This article examines political ideology, cultural nationalism and the contesting of identity in early twentieth-century Chile. It does so by tracing the emergence of a unique cultural construct – the huaso cowboy – in the literary sphere and by exploring a ‘rural idealist’ discourse employed by middle-class, reformist intellectuals who hoped for the mitigation of the ‘social question’ and the displacement of traditional oligarchs from cultural and political centrality. It also seeks to explain how the fiction genre known as criollismo challenged elitist conceptions of ‘nation’ and ‘culture’ in the context of dramatic socio-political, economic and demographic change.