La identidad pampina en Rivera Letelier

Abstract

The cultural identity of northern Chile’s “Pampa” is heterogeneous and complex. Its unity if granted by a shared geography –the nitrate deposits in the the world’s driest desert– and those activities related to nitrate minerals extraction. Nitrate fiction has early samples in nineteen-century Pacific War (Chile versus Peru and Bolivia), and acquires a mature aspect by the beginning of twentieth century. Nitrate-pampa writing registers, witnesses, and transforms the reality of the desert and of the miner’s villages, both condemning and evoking its ways of life beyond real death. Hernán Rivera Letelier is part of the Pampa cultural and literary tradition, but he reformulates it, and in so doing he recovers for Latin American and Chilean fiction the vast Pampa area as a space for varied and incredible stories, in a culturally post-modern an hybrid perspective.