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

In Mining for the Nation Jody Pavilack has produced a solidly documented study about the political endeavours of the Chilean colliers during the turbulent decades of 1930 and 1940. Pavilack centres her study in Lota, the main collieries in the country, although she also marginally includes towns such as Coronel, to the north, and Lebu to the south. The author’s declared aim is to analyze the politics of the Chilean Popular Front at the local and “popular” (meaning working class?) level. In order to accomplish her objectives, Pavilack has used a wide array of sources to account for the miners’ political experience. In characterizing the mining communities she has used intensively the documents left by the Compañía Industrial de Lota (quite an endeavour since they are not classified) as well as the municipal archive of Lota and interviews with former colliers and union leaders. To analyze labour relations and the local politics she used the documents produced by the regional government (Intendencia), the Ministry of the Interior (in charge of law and order), and the Ministry of Labour and the General Directory of Labour Affairs, which is one of the dependencies of the former. She also made good use of parliamentary debates and the press, both local and national. Pavilack also had access to the reports periodically produced by the Labour Attaché at the United States’ Embassy in Santiago, a very valuable source since that official was, or was said to be, an expert in labour relations. Therefore, from the methodological point of view it is a solid book, although one wonders about the number of interviews (thirty seems to be a limited sample in communities with over 15,000 workers) as well as the persons interviewed, mainly union leaders and members of political parties, mainly the Communist Party.

Pavilack contends that, contrary to what conventional wisdom and analyses from the far left have maintained, the working class was not a passive actor of the Popular Front period; workers played an active role and contributed actively to the shaping of the political scenario. Therefore the Popular Front should not be viewed as a demobilizing period, although here it should be remembered that the Front dissolved in 1941. Quite the contrary, according to Pavilack, labour leaders and political activists (mainly members of the Communist Party), articulated a program of participative democracy and social justice which was enthusiastically made their own by the colliers and the communities, to the despair and fear and staunch opposition of the local economic elites and right wing parties, who put heavy pressure on the centrist members of the Front to detain the mobilization and advancement of the workers. These developments lead the author to conclude that repression, particularly harsh during the government of President Gabriel González (1946–1952), was mostly motivated by local, national events – labour agitation in the collieries was part of national movements – rather than by external variables such as the politics of the Cold War.

The book is organized in three parts, and it is rather conventional and uneven. The first part consists of a characterization of what could be called “the world of coal,” that is to say the environment, both physical and social where, according to the author, in the first quarter of the 20th century, the “worker citizen” entered the scene. According to this, after a prolonged strike in 1920 communists and socialists begun to make inroads in the coal mining communities, which hitherto had been under, if not the control, a heavy influence of anarchists and Trotskyists. It was a new scenario and while the latter lost influence the former combined their activism with making use of the new labour legislation both for reorganizing labour and managing labour conflicts. Thus when the Popular Front was organized at the national level in 1935, the local leaders were prepared to give...