Pipiolos
Pipiolos
Pipiolos, the nickname first commonly applied to Chilean Liberals in the 1820s. In conventional Spanish, the word has the connotation of "novices" or "beginners," and also has a slight sense of "men on the make." The local Chilean use is said to have derived from pío pío, the noise made by chickens when scratching around for grain. Apparently a similar sound was made by the pre-dominantly Liberal card players who frequented an insalubrious café in Calle Ahumada, Santiago, owned by Spaniard Francisco Barrios. (This café, one of only two or three in Santiago at that time, went out of business in the mid-1820s.) Like many nicknames of this sort (for example, Tories in England), the expression was adopted by those it sought to ridicule. A short-lived newspaper, El Pipiolo, published eight issues in 1827. The term is most accurately used to denote the Liberals of the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s.
See alsoChile, Political Parties: Liberal Party .
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Collier, Simon. Chile: The Making of a Republic, 1830–1865: Politics and Ideas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Gazmuri, Cristián; Manuel Loyola; and Sergio Grez Toso. Los proyectos nacionales en el pensamiento político y social chileno del siglo XIX. Santiago: Ediciones UCSH, 2002.
Scully, Timothy. Rethinking the Center: Party Politics in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century Chile. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992.
Simon Collier