Working class Chilean communist poet and novelist, Nicomedes Guzmán, pseudonym of Óscar Vásquez Guzmán, was born in the Club Hípico neighborhood of Santiago, Chile on June 25, 1914, was one of the most prominent members of the Chilean literary Generation of 1938, a literary and publishing generation born out of the socio-political movements that in 1938 collectively brought a political organization, the Popular Front to power under President Pedro Aguirre Cerda.
It is no coincidence that this president, proposing an unprecedented political method of governing through education, led a left-wing, transformational coalition with the strong support of artists and writers. Nicomedes Guzmán, Violeta Parra, and Volodia Tetelboim among othersworked tirelessly for the Popular Front and for Pedro Aguirre Cerda's rise to the presidency. The Chilean literary Generation of 1938, was also one of the proletarian movements that set the stage for the presidency of Salvador Allende.
Of working-class origin, Guzmán became interested in literature as a child, reading the magazine "El Peneca". At a very young age he also decided to become a writer, and at 15 he managed to publish stories, poems, and drawings in this same magazine, under the pseudonym Ovaguz.
His early novels were about what surrounded him and what he could see with his own eyes: his neighborhood, his family, his friends, and his neighbors. Therefore, reading him is a way to get to know the Santiago of yesteryear and, in particular, the lives of its poorest inhabitants.
He not only wrote about marginalization, poverty, and social injustice: he lived these realities and transformed them into literature. His works, marked a milestone in Chilean narrative for their profound portrayal of the most marginalized sectors of society. His work is extensive and varied, including novels, poetry and anthologies of deep human and social feeling.
He was the son of Nicomedes Vásquez Arzola and Rosa Guzmán Acevedo. Nicomedes Guzmán's real name was Oscar Nicomedes Vásquez Guzmán. He used his middle name and second surname as his artistic pseudonym as a way of honoring his father, and his mother.
His father held various jobs, including streetcar driver and occasionally ice cream vendor; his mother, a homemaker, supplemented the family income with occasional work as a domestic servant.
In Los Hombres Obscura (The Dark Men ) from 1939 , he dedicates, his novel to them.The novel tells the story of the lower social classes and their lives within a tenement building. It highlights the stark differences between the abusive wealthy and the most needy, those affected by the decisions of the ruling class.
The novel has a significant ideological component, emerging from within the very society that has been marginalized, a society imbued with proletarian convictions, and is rich in political and ideological allusions.
According to Volodia Teitelboim (1916-2008) , this novel was also "the shot that signaled the start of a new era, a different stage of narrative in this Finisterre called Chile," a stage characterized by writers convinced that they wanted "to take the pulse of the people, to write in rhythm with their battered existences. They took the side of the discontented. They tried to be writers of the poor, of the rural and urban worker, of the miner, of the south and the north"
Nicomedes Guzmán's schooling was irregular and his education was largely self-taught, although he studied as an adult at the Federico Hanssen night school. He began his career as a typesetter and bookbinder's assistant, later working as a truck driver's assistant on Matucana Avenue in Santiago , a place with a vibrant, bohemian nightlife of a popular nature.
He later worked as an assistant at a real estate agency in the heart of the Chilean capital. Thanks to the acclaim his first two works received, he was hired by the Department of Culture at the Ministry of Finance, along with Luis Sánchez Latorre .
He participated in the alliance of Chilean intellectuals created and led by Pablo Neruda, along with Pablo de Rokha. Guzmán was the author of the poetry book The Ashes and Dreams (1938) In the prologue to the book Pablo Neruda wrote: “Its whispering sweetness seems not to coexist with the scars that “Blood and Hope” imprinted on us, but it is a sign of greatness that the writer, who revealed to us the hell of the streets of Chile, has another mark of wandering delirium, dreams and ashes that add the infinite dimension of poetry.”
He actively participated in both civic action and various areas of literature, such as writing, publishing, and printing. and of novels and stories that marked milestones in the Chilean literary tradition such as The Dark Men (1939) , Blood and Hope (1943) , Light Comes from the Sea (1951) and A Coin to the River and Other Stories (1954) and collaborations with various magazines, which helped him to conceive of literature from a broad perspective, as a set of practices that integrated illustration, typographic design, bookbinding and editing.
His collaborations in this regard, which he carried out in the magazine El Peneca (1908-1960) , between 1931 and 1937, where, with the pseudonym " Ovaguz ", he published illustrations, sports chronicles and literary texts, marked an important milestone in his training because he was able to meet artists, such as Fidelicio Atria (1904-1965) , who influenced the development of his technical skills and his aesthetic notions.
As a result of this knowledge, in 1934 he wrote, designed, illustrated and bound the book, unpublished until 2015, entitled Croquis del corazón (Sketch of the Heart ), under the pseudonym Darío Octay as an ode to the love he felt for a woman named Lucía Salazar.
They married on June 6, 1936, in the Church of Lourdes, which at that time was undergoing the construction of a second building designed by architects Eduardo Costabal and Andrés Garafulic, with sculptor Lily Garafulic.
The couple lived in the home of José Besa, where they also shared a home with Manuel Guerrero Rodríguez, a contemporary writer of Nicomedes Guzmán and father of Professor Manuel Guerrero Ceballos, who was murdered during the civil-military dictatorship by state agents along with José Manuel Parada and Santiago Nattino, an event known as the Degollados Case, which occurred in 1985. With marriage came Lucía and Nicomedes' first child: Oscar Vásquez Salazar—who would later become a renowned journalist and writer
In their home on Germán Riesco Street, the couple had two more daughters, Ximena and Florencia. As the family grew, they acquired their own house in the newly established El Polígono neighborhood, inaugurated in 1939 south of San Pablo Avenue, at 730 La Acacias Street (later Carlos Pezoa Véliz).
In this house, Nicomedes Guzmán would produce his best literary and editorial works and consolidate a value-based vision regarding the daily life of a population that, despite its social diversity, largely comprised the Chilean working class. This vision would position him as a leading figure and representative of the values and identity of the Chilean people.
In this house on Carlos Pezoa Véliz Street, in the heart of El Polígono, the book of poems Croquis del Corazón (Sketches of the Heart) was kept in a chest by Lucía Salazar even after her 81-year relationship with Nicomedes Guzmán ended. This object of love, created for this beautiful family moment, saw the light of day in 2015 when the family decided to no longer consider it a private family heirloom, but rather a part of Chilean popular culture.
The original is donated to the National Library, who restored and preserved it, and the Victorino Lainez Publishing Cooperative together with the Al Tiro Cultural Center of the El Polígono neighborhood of Quinta Normal jointly publish 1000 facsimile copies of this important example of national and communal literature.
The El Polígono housing complex was built in 1939 as part of the public housing policies promoted by the Popular Front government under the presidency of Pedro Aguirre Cerda. Through the Caja de la Habitación Popular (Popular Housing Fund), the State purchased the land located around San Pablo and Barros Arana streets, which had previously been part of the "Chacra el Polígono" (El Polígono Farm). The name derives from the shooting range that operated on this land for military and sporting purposes. Adjacent to the range were also some tomato fields and a school (Medina and Solar, 2010).
Prior to this state investment in the construction of a workers' housing complex, several plots of land belonging to these farms were purchased for the subdivision and construction of the Quidora housing complex around 1915.
With this state investment, the El Polígono complex became part of the major public works projects undertaken by the Pedro Aguirre Cerda administration in Quinta Normal. Nicomedes Guzmán came to live in one of the first houses built during the initial phase of the settlement's development.
The El Polígono settlement features diverse housing types that converge within a single territorial unit. Between 1939 and 1942, 290 houses were built.
Some were detached with their own front gardens, while the majority consisted of a shared entrance and a common front patio that was later divided into four separate dwellings: two on the first floor and two on the second. These latter two were accessed via a single staircase that began in the shared patio.
Then, between 1946 and 1949, construction began on 120 apartments with a total area of 56 square meters. The land located at the entrance to San Pablo Street remained undeveloped until the 1960s when the State decided to build educational establishments; during that entire period, the land was used as dirt fields for playing soccer.
The convergence of a strong and centralized state development movement, the transversal political principles among the popular classes regarding prioritizing school education to promote the growth of the country, the effective application of public policies that allowed the working classes to solve certain basic needs, including housing, and the centrality of art within the creative possibilities of Chile, motivated the formation of artists, artisans and intellectuals in the El Polígono neighborhood in the various areas of knowledge, such as La Sonora Palacios, Guillermo Prado, Richard Rojas, Homero Bascuñán, Hirohito and his group, among others.
Nicomedes Guzmán began a literary development from El Polígono that would soon lead him to work in the Department of Culture of the Ministry of Education and as an editor at Editorial Cultura.
He also collaborated during the 1940s in the magazine En Viaje (1933-1973) , a media outlet of the State Railway Company, where he published texts under the pseudonym - which he had already used to sign Croquis del corazón - of "Darío Octay", which he devised as a tribute to the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío and the town of Puerto Octay.
As an editor, he conceived collections such as La honda and Novelistas contemporáneos de América , both published by Ediciones Cultura, of which he was director. He also compiled anthologies of the work of Baldomero Lillo (1867-1923) , the short stories of Marta Brunet (1897-1967) , and the poetry and prose of Carlos Pezoa Véliz (1879-1908) , all published by Editorial Zig-Zag .
It was Nicomedes Guzmán's literary ability to portray the harsh reality of the popular classes at the beginning of the 20th century that led him to win the Santiago Municipal Literature Prize in 1944 with Blood and Hope his most autobiographical work.
We witness the narrative of a working-class child, Enrique Quilodrán, the son of a machinist and a laundress.Through his childlike eyes, he observes events not only within his family but also recounts the repressions of the time. At the beginning, he writes: “And we, the children of that era, were time itself, perpetually playing, mocking that life which, in its misery, became heroic.”
Later: “Life shook us all. Some more than others. But, if we emerged triumphant in childhood, the games of adulthood rotted into apathy and discouragement.”
The Quilodrán family lives in a tenement located at Mapocho 2480, corner of García Reyes, a place where Nicomedes Guzmán's family also lived approximately between 1918 and 1928. “Short, with a height betrayed by just a few two-story buildings, wrinkled, dusty, the neighborhood was like an old dog abandoned by its master… Over there, San Pablo Street. Here, the tram depot and the large workshops of the Electric Company” (Guzmán, 1943).
Throughout the narrative, the author describes the neighborhood (“the poor neighborhood was like a flower fallen in petals of mist”), the tenement's residents (“the prostitutes, the thieves, the evangelicals, all the workers”), the economic problems such as unemployment (“the capital seemed to tremble under the weight of miserable and hungry humanity”), and the sense of impending doom, among other aspects.
On a personal level, the narrator's father, a streetcar worker and active union leader, suffers the brunt of the repression, thus framing the story in the 1920s, with the streetcar workers' strike, supported by the Chilean Workers' Federation, as its backdrop.
After beginning his literary life in the Quinta Normal district, Nicomedes Guzmán, having recently gained a place in the literary field, met Violeta Parra through the renowned bookseller of those years, Rafael Hurtado. Parra, having recently arrived to live on Edison Street and later, after marrying railway worker Luis Cereceda, at the Cité de las Viudas on Andes Street with Lourdes, was also beginning in the 1930s the great work of dedicating her life to art, research, writing, and creation from Quinta Normal.
Nicomedes Guzmán separated from Lucía Salazar during the 1950s, later beginning a relationship with psychologist and social worker Esther Josefina Panay Pérez, who also lived in Quinta Normal. hey had two children, and his daughter Olaya has dedicated much of her work in the literary world to rescuing and publishing her father's work, leading, among other projects, the publication of "Estampas populares de Chile" (Popular Scenes of Chile).
Throughout his extensive career as a writer and editor, Nicomedes Guzmán dedicated himself to establishing a vision of work and social justice and to forging new professional paths that helped diversify the understanding of literature as a body of aesthetic content.
He also championed the work of unpublished writers and promoted that of established authors, aiming to enrich national and Latin American literary production.The Municipality of San Miguel awarded him the National People's Prize in 1961.
As a writer, he created a vision of marginality that transcended stereotypical portrayals of the working class. His work, rooted in Marxism, imbued the world he narrated with a sense of hope and historical redemption, exploring the causes and consequences of inequalities in capitalist society.
The themes of his literary work, centered on predominant social aspects of Chilean life at the time, emphasized social injustice, the exploitation of workers, the miserable life of the suburbs, moral degradation in poverty, and corruption in power.
For many years, Guzmán's literary production was described as "the Voice of the People," a definition based on the myth that testimonial writing corresponds to the faithful transcription of a reality or a true event when, as has been shown, testimonial discourse is interfered with by the filter of memory and a subjectivity that elaborates and even invents what is supposedly real.
However, Nicomedes Guzmán's complex writing poses a serious challenge to those addicted to rigid classifications. It is not the Voice of the People, but rather the Voice of Nicomedes Guzmán, a writer who models his imagined or reshaped stories from a familiar environment.
The tools of his writing come from diverse literary sources, which did not conform to the hierarchy of "the canon" established by official culture, but rather to unsystematic chance encounters: the book he found in a bookstore, the book a friend lent him, the book recommended by the owner of a shop that sold old books or rented the latest ones.
These chance encounters formed a cultural melting pot that created a heterogeneous intertextual field in which 19th-century Realism and Naturalism, the avant-garde, sentimental serials, and the cinema that, along with radio, ushered in mass culture in the 1940s, are all mixed together.
In addition to its unsystematic nature, Guzmán's ideological position serves as the firm and explicit foundation of his entire work. His Marxist discourse aimed at social denunciation, political resistance and the utopia of equality as a counterpoint to the hegemonic nation. This political agenda conveys the hope for change in Chilean society.
At the beginning of the 1960s, Nicomedes Guzmán's health deteriorated rapidly due to complex physical and psychological factors, and he died in the El Polígono neighborhood at the age of 50 on June 26, 1964. His remains were laid in state at the Chilean Writers' Society, of which he was Director.
Among the various photographs, paintings, pictures and works of art that to this day adorn the walls of Nicomedes Guzmán's house – which has been inhabited for several years by his son Darío Vásquez – the image of Nicomedes with Darío and Pablo Neruda at a barbecue held at the Nobel poet's house on the occasion of the visit of the Czechoslovakian football team to Chile in 1958, is one of the images that attracts the most attention within the space and that recalls the social and festive sense of the writer from Quinta Normal.
Both sons, born and raised in the streets of the same town, El Polígono de Quinta Normal, have made a circumstantial contribution to keeping their father's memory alive. In fact, when the 100th anniversary of the writer's birth was commemorated in 2014, they carried out various activities to reconstruct his legacy, including the publication of a text, the naming of the town's library after him, the placement of a commemorative plaque on his house, and later the creation of the Nicomedes Guzmán Foundation. Darío Vásquez still lives in the writer's house in the El Polígono neighborhood, preserving the legacy of his life and work. The son of Nicomedes Guzmán, a teacher by profession, has also been a major figure in the history of the Quinta Normal district, serving as a national leader of the Teachers' Union from the 1990s until the last union elections, when he handed over his position as General Secretary to the new generation.
From the family home, he now safeguards the writer's legacy, as well as that of his mother, Lucía.
The house, by his own choice, has undergone some changes to its original structure; it now has two floors, and the interior spaces have been significantly diversified.
One of the most important works still in Nicomedes Guzmán's house is a portrait of him painted by the renowned Chilean artist Pedro Lobos. Family lore recounts that the writer, angered by Lobos's delay in finishing the painting, simply—in the midst of an argument—took it from his studio and brought it home, preventing the painter from completing and signing it. Today, this painting is the most valuable work created in honor of Nicomedes Guzmán that remains in the family home, a highly prized piece that has been separated from others which, by family wish, now form part of the Nicomedes Guzmán Archive at the National Library of Chile.
The house of Carlos Pezoa Véliz in the El Polígono neighborhood continues to safeguard the old furniture, works, and stories of Nicomedes Guzmán, despite the political persecution that Nicomedes and his family experienced in their home in El Polígono with the promulgation of the " Cursed Law," which was implemented during the governments of Gabriel González Videla and Carlos Ibáñez del Campo between 1948 and 1958.
This law caused Nicomedes Guzmán to be under police surveillance at his home in Carlos Pezoa Véliz because of his membership in the Communist Party, as well as during the coup d'état and the subsequent civil-military dictatorship (1973-1990), which forced part of his family to be persecuted and exiled.
The legacy of Nicomedes Guzmán continues to inspire many. I will conclude this article by quoting Nicomedes Guzmán himself, regarding his vision of literature: “I believe that literature has a vital responsibility: to create a climate conducive to peace, to better understanding among men, in exchange for describing their struggles, telling their truths, even touching on what is corrosive in beings, confronting the aspects of human negation with virtues, particularly tenderness, which, in my understanding, is the most manly gift of man, the foundation of all acts of existence.”
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