Culture
This area is known as the "huaso province" after the name of the Chilean cowboy, the huaso. Sashes and mantas – traditional items of the huaso costume – are woven in Doñihue on heavy vertical looms. Designs imitate vine leaves, bunches of grapes, pines and copihues. Other designs of colored stripes are woven on horizontal looms.
The population is a mixture of both European (including Argentinan immigrants) and Indigenous races and cultures, thus the region has a homogeneous culture known as Chileanidad is present and a mestizo imprint is evident.
The Libertador General Bernardo O'Higgins Region was settled by Spaniards (notably Andalusians, Basques, Aragonese and Navarrese) and other Europeans. French and Italian families established agriculture including the important wine industry: the Wine Route is one of the main tourist attractions of the Colchagua valley. Breweries can be found as well, the legacy of German and Swiss immigration. Livestock herding was especially influenced by British, Greek and Yugoslavian settlers.
In the late 19th century, a small number of Cherokee and Oklahoman settlers of American Indian descent from the USA was brought to the Libertador General Bernardo O'Higgins Region by the Chilean government, displaced by white settlement in Oklahoma. They founded in the 1880s a cooperative farm named Ovasso (an Osage word for "the end" or "edge"), which was later abandoned.
There is a small colony of Aartis or "Artas", East Indians descended from hired railway workers from British India in the early 20th century.
The relatively small distance from Santiago has led to a growing urban influence in the local culture. The largest city, Rancagua, is fast becoming a suburb of Santiago's upper-class professional workforce.
Read more about this topic: Libertador General Bernardo O'Higgins Region
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than as a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.”
—Henry David David (1817–1862)
“Our culture has become something that is completely and utterly in love with its parent. It’s become a notion of boredom that is bought and sold, where nothing will happen except that people will become more and more terrified of tomorrow, because the new continues to look old, and the old will always look cute.”
—Malcolm McLaren (b. 1946)