Trabajos y rebeldias en la pampa salitrera: El ciclo del salitre y la reconfiguracion de las identidades populares (1850-1900) (review)

Trabajos y rebeldías en la pampa salitrera: El ciclo del salitre y la reconfiguración de las identidades populares (1850-1900). By JULIO PINTO VALLEJOS. Colección Ciencias Sociales (Historia). Santiago: Universidad de Santiago, 1998. Photographs. Illustrations. Map. Notes. Bibliography. 326 pp. Paper.

Long known for their sophisticated and innovative research, Chilean historians, along with other faculty in the humanities and social sciences, were dealt a reeling blow by the Pinochet dictatorship. Many young scholars were forced into exile and subsequently found academic shelter and earned advanced degrees, mainly in Western Europe, less commonly in the United States or Mexico. Others managed to survive in Chile, picking up a variety of teaching jobs in the rubble of the shattered universities. During the past 10 or 15 years, as the exiles returned and new faces emerged at home, a renewed vitality is apparent not just in the two traditional centers in Santiago (the University of Chile and the Catholic University) but also in the new private schools founded during the dictatorship or in such places as the University of Valparaíso or the University of Santiago de Chile. Julio Pinto Vallejos's book on the "reconfigurations of popular identities" in the nineteenth-century nitrate industry is in keeping with this new work that seeks to penetrate the "social worlds" of unexamined people.

The discovery of sodium nitrate in the desert pampa provinces of Antofagasta and Tarapacá led to the migration of Chilean workers into those areas to intermingle with resident Peruvian and Bolivian settlers. Competition over mineral wealth soon led to the War of the Pacific (1879-84), stark conflict between labor and capital and two of the most bloody repressions of workers by armed force in Latin American history.

Julio Pinto, director of the History Department at the University of Santiago de Chile, leads us through this history in a questing, examining, analytical way, exploring conventional interpretations, offering alternatives. He demonstrates that the initial Chilean migrants were not (as the landowners often claimed) rustic farmworkers duped or coerced into the nitrate fields, but rather workers already with wage-earning experience, who voluntarily left their jobs seeking higher pay. In a fairly short time, given the heavy capital investment, the consequent requirement for specialized workers in an evermore mechanized industry, and the workers' own recognition of their common plight, the migrants begin to take on the characteristics of a proletariat. Isolated in the desert, unable to return to their homeland in central Chile, workers could only "flee inward," that is, to accept their new situation. This led at first, to outbreaks of protest or local revolts put down, in the absence of any state presence, by company gendarmes, and a growing, sporadic, discontinuous sense of a desert plains (a "pampa") identity.

Toward the end of the century the workers' experience had led to a degree of political consciousness. In 1890 the first widespread strike was violently broken by the machine-gunning of several thousand workers by the now formidable garrisons of the army. Although the nitrate workers have long been credited with initiating the long march of the Chilean Left with this strike, Pinto shows that the impetus came in fact from the more organized port workers with rather passive support from mine workers themselves. In another fascinating chapter the author explores the reasons for the nitrate workers' glacial indifference to President Balmaceda's call for support against the nitrate bosses in the civil war of 1891, but then paradoxically, their subsequent adoration of the martyred president. A final chapter leads to the development of a clear "pampino" identity and full politicization by 1925.

Pinto's story of the twists and turns of the nitrate workers' construction of their own particular identity, their conflictive relations with the powerful and largely...