Reconstructing the City, Constructing the State: Government in Valparaíso after the Earthquake of 1906

Abstract

In 1906, an earthquake leveled much of Valparaíso, bringing Chile’s principal port both a crisis and an opportunity to rearrange urban space. As it turned out, the earthquake also destroyed much of the municipal government’s political power and increased that of the national government. After the disaster, the national government circumvented the municipal government and took the lead not only in emergency relief and large-scale public works but also in the mundane details of local regulations and zoning, matters that the national government had previously ignored. A new national law created a special reconstruction commission, dominated by presidential appointees and subject to direct presidential approval. It was this commission that shaped the new Valparaíso that rose from the rubble of the old. Through it, the national government took over certain powers previously developed by the local government, as well as nearly all of the local government’s momentum and initiative for shaping Valparaíso.The earthquake and the reconstruction show that Valparaíso’s nineteenth-century municipal governments laid pioneering foundations for Chile’s twentieth-century interventionist and regulatory national state. From the 1840s to the early 1900s, Valparaíso’s municipal government took the lead in local matters such as fire regulations, street lighting, street improvement plans, and utility concessions. Municipal authorities needed national approval for certain major financial matters, but they usually received it. Municipal efforts in local development and regulation gradually led citizens to accept government intervention in their lives and businesses. The municipal administration was fairly well organized, and its decisions were fairly frequently heeded. National trade policy, naval spending, investments in transportation infrastructure, and actions on other nationwide concerns affected Valparaíso significantly, but local people handled local matters. However, those local initiatives built national government power in the long run. In the early twentieth century, the national state gradually came to exercise more direct power and influence over business and daily life, as well as greater control over the provinces, including Valparaíso. The earthquake let the national government expand its activities in Valparaíso rapidly. Similar changes followed in four other cities between 1906 and 1928 and eventually spread throughout Chile.1Valparaíso’s case fits into a pattern common throughout Latin America. Even before many Latin American national states controlled borders, taxes, or violence, and before they commanded feelings of national loyalty among their people, city officials were expanding government regulation and intervention into many parts of life.2 Such activities became a major characteristic of the state in the twentieth century. Municipal officials and other urban leaders led quests for various versions of modernity. They used the power of local governments to enforce (or try to enforce) their notions of order, discipline, and modernity, which many theorists link to the creation of the state.3 Most people had more contact with local government — through city ordinances, regulations, public works, and so on — than they did with any other level of the state. Most studies of Latin American urban history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries trace the influence of national and international policies and activities on the development and life of the region’s cities.4 A new body of literature, still relatively small, traces the converse influence of cities on national states, including municipal governments’ role in pioneering state involvement in everyday life.The connection between urban undertakings and state formation dates to at least the late colonial period. When the Bourbon intendants failed to create a uniform royal government throughout the empire, they instead used their positions to strengthen government in the cities. Their projects, from water supplies to uniform street numbers, expanded royal activities at the local level, the only level at which the intendants were able to exercise much power.5 At the end of the colonial period, cabildos were the only creole-dominated government institutions, and these city councils formed distinctly local cores within national independence movements. Municipal action continued to build state power and shape national political institutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Christina Jiménez argues that between 1880 and 1930, the ordinary citizens of Morelia, Michoacán, pressured the municipal government for sewers, paving, and other urban improvements with as much energy as the liberal authorities did.6 This lobbying not only “motivated residents to identify, at least partially, with the developmentalist agenda of the Mexican state” but also created the “collective organizing in urban neighborhoods . . . [that was] a primary form of political activism for urban inhabitants throughout the twentieth century.”7 Diane E. Davis, in her study of twentieth-century Mexico City, shows “the critical role played by urban-development conflicts in national transformations.”8 For example, she notes that Francisco Madero’s government pointed to Mexico City’s size and needs to justify national regulation of various aspects of urban life, even as the same national government proclaimed municipal autonomy for cities in general; she also argues that the CROM (Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers) built its national power on its initial participation in the government of Mexico City and the Federal District.9Even modernization projects led by national states show the importance of cities as arenas for developing new types of state power and authority. An extreme example came when Argentina’s other provinces removed the city of Buenos Aires from Buenos Aires province in 1880. Rather than move the seat of provincial government to some existing small town, the governor and his supporters built a whole new port city, complete with municipal government. In La Plata they sought to model the technological and social projects that they said would “civilize” the province and strengthen the provincial government.10 The Brazilian government’s more famous urban renewal in Rio de Janeiro in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries expanded state control of hygiene, public order, social and racial segregation, and other facets of daily life. Its goals were much the same as in La Plata: to attract “European capital and labor” but also to let “Brazil transcend itself as a country of color and backwardness.”11 The so-called Anti-Vaccine Riots of 1904, largely provoked by slum clearance and other urban-renewal measures, “came close to toppling the national government.”12 Many scholars have used such examples to show that states shaped cities. However, these examples also show that cities shaped states.Much of urban history deals with human attempts to use technology to control nature for the ostensible benefit of large population centers. Rather than being somehow “natural” — free from human influence — disasters happen when those attempts fail. Louis Pérez points out that Cuban hurricanes killed many more people and damaged much more property after seafaring Europeans built trading ports for storm-driven waters to flood.13 Pérez also argues that a series of particularly devastating hurricanes in Cuba in the 1840s enabled fast-growing tobacco and sugar to replace capital-intensive, slow-growing coffee as the island’s main plantation crop.14Disasters give us a chance to see how people and states behave under stress. They may expose habits and assumptions of earlier generations held so unquestioningly at the time that they were rarely mentioned in the historical record. They may let us see how astute people took advantage of the disruption to promote their own interests. Disasters test or destroy the order that many urban reformers and state builders seek. For example, Charles F. Walker shows that the Spanish crown used the reconstruction of Lima after the 1746 earthquake as an early experiment in rational reform, before the full-scale Bourbon reforms unleashed that agenda in greater force.15 Mark Healey argues that the relief and reconstruction of San Juan, Argentina, after its 1944 earthquake gave the military government “its first chance to deliver on promises of social justice.”16 Juan Perón, who as secretary of labor headed the relief efforts and the first national reconstruction plans, failed to rebuild the city quickly and failed to create “a democratic new city” at all, in part because of a conflict between the national government’s inflexible plans and a local elite that opposed major changes.17 Nevertheless, Healey points out, Perón used the earthquake relief and recon struction as an example of his ability to fulfill his promises. Valparaíso’s earthquake both illuminated the city’s experiences with regulating urban spaces and cleared the way for the national state to expand its authority. In Valparaíso and other places, politicians, entrepreneurs, and others took advantage of disasters to create a new order based on their own goals.Fernando López-Alves, commenting on the concept of “state capacity” as a defining feature of states, asks: “capacity to do what?”18 By the early twentieth century, the ability to regulate business, private affairs, and daily life — ostensibly for the general good — was a basic characteristic of the Latin American state as most people understood it. Many of the central issues of twentieth-century political history concern this sphere of state activity. Local governments, including Valparaíso’s, furthered the formation of national states by pioneering key state activities at the local level.Valparaíso’s early experimentation with urban infrastructure and municipal regulation coincided with its early growth as a commercial city. Without the port, no city would have arisen on such inhospitable terrain. Steep hills rose several hundred feet from just behind the beach, in one spot rising directly out of the surf. The bay was open to most storms. Nevertheless, in the decades after Chilean independence in 1818, Valparaíso quickly dominated international trade on the Pacific coast.Chile emerged more quickly than did its neighbors from the postindependence period of political experimentation and instability. Between 1829 and 1833, conservatives (led by Valparaíso merchant Diego Portales) set up a strong central state that would go until 1891 without an unconstitutional transfer of power. Stability encouraged commerce, especially in light of the frequent internal conflicts that plagued neighboring countries. In Argentina, those conflicts often centered on the role of the port and city of Buenos Aires itself, a struggle Valparaíso never had to face. In addition, Valparaíso profited from Chile’s tariff structure and other trade policies; these protected a few local products but generally supported both imports and exports, which rose quickly.19 Valparaíso was the closest port to Santiago, Chile’s largest market, and for many decades it was the only port in central Chile legally open to international trade.20 These legal and geographical advantages meant that Valparaíso handled most of Chile’s trade. Trade through Valparaíso accounted for 69 percent of Chile’s customs revenue in 1834, a figure that rose to 92 percent in 1843 and 1853 and settled at 85 percent in 1863.21 Eduardo Cavieres describes sustained national efforts to attract foreign trade to Valparaíso, beginning with favorable legislation passed in 1824.22 Simon Collier writes that Diego Portales and his conservative supporters wanted to make Valparaíso “the dominant port on the Pacific coast”; to this end, when they controlled the national government in the 1830s, they established government-operated warehouses where merchants could store imports without duty while waiting for favorable market conditions.23 These policies, along with Valparaíso’s convenient location along the sea-lanes from Europe to the Pacific ports of the Americas, enticed many merchants to make Valparaíso their base for trade with countries further north. Thus, Valparaíso acted as what the geographer A. F. Burghardt calls a “gateway city,” funneling trade and communication to a maritime hinterland.24 The city grew from a town of about 5,000 in 1818 to a city of about 52,000 in 1854, topping 100,000 in 1875 and reaching 162,000 by 1907.25 Valparaíso dominated shipping, and shipping dominated Valparaíso. Chileans called the city’s residents porteños, the people of the port.Cavieres shows that in the 1820s and 1830s, Valparaíso’s Chilean and foreign-born merchants lobbied the national government to give them more autonomy from Santiago and to make their trade easier and more profitable. They won laws ending Santiago’s domination of the customs service (ca. 1837), their own commercial regulating body or consulado (1839), and their own province, with Valparaíso as its capital.26 Nevertheless, the national government still set trade policy; this regulatory sphere relates to border defense and tax collection, both part of the traditional definition of state formation.Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the national government took great interest in the commercial and naval aspects of its principal port, which was not only its largest source of revenue but also a strategic naval base. In the early 1860s, after an earlier private effort failed, the national government finished the railroad from Valparaíso to Santiago. In 1883, the national government completed Valparaíso’s first deepwater pier, adjacent to the government warehouses, so that ships could unload their cargoes directly onto land. The new government pier allowed some ships to unload faster, but crowding and other factors meant that many ships still had to unload into small shallow-draft barges.27 From then until the 1910s, the national government considered building breakwaters and more piers to make Valparaíso’s harbor safe and efficient year round.In contrast, municipal officials and leading residents took the lead in paving streets, installing lighting, regulating construction, governing public decorum, and other local matters. Above all, people in Valparaíso came up with overall plans of what their city was and what it should become. The formal structure of the city’s government did not suggest such local initiative. From 1842 to 1892, the provincial intendant (a national-level official appointed by the president) acted as the municipal executive and presided over a city council voted into office by a limited electorate.28 Chile’s intendants played a key role in unifying national politics, particularly by managing elections in favor of the president’s candidates.29 In keeping with Valparaíso’s national importance, midcentury intendants included former presidents of the republic and two former intendants of Santiago. Although the intendants were in charge of the provincial seat of government and agencies throughout the province, they put much (perhaps most) of their time and energy into municipal matters until the 1870s. Nevertheless, the national government did not dominate local affairs. Valparaíso’s intendants regularly exercised their own will in local affairs, apparently because the same poor communications that kept the intendants from governing directly outside their provincial capitals kept national officials from controlling the intendant completely or from understanding local conditions as well as he could. In the 1840s, for example, intendants took the city council’s side in disputes with the national government over fire regulations and gas-light concessions. The overall strength and security of the national government may have made presidents more willing to allow the intendants — and the city councils — this measure of independence. In turn, these experienced professional administrators helped the amateur city councilors build up municipal power and authority.From the 1840s to the 1870s, the merchants, landowners, newspaper editors, and professionals of the porteño elite generally accepted the notion that the municipal government should exercise its authority to improve the city. Specifically, they wanted the city to deal with the problems caused by cramming a growing population into a narrow strip of land and hanging the overflow from a range of precipitous hills. Even those who opposed particular measures usually agreed with this overall goal. By the early 1840s, many proposals for public works, private buildings, and other changes — even ones that directly addressed only a small place or a narrow problem — reflected a vision of improving Valparaíso in some way. The intendant and city council explicitly connected their attempts to fix practical problems such as fires or potholes with general plans to make the city more modern and orderly. They implicitly sought to increase municipal control of the city’s life and development. Indeed, their apparent working definition of modern tied technology closely to order and control, as the works of James C. Scott and other scholars suggest. The municipal government encouraged entrepreneurs to install citywide technological networks, most notably gas (1856) and streetcars (1863). Proponents hoped that the municipal government would control these centralized networks more effectively than the congeries of small businesses, specialized officials, and individual citizens they replaced. To some extent, they were right. The city government managed to levy property taxes and other internal taxes, in contrast to a central government dependent on customs revenues.30 They passed regulations to reduce hazards, especially fire. The public works and infrastructure projects they undertook were locally controlled and financed. The regulations that they passed reflected local ideas and expanded municipal power.Fire is a good example of the city government’s expanding regulatory power. Home to many wooden buildings, narrow streets, and an increasing variety of oils and other combustible merchandise, Valparaíso lived in fear of fire. Major blazes destroyed whole streets of buildings in 1843, 1850, and 1858. The conflagrations and the general fear of fire drew the city government to regulate construction and warehousing, two major parts of the city’s life. After the 1858 fire, for example, intendant Jovino Novoa asked the city council to pass stronger fire regulations suggested by a committee he had named. The council passed only half of the proposed regulations, thus simultaneously increasing its regulatory activities and demonstrating that it was not controlled by the intendant.31 Porteños generally supported fire-safety regulations, but some objected to provisions that reduced their options for building on their property. For example, some landowners who supported fire safety in principle objected to an 1843 ban on wooden balconies, 1871 restrictions on the storage of combustible substances, and frequent attempts to widen streets into firebreaks.32 The dispute over balconies, in particular, recalls the aftermath of the Lima earthquake of 1746. Lima’s elite generally favored changes to improve urban safety, but opposed a ban on their fashionable two-story mansions; the viceroy considered second stories unstable and dangerous.33 Over time, the Valparaíso city government won most of these disputes, strengthening its capacity to regulate.The history of firefighting in the city illustrates the border between national and municipal spheres. After the 1850 fire, rich Porteños and foreign residents founded Chile’s first volunteer fire department.34 Young, well-to-do volunteers did the heroics, while paid working-class auxiliaries did the pumping. The national government, eager to protect lucrative commerce and its own buildings, contributed some money and exempted the auxiliaries from militia service to help recruitment. However, the national government did not try to manage the fire department and took only a passing interest in stronger fire regulations. The fire department became a focus of local initiative in Valparaíso and often advised the municipal government on fire regulations.Beginning in the 1870s, foreign investors and the state began to finance and manage some projects. The city council granted a concession to a British company to build and operate a sewer system. After an 1870s municipal water supply proved insufficient for a population nearing 120,000, Valparaíso began to build a municipal reservoir and distribution system so expensive that it required the city’s first European bond issue; even so, the expense led the state to bail out the project and take control, beginning in 1897. Around the same time, the administrative habits of the national government finally began to catch up with the railroads and telegraphs that had begun stitching the country together in the 1850s. The national government controlled the intendants much more closely than before.35 Nevertheless, local boosters expected local government and local investors to continue to shape the city. Between the 1870s and 1906 (despite a slight increase in national involvement), they did.For a while, municipal power actually grew. In the 1870s, intendant Francisco Echaurren and the city council persisted in widening streets whenever existing buildings were replaced. The ensuing conflicts with a few affected property owners and several cabinet ministers eventually drove the Chilean congress to pass the Transformation Law of 1876, which fixed the widths of city streets and gave the municipal government additional power to regulate construction. Although the law was a compromise, it built municipal power by giving authority in this matter to the same intendant and elected officials who had first taken up the cause of wider streets. The city also regulated its growing light and heavy industries, from boiler inspections to water-pollution controls. It regulated some uses of the waterfront, juggling the need for urban space with the economic dominance of the port.The civil war of 1891 ushered in the parliamentary era, and the 1892 Ley de la Comuna Autónoma gave Chile’s city governments greater autonomy from the central government, although it did not provide adequate financial resources.36 The primer alcalde, the internally elected leader of a city council, replaced the intendant as the chief executive of the municipal government. Therefore, from 1892 on, it makes sense to refer to a primer alcalde as a mayor. Intendants no longer intervened much in local administration, although they still informed their superiors in the national government about progress and needs in the city.Elite consensus on urban improvement weakened during these decades, in comparison with the period from the 1840s through the 1870s. Moreover, an increasingly outspoken working class complained of draconian ordinances and scanty services. Nevertheless, municipal regulations and services continued to grow. The city council and mayor expanded the water supply, built municipal sewers in areas that the private company declined to serve, and — after some shady dealings and a court defeat — signed a concession for electric streetlights and trolley cars.Cabinet ministers, particularly the ministers of the interior, sometimes had to resolve disputes between different agencies and interest groups in Valparaíso, but this involved isolated matters such as the use of certain parts of the waterfront at certain times of day. Throughout the nineteenth century, as long as Valparaíso did not hinder trade or national defense, national officials in Santiago took little interest in what the port city looked like, how it smelled, where its citizens bought meat, whether they stepped in potholes, or whether they found their way around at night by oil, gas, or electric light. They took even less interest in whether Valparaíso was a modern city, a model for the country, or any such notion of urban progress. It took the 1906 earthquake to put the state (and foreign investors) at the head of Valparaíso’s local affairs. This change foreshadowed increasing national government involvement in Chilean cities, including Viña del Mar and parts of Santiago, as well as growing national influence in other facets of Chilean society.In the first years of the twentieth century, Valparaíso was still Chile’s main commercial and financial center. The city hosted the headquarters of the country’s most important foreign and domestic banks and trading companies. Karin Schmutzer notes that although nitrates from the northern provinces (seized from Bolivia and Peru in the 1879 – 83 War of the Pacific) had become Chile’s largest export, Valparaíso still handled up to half the country’s imports, as well as up to half of internal coastwise trade.37 She points out that customs revenues at Valparaíso rose “at least until the eve of World War I,” even though they were less prominent than before, making up barely a quarter of the national total by 1900.38 Even nitrate transactions took place in Valparaíso, via telegraph to London and the Chilean north.39 Schmutzer also shows that although the rise of San Francisco, California, and changes in shipping practices meant that Valparaíso was no longer a significant distribution center for goods en route to other countries along the Pacific coast, it was still an important international port. For example, it remained a major port of call for British, German, French, and Peruvian freight and passenger steamships, and both the British Pacific Steam Navigation Company and the Chilean Compañía Sudamericana de Vapores had their headquarters there.40 Moreover, some industry was developing in and around Valparaíso during this period. An 1895 geography book lists dozens of industrial firms; some were little more than small workshops or local bakeries, but others produced food and other light industrial goods on a substantial scale.41 Valparaíso also had several manufacturers of railroad equipment, bridges, propellers, boilers, trolleys, mining equipment, and other metal goods, which Robert Gwynne calls “a significant local engineering industry.”42Most of Valparaíso’s major businesses, markets, public offices, churches, transportation facilities, and industries, along with many elite residences and tenements, were squeezed into the city’s limited flatlands. By the early twentieth century, landfills and excavations had doubled this area (called the Plan), but buildings already covered the new land and straggled up the hills.43 The Malecón — a combination seawall and quay where longshoremen used lighters to land about 70 percent of the cargo from ships anchored in the harbor — ran for a mile along the waterfront. Since the Malecón was a busy pedestrian route during the day and promenade in the evening, its users — and their interests — often collided.44 The railroad to Santiago ran, unfenced, just behind the Malecón. The customhouse, the state warehouses, the busy (and inadequate) state pier, and the railroad terminus occupied the western end of the waterfront. Bank buildings, merchant houses, the stock exchange, the intendancy, the central railroad station, and the like clustered in the Puerto, an area of a few blocks situated between the customhouse and the protruding Cerro Concepción. East of Cerro Concepción lay the Almendral, with department stores, theaters, the fashionable Plaza de la Victoria, and similar prestigious establishments at its western end. The rest of the Almendral hosted an uneasy mixture of mansions, tenements, and light industry, with the main railroad yard and the gasworks at the eastern end of the waterfront. The palm-lined Gran Avenida crossed the Almendral on a landfill that reached two blocks beyond it into the bay. Even in the Plan, most of the streets were narrow and crowded with traffic of all sorts.In the early twentieth century, the fairly flat-topped hills at Playa Ancha at the west end of the city held a large park and two growing neighborhoods. The residents of the steeper but still relatively buildable Cerro Barón at the east end of the city included many skilled workers from the railroad yard and repair shops just below the hill. The other 20 or so hills surrounding the city were steep, separated from one another by deep ravines, hard to climb, and awkward to build on. Indeed, decades of excavations to create flatlands down below had left many hills even steeper than before. Even in the built-up areas, the winding streets often narrowed into alleys or turned into flights of stairs. However, Cerro Cordillera, above the Puerto, held a good-sized neighborhood, as did Cerro Bellavista. On some of the hills, poor residents lived in shacks and other marginal housing. Many well-to-do English and German residents lived on Cerro Concepción and Cerro Alegre, near the center of town.Since the early nineteenth century, Porteños had imagined urban growth that would clamber up the steep hills that hemmed in the narrow shelf of land at the city center. Nearly all visions of progress for Valparaíso assumed uphill growth. Myth was one thing, however, and reality quite another. True, in the 1820s and 1830s, the detached houses and front gardens on Cerro Alegre and Cerro Concepción formed something like the posh “garden suburbs” of England and the United States. However, these neighborhoods became the exception and not the norm. Many hill residents were poor, and very few were rich. Proposals for street improvements, streetcars, lights, and other services usually put off improvements to hillside neighborhoods until later. “Later” sometimes never came, and if it did, it usually brought inferior services — particularly outside the denser, more stable neighborhoods of Playa Ancha, Cordi