THE FRONTIER IN TENSION: NATIONALISM AND SOCIAL MOBILIZATION DURING THE "DON LADISLAO WAR" (CHILE, 1920)

Abstract

The article examines the military mobilization decreed in July and August 1920 by the Chilean Minister of War, Ladislao Errázuriz, in response to the alleged deployment of Peruvian troops on the northern border. The study considers that this scenario allows a privileged analysis of the relation between nationalism and social mobilization as a crucial element that distinguishes this ideology. This approach is novel in a historiographical context that has tended to explain this nexus in a simplistic way, considering it as a mere manipulation of the elites, with no further social roots. Through a qualitative approach to the public opinion of the time, the article reconstructs the dynamics of social mobilization that articulated the nationalist discourse on broader levels than the purely discursive. Thus, the research argues that the massive nationalist demonstrations that accompanied the call for military mobilization are evidence of one of the singularities of nationalism as an ideology: its ability to hide, through identity interpellation and social mobilization, its relative conceptual weakness.