“From the Southern Borders of Pan America”: Chile at the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo

The Pan American Exposition, held in Buffalo, New York in 1901, sought to shape relations between the American nations by constructing a shared identity in distinction with the rest of the world. The United States’ organizing committee championed hemispheric cooperation or Pan Americanism as a strategy to enforce its imperialist dominance, as well as to undermine Spain’s renewed efforts to solidify hegemony in Latin America through appeals to a common Hispanic heritage. The Buffalo exposition dovetailed with the Monroe Doctrine (1823), the Mexican American War (1848), the Spanish-American War (1898), and the creation of the Panama Canal (begun in 1904) in materializing U.S. imperial hemisphere aspirations. The fair’s logo design, for instance, personified North and South America as two women holding hands on top of what corresponds to Central America and the Caribbean. They converge in newly acquired U.S. land – Panama - symbolizing a new American partnership and independence from European colonialism. This paper studies the visual culture of the fair, with a special focus on the Chilean pavilion and its fine arts exhibition. I consider the Chilean aesthetic program in relation to the organizer’s objectives in order to unpack the visual strategies of soft power in a moment of intense competition between Spain and the United States. The Chilean pavilion contradicts the overall architectural theme of the fair -Spanish Renaissance- with a metallic building as a strategy to showcase its industrial advancement. The interior, on the other hand, showcases Chile’s main exports –saltpeter and copper– on the first floor and a classical nineteenth century fine arts exhibition in the second, with a strong presence of indigenous sculpture. Heritage and modernity collide in a cultural and economic approach to stimulate international cooperation with the United States.