Diversiones y juegos populares: Formas de sociabilidad y critica social, Colchagua, 1850-1880 (review)

This brief book looks at what the people of Colchagua, a rural province in central Chile, did for recreation in the mid-nineteenth century. The author relies principally on the reports of local political officials, but Purcell Torretti also uses newspapers, travel accounts, and novels.

The people of Colchagua liked to spend time in chinganas (bars or small inns), play cards, dice, and bolos (a game with mallets and balls something like croquette), attend cock fights and horse races, and gamble, among other recreational activities. The author offers the following main conclusions regarding these topics. Sometimes fights broke out at these events, especially when the people involved were drinking. People enjoyed participating in these activities on holidays. People preferred outdoor activities when the weather was nice. Most horse races were held on Mondays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, although, Purcell Torretti notes, sometimes they were held on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Railway workers liked to visit taverns. Bars could be noisy and the neighbors complained. There was generally singing, dancing, drinking, and fights in the bars. Drinking aided social interaction. Many people became more emotional after they drank. Drinking probably contributed to the fights that broke out in the bars.

The author spends the bulk of the text backing up these conclusions. Many readers may consider these findings to have been predictable enough, not really warranting careful historical documentation.

This concern notwithstanding, the author's approach throughout this books is to offer such conclusions—for example, at the bars in Colchagua people drank alcoholic beverages and sometimes fights occurred—and then to provide many quotations from police reports, song lyrics, selected secondary literature, and other materials to prove the truth of these assertions. Quotations from these sources comprise more than half of the text in many places. The authors quotes especially from police reports which offer blow-by-blow accounts of barroom fisticuffs.

The author covers in this manner several other matters. Some reproductions of painting showing people at play are included, to which Purcell Torretti adds his summary of what the paintings show. The author provides a list of the names of individuals who owned bars. The author also explains what materials and dimensions were used to construct bars and cock fight rinks. The author fully details the rules for various card and dice games, including the popular variations of these.

Overall, while the author correctly notes the need for historical study of the daily lives and especially the recreational activities of ordinary people, Purcell Torretti has not really moved beyond the conclusions noted above to consider possible comparative, social, cultural, political, or economic implications.