Between Pan-Americanism and the Cold War: A Modern Building for the Young Men's Christian Association of Santiago (1920-1964)

In 1963, the new institutional building of the Santiago Young Men's Christian Association (YMcA) was inaugurated in the historic center of the city. It was not the first headquarters that the American-origin institution had in the capital, but it was the first designed to accommodate a mixed program, which included educational, sports, social, and cultural activities. Innovative both for the coexistence of uses and for the proposed vertical solution, the building reflected the interests of the institution and its views on how Chilean youth should be oriented in a context of modernization and accelerated social transformation. Representative of a period of collaborations between Chile and the United States, the project continues some of the logics of interwar pan-Americanism, but in a context of the Cold War. Its conception and management condense transnational power relations, within a global framework of political, commercial, and cultural interests. Financed with contributions from the International Committee of Young Men's Christian Associations of the United States and Canada, American companies installed in Chile, and American philanthropic societies, its construction is the result of the relationships between business capital and a civil entity of religious origin. In the intersections between political history and the history of the city, the article analyzes the design, financing, and construction of an institutional building based on institutional archives, seeking to understand the shared visions between the Association and a business ecosystem regarding market economy, youth education, and liberal democracy.