Partners in Conflict: The Politics of Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950–1973 by Heidi Tinsman (review)

98 The Latin Americanist Fall 2004 in or negotiating sexual activities. Sex educators in Guadalajara, concludes the author, focused mainly on the idea that doing what is “scientifically” recommended to prevent HIV infection is enough and effective disregarding other social practices, including the importance of risk-taking in sexual activities. “Trust, Love, Passion,” lastly, is the analysis of those social practices and a claim for the need to integrate the “two contrasting views of the sexual moment” (255)-the one that focuses on desire, seduction, passion and in general the idea of sexual satisfaction and emotions and the one that contains the “highly medicalized discourses of HIV prevention” (255). Despite the objections I pointed out at the beginning, The Night is Young is an important contribution to Mexican studies in an area that has received modest attention-sexuality. Finally, another aspect that makes this book outstanding reading is that in its best moments, it offers a free and candid view of sexuality in Guadalajara, a view that is much more dynamic, fresh and lively than the stereotypical representation of Mexico as a repressed and religious society. Rafael Herna’ndezRodriguez Southern ConnecticutState University Partners i n ConJlct: The Politics o f Gender, Sexuality, and Labor in the Chilean Agrarian Reform, 1950-1973. By Heidi Tinsman. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2002. xviii +296p. $64.95 cloth, $21.95 paper. In the 2001 special volume of the Hispanic American Historical Review dedicated to gender history, Thomas Klubock reminds us that most histories of Chilean president Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular coalition have focused mainly on its prominent male figures and ignored female contributions to his programs. Heidi Tinsman, who also published an article in the same volume of the HAHR, has helped fill this historiographical void with the publication of Partners in ConJlict. Tinsman’s work looks at the groups Gabriel Salazar examined in his Labrodores, peones y proletarios before they were peonized by August0 Pinochet’s neo-liberal reforms and became strong voices of protest against the Pinochet dictatorship. Tinsman also adds to the small but growing body of local histories of Chilean women, but stands out among this group in that she Book Reviews 99 examines a region that was deemed by the Eduardo Frei Montalva government of 1964-70 a proving ground for the Agrarian Reform. As a result, what began as a local study has a great deal to say about essential elements in the struggles of rural women both in the Aconcagua valley and throughout Chile during the Agrarian Reform. With this text, Tinsman also has established herself as one of only a handful of scholars who have successfully sought to meld a more traditional but still very essential Marxist-feminist analysis with discussions of patriarchy and sexuality that govern relationships among families and social classes, and between employers and employees. The Chilean Agrarian Reform of course met a tragic and inauspicious end in 1973, but one might expect to have found at least a fleeting improvement in the lives of rural women before the military coup. Tinsman rightly dampens this sentiment however , by noting that although campesino life in general improved during the Agrarian Reform, the combined forces of the central government, minority parties, unions and the Church, while ostensibly supporting gender mutualism, ended up reinforcing rural patriarchy. This monograph began as a local study of campesinos in Chile’s overwhelmingly agricultural Aconcagua valley. Tinsman turned it into a more universal tome however, showing the reader how the subjects of her narrative, although isolated, were very much affected by and participants in, the radical and widespread socio-economic changes that defined the Chilean Agrarian Reform. Tinsman explains in her introduction that her analysis employs elements of Marxist and psychoanalytical feminism. The latter is based principally on more than eighty oral histories from witnesses of the Agrarian Reform that the author collected in a series of interviews in 1989. The Marxist-feminist analysis is backed by a solid and well-argued picture of Chile’s rural economy and society on the eve of the Agrarian Reform that comprises most of chapter one. Here Tinsman traces the ever-evolving world of the Aconcagua campesino, one whose status within...