Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile's El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904-1951 (review)

In 1904, William Braden, a United States mining engineer, persuaded the American Smelting and Refining company and the Guggenheim brothers to buy and develop a remote, flooded, and virtually abandoned copper mine, four days by mule from the nearest town and 10,000 feet above a verdant valley, in the barren Cordillera of central Chile. By the 1930s, enormous shafts, and miles of lateral tunnels driven into the unforgiving mountain, had made “El Teniente” the world’s largest underground copper mine and “the envy of copper producers the world over.” (30). Heavy capital investment and ingenious technique, a private railroad, a company-built hydroelectric plant, and state of the art crushers and smelters combined with labor costs only a fraction of those in the United States to yield steady profits of between 20 and 40 percent. But even though the investors were able to import the machinery, ready to go, they had to draw from a rural landscape of drowsy estates and dusty hamlets a labor force utterly unprepared for the discipline of industrial work.

The story of how these tough, footloose, hard-drinking, usually single, seasonal, and often migratory, peones and jornaleros were broken to the rhythm of mine work is the fascinating subject of Klubock’s deeply researched and original book. Recruited by the offer of wages more than twice those paid in the countryside, young men, soon accompanied by a parallel movement of mostly single women, came to cluster in the rude settlements, stores, bars, and brothels in the shadow of the mine. The American managers of El Teniente were quick to see that a strict, even repressive, labor policy, in conjunction with an unprecedented program of corporate social welfare, offered the best chance of taming the independent spirit of the new workers. Central to company policy was its promotion of a “modern” nuclear family, in which a tumultuous, masculine virility would be transformed into sober fatherhood and an uninhibited female sexuality into responsible domesticity. By 1932, a relatively stable population of 9,000 people had come to dwell in the barracks of the company town of Sewell on the steep slopes below the mine, slowly developing a hard-rock militancy that would break out in unpredictable ways in the years to come.

Understandably enough, the company’s policy was something that the traditional elites who ran Chile could get behind. In time, during the era of the Popular Front (1938–1947), even the Radical-Socialist-Communist coalition was prepared to accept the Braden Copper Company’s corporate welfare policy as its own, by reproducing at the state level similar projects of moral and cultural reform. These projects, however, focused on the family and “proletarian morality,” while continuing the gendered process of class formation.

At the same time, in contrast to the conservative, rural-based nationalism of the right, or the “criollismo” of the middle class, a leftist nationalism emerged to attempt a socialist redefinition of the national community. Consequently, not only did the mine workers of El Teniente express themselves more and more in nationalist language; they also came to understand that their new-found rights of working-class citizenship conferred economic power. Eventually, they offered support for Salvador Allende’s nationalization of the American-owned copper mines in 1971. Eventually, they began to display “multilayered and contradictory forms of identity and consciousness,” leading to a clamorous strike, devastating to the Popular Unity Government in 1973. This book’s emphasis on the long development of the workers’ everyday culture, on masculine workplace solidarity, and on the challenging attitude toward authority—whether corporate or state—makes these actions more comprehensible.

Klubock believes that his study shows how “struggles between labor and capital took place on a gendered field of power and reconstituted social constructions of masculinity and femininity.” Underneath this annoying abstraction lies a lucid and persuasive history drawn...