Mining for the Nation: The Politics of Chile's Coal Communities from the Popular Front to the Cold War (review)

This history of coal mining in Chile is an informative narrative of the era it covers as well as of its specific subject. It should be of interest to Latin Americanists dealing with the region and the origins of the Cold War. Pavilack, while ignoring my study of the era, does an excellent job of summarizing Chilean politics from the 1920s through the 1940s. She also provides a solid narrative of coal mining from the early republic until its consolidation as a sector in the 1920s. Unlike Chilean nitrates and copper, coal was wholly owned by domestic capital. The family name most closely associated with it was Cousiño, and its Coal Mining and Industrial Company of Lota (CCIL) became the dominant entity of the industry. Pavilack's narrative eventually concentrates on the politics of the sector and the region in southern Chile near Concepción but her work does a good job of integrating social history, some related to the elites and much more to the miners.

Chilean coal was fairly soft and dirty but it provided an essential part of the nation's energy. It will come as no surprise that the Cousiños lived well and the miners poorly. While the work bogs down here and there in archival detail, it is never uninteresting and provides some surprising findings even for Chilean specialists. There are vivid descriptions of mining under the ocean, of the labor communities, and of the gut-renching poverty. The miners' adaptation of communist militancy, including joining the party, is well known, but Pavilack provides on-the-ground narratives of how miners were recruited, how their meetings were conducted, how socialists in the region competed for support and divided the labor force, and the general extent of an often-sophisticated class consciousness within the left. She ties a sense of commonality among the miners to their shared experiences as laborers on nearby large estates, drawing heavily on Brian Loveman's pioneering work, and, of course, to the bitter life they were handed in the mines and mining camps. Her most arresting discovery is the role that native Methodists played in raising laborers' sense of self-worth. She compares the Methodists' emphasis on "brotherhood and love for all people" (p. 107) in radicalizing mining communities to that of Catholic liberation theology in the 1960s.

There is an unavoidable denouement: the left did not win in the 1930s and 1940s or at any later time. The coal miners suffered devastation during the Great Depression but provided crucial backing for the Popular Front's victory in 1938, only to see President Pedro Aguirre Cerda die a few years later. They endured conservative Radical Party rule through the war years and then helped Gabriel González Videla, whom they considered part of the party's left wing, to victory in 1946. A crucible soon formed as the coal mining bosses pushed hard to roll back labor gains and the president allowed the cost of basic foodstuffs to rise; the miners understood that the president had abandoned them and prepared themselves for a legal, crucial strike. Then González Videla ordered them to return to work and later claimed he had promised major wage increases. By then, the workers had no reason to believe him—the bosses had been ignoring the labor code and their constitutional rights (Pavilack provides some crucial local evidence at this point), and police harassment had intensified. The miners were not even told what the raise would be before the strike; the government trumpeted a figure of 40 percent only after it began. González Videla militarized the area, the army and police carried out summary arrests of labor leaders, the strike was suppressed, and a new law banned the Communist Party, truncating the miners' long struggle for...