Mario Gongora is, by common consent, the outstanding Chilean historian of his generation, and has certainly been one of the most respected Latin American historians of recent decades. His impeccable, deep, and, above all, reflective scholarship has won him, it is fair to say, a widening circle of admirers both inside and outside Chile. As a teacher, don Mario worked for more than thirty years in the University of Chile, before taking up his present appointment in the Catholic University of Chile (Santiago). As a scholar, his earliest publications—those that established his reputation—were in the field of Spanish American colonial history. In more recent times he has turned his attention to the history of ideas, while his grasp of the entire “national period” of Chilean history has lately been abundantly revealed in a masterly essay, the Ensayo histórico sobre la noción de estado en Chile en los siglos xix y xx (1982)—perhaps the finest work of this kind since the appearance in 1928 of Alberto Edwards’s classic, La fronda aristocrática en Chile. Few modern Latin American historians have meditated as intensely as Mario Góngora on the nature of the historical enterprise itself, as is to some extent illustrated in the interview that follows. This interview was conducted in Santiago de Chile on December 29, 1982, and Professor Góngora’s remarks have been translated into English by the interviewer.
SIMON COLLIER: I would like to begin this interview, don Mario, by asking you for a sort of opening autobiographical reminiscence, covering such matters as your family background, what you see as particularly decisive periods in your intellectual development, the stages of your formal education, and so forth.
MARIO GONGORA: I was born in Santiago, in 1915. My father was an officer in the Consular Service, and he rose to become Chilean Consul in Oruro, the Bolivian mining town—indeed, the earliest memories of my life are from there. I don’t know (and I’m not much interested in genealogy) whether his family may perhaps have been descended from Alonso Góngora Marmolejo, the sixteenth-century chronicler, who came as a soldier to Chile from Carmona in Andalusia. My mother came from families that were very widely represented in the agricultural provinces of central and southern Chile: Talca, Maule, Linares. On her maternal side, she was descended from a French family that came to Chile in the eighteenth century, as did several French families at that time—from around 1710 onward.
I think the decisive period of my intellectual biography was really 1931-45—the end of adolescence, the years of youth, for those of us born around 1914-19. Now in Chile those particular years coincided with the downfall of the dictatorial-modernizing presidency of Carlos Ibáñez and with the worldwide ideological and military struggles that ended in 1945. I wouldn’t care to describe my own age-group as a “generation” (largely for theoretical reasons about what constitutes a generation), but even so, we are talking here about the appearance on the scene of several distinctive groups of young men, and these were groups of great political and spiritual importance at that time and over the years that followed. What these groups did (or anyway claimed to be doing) was to break definitively with the mentality of nineteenth-century Chile. In their own way, they carried on the “self-criticism” of Chile begun, in the years after 1900, by so many figures in the world of thought and art.
These young men—and I include myself among them—were able to secure direct contact with early twentieth-century European currents of thought. The Catholics—again, myself included—were in touch with the French “Catholic renaissance” represented by Léon Bloy, Charles Péguy, Jacques Maritain, and so forth. The young left-wingers of the time became acquainted with Marxism (whether Stalinist or Trotskyist) and also with Freud. And the artists of that period, thanks largely to the opening provided by Vicente Huidobro, were in touch with the Parisian schools. In politics also, at that time, we saw the rise of the Juventud Conservadora, afterward renamed the Falange Nacional—which I myself left in 1938; and that, as you know, was subsequently transformed ideologically into Christian Democracy. We also saw the growth of various socialist parties and, in opposition to these, the National Socialist Movement of Jorge González von Marées. And last, we also saw the rise of the Communist party, formed in 1921, which began to act in full legality after 1931, having been proscribed in Carlos Ibáñez’s time.
The intellectual nuclei of these various groups were very eager for a closer contact with what was then going on in the contemporary sphere in France and, to a lesser degree, Germany. This can be contrasted with other influences affecting other age groups of Chileans. The Chilean relationship with Spain and with Hispanism in the twentieth century, for instance, came from two sources: one, which was literary in nature, derived from the influence of Menéndez y Pelayo, the Generation of 1898, Menéndez Pidal, and the poetic Generation of 1927; the other, more ideological in nature, stemmed from Ramiro de Maeztu’s Defensa de la hispanidad and from the Spanish Civil War. (Nowadays this latter influence has vanished, although Spanish literary influence carries on.) The massive influence of North America (and on a smaller scale Great Britain) only came in from around 1945-50. The young men of the postwar period had mental habits that were very different from those of the age-group to which I myself belonged: they were more specialized, of course, and less preoccupied with their own cultural roots—though this was less true for artists, and for scholars in the fields of philosophy and literary criticism.
With respect to my own personal line of development, I should say that from about 1940 onward, in addition to my enthusiasm for French thought, I acquired a greater interest in (and contact with) the sources of German thought. Both traditions remain fundamental as far as I am concerned.
As to my education—well, I studied humanities at the Liceo San Agustín in Santiago, and then law at the Catholic University from 1932 to 1936: I did the full course, and won a prize for the best student, but I didn’t carry on to get the full professional qualifications to practice as a lawyer. (I realized that I had no professional vocation for the law, that I had taken it up simply because it was considered the “only” humanities course at that time.) Finally, I studied pedagogy in history at the University of Chile from 1940 to 1944. In December 1944 I received the degree of Licenciado in Philosophy (with History) and the professional title of Profesor de Estado.
SC: Could you give me some idea as to the extent of your travels abroad? In the historical field, have there been any foreign contacts of particular importance to you?
MG: My first journey to Europe was in 1938—that was mostly spent in Paris. My other journeys since then have been somewhat less enthusiastic— more in the nature of research trips. When I started my research on Spanish American colonial history, I went to Madrid and Seville—that was in 1947-48. I went again in 1952-53, 1956, 1961, and 1974. On these visits to Europe, decisive contacts in the historical field were not numerous: I have little capacity for personal contact. But I ought to mention conversations I had with the Austrian historian Otto Brunner, in December 1952, and with Alphonse Dupont, a professor at the Sorbonne, in the course of 1961. For me, the conversations I had with both of these men were extremely important.
I should add that on several of my research trips I attended classes given by Fernand Braudel at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. In 1961 I myself gave classes at Cologne University, at the invitation of Richard Konetzke; in 1972 I did the same at Oxford, at the invitation of Malcolm Deas; and in 1974 I went to Yale University, on the kind initiative of Richard Morse, and sponsored by the Guggenheim Foundation.
SC: Of the various places you have visited outside Chile, which made the biggest aesthetic impression on you?
MG: The biggest impression? Paris—not only because of what I saw directly, with my own eyes, but also because of the way I could see it reflecting my previous readings in French history and literature. Vienna made a similar impression on me (not as great, as my stay there was short) at the end of 1952. While there I really sensed the greatness of an Imperial city.
SC: Could you say just a little about your teaching career?
MG: I don’t feel the need to go into great detail. I started with the job of Jefe de Trabajos in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Chile in 1945, ending up there as Professor of Medieval and Modern History—from 1952 onward. After that point I directed three research institutes: the Institute of Historico-Cultural Research in 1953-54; the Seminar (later the Center) for Colonial History from 1960 to 1968; and the Department of Humanistic Studies in 1975-76. All of these were part of the University of Chile. I was Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities in that University in 1976-77, and I retired from there, with more than thirty years’ service, in 1977. Since March 1978 I have held a personal chair in the Institute of History at the Catholic University of Chile—where I have done my best work as a teacher.
SC: What honors or awards have you received? Have you ever held office in national or international organizations?
MG: I won the National Prize for History in 1976. In 1982 I was designated a member of the National Council for Scientific and Technical Development, for a two-year period. I have never worked for any international organization.
SC: How did your interest in history begin? How did it develop thereafter?
MG: From the end of my adolescence onward, I found myself reading works on the history of France, starting with chapters from Lavisse’s great treatise. And from childhood days, too, I had been a great reader of historical novels. In my heart of hearts I was infinitely more interested in European history than in the history of Latin America. As I’ve already explained, my period of legal studies was of no use to me professionally, but it did point me in the direction of the first research I was to carry out on Spanish American colonial history—research on the history of law. My attendance at a course given by Professor Alfonso García Gallo at the Universidad Central de Madrid (in 1947-48) greatly reinforced that initial, historico-legal interest of mine, though I subsequently abandoned it, back in Chile in the 1950s and later, in favor of an interest in social history (first of all) and in the history of ideas (later on). In any event, that first visit to Spain—that particular contact with the University of Madrid and with the Archivo de Indias—was decisive in my taking the road of research, down which I continue to travel.
Alongside research, I still keep up my original interest in European history. This has been reflected in the pattern of my university teaching. I’ve always taught, in fact, Medieval and Modern European History (in the modern period, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries only), though alternating this with courses on the philosophy of history, or theory of history, as many now prefer to call it.
SC: You’re never regularly taught Latin American history as such?
MG: No, and I’ve never felt, at any stage of my life, that there was the slightest contradiction between doing research on Spanish American history, on the one hand, and teaching the history of Europe, on the other. After all, European history did correspond very definitely to my earliest historical interests.
SC: In many of your writings, don Mario, a definite philosophical background—certainly a comprehensive familiarity with the world of ideas— is very noticeable. Are there, I wonder, any particular writers—philosophical, historico-philosophical, or even creative writers—who have influenced you in an important way?
MG: Well, I’m not, formally speaking, a scholar in the field of philosophy, except insofar as this has a bearing (explicitly or implicitly) on conceptions of history. My first great “experience” in the philosophy of history—and that would have been around 1935—was Spengler’s Decline of the West, in García Morente’s magnificent translation. I continue to be devoted to that much-reviled thinker, so abused and so used by the majority of specialists. My second and third readings of the book, understandably, were more critical, but no less admiring. In this particular field I have also read and admired Vico, Herder, several of the German Romantics, Hegel (though only his Philosophy of History), Nietzsche (who is not, as you know, a philosopher of history as such, but nonetheless a great diagnostician and forecaster of history), and also Heidegger and (with rather less devotion) Toynbee. I continue to be enthusiastic about those great classics of historical writing that manage to incorporate large-scale world-historical “vistas”— by Ranke, Burckhardt, Michelet, and, in our own century, Huizinga, Meinecke, Braudel, and Altheim. In respect of theorists of historical “science”— that’s to say historical “science” without metaphysics—I have read and admired (and in some academic years or semesters have also taught) Dilthey and Max Weber. If I could just mention the Annales school of history at this point, nobody could fail to admire the magnificence of Braudel’s Mediterranean—but the quantitative and markedly “socioeconomic” orientation of that school is a long way from my own.
Just going back to the question for a moment, I should add that philosophy of history, and history itself, have never been the sole nourishment of my intellectual life. I have also loved (and been faithful to) the great writers whose works I got to know in my youth: Mann, Proust, Rilke— especially Rilke. These writers aren’t just “hobbies” of mine. They are very close indeed to my heart.
SC: Taking just one of the names you mentioned, I wonder if you could tell me, in just a word or two, what it is that you as a historian find interesting or valuable in the writings of Heidegger?
MG: What has interested me in Heidegger is the idea that the world-historical process is somehow rooted in the historicity of man himself—in his personal existence—and that in his personal existence the past, the present, and the future are all intimately involved. And his philosophy implies the ontological convergence of being and time.
SC: Your considerable reputation as a historian, don Mario, is based to a large extent (though certainly not exclusively) on your studies of the colonial period. How do you yourself see the long-term consequences of that particular colonial experience for Latin America? How far has the colonial legacy been reflected in the national and republican era?
MG: On this point I would go along with Braudel. I think that there are layers of history which are of “long duration”—in this case, layers of history that have survived from colonial times into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There’s the language, of course. The monarchical state may have disappeared in 1810, but not the notion of a dirigiste state, an active and decisive state—the Friedmanite experiment attempted here in Chile between 1974 and 1982 has now clearly run into the sands. Catholicism persists, too, though since the nineteenth century it has been tinged with a kind of clericalism unknown in colonial times, when, after all, you had unanimity on essential ideas as between church and state, a unanimity only broken in the nineteenth century. (Clericalism is really the expression of a politico-ecclesiastical war mentality.) Something else we got from Spain is the notion that social practice should somehow be regulated by ethical and juridical values; this idea has endured. However much it may have been contradicted by “facts”—by what has actually happened from time to time—those “facts” are never able to attain a purely pragmatic justification. As far as social and economic structures are concerned, well, the plantation and the hacienda survived everywhere—until the various “agrarian reforms” or until the introduction of a capitalist mentality into agriculture. I would say, too, that we inherited from Spain the absence of an authentic industrial capitalism—wherever this has been promoted, it has turned rapidly into an adventurous, speculative, or financial kind of capitalism, something that existed also in sixteenth-century Spain. Finally, the whole vast area of folklore and the arts—on any number of different levels—bears witness to the persistence of the colonial Hispanic experience.
SC: If you had to single out just one of your historical works, which would it be?
MG: It’s impossible to give any of them a place of privilege. One never knows which is the best.
SC: Do you have any historical work in hand at the moment?
MG: I have just published two pieces of research in 1982, and I think I have a right to idleness. Even so (and on a somewhat different level) I should perhaps mention that I am currently preparing a second edition of the work of the seventeenth-century chronicler Diego de Rosales—a completely revised version, based on the original manuscript. The first edition (1877) has long been out of print, and is anyway very defective. Rosales was the principal Jesuit chronicler of our colonial period.
SC: Is it possible for you to estimate the influence you have had on your students, or on other Chilean historians, over the years?
MG: It seems to me to have been scanty, owing to my reserved character. I have become friendly with some of my former students—but influence? I don’t know. The truth of the matter is that my historical convictions— my feelings about what history actually is—are a long way removed from the historiographical positivism of nineteenth-century Chile, and this, despite everything, continues to leave its stamp on researchers who are in their fifties, forties, and thirties even nowadays. The themes change; the European influences change; but history is still viewed, and history is still done, very much in the manner of Diego Barros Arana, Miguel Luis and Domingo Amunátegui, Ramón Sotomayor Valdés, and so on. Alberto Edwards and Francisco Antonio Encina never had much success among specialists, as they were disdained as “intuitionists.” In fact, the credo of the Enlightenment, the credo of Progress, has recovered much of its vigor since 1945—aren’t the Germans right when they talk about Massenaufklärung? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose—that still goes for Chilean historiography.
SC: It has been said, possibly too often, that Chile is a "land of historians," and undoubtedly one great generation of historians always springs to mind when this is said—that of Diego Barros Arana and his contemporaries: the Amunátegui brothers, Vicuña Mackenna, Sotomayor Valdés, etc. Do you yourself have a favorite among the historians of that famous generation?
MG: Yes. Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna—because, in spite of all his carelessness (to put it very mildly) in research, he is the one who has to the greatest extent a sense of appreciating and admiring the historical events or personalities that form the focus of his works. Let me give you an example: even though he was ideologically an enemy of Diego Portales, his book about that man is charged with an admiration, an enthusiasm, that really highlights the historical greatness of Portales, or anyway the Portales of the first administration—in his second, he seemed to Vicuña Mackenna to have been a drastic tyrant. Thanks to that particular quality of admiration and enthusiasm, Vicuña Mackenna at times achieved a profounder vision than was open to historians more closely attached to the “plain facts.”
Quite apart from this, Vicuña Mackenna was the pioneer, in Chile, of urban history, rural history, the history of the mining zones and the nascent railways—he did all this, needless to say, in his own peculiar and rather picturesque way. A further distinctive aspect of his personality, I think, can be found in his political and social ideas. Though himself an aristocrat, he was nevertheless the most penetrating exponent of bourgeois-democratic thought (or anyway all that bourgeois-democratic thought could then amount to) in the Chile of 1850-80. Inevitably, his expression of this line of thought sometimes descended into “picturesqueness,” and even, at times, vulgarity.
SC: What would you say has been your greatest satisfaction as a historian?
MG: To have read so many historians and philosophers of history, both as a duty and as a pleasure.
SC: Over the years since you first entered the field there have been some notable advances in the study of Latin American history. Could you possibly single out two or three of your own contemporaries who, in your opinion, have made specially important contributions to our field?
MG: I can name some near, though not exact, contemporaries, whose achievements seem to me to have been of cardinal importance since around 1940 or so. But it’s impossible for me to limit myself to just two or three. Will you let me mention nine? In no particular order of importance—for all of them are excellent—these would be: Robert Ricard, Marcel Bataillon (for his articles on the erasmistas in the Indies), George Kubler, Woodrow Borah, John L. Phelan (for his work on millennialism in New Spain), François Chevalier, Tulio Halperin Donghi, Guillermo Céspedes del Castillo, Magnus Mörner. I really ought to cite a number of others, but I appreciate the selective sense of your question. I should, however, give an explanation for one great absentee from this list: Pierre Chaunu. My scanty training in quantitative history prevents me from evaluating the true caliber of his Séville et l'Atlantique—even so, I believe it to have exercised a great influence. But I don’t think you’ll let me get to ten.
SC: What do you now see as the most urgent task, or tasks, facing Chilean historiography, or Spanish American historiography more widely?
MG: We need a new kind of political history—one that can get beyond the political history of the nineteenth century, one that employs better analysis, one that discloses the factors of la longue durée, one that allows for the dispassionate contemplation of ideology. And there are new disciplines that ought to be cultivated: the history of collective psychology and of symbols (now cultivated in Chile, independently of me, by Rolando Mellafe). Thanks to the scholars of the last twenty years or so, we have now reached a point where demographic and social and economic history possess a degree of solidity that was unknown to nineteenth-century historians and to those of us who started before 1950. But history is a house of many mansions, and it is important that the younger generation should avoid attributing exclusive or absolute qualities to the latest intellectual trends, as always happens in Spanish America.
SC: Why does this always happen in Spanish America?
MG: I would say that Spanish America tends to take the most recent results of European science and research, but does not take the inner dialectic from which those results proceed. In consequence, it does not gain a clear idea of the continuity that exists between one theoretical position and the next. Spanish America picks up the results, so to speak, in a series of instant “flashes,” and with each new flash believes that all previous results have somehow been nullified.
SC: The role of the historian obviously varies from time to time and from country to country. What do you think has been the role of historians in the history of Chile itself?
MG: Chilean historians of my age group have had no influence at all on the historical process itself. We’ve basically been university teachers, not politicians, though naturally we may have held political convictions. In the last century all the good historians were, above all, Liberal politicians. Only very rarely were they Conservatives; you had, too, the odd ecclesiastical dignitary who was also a historian. Edwards and Encina were also politicians in their own way—politics, for them, forming short interludes in lives that were more remarkable for other things. Jaime Eyzaguirre was a mixture: author of essays and historical manuals, “intellectual entrepreneur” (in the best and most generous sense of that term), and teacher and mentor of youth. Back at the turn of the century there were some great scholars who weren’t politicians, but who weren’t really historians either: José Toribio Medina, for instance, or Tomás Thayer Ojeda. Then, from the middle of the 1920s, roughly, you can see the appearance of the pure universitybased scholars—Ricardo Donoso, Guillermo Feliú Cruz, Eugenio Pereira Salas, the successors of the nineteenth-century tradition. In the mid-1930s, a new conception of research became noticeable, with Néstor Meza Villalobos’s works on the conquest, and also, around 1950, I think it possible to say, with myself—but we for our part haven’t exercised the slightest influence on the historical process. These days there is an abyss between the politicians (or their technocratic successors) and the historians—but I think that’s a general phenomenon of mass civilization. The politician nowadays seeks out the economist, the sociologist, the political scientist, who are of interest to him in relation to immediate problems—in what is thought to be “the present.”
SC: Do you have any suggestions about how historians in the United States should go about improving their relations with Latin American historians? Do you in fact feel there is a need for improvement?
MG: I really don’t believe at all in “improvements” that are in any sense planned. To the extent that Spanish Americans read and appreciate the best that North American historiography spontaneously produces, there will be improvement.
SC: In conclusion, don Mario, I would like to ask you for a final, brief reflection or comment on the current state of Latin American historiography. Are you happy with what you see?
MG: No, not at all. I’ve touched on this already, in my answer to your question about the tasks facing historians. But it is a matter for rejoicing that Spanish American and Latin American history should now be attracting not only hispánicos and lusitanos (in the widest sense) but also—and at such a respectable level—North Americans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Germans, Swedes, Italians …. They have brought a breath of fresh air into the historical study of our continent.
Translation of the interview was made possible by a grant from the Tinker Foundation of New York.
