Riquelme, Daniel (1855?–1912)

Daniel Riquelme was born in Santiago, Chile; his birth year is given variously as 1853, 1854, 1855, and 1857. Son of a stenographer and a teacher, he became a prominent figure in Chilean letters. During the War of the Pacific Riquelme served as a correspondent for the Valparaiso newspaper El Heraldo and accompanied Chilean forces on their excursions into Peru and their capture of Lima. Many of his articles on the War of the Pacific, often written under the pseudonym Inocencio Conchalí, were later published by the Chilean government under the title La campaña del ejército chilena en Lima; others appeared in his Chascarrillos militares, which appeared in 1885 and was reissued in expanded form in 1888 as perhaps his best-known work, Bajo la tienda.

Riquelme's descriptive, often humorous, and very human sketches of common soldiers and, later, Santiago's workers and bohemians—sometimes amalgamated into a single type, el roto—garnered him high praise as a chronicler of Chilean popular culture and the everyday life of central Santiago. Riquelme sought treatment for tuberculosis in Lausanne, Switzerland, and died there on August 9, 1912; an obituarist noted that "perhaps no one has penetrated so deeply into the popular soul as has Daniel Riquelme."

See alsoJournalism .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works by Daniel Riquelme

Chascarrillos militares [Humoristic Military Sketches]. 1885.

Bajo la tienda, recuerdos de la campaña al Perú y Bolivia, 1879–1884 [1888] [Under the Tent: Reminiscences of the Peruvian and Bolivian Campaigns, 1879–1884]. Santiago: Zig-Zag, 1937.

La revolución del 20 de abril de 1851 [1893] [The Revolution of April 20, 1851]. Santiago: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1966.

El incendio de la iglesia de la Compañía el 8 de diciembre de 1863 [The Conflagration of the Church of the Society, December 8, 1863]. 1893.

Compendio de Historia de Chile [A Condensed History of Chile]. 1899.

El terremoto del Señor de Mayo [The Earthquake of Senor de Mayo]. 1905.

Secondary Work

Castro, Raúl Silva. "Introducción Biográfica." In La revolución del 20 de abril de 1851, by Daniel Riquelme. Santiago: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1966.

                                            Raymond B. Craib