Nicolás Palacios

Nicolás Palacios statue on his birth place's main square, December 2009.

Monument to "Chilean Race", Nicolás Palacios.

Nicolás Palacios (September 9, 1854–June 11, 1931) was a Chilean physician and writer born in Santa Cruz, best known for his writings on the "Chilean race" and national identity. His uncopyrighted early 1900s book La Raza Chilena form the ideological backbone of many Chilean Nazi groups.

The Chilean Race

Nicolás Palacios identifies what is typical Chilean with the figure of the roto and a supposed Chilean race. Palacios elevates the Chilean mestizo in status since, according to his writings, the Chilean is a mix of two bellicose master races: the Visigoths of Spain and the Mapuche of Chile.

Palacios traces then the origins of the Spanish component of the "Chilean race" (Spanish: Raza Chilena) to the coast of the Baltic Sea, specifically to Götaland in Sweden, one of the supposed homelands of the Goths.^[1] As Palacios explains, at most 10% of the Visigoths mixed with the native Iberians of Spain, while the rest remained racially pure though the Middle Ages. The conquest of Chile and the War of Arauco that followed for many years attracted adventurous Spaniards of martial lineage to Chile, thus giving Chile an overwhelming amount of Visigoth heritage and blood, in contrast to other more prosperous Spanish colonies where "merchant peoples" dominated. These Spaniards of supposed Visigoth ancestry would have mingled with native Mapuches, producing the common Chilean Roto. According to Palacios, about 25,000 Goths arrived to Chile during the first five generations after the initial conquest in the 1540s and 1550s.

Further, Palacios goes on to claim that both the blonde and the bronze coloured Chilean mestizo share a "moral physonomy", and that both think and reason in an identical way. This similarity he states can be found on early Spanish literature about Chile, among them the epic poem La Araucana, where Mapuches are frequently compared to the barbaric Germanic tribes that fought the Roman Empire. Palacios denies that the "Chilean roto" would be racially a "Latin", and said the Chilean has nothing "Latin" except the language and the surname. Palacios finds in alcoholism also a similarity with the Germanic peoples of Northern Europe.

Palacios warns against immigration from Southern Europe and claims on medical grounds that Mestizos derived from Southern Europeans was a lack "cerebral control" and that they are thus a social load. He also states that there is no possibility for the Latin race to produce a "Miguel Cervantes" or "Michelangelo" in Chile or elsewhere, because the Latin race in the 20th century is very different from that in the Renaissance.

References

1. ^ Raza Chilena Nicolás Palacios

Persondata
Name	Palacios, Nicolas
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Date of birth	1854
Place of birth
Date of death	1931
Place of death