Gómez Rojas, José Domingo (1896–1920)

Born in Santiago, Chile, on August 4, 1896, José Domingo Gómez Rojas achieved literary fame at a young age. In 1913 he published Rebeldías Líricas, a collection of poems attacking class privilege and celebrating youthful rebellion that, by the decade's end, resonated with Santiago's middle-class youth and university students. As a law student at the University of Chile, he also worked with labor and anarchist movements in Santiago and Valparaiso and affiliated himself with the Chilean branch of the International Workers of the World. Taken into custody during a sweep of the offices of the Chilean Student Federation (FECH) in July 1920, he spent the next two months incarcerated. His condition deteriorated as a result of solitary confinements and physical abuse, and he was transferred in late September to an asylum, where he died on September 29. Gómez Rojas's death had a powerful impact on subsequent generations of Chilean intellectual and political leaders, and he has survived as a symbol of resistance to state repression: The Popular Front repeatedly eulogized him in the 1930s and 1940s, and nearly a half-century later in 1983 a student collective organized in opposition to Pinochet's dictatorship named itself "el grupo José Domingo Gómez Rojas."

See alsoLiterature: Spanish America .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Work

Rebeldías Líricas. [1913]. Santiago: Ediciones Ercilla, 1940.

Secondary Work

Valle, Fabio Moraga, and Carlos Vega Delgado, eds. José Domingo Gómez Rojas: Vida y Obra. Punta Arenas, Chile: Editorial Ateli, 1997.

                                   Raymond B. Craib