Overview

On October 1, 1920, the city of Santiago, Chile, came to a halt as tens of thousands stopped work and their daily activities to join the funeral procession of José Domingo Gómez Rojas, a 24 year old university student and acclaimed poet. Nicknamed ""the firecracker poet"" for his incendiary poems, such as ""The Cry of the Renegade"" Gómez Rojas was a member of the University of Chile's student federation (the FECh) which had come under repeated attack for its critiques of Chile's political system and ruling parties. Government officials accused the FECh's leaders of being advocates for the destruction of the social order, subversives who had the temerity to question national policy making, and insolent youths who did not know their place. Arrested for alleged sedition as part of a five-month-long ""prosecution of subversives,"" Gómez Rojas joined other students and workers in Santiago's prison system. He never left. After two months in police custody, he died in Santiago's asylum, quickly to be reborn as a political martyr for students and workers alike.This microhistory recovers the context within which Gómez Rojas's arrest, imprisonment, and death unfolded and the experiences of men he counted as friends, comrades, colleagues, mentors, and pupils. Fifty years before the much-heralded student movements of 1968, Raymond Craib shows, university students and workers were active political collaborators and radicalized political subjects. In interwar Chile, members of Chile's sizeable working class marched side-by-side with students from the FECh. At the same time, increasingly radicalized university students, as well as former students, workers, and worker-intellectuals, gathered together to talk, read, and find common cause. Members of what Craib calls a ""capacious Left"" they shared a wide-ranging interest in works of sociology and political theory, a penchant for poetry, and an eclectic embrace of anarchist, socialist, and communist principles and practices. They also shared the experience of repression, an experience that ultimately cost Gómez Rojas his life and marked an entire generation of political organizers and agitators, including future president Salvador Allende and poet Pablo Neruda.

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9780190241353

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Reviews

Through a deep, moving, historically embedded homage to Chilean student, poet, and rebel Gomez Rojas, Craib illuminates an entire epoch of emancipatory fervor, circulating internationally but solidly rooted in the lived experience of Santiago. Very, very rarely is history so vivid, closely documented, passionate, and, above all, alive. James C. Scott, Yale University Craib uses the life and death of an anarchist poet, his friends and comrades, as a window on an era, a city, a country, and a movement. This is a luminous book, hard-hitting and incisive, but also eloquent and nuanced, at once an evocative account of everyday anarchism and a portrait of the 'capacious left' of the post-World War I years, when students and workers joined together to protest social injustice. Peter Winn, author of Weavers of Revolution Approaching anarchism not so much as an ideology or a movement, but rather as a personal and collective disposition to what he terms 'insolence,' Raymond Craib explains brilliantly what drew people to anarchist ideas and forms of activism. A rich and compelling narrative history that marshals, effortlessly, economic, social, and political history and an impressive range of sources, The Cry of the Renegade sheds new light on a pivotal moment in Chile's modern history while making a major and highly original contribution to the comparative study of anarchism. Paulo Drinot, author of The Allure of Labor: Workers, Race and the Making of the Peruvian State Raymond Craib's wise and informative book narrates the violence - and the context of the violence - of the third week of July 1920 in Santiago, Chile, which was marked by the imprisonment of a great many young anarchists, guilty of thinking ideas about a more just society. Among them was Jose Domingo Gomez Rojas, a 24-year-old poet who was tortured and died after weeks in prison. Gomez Rojas's spirit and the spirit of his poetry live on in Craib's The Cry of the Renegade. This book is a service to the history of Chile, to the history of Latin America, and to the history of the world. Thomas E. Kennedy, author of The Copenhagen Quartet

Author Information

Raymond B. Craib is Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes.

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