciences, applied sciences, and social sciences all received investments from US foundations under this developmentalist logic. But the Rockefeller Foundation also had major programs in the humanities, both in the United States and overseas. It expected that excellence in the humanities, such as in creative writing, accompanied national development and assisted with the process of national self-reflection. It also believed that professional exchanges between countries would enrich the artistic scenes of both, while also cultivating greater international understanding. Its grant officers were professors in those fields, who generally tried to encourage the development of the types of programs that they thought were of value in the United States.
In 1955, just before Stitchkin became rector, Concepción established a new initiative: “Summer School” terms that took place in January, between semesters in the southern hemisphere. These brief sessions, on a model that had been introduced at the University of Chile in 1936, were intended to provide enrichment and education to the broader community, and break down the barriers between the university and the public. They included open events—musical performances, poetry readings, and the like—as well as classes for graduates and professionals that could be similar to the task of “university extension” in the US land grant universities.Footnote 24
And that brings us to the third constituency for the soon-to-be-created Taller de Escritores—the writers themselves. Three were essential to the creation and administration of the program: Gonzalo Rojas, Fernando Alegría, and Sergio Vodanovic. The poet Gonzalo Rojas, born in 1917, grew up near Concepción, moved to Santiago as a teenager, and studied at the University of Chile, where he had helped found the Surrealist-influenced literary group Mandrágora. In 1952, he returned to Concepción to teach, somewhat depressed by the homecoming. He had bad memories of his difficult childhood and found the city provincial and the university mediocre.Footnote 25 Perhaps it is for that reason that he was particularly eager to organize ambitious events that brought his literary friends to him. In 1955, as chair of the Spanish Department, he was placed in charge of Concepción’s Summer School. As part of the programming in 1958, Rojas organized a special “Encuentro de Escritores Chilenos,” a meeting of Chilean writers.Footnote 26 These sessions featured poetry recitals and discussion about the state of literature in the country and the responsibility of writers to their society. The siblings Nicanor and Violeta Parra were among the performers at the Summer School, and among the participants were writers Rojas had known in Santiago, some of whom would later obtain grants from the Taller de Escritores.Footnote 27
One of the writers who attended the Encuentro de Escritores in 1958—and assisted Rojas with its preparation—was Fernando Alegría. Through this connection, Alegría established a lasting relationship with the university: he would become the director of the Taller de Escritores. Nearly the same age as Rojas, Alegría was born in Santiago in 1918. He developed ambitions as a writer early, and wrote his first book, a fictionalized biography of the founder of Chile’s Socialist and Communist parties, as a teenager. In 1939, he went to the United States for a master’s degree at Bowling Green University, and then began a doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. He was offered a teaching position at Berkeley in 1948 and spent the rest of his life living in the San Francisco Bay Area, while traveling to Chile regularly. “In spite of the limbo you chose,” Pablo Neruda commented to him in a letter about his decision to settle in the United States, “your attitude is exemplary in preserving your devotion and attention to lo nuestro [i.e. Chile and Chilean culture].”Footnote 28 In 1957, Alegría published a successful novel, Caballo de copas, a picaresque work that follows a poor Chilean immigrant through the underworld of the San Francisco Bay Area, and his eventual success through a bet on a Chilean racehorse. Critics in Chile hailed it as a triumph of social criticism and credited it as an important “Chilean” novel in spite of its setting. In the press, Alegría’s position at Berkeley was presented as honoring Chile by bringing the country prestige abroad.Footnote 29
Politically, both Rojas and Alegría belonged to the independent left. Their literary generation was that of “38,” in reference to the year of the formation of Chile’s first Popular Front government. The Great Depression produced, in Chile, the most severe economic contraction in Latin America. In response, several parties of the left and center-left joined together for electoral purposes. Young people also felt the radicalizing passions of the Spanish Civil War and the moral struggle against fascism.Footnote 30 The end of the Popular Front came in 1947 when strikes at Lota—near Concepción—led the president Gabriel González Videla to accuse Communists of conspiracy against him and to intervene against the strikers.Footnote 31 He expelled members of the Communist Party from his cabinet. Even many non-Communists considered this a betrayal. The Communist Party was outlawed by the so-called “Ley Maldita” of 1948, forcing it underground. Pablo Neruda, Chile’s most important writer and a senator from the Communist Party, fled the country. The persecution gave the Party a certain amount of prestige, even among writers who were not members. Although there were right-wing writers in Chile, many more were on the left, and literary culture favored genteel fellow traveling, which remained in place after the Ley Maldita’s repeal in 1958.
As a result, gatherings of writers tended to combine discussion of literary matters with political debate, with a focus on the role of the writer in social transformation and social justice. The 1958 conference in Concepción, organized by Rojas, was billed as a meeting of Chilean writers. Its only “international” visitor was Alegría, Chilean by nationality, who joined from Berkeley. In his speech, Alegría spoke as a literary critic. Reflecting on the agenda of the “Generation of ’38,” he made the case for a renovation in all aspects of Chilean letters. Formerly dynamic trends in novels and poetry, inherited from early twentieth-century models, no longer served their purpose, he argued. Drama had devolved into melodrama. The originality of thirty years ago had given way to mass-produced mediocrity. Chilean literature had to break free from the inheritance of “costumbrista” (romantically folkloric) works. “We must carry [our novels] to the plane of big ideas, to the problems of modern man, to the complex settings of our cities, and not only those of our fields and mountains; in contact with international thought so that it may contribute with its own intellectual and ideological wealth to elucidate the destiny of mankind in the contemporary world.”Footnote 32 Alegría’s intervention, delivered on the first day of the event, initiated days of debate.Footnote 33
At the closing act of the event, Rector Stitchkin wondered, “Why, if the University has accomplished that the writers of Chile reflect on the problems of literary creation, could we not try … to create some classes for creative writing?” Stitchkin asked Alegría if he would be involved in the creation of a Writers’ Workshop. For this purpose, Alegría had several useful skills. He was both author and critic. He had worked in several genres. Although his residence in the United States was a disadvantage, it also meant that he was not tied to Santiago, unlike many of the country’s cultural elites.Footnote 34
The initiative did not get off the ground immediately, but the seed was planted. Rojas kept expanding his ambitions. In 1960, he organized, for the summer school, a “Primer Encuentro de Escritores Americanos” (First Meeting of American Writers). Expanding from the Chilean focus of the event two years prior, he sought to bring together writers from across the countries of Latin America: Ernesto Sábato and Eduardo Mallea from Argentina, Leopoldo Zea and Jaime García Terres from Mexico, Germán Arciniegas and Jorge Zalamanca from Colombia, José Antonio Portuondo from Cuba. There was, Stitchkin declared at the opening, “a lack of awareness of the other peoples of the Americas.”Footnote 35 In a time after the Cuban Revolution, a continental conference to discuss common problems seemed more urgent than ever.
Alegría was also asked to assist with the planning by inviting the Beat poets from San Francisco. After Ginsberg’s reading of his poem Howl at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955 had launched him to fame and helped establish a new poetic counterculture, Alegría had made an unauthorized translation of the poem into Spanish. He thought of the invitation to Concepción as something of an apology, showing up at City Lights Bookstore with offers to Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg. Both were delighted to make the trip.Footnote 36
Ferlinghetti, in his capacity as publisher, was interested in new writing that fit the City Lights project: its Pocket Poets series had recently released a translation of Nicanor Parra’s Anti-poems into English; and the trip produced a lasting friendship between Ginsberg and Parra.Footnote 37 Much of what Ginsberg actually wanted from the trip was drugs—he ended up staying six months in South America, searching for and eventually finding ayahuasca and yagé, which led to his collaborations with Timothy Leary.Footnote 38 But both Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg were also interested in political developments. Both were on the political left and critical of the US conduct of the Cold War. Ferlinghetti was active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and made a sympathetic visit to Cuba directly after his trip to Chile.Footnote 39
Arriving in Concepción, Ginsberg drew considerable attention. “I seem to be the only bearded man in Chile, so my photo was in all the newspapers—and children on the streets thought I was Fidel Castro’s representative,” Ginsberg recorded in his journals. Ferlinghetti did a poetry reading accompanied by jazz, and Allen Ginsberg, “perhaps the most eccentric writer of the many who arrived,” attracted attention from the press and from young fans, recommending “marijuana for everyone.”Footnote 40 Both spoke about repression in the United States. Ferlinghetti was excited by the literary cross-fertilizations taking place, while noting that Ginsberg was less impressed. “Most everybody at Conference was un-poetic,” Ferlinghetti wrote, “but one thing was most interesting, all the communists seemed to take over enough to make the whole week a big argument between pro and anti political writers. Everybody from every country got up and made fiery speeches about the workers.”Footnote 41 The local Communist party organized a tour for the writers to visit the undersea mines at Lota, where workers dug coal for a dollar a day. Ferlinghetti was stunned to see the miners emerge from the ground, in “little elevator cages, like animal cages in a zoo.” When a reporter asked him about his trip—“Whom do you see as the future of South America?”; “Whom do you consider the greatest poets in Chile?”—the only answer he gave was, “The faces of the miners at Lota.”Footnote 42
At the beginning of the week, the largest local paper—El Sur—praised the university for bringing the area the international attention it deserved.Footnote 43 But as the event went on, some of the local press grew alarmed by the political tenor of the discussion. Marxist literary critic José Antonio Portuondo’s recitation of developments in Cuba, for example, produced sustained applause.Footnote 44 The university administration grew concerned.
All the same, the 1960 conference was an opportunity for Alegría and the university to put some of their ideas in motion. After it, Alegría oversaw the creation of two academic bodies at Concepción: the Instituto de Investigaciones Literarias, a program for the study of comparative literature, and the Taller de Escritores, the Writers’ Workshop. In March 1960, before the first group of writers was chosen, before the Rockefeller Foundation donated any money to the project, Rodolfo Zañartu, the head of Concepción’s philosophy department and a close ally of Stitchkin, wrote to Alegría. “Only for the good of our university, you need to be careful with those you select to work with you,” he wrote, “after the comments made by the press in relation with the Encuentro de Escritrores. That is to say, it would do grave damage to our institution if your Department tomorrow could be tagged as ‘pro’ or [politically] ‘committed’ [i.e. left-wing].”Footnote 45 Zañartu formed part of the committee that selected writers for the second and third sessions, suggesting one way in which political considerations might have shaped career opportunities and the literary landscape: by offering more opportunities to non-leftists.
Furthermore, as he considered the role that a Taller de Escritores might play in Concepción early in 1960, Alegría visited the Centro Mexicano de Escritores in Mexico City. By this time the CME had already secured a grant for its bulletin from one of the CIA’s front foundations: its connections with CIA-affiliated groups would grow in the next few years.Footnote 46 Alegría based the form of Concepción’s workshop, at least in part, on what he saw in Mexico. There was a closed workshop system as well as open public events. There were grants that allowed writers to devote themselves to writing full-time during the period of support. Reading works aloud for discussion and analysis within the group was described as optional.Footnote 47
That May, southern Chile was shaken by an enormous earthquake, of magnitude 7.75 on the Richter scale. A third of Concepción’s buildings were destroyed, including the university’s theater. Rubble was everywhere for months, and, even in the city center, walls were sometimes held up by pitchforks stuck in the ground.Footnote 48 In spite of the difficult circumstances, the university went ahead with its first Writers’ Workshop. Some criticized the initiative as inappropriate to an underdeveloped country, especially at a moment of so much need, and compared Alegría to Christopher Columbus arriving with trinkets to deceive the locals. Others defended the program as a way of relieving writers from the bureaucratic drudgery that they often endured to make ends meet.Footnote 49 One of the participants called the inauguration of the Taller—in questionable taste, given the circumstances—“the most sensational news of the year … a spiritual earthquake.”Footnote 50
Alegría did not conceive of the workshops in political terms, but in professional ones. He wanted writing to be taken seriously as labor, and to give young writers the opportunity to develop their craft without the constant pressure of earning money. “We selected ten writers capable of producing literary work which could be taken as the expression of the present state of young Chilean literature,” Alegría informed the Rockefeller Foundation. Some were experienced authors: the novelist Nicomedes Guzmán (an old friend of Alegría and Rojas), the poets Miguel Arteche and Pablo Guíñes, the poet/essayist Mario Ferrero, and short story writer and poet Enrique Lihn. They also admitted some younger writers, including poet and essayist Jorge Tellier, novelists Christián Huneeus and Manuel San Martín, and playwrights José Chesta and Manuel Ravanal (see figure 1).
A Session of the Taller de Escritores displays the professional environment and lack of gender diversity. From Left to Right: Braulio Arenas, Alfredo Lefebvre, Christián Huneeus, Sergio Vodanovic, Rodolfo Zañartu, Fernando Alegría, Manuel Rojas
Source: Emilio Filippi, “Forja de Escritores,” Zig-Zag, January 27, 1961.
Figure 1 Long description
A black and white photograph of a group of men sitting in a row, likely in a professional setting. From left to right: Braulio Arenas, Alfredo Lefebvre, Christin Huneeus, Sergio Vodanovic, Rodolfo Zaartu, Fernando Alegra, and Manuel Rojas. They are seated at a table with papers and a typewriter in front of them. The men appear to be engaged in a discussion or meeting, with some looking at the camera and others appearing deep in thought.
Due to the administrative and budgetary problems caused by the earthquake, the session lasted only four months, from October to January. This first session was supported only by the University of Concepción. Alegría, on sabbatical from Berkeley, was able to participate the whole time. He taught lessons and supervised discussion. The group developed critique and camaraderie. When Arteche read a poem in which a solitary figure counted coins to represent avarice, the tutor Braulio Arenas said he did not understand him. Guzmán replied, “How not? That man is you,” provoking laughter from the rest of the students.Footnote 51 “Work in the Taller has been exciting and rewarding,” Alegría wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation’s John P. Harrison in December. “Discussions are always kept on a high level. Criticism is constructive, imaginative, and sound.”Footnote 52 Alegría told Harrison that in 1961 he hoped to publish a bulletin, an anthology, and establish an exchange of becarios with Mexico and the United States—similar to the operation of the CME, which already had Rockefeller’s support. (The CME, meanwhile, contemplated coordinating activities with Concepción to extend its program in Latin America.Footnote 53 ) Harrison quickly authorized $10,000 to extend the terms of the grants, although the money ended up being put towards a second group of writers in 1961 instead.
The next two sessions of the workshop had financial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, which made it possible to lengthen the terms of the writers’ sabbaticals. José Donoso (a member of the third class), in his Historia personal del “boom,” writes about Santiago literary life circa 1960 as having several features. One was precarity: almost no writer made a living from poetry or prose, and often had to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. A second was the difficulty of finding publishers and publishing opportunities. A third was isolation. The works of other Latin American writers were all but impossible to obtain outside of their own countries. It was easier, remembered Donoso, to buy books by European or North American writers in Santiago or Bogotá than it was to find works of contemporary Latin American literature. To those problems one could add censorship, formal or informal, as well as the greatest challenge of all: the limited reading public, given the high cost of books and the relatively low levels of literacy.Footnote 54
The Rockefeller Foundation thought that it could address all five of these problems. It had taken a particular interest in creative writing in the postwar period, supporting the growth of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, among others, on the grounds that a more educated population in the United States would be healthier internally and better prepared for global leadership.Footnote 55 “We are to a degree bound by our tradition, the character of our trustees, and the nature, temperament and training of our staff members,” wrote one employee in 1963. “By and large, this means that we will most often take an aesthetic position which is somewhat ‘right-wing.’”Footnote 56 Perhaps so, but the modal politics of the major US foundations was a reformist liberalism. In a place like Chile, that did not necessarily imply alignment with local economic elites (who could often be perceived as backwards) but rather with its professional classes (who offered the promise of change without revolution). The Rockefeller Foundation understood its support for the arts as a part of that broader mission: of helping a society to develop, including through the arts and humanities.
Insofar as there is evidence of any political motivations that appear in the correspondence about the Taller de Escritores in the records at the Rockefeller Archive, its objectives fit broadly within the idea that excellence in the arts is a part of national development, and independence in the arts is essential to their being able to carry out this task. Rockefeller’s John P. Harrison wrote to the Taller’s assistant director in 1960: “I am in complete agreement with you about the importance of this opportunity to realize a workshop for playwrights that will have the necessary continuity and sponsorship to become an integral part of the theatrical and cultural life of Chile.”Footnote 57 The document authorizing the grant to the Taller de Escritores asserts: “Hopefully this Workshop will provide an opportunity long looked-for by Humanities officers to support creative writing – in particular playwriting – in a situation free from undesirable pressures as to content and the author’s point of view on social and political questions.”Footnote 58 In addition, there was a hope that, by connecting the Taller to the CME, it might be possible to build a network that might lead to the eventual “Latin Americanization” of the writing centers by supporting exchanges between them, as well as increase opportunities to publish and make their works better known.Footnote 59 The Rockefeller Foundation’s plans for expanding the reading audience for Latin American authors included the internationalization of Latin American literature and their translation into English, which it hoped would contribute to greater international understanding.Footnote 60
Rockefeller’s relationship with the assistant director of the Taller de Escritores, the playwright Sergio Vodanovic, illustrates these aspects of its program. Vodanovic had already been the recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation grant, which, in 1957, allowed him to study at Yale and work with playwrights in New York. While on fellowship, Vodanovic had completed the play Deja que los perros ladren [Let the dogs bark].Footnote 61 The play tells about the life of a bureaucrat who is pressured by a minister, his childhood friend, to close a local newspaper that had exposed governmental corruption. Doing so brings the protagonist both wealth, and regrets, when his son seeks to follow in his footsteps. The Rockefeller connections helped the play secure English translation by Lysander Kemp and performances in Dallas in 1961.Footnote 62 A few years later, it was made into a feature film, the first such film in Chile in some time. Tackling these themes of political corruption was perhaps the kind of thing that the Rockefeller Foundation had in mind when it said it wanted to support work free of political pressures. Vodanovic felt comforted by the experience. “I am sure that the Rockefeller Foundation wants to help us,” he wrote to Alegría in early 1960, “but it no way to impose on us a particular way of working.”Footnote 63 One Chilean professor who remembers the era says that he and his colleagues did not see Rockefeller money as particularly political; when it arrived, it was like a gift from a “fairy godmother.”Footnote 64
The second group of writers was selected in April 1961. This time, the modest $10,000 subvention from the Rockefeller Foundation allowed Concepción to lengthen the terms of the writers’ grants to extend from the beginning of May through the end of December. The University paid other costs, including salaries for the Taller’s teachers and staff.Footnote 65 During the selection of becarios, the surrealist poet Braulio Arenas, who taught at Concepción and was part of the selection committee, wanted to make sure that women were included, because there had been none in the first workshop. But Arenas was worried about Marxists. Vodanovic, by contrast (although he was a Christian Democrat and therefore in the political “center” by Chilean standards) dismissed the concerns about admitting Marxists, but, all the same, does not seem to have prioritized gender diversity.Footnote 66
If left-wing politics had been a concern for the university—expressed at different times by Zañartu and Arenas—it seems to have been more a matter of wanting some ideological diversity rather than a matter of excluding the left. In the first class, Nicomedes Guzmán was a proletarian author who, in his writing, explored social class from a Marxist perspective. Enrique Lihn was an identifiably left-wing writer in the early 1960s. (He would later spend two years in Cuba, which eventually led to his distancing from revolutionary politics.) If maintaining the reputation of the university remained a concern, it took other forms. Vodanovic reported to Alegría that the criteria for selection had been that the ideal writer should be no older than thirty-five, have at least one book published, and have something to offer in dialogue, and be capable of receiving the suggestions of others. “Equally,” he wrote, “we looked at their moral aspects, to avoid that the group would be made up of people who had questionable conduct, whether in sexual matters (recognized homosexuals without much talent) or in the commercial ones (people with public debts, checks, etc.) that could compromise the university by association.”Footnote 67 Once again, no women were selected, and a culture of machismo does seem to have pervaded the workshops. (Machismo was not unusual on the Chilean left in this period, and was in many ways institutionalized.Footnote 68 ) Indeed, Alegría made sexist comments about having two attractive young women attend the workshop, but only to smile, and not to participate.Footnote 69 “For personal reasons I would have liked to provide grants to [Gonzalo] Drago [Gac], to Carmen Castillo and to M. C. [María Carolina] Geel,” Alegría did reply to Vodanovic. “But, as you say, it is necessary to obey the first objective of the Taller: to discover and assist new writers.”Footnote 70
But if certain normative gender expectations were (re)enforced, there was political and stylistic diversity. The second class brought in a new group of ten students from an applicant pool of sixty-four—Guillermo Atías, Luis Domínguez, Luis Vulliamy, Andrés Pizarro, Efraín Barquero, Edmundo Herrera, Pedro Lastra, Jaime Valdivieso, Juan Guzmán Améstica, and Raúl Ruiz. (The essayist Valdivieso was chosen at Alegría’s insistence, even though his Marxist tendencies had worried Arenas.) To these men was added an eleventh candidate, Verónica Cereceda. An actress and playwright, Cereceda’s participation was supported financially by the University of Concepción’s Escuela de Teatro rather than the Rockefeller fund.Footnote 71 She was misogynistically described in the press as a “loan with a skirt” from the university to the workshop.Footnote 72
The Rockefeller Foundation’s John P. Harrison visited Concepción in May to check on the Taller and other projects, and neither he nor Stitchkin was happy with the visit. “[Stitchkin] seems to assume that [Concepción] is the only truly forward-looking university in Spanish America,” Harrison recorded in his diary, “and [I] apparently unwittingly insulted him by pointing out how some similar problems were being faced elsewhere.” Although they agreed that the Taller de Escritores was an important part of Concepción’s extension to the community, Harrison then pressed Stitchkin on why the fellowships for writers did not extend past the academic semesters to a full year, as he thought they should. Harrison also thought that they should renew the best writers for multiple sessions—giving the example of Rulfo at the CME, who had written El llano en llamas and Pedro Páramo on consecutive grants and nothing otherwise. “From the spate of oratory that followed,” Harrison recorded, “[I] inferred that [I] was being repelled from invading the sacred autonomy of the University.” The Chileans felt that Harrison was telling them how to run their program and interrogated its participants “like a detective investigating a crime,” which they found disrespectful.Footnote 73 Harrison told Stitchkin that support for the Taller would depend on quality leadership—namely, Alegría—and Stitchkin responded with frustration. Since Berkeley did not always make Alegría available, Stitchkin grumbled about the “need of US universities to arrange the practice of their own institutions to support the general political position of the US government in regard to improving higher education in Latin America.”Footnote 74
Nevertheless, in the next months the group made impressive progress. The poet Pedro Lastra remembers Gonzalo Rojas giving good editing advice: taking out words from his poems one at a time and asking him to consider whether the change improved the work.Footnote 75 Luis Vulliamy finished one novel, Isla firme, in the first two months at the workshop and then began work on a new project, Juan del Agua. That book, which was finished quickly and published in 1962, was an indigenist work chronicling the impact of industrial civilization on a small village. Barquero wrote the poem “El Regreso” and then began working on a poetic ode to manual laborers.Footnote 76 Atías, a politically active member of the Socialist Party, worked on a novel set in the period of Chile’s Popular Front. Playwright Juan Guzmán wrote “Wurlitzer,” about young people who, facing poverty and a lack of other options, become involved in smuggling to earn a living. Cereceda dramatized the struggle of the Communist miners of Lota, whose campaign for higher wages had been halted by the earthquake of 1960.Footnote 77
The second group also included the playwright Raúl Ruiz, then only nineteen years old, who wrote “La maleta” during his time in the workshop.Footnote 78 The play, which Ruiz later made into a short film, appears to be about a man with a near-copy of himself in a large suitcase, who later replaces him. Ruiz went on to a decades-long career in avant-garde and surrealistic theater and film. Alegría was particularly impressed with Ruiz, saying that, when he first read him, he thought he was imitating Ionesco or Beckett, only to learn that he had not read either. Alegría recommended to the Rockefeller Foundation that Ruiz be given an opportunity to study in the United States.
The Workshop was also considered generally successful, even though there were practical challenges. Both of those selected as essayists left jobs as primary school teachers with the support of the grant but felt that they would not have access to the resources they needed to complete their works if they left Santiago. Atías, considered the most distinguished grant recipient in the second group, worked as a banker and similarly said that he could not relocate. All promised to attend every required meeting but preferred to remain in Santiago.Footnote 79 Attendance sometimes flagged, as the weekly meetings required long bus rides of more than six hours in each direction. In the end, the period and total of the grant was insufficient to justify relocation, and only three of the writers ended up moving to Concepción.Footnote 80
Alegría could not move either. He spent June, July, and August in Concepción with the Taller, but his plan to teach half-time at Berkeley and half-time at Concepción were rejected by but his department chair at Berkeley. (The chair at the time, the Chilean writer Arturo Torres Rioseco, pointedly asked who would do his teaching and committee work.) Alegría maintained contact with Vodanovic, and read and commented on documents mailed to him, but he could not supervise the project. Vodanovic felt out of his depth, except in theater. John P. Harrison at the Rockefeller Foundation urged Alegría to find a long-term arrangement, because the Foundation wanted to provide sustained funding but could not do so on an ad hoc basis.Footnote 81
The closing of the second session coincided with the January programming of the Summer School, allowing the participants to share their work on that stage. And the session of 1962 was the largest that had yet been organized: a farewell to Stitchkin, who was stepping down as rector. Stitchkin wanted the event to address the “problems of man” in a changing world, and to include major speakers from around the globe. Days of activities, planned around the ideas of the “Image of Man” and the “Image of Latin America,” were organized (see figure 2). The physicist Linus Pauling, who had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and was known for his antinuclear activism and criticism of the Cold War (including US intervention in Latin America), inaugurated the proceedings.Footnote 82
The cover of the pamphlet advertising the 1962 Summer School at the University of Concepción, with a twin focus of on the “Image of Man” and the “Image of Latin America.” José Donoso described the event as the beginning of the “boom” in Latin American letters, but the university administration feared that it endangered foundation support. Source: Fernando Alegría papers, Stanford University Department of Special Collections, flat box 99, folder 13
Building on the previous two Encuentros, Rojas was able to create an even more international event. Donoso, in his personal history of the “boom” in Latin American letters, describes that conference as its beginning. Deborah Cohn has argued that the “boom” paradoxically “benefited from both hegemonic and anti-hegemonic forces—that is, from endeavors that stemmed from commitments to anti-revolutionary and revolutionary politics alike.”Footnote 83 The 1962 conference, supported by funding from the International Development Bank, showcases both aspects within a single event.Footnote 84
Donoso was astonished to find himself surrounded by luminary figures from around the continent, united by faith in Cuba:
Without a doubt it was Pablo Neruda and Carlos Fuentes who set the tone at that—for me—historic Congress of Intellectuals in Concepción. Enthusiasm and faith in Cuba were so alive in that moment that—between the Chilean and the Mexican—they convinced Alejo Carpentier, who, unlike the other grandiloquent pronouncements of the other speakers, defined himself as “a student of literature and music”—that he not read the speech he had prepared, Magical Elements in the Literature of the Caribbean, but that in its place he improvise something rather bland about the educational reforms of Fidel Castro, which at that time seemed more urgent.
Fuentes, whose charisma won over the crowds, told audiences that the Mexican and Cuban revolutions had shown the way for Latin America to unbind itself from “from Western tutelage.”Footnote 85
Frank Tannenbaum, a historian of Latin America who had been an anarchist radical in his youth but had settled into a rather conservative Cold War liberalism by 1962, proposed a federal system for the Americas that would bring together the United States and Latin America in a union of juridical equality that could, in turn, repel foreign imperialism (by which he meant that of the Soviet Union).Footnote 86 He was not well-received. First Fuentes and then several other Latin American writers questioned on what ground there could be equality between states, when the United States was the imperial and interventionist power in the Americas? “Fuentes wiped him off the stage,” remembered Donoso, “with a brilliant speech bristling with dates, facts, statistics, production statistics, references to public documents and private conversations that, amid laughter and applause, left the Yankee stuttering and ashamed.” A series of others distinguished intellectuals echoed Fuentes’s critique. Tannenbaum responded by asking the audience “how much blame or responsibility they were willing to accept, putting it in precise figures – 75%, 40%, 1%? – and concluding that if they would not accept any responsibility they were completely immoral and offered no hope for the future of Latin America.”Footnote 87 After the event, Tannenbaum complained to the press that “it is not right that the University of Concepción … which has received generous support from the United States … treats visitors this way.”Footnote 88 But the audience primarily experienced the exchange as a kind of intellectual victory over Yankee paternalism. “As the Congress dispersed in Santiago,” wrote Donoso, “the literary temperature had changed, and risen dramatically. The rules and the audience were going to be different, and we would have to go out and forge them.”Footnote 89
In both the Encuentros de Escritores, and the roughly coincident Talleres de Escritores, there had been voices within the university administration expressing concern about the ways in which prominent displays of left-wing politics might affect the image of the university. But the 1962 conference—a major public event, nationally and internationally—had been more full of them than ever. As a result, the trustees of the university, including a group of conservative Masons, removed Gonzalo Rojas from his role as director of the summer programming. Even Stitchkin was criticized. Rojas was told that the events had endangered ongoing funding from US foundations, which had become crucial to the university.Footnote 90
The man chosen as the new rector was a medical doctor, Ignacio González Ginouvés. Although the Taller and the Encuentros were not formally connected, they occupied a similar space within the university. González expressed interest in continuing the Writers’ Workshop, but lacked the strong literary commitments of Rojas and Stitchkin. Alegría still wanted to continue. And, despite the concerns of the university trustees, the Rockefeller Foundation remained open to the possibility. The program was attracting international attention. The Uruguayan critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal and the Paraguayan novelist Augusto Roa Bastos (who had attended the 1962 event) both expressed interest in working with the program.Footnote 91
It is possible to imagine, at this juncture, that the workshop might have been drawn in to the broader initiatives connected directly to US cultural diplomacy. The CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom, recognizing the appeal of Cuba in the early 1960s, was trying to reach out to younger generations with a subtler, and less bombastically anticommunist, approach. Rodríguez Monegal would soon be chosen as editor of a literary magazine, Mundo Nuevo—the voice of the “boom,” according to Donoso—with that approach. Or, the Workshops could have stepped up exchanges with the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, perhaps developing into a hub for South American writers. That the CME’s Margaret Shedd solicited Vodanovic’s help in selecting Chilean writers to participate in the CME in 1964, after the Taller’s final session, suggests that this might indeed have been the case.Footnote 92 But neither took place in the end.
The obstacle was not the Rockefeller Foundation. In February 1962, Rockefeller’s Harrison wrote to Alegría, saying that he wanted Concepción to begin arranging a long-term basis of support for the Workshops, and that Rockefeller was willing to assist.Footnote 93 Alegría thought that the Taller should be given a permanent home inside a larger initiative in literary studies, but did not have the ability to commit to supervising it. But the new rector grew concerned that there was no way to meet the expectations of the Foundation, who wanted full-year terms for the grant recipients, residential requirements in Concepción, and clear commitments of personnel. “I should bite the bullet and tell Rockefeller that we appreciate the gesture, but we are not able to respond to the commitments that it would involve,” González wrote to Alegría in August. If not, he feared that the Foundation—which gave Concepción money for so many other programs—would feel deceived. Preserving good relations with Rockefeller, he thought, was his most important responsibility. “I know how those Americans are,” he wrote Alegría, “and I’m sure that they would appreciate my frankness today more than what they could, tomorrow, consider a very Latin deception.”Footnote 94
Thus, the Taller de Escritores at the University of Concepción was short-lived, due to a combination of practical and political problems. On the practical side, Rockefeller thought keeping Alegría involved was essential and that it should establish regular, yearlong grants, on the model of the CME. But Alegría was not available, and money was always difficult to come by. Politically, the bigger problem was local anticommunism rather than anticommunism at the Rockefeller Foundation. Nevertheless, the broader configuration of the dependence on foreign funding made university leaders fear that continuing to work with leftist writers would put their other grants in danger: a case of premature compliance in the situation that Álvaro Morcillo Laiz has described as “philanthropic domination.”Footnote 95 If the CIA had been interested, as it was in the CME, it might have wanted to use the workshops to try to subtly elevate the careers of the non-Communist left over that of the Communist left. But this goal could well have been in tension with the fears of university officials.
And so the third group of participants, with grants that extended from October 1962 to April 1963, proved to be the last. A devaluation of Chile’s currency, the escudo, helped stretch the value of the remaining Rockefeller money, and the sessions were fixed at seven months. The jury again consisted of Vodanovic, Rojas, and Zañartu. Out of fifty-six applicants, they chose Antonio Avaria, Hugo Correa, and José Donoso for prose fiction, Alberto Rubio and José Miguel Vicuña for poetry, Mario Cruz and Alejandro Sieveking for theater, and Edmundo Palacios and Jaime Giordano for essays.Footnote 96 Because of his commitments at Berkeley, Alegría was not able to be involved. Vodanovic complained that the group lacked the esprit de corps of previous classes. The sessions were fine, he said, but the writers were making only slow progress.
In spite of Vodanovic’s concerns, the final sessions did not lack for literary merit. Hugo Correa was a pioneer of Latin American science fiction (a genre that was generally excluded from writers’ workshops in the United States). In spite of Vodanovic’s earlier comment about gay writers, the class included Mario Cruz. His work circulated mostly clandestinely in the 1970s because of its homoerotic themes, until a 2019 film of El príncipe resurrected interest in his work. Alejandro Sieveking’s next play, La remolienda, became a classic of Chilean theater, and the work has been repeatedly restaged. José Donoso, reported Braulio Arenas, “will write a gothic Chilean novel, with a Southern [Chilean] landowner and a monstrous son as its principal characters.”Footnote 97 Donoso would need several more years to finish El obsceno pájaro de la noche, but, when complete, it joined the canon both domestically and internationally.
Knowing that it would be the final year, Vodanovic promised Alegría that at the closing he would talk about everything that had been accomplished. “It is essential that an initiative of this significance not disappear suddenly, as if he had failed, but that it be concluded by indicating the achievements attained and the outcome of such an interesting experience.”Footnote 98 In the closing remarks that he made at the end of the third session, Vodanovic gave a pluralistic liberal justification for the work that had been done. Several of the participants had won prizes for the work they had completed at the Workshop. “The writers that passed through this workshop learned the difficult practice of tolerance and freedom,” he argued. “Literature is a form of knowledge, a means of exploration and communication of the most profound realities lived by man.”Footnote 99 Rector González thanked the participants and organizers and then made some weak comments about not letting the years of work pass away “without a trace.” He would seek a way to continue the program, but “without any precise plans.”Footnote 100 It would, in fact, be the end.
If Cold War interests operated at the edges of the Writers’ Workshop at Concepción—helping it gain support from the Rockefeller Foundation and then, because of the worries of university officials, lose it—it was not the case that the workshop copied US models, or produced quiescent writing. Although brief, the experiment influenced the thinking of writers inside and outside of Chile. Uruguayan poet and essayist Mario Benedetti—a firm leftist and anti-imperialist—had seen some creative writing classes taught in the United States in ways that he feared could be destructive to young writers. And he had seen a creative writing class taught at a Southern university by a professor whose qualifications were limited to having written more than two hundred cowboy novels. But on visiting the Taller de Escritores, he declared his fears unfounded, precisely because it was not a copy of the North American versions. The relationship between Alegría (or other tutors) and the grant recipients was less that of professor and student than it was a group of friends. Benedetti found them reading work together, playing guitars and singing songs. “Much more than a foreign model,” Benedetti wrote of the Taller de Escritores, “the Chilean temperament has been taken into account.” Benedetti hoped that in Uruguay, where the cost of living meant that writers often had two or three other jobs to make ends meet, the government might help establish a similar program.Footnote 101
Although there had been minor political issues around the edges, they had never been front and center in the short life of the Taller de Escritores. Pressure for ideological screening of the becarios came from the University of Concepción rather than the Rockefeller Foundation, and was at least sometimes overruled by Alegría, the person that Rockefeller wanted in charge. Unlike the Centro Mexicano de Escritores, which had been started by a North American writer, there was no major tension between the director and the students, all of whom were Chilean, which eliminated at least one possible source of friction. Some of the participants in the Taller would later recreate workshop environments as a part of their professional practice, but without the same international connections. Enrique Lihn and Luis Domínguez established a workshop at the Pontifical Catholic University in Santiago at the end of the 1960s. In this way, the workshop system was passed down to new generations of Chilean writers, sometimes informally.Footnote 102
The subsequent trajectory of the writers who passed through the Taller de Escritores does not support the hypothesis that the institution of the writers’ workshop is inherently incompatible with commitments to social transformation. Alegría began his odyssey of the Taller with, in 1958, a call for a transformative literature of ideas: precisely the opposite of the effect that the writers’ workshop is alleged to have had in the United States. Writers write from their personal and social experiences, and developments in Chile placed many of the participants in the Taller in direct opposition to US policy in Chile. In the 1964 elections in which the two principal candidates for the presidency were the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei and the Socialist Salvador Allende, the United States—via the CIA—put considerable support behind the former, including in the form of an anti-Allende “campaign of terror.” Shortly after the closing of the Taller, Salvador Allende wrote to Alegría directly, asking him to donate his poem Viva Chile, Mierda to the campaign. Along with the work of other poets, including Pablo Neruda, Nicolás Guillén, and Nicanor Parra, Allende hoped that support from writers and intellectuals could counteract the propaganda campaigns arrayed against him. “It seems to me that there would be nothing better to offer the [Chilean] people, in place of empty rhetoric, than works of real artistic quality,” he wrote.Footnote 103 Although Allende did not win that election, Alegría’s poem became closely associated with him, and Alegría remained a personal friend, as well as a critic of US foreign policy in Vietnam, Chile, and elsewhere.Footnote 104
The University of Concepción itself was perhaps the university most transformed by the student movements that exploded across Chile in 1968, occupying the campuses and demanding student participation and orientation towards addressing social problems. Stitchkin was brought back briefly, as rector, to negotiate these changes at Concepción. When Allende was elected president in 1970, Lihn edited two issues of Atenea—presented as Nueva Atenea—dedicated to the possibilities of revolutionary transformation in politics and culture. The bourgeois university, he declared, was elitist. The new socially committed university that was being built should be at the service of workers and the process of social transformation, rejecting the idea of the university as the producer of human resources for the capitalist economy. The University, “as an organ of civil society,” they declared, “served as an instrument of consensus-building and legitimation of the existing order.”Footnote 105
The new environment of Allende’s Popular Unity government inspired many writers to try to bridge the gap between their modestly bourgeois lives and those of Chile’s poor. Many of the writers in Lihn and Domínguez’s Workshop at the Catholic University banded together to issue a statement of support for Allende’s government when he was elected in 1970, only to find themselves criticized for opportunism by the Socialist and Communist parties.Footnote 106 Another participant in the Catholic workshops, Gonzalo Millán, remembers going to poor neighborhoods to teach writing workshops to young people in those years, trying to participate in the process of revolutionary transformation. He also recalled being harassed by members of leftist parties because of his long hair and hippie demeanor. Internal tensions grew along with external pressure. In 1971, the arrest and subsequent self-criticism in Cuba of the poet Heberto Padilla caused many Latin American writers to distance themselves from Castro’s regime. For Donoso, that marked the end of the “boom,” and it divided Lihn’s Taller, as well.Footnote 107
Lihn’s attempt a revolutionary, Third-Worldist Atenea seems, in its own limited way, to portend the fate of Allende’s experiment in socialist transformation. The magazine was a microcosm of the larger problem: neither Lihn nor Allende had sufficient support to sustain its proposed transformation against its enemies and rivals. Nueva Atenea became Atenea again, returning to traditional, nonrevolutionary, and Chilean (rather than internationalist) themes. Meanwhile, social polarization and fears of political violence became more acute throughout the country, spurred on by US interference. In Lihn’s 1973 satire, Batman en Chile, the CIA and the right-wing elite hire Batman to stop the local left. But Batman, from his secret cave in the Andes, is befuddled because the Communists are working legally within the political system and his right-wing patrons are not. “Who here are the real representatives of law and order?” anguishes Batman. “Where is the enemy?”Footnote 108 On September 11, 1973, the military overthrew Allende. Alegría was in Chile, working on a biography of his friend Allende, and returned to the US, now in exile. Gonzalo Rojas, who had been serving as Allende’s ambassador to Cuba at the time of the coup, was fired from the University of Concepción when the military authorities took over. He went into exile in East Germany.Footnote 109
None of this is to deny the soft power of the Rockefeller Foundation or other programs of cultural exchange. But writers exist both in their microinstitutions (like the Writers’ Workshop) as well as national—and international—contexts. To understand what and how they write, we must attend to all three. Chile’s national and international context in the 1960s and 1970s was not that of the United States. If literature in the United States grew more quiescent in the era after the Popular Front of the 1930s, it probably has more to do with the lived experiences of writers than the institution of the workshop itself. In Chile, for what it is worth, the workshop at Concepción placed the generation of the Popular Front in charge, and the years were full of hope for profound changes, not middle-class conformity.
The University of Concepción’s Taller de Escritores, although short-lived, tried to support writing that would reflect different aspects of contemporary Chilean social reality. For the participants, the Workshop and its Rockefeller Foundation grants provided an opportunity to write without having to work. For the university and its rector, it was a chance to enhance the institution with a prestigious program. For Alegría, it was a chance to do work in his home country. For the Rockefeller Foundation, it offered the possibility for the cultivation of a sympathetic elite. Within the cultural Cold War, the Taller was a small terrain of struggle, rather than a straightforward instrument of cultural imperialism. The left-wing culture of most writers, and of the most important writers involved with the workshop, converted the Encuentros into a perceived risk for the university after the Cuban Revolution. But the most conservative actors in the story—worried about the local reception of events and loss of Rockefeller support—were the trustees of the University of Concepción. Their fears, in combination with Alegría’s practical difficulties in coming to a workable arrangement with Berkeley, brought the Workshop to a relatively quick end. But, in the meantime, the writers had time to write, work on their craft, and build communities for the purposes they saw fit.
Open access
