Beyond Patriotic Phobias: Connections, Cooperation, and Solidarity in the Peruvian-Chilean Pacific World

Abstract

Joshua Savala contends that whereas previous scholars have presupposed antagonism and conflict in Peruvian-Chilean relations, his work highlights several instances of cooperation and solidarity between Peruvians and Chileans from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. One of his main objectives in Beyond Patriotic Phobias is to decenter the War of the Pacific and its attendant nationalist excesses as the central determinant of Peruvian-Chilean relations and to demonstrate that Peruvians and Chileans who moved throughout an imagined South American Pacific world produced the possibility of cooperation and collaboration. He seeks a more positive history of the relationship between Peru and Chile while not neglecting the past conflict and antagonism between the two countries.The theme of circulation looms large in this compact book. Indeed, the author demonstrates a keen eye for the more quotidian forms of circulation between Peru and Chile, including shared ideas regarding gender relations, the spread of cholera bacteria, and the parallel development of modern policing techniques. However, it is the circulation of people, in particular the movement of nonelite Peruvian and Chilean maritime workers, that indicates for Savala the existence of a greater transnational South American Pacific world. The multinational crews of the ships and dockworkers shared common work experiences at sea and in urban port cities, and their mutual struggles during the international anarcho-syndicalist movement of the early twentieth century helped them see beyond the narrow horizon of their nation-states. Anarchism, an oceanic perspective, and transnationality thus coalesce to become Savala's framework and analytical lens.The majority male and single crews of ships inhabited a highly patriarchal space where ideas regarding gender relations and masculinity were shared by many Peruvians and Chileans. In addition to submitting women to one's sexual desire, a real man had to be strong, hardworking, and, significantly, loyal to the union. Even though the author notes the homosocial and casually homosexual nature of this maritime world, he emphasizes that women played an essential coconstitutive role in constructing the gender relations in the region, whether by interacting with men as sex workers in the port cities or, in some cases, by traveling along with them at sea. In chapter 3, “Transnational Cholera,” Savala argues that while the threat and spread of cholera in 1886–88 might have increased conflict in Peruvian-Chilean relations, the fight against the disease in fact encouraged cooperation between two distinct national medical communities, a science without borders. Savala credits the cholera outbreak with advancing state formation through the development in both Peru and Chile of state agencies, policies, and the physical infrastructure to isolate and defeat the disease. In chapter 5 the author makes a similar point regarding policing techniques, as both nation-states embarked on parallel paths to develop and share modern criminological practices, intelligence, and tighter methods of social control.For Savala, the cooperative efforts of maritime and port workers in the South American Pacific best evince the promise of transnational solidarity between Chileans and Peruvians. He selects and then analyzes three episodes of Chilean-Peruvian labor organization in Valparaíso, Chile, and Mollendo, Peru, where locals of the Industrial Workers of the World were established in 1919 and 1925, respectively. Anarchism, by definition antithetical to the nation-state, provided workers on both sides of the border with an alternative idiom through which to establish more meaningful communication and a greater sense of belonging. When Chilean ship crews backed striking Peruvian port workers in Mollendo in 1925, words and moral support turned into a successful industrial action. In a fitting epilogue, Savala carries the story forward to the 2000s and shows how Peruvian and Chilean fishermen cooperated during an acrimonious maritime dispute between the two countries.Beyond Patriotic Phobias is a welcome addition to the scholarship dealing with Peruvian-Chilean international relations. Savala cogently argues that achieving a thorough understanding of the relations between Chile and Peru requires unearthing the many occasions when people on both sides of the border cooperated to meet the challenges of modern nation-state formation. His claim that Peruvians and Chileans cocreated a Peruvian-Chilean Pacific oceanic world where this cooperation unfolded is conceptually intriguing, and his focus on port cities as key contact zones is well chosen. It is curious, though, that Arica and Iquique, two Pacific ports seized by Chile during the War of the Pacific, receive negligible attention, even though Peruvians and Chileans existed cheek by jowl in these cities through much of the period of his study. These ports and their surrounding hinterlands became sites where attempts at working-class solidarity foundered on the twin reefs of nativist politics and chauvinistic nationalism. However, it is not Savala's aim to linger on such nationalist conflict, prevalent as it was in this period. He succeeds in pointing out that despite all the discord at the nation-state level, some Peruvians and Chileans boldly opted for more cooperative and supportive forms of human association.