Appraising the Chilean labor movement during 1925: The Case of The South Pacific Mail

Abstract

The multidimensional relationship between Chile and Great Britain during 1810 and the mid twentieth century has been thoroughly studied by different areas of inquiry. In this sense, discourse analysis has resorted to the analysis of written press to explore various dimensions of this relationship. The present dissertation will analyze the way in which strike-related news were delivered and appraised by the Valparaiso-based, British newspaper The South Pacific Mail during 1925. Particularly, our dissertation aims to investigate how the Chilean social movement was appraised by this media sample, particularly in its portrayal of the Chilean working class. The topic was analyzed in eight pieces of news of the 1925 edition of The South Pacific Mail. Once digitized, the corpus was analyzed in the light of Martin and Rose’s Appraisal theory (2007). Our results suggest that the close relationship between Great Britain and Chile greatly affected the appraisal done by the British newspaper of the Chilean working class. In particular, it provides evidence that the economic, social and cultural dimensions of this relationship had a negative influence on the appraisal of the Chilean labor movement and its causes.