Abstract

The current article is part of a broad doctoral research project examining the ethnic Italian Press, which was published in Chile between the 19th and 20th century. By the end of the 19th century, the Italian community in Chile, which used to be divided into multiple and isolated realities, started to congregate and consolidate into a unified whole. Consequently, it is during this period that for the first time Italian speeches began to circulate in Santiago and Valparaiso, promoted by the publication of the ethnic Italian Press, which is the object of our study. The press aimed to maintain connections with the mother country and concurrently reinforce the internal dynamics to the newly formed Italian community. The study of the Press is led through the analysis of journalistic and literary speeches available on Italian newspapers from 1890. This is the year when L’Eco d’Italia, which is the first example of ethnic Italian Press in Santiago, Chile, was published. The central aim of the current article is to investigate how these journalistic and literary speeches affected the image of the Italian community in Chile. We adopted a qualitative methodology that entangles two different phases: a heuristic phase, or phase of discovery (involving observation, description and inductive generalization, to evaluate the working hypotheses); and a hermeneutic phase, or phase of source interpretation (where techniques are adapted to the object of study and are academically accepted for the analysis of the corpus documentale). The article consists of four parts: 1) a brief contextualization of the historical Chilean and Italian background; 2) an introduction to the theoretical concepts discussed in our study that are crucial for the analysis of the newspapers; 3) the central object of our study that is the ethnic Press and his functions; and finally, 4) our conclusions