Osvaldo Reyes

Who was Osvaldo Reyes?

Osvaldo Reyes Herrera, was a Chilean artist who lived in Chile, Mexico, and Canada.

The eldest child of a railway baggage porter and a seamstress, he had to help support the family financially to ensure that his seven siblings were able to finish their education, while he studied to be a teacher. He was born in Santiago, Chile in 1919, when the world was reeling from the First World War. He experienced poverty and inequality firsthand, and had to strive hard to overcome them. He grew up in the Santiago barrio of Estación Central, which in those days was on the outskirts of the city. His teenage years coincided with the devastating effects of the Great Depression in the thirties in Chile, when the country suffered the bankruptcies and layoffs that provoked the worst social crisis in Latin America's history.

He married in secret so he could stay to care for his family, instead of starting his own household. The first of his family to get an education, he made sure his siblings got the same opportunity, and later taught art to underprivileged and special needs children.

In his first post as a teacher, in the southern city of Puerto Natales, Chile, he taught classes of children who came to school barefoot in spite of the cold, in a small school with glassless windows, shaken by the gusts of icy wind typical of the Chilean south. Most of his students could not read or write, nor could their parents. He succeeded in helping several of these children on the road to success, and in the process he acquired the conviction that his country was in need of profound change. It was in those years that he came to define himself as a socialist, a conviction which he held to the end of his days.