Chilean spectators and social coexistence: the Aurora de Chile and El monitor araucano

Abstract

The Aurora de Chile (1812-1813) and El Monitor Araucano (1813-1814)-historically the first two Chilean newspaperswere managed by Camilo Henríquez, an ordained priest whose vision was to educate his readers and compatriots and thus contribute to the construction of national identity during the independence period. Even though Latin American print journalism represents a seldom-analyzed medium from the various approaches of textual criticism, these newspapers and others like them-the Gazeta de Buenos Ayres (1810-1821) or the Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro (1808-1821), for example-functioned at a time when the spread of concepts from the European Enlightenment was able to contribute to a sense of national social coexistence after independence in Chile. First, the proposed article, with an understanding of the distinctive features of the Latin American press in the 19th century, links the Aurora as well as El Monitor with the European journalistic-literary genre of the spectator. Second, and always with an awareness of the social and political functions that these texts served in their time, the article explores notions of the "knowledge of social coexistence" as expressed by Henríquez's newspapers in the early 19th century.