Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence, and the Nation-State in Chile, 1890 to the Present (review)

December 21, 2007 marked the one hundredth anniversary of the massacre of striking nitrate workers—the number perhaps exceeding 3,000—by the Chilean military at the Escuela Santa María in Iquique. To commemorate the massacre, a national coordinating committee, consisting of diverse institutions and individuals, planned and executed a wide-ranging slate of activities that began in Santiago and culminated in a week-long series of events in Iquique. On the concluding day, Chile’s interior minister helped to inaugurate a new mausoleum in Iquique honoring those who died in that notorious episode of state violence. Lessie Jo Frazier’s book, Salt in Sand, which traces the history of state violence in the formation of the Chilean nation-state and explains the evolving morphology of memory associated with that violence, could not have been timelier.

Frazier begins with an ethnographic scene of arrival: the early 1990s, a decade in which Chileans found themselves beginning to struggle with the legacy of the human-rights violations of the Pinochet regime. According to Frazier, as part of their political project of regime transition and reconciliation, the postdictatorship governments of the Concertación represented the 1973 coup and its attendant violence as an aberration in the history of an otherwise pacific and stable nation. Observing that various nonstate actors, such as working-class communities and human-rights and survivor groups, responded to this official memory with their own countermemory, Frazier interrogates the past and discerns a history of state-sponsored violence, from the largely forgotten massacres of Oficina Ramírez (1891) and La Coruña (1925), to the slaughter at Escuela Santa María, and finally to episodes of state repression, torture, and execution at detention camps in Pisagua during various eras. All of these “events” took place in the northern Chilean province of Tarapacá, which becomes the well-chosen vantage point for her study.

Frazier posits and periodizes the predominant forms of memory associated with state violence: cathartic memory during the oligarchic state period (1890s–1930s); empathetic memory in the populist period (1930s–1973); and finally sympathetic memory, which waned into an amalgam of nostalgia and melancholy, in the neoliberal period (1973–2005). The massacre at Escuela Santa María in 1907 looms large in Frazier’s account; it not only represented the most notorious early example of state violence, but it engendered “cathartic memory,” which she interprets as memory that calls for “direct, militant, and transformative action that claims past suffering in the anticipation of future struggle” (p. 62). The subsequent rise of the labor movement following the massacre can be seen as an example of this type of “memory for action.”

Frazier sees this type of confrontational memory being restructured over the course of the twentieth century as Chile’s multiparty system emerged. Political coalitions, such as the Popular Front and later Popular Unity, mobilized a different memory of the 1907 massacre, one intended to create less confrontational and more empathetic alliances (“your history is part of mine” [p. 67]) among center-left political parties. Memory becomes complex in the neoliberal period. During the dictatorship, anti-authoritarian sectors of Chilean society used the Santa María massacre as an allegory in part to draw international attention (and sympathy) to the contemporary suffering in their country. The memory modes of nostalgia and melancholy, which according to Frazier have become dominant in the postdictatorship period, have sustained an economy of reconciliation by conveying a “sense that the past is radically distinct from the present and that the future will merely elaborate the logics of the present” (p. 147). This type of official memory works for those sectors of Chilean society that view 1973 as a mere “blip” and now want to move on. But what of the victims of state violence, the dead and those they left behind...