Modern Chile Research Articles

Memory and Labor History in Modern Chile - Ránquil: Rural Rebellion, Political Violence, and Historical Memory in Chile. By Thomas Miller Klubock. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. Pp. 288. $50.00 cloth.

Memory and Labor History in Modern Chile - Ránquil: Rural Rebellion, Political Violence, and Historical Memory in Chile. By Thomas Miller Klubock. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. Pp. 288. $50.00 cloth.

Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile by Joshua Frens-String (review)

Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile by Joshua Frens-String (review)

Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile

Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile

Hungry for Revolution: The Politics of Food and the Making of Modern Chile

Chilean food politics are perhaps best associated with images of the March of the Empty Pots and Pans, led by middle- and upper-class women a year into Salvador Allende's presidential term. Yet, as Joshua Frens-String demonstrates in Hungry for Revolution, the close association between food and politics in modern Chile began long before Allende's “road to socialism.” Hungry for Revolution documents the importance of food politics in the creation of the welfare state, the development of mass politics, and the advent of dictatorship in twentieth-century Chile. This highly readable and engaging narrative is suitable both for experts in Latin American and food history and for students looking to learn more about food politics and modern Chile.Hungry for Revolution examines how changes in political regimes affected state attempts to address social inequality and activism around food sovereignty. Using state documents, newspapers, memoirs, and speeches from political activists, Frens-String identifies food's central role in the making of Chile's welfare state, which was one of the strongest in Latin America until the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. In doing so, he places the origins of food politics in Chile well before the neoliberal deregulation of the 1970s and 1980s. He seeks to address the “question of whom national development efforts have historically been set up to benefit, and at whose expense” (p. 11). With a focus on state actors as well as social activists, which provides a well-rounded account of politics from both above and below, he does an admirable job of answering this question for the Chilean case and suggesting connections to other contexts.The book is divided into three parts, each of which focuses on a different time period. The first, “A Hungry Nation,” covers the twentieth century's first decades. Chapter 1 analyzes how food shaped Chile's place in the world economic system and how awareness of the link between global economic prosperity and economic marginalization at home drove political mobilization around food access. Building on the first, the second chapter explains that working-class politics merged with concerns about food security, leading workers to mobilize specifically as consumers, not just as workers.The second part, “Containing Hunger,” addresses the 1930s through the 1960s. Chapter 3 details the rise of the welfare state as a response to concerns about food sovereignty and working-class activism. Specifically, it explores programs designed to raise Chileans' standard of living and nutritional levels in relation to both national concerns and international trends. These events prompted social reformers to propose agrarian reform to address structural inequities, stimulate agricultural production, and reduce dependence on food imports, which is the subject of chapter 4.The book's pace slows in the final part, “Recipes for Change,” and centers on Allende's presidency (1970–73). Chapter 5, “When Revolution Tasted Like Empanadas and Red Wine,” documents the successes of Popular Unity's first year in office, when household goods and foods were available in large quantities and accessible to Chileans of various social classes. Chapter 6 moves on to grassroots activism and worker control of the food supply. This chapter is the book's most historically significant; it describes the establishment of the juntas de abastecimiento y precios (supply and price control boards), local organizations started by activists that monitored the prices of staple items, distributed foodstuffs to lower-income residents, and helped keep items reasonably priced despite inflation. This chapter's focus on consumer activism and grassroots organizing shows how local communities can affect food supply and distribution in a way that goes beyond supply and demand economics and for-profit consumerism. It highlights a different way of thinking about participatory democracy based on joint consumer-worker control of the food economy. The final chapter traces the way that the anti-Allende Right and the Chicago Boys changed the nature of food politics; they moved the discourse away from social welfare and the idea that nutrition was a fundamental right of citizenship and toward a free-market belief that food should be treated like other consumer goods. This chapter emphasizes conservative women's essential role in this process alongside other economic and political actors.Hungry for Revolution's strength is the connection it makes between the past and the present and its contribution to thinking about food politics beyond twentieth-century Chile. The epilogue concludes with recent Chilean protests against the Pinochet-era constitution, citing a protest sign from 2019 that declared that “neoliberalism was ‘born in Chile’ but would ‘die’ there as well” (p. 201). The connection between Chile's twentieth-century food politics and contemporary challenges to neoliberalism emphasizes history's importance for contextualizing the present. As Frens-String asserts, the question about the state's role in determining fundamental rights and standard of living is as relevant as ever; as people around the world challenge austerity and late-stage capitalism, the Chilean case provides an alternative way of merging economic concerns and social welfare.

Desired States: Sex, Gender, and Political Culture in Chile

More than a year before Chile's massive social uprising (estallido social) erupted in October 2019, protests in May 2018 against sexual harassment in higher education sparked a broader national reckoning over the historical entrenchment of patriarchy, gender violence, and gender inequality. In the context of resurgent feminist movements in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America in the twenty-first century, historical anthropologist Lessie Jo Frazier's Desired States makes a timely contribution to theorizing the role of desire in shaping modern Chile's political culture.As an interdisciplinary scholar, she creatively marshals an impressive array of methodologies and theoretical texts to analyze cultural texts as well as ethnographic and archival research. The book is organized around four episodic case studies spanning from 1913 to 2019. Chapters 1 and 3 trace debates about sexuality within leftist political movements, while chapters 2 and 4 consider the role of gender and desire under repressive states. For each case, she “maps constellations of desires—relationships, affects, projects, and practices” in support of her overarching argument that “by understanding how desire in and for political projects works through gendered and sexualized orientations, we unlock an indispensable dimension for the analysis of states and political cultures more broadly conceived” (p. 13). Frazier's expansive application of desire as a category of analysis includes desire by representatives of the Catholic Church and the anarchist feminist movement for divergent forms of working-class sexuality, desire by the military for different modes of gendered discipline in prison camps, desire by 1960s leftist militants for a socialist state compatible with their continued heterosexual male privilege, and desire by civilian authorities for a domesticated citizenry complacent with the neoliberal state's reconciliation process. Given the author's stated goal to “participate in ongoing imaginings of more just, yet still passionate, politics” by highlighting the “high cost” of organizing “political culture around a certain desire for the state,” a narrower focus on political desire vis-à-vis changing modes of state formation might have produced a more cohesive narrative across the four case studies (pp. 22, 119).I found that the book's expansive thinking, tantalizing theorizing, and impressive breadth at times came at the expense of a deeper engagement with the historical context. In several places, the analysis contains interpretative leaps not always convincingly substantiated by the historical evidence. For example, Augusto Pinochet's 1979 memoir, El día decisivo: 11 de septiembre de 1973, covers his experience in 1948 guarding relegated Communist families at the Pisagua prison camp, including a lunchroom protest over the poor quality of food in which he found himself surrounded: “Defenderme en forma violenta significaría ser arrollado por la multitud, que luego se ensañaría en contra mía.” By mistranslating the last phrase as “looking for blood,” as opposed to ensañarse being more akin to the intent to cause harm, Frazier makes a conceptual leap to argue that “postmenopausal” women protesters threatened military men's bodily integrity and masculinity (pp. 76–77). While thought provoking, such assertions may not be sustained by the evidence or at least require far more contextualization. Indeed, imprisoned Communist militants' respect for party hierarchies during this incident invites a deeper discussion of the centrality of the Communist family to Chile's political culture, which would have directly connected with the analysis in chapter 3 of “respectable heteronormativity” as one element in the “sexual ideologies and practices of the leftist male activists who came into power” in 1970 (p. 21). Here again, however, the analysis appears to flatten the Chilean Left into a more homogenous entity than it was. In making arguments about the “New Man's sexuality” as it pertained to “the hegemonic left,” meaning the Communist and Socialist Parties, Frazier bases her argument around Trotskyist labor historian Marcelo Segall and his archive (p. 111). Yet Segall's own biography confounds his representativeness. Born in 1920, he left the Partido Comunista de Chile in 1957, prior to the 1959 Cuban Revolution, and remained a political independent. Thus during Chile's experiment with democratic socialism under Salvador Allende (1970–73), Segall was neither a '68 rebel youth inspired by Che Guevara nor a member of the mainstream “hegemonic left” that formed the governing Popular Unity coalition. Other prominent Communist militants, including Raquel Weitzman and Volodia Teitelboim, discussed in the epilogue, might have been more logical examples to illustrate the persistence of patriarchal attitudes, party hierarchies, and sexual practices in Chile.These concerns aside, historians of modern Latin America will do well to heed Frazier's intellectual provocation to see political desire as something beyond the passionate politics associated with charismatic populist leaders. Desired States is an open invitation to explore how these dynamics play out in Chile and elsewhere.

Five Republics and One Tradition: A History of Constitutionalism in Chile 1810–2020 by Pablo Ruiz-Tagle

<i>Five Republics and One Tradition: A History of Constitutionalism in Chile 1810–2020</i> by Pablo Ruiz-Tagle

History of Tomato Cultivation in Chile: The Limachino Tomato Case

Landraces play an important role in agricultural sustainability, food security and the future crop improvement. Systematic information about agricultural evolution of crops is crucial for the implementation of effective conservation and utilization strategies. Unlike Europe and North America, historical data of crops is less complete in other parts of the world, especially for regions where high diversity of crop genetic resources, such as Chile. In order to contribute to the understanding of Chilean genetic resources dynamics and their conservation, we present the case of tomato landraces, particularly the Limachino tomato. Through an extensive literature review, an overview is presented regarding the tomato origin and diversification, in situ conservation status, the role of the genetic resource’s units and the importance of the integration of the small-scale commercially-oriented tomato farmers in the modern Chile to advance towards a more effective and sustainable landraces conservation.

The Gathering Storm: Eduardo Frei's Revolution in Liberty and Chile's Cold War

The Gathering Storm: Eduardo Frei's Revolution in Liberty and Chile's Cold War

Energy, Economic, and Environmental Performance of a Single-Family House in Chile Built to Passivhaus Standard

The energy consumption of buildings accounts for 22% of total global energy use and 13% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In this context, this study aims to evaluate the energy, economic, and environmental performance of housing in Chile built according to the Passivhaus (PH) standard. The standard was applied to housing in eight representative climate zones with a single-family residence as reference. The analysis incorporated passive strategies, which are considered as pillars of the PH. The energy performance was analyzed using the Passive House Planning Package software (PHPP), version 9.6a. The results showed that when every passive strategy is implemented, the heating energy demand decreases by 93%, while the refrigeration demand is nonexistent. These results were achieved through a 37% increase in the overall initial budget investment, which will be amortized over an 11-year period. In this way, the primary energy consumption is reduced by 32% and, correspondingly, CO2 emissions are reduced by 39%. In modern Chile, it is difficult (but not impossible) to incorporate PH. However, governmental programs and aids could represent an initial step. Therefore, this research will help to identify strategies for incorporating PH in Chile, with the aim of improving the energy performance of housing.

Privatization and business groups: Evidence from the Chicago Boys in Chile

Business groups are the predominant organizational structure in modern Chile. This article tests the long-standing hypothesis that the privatization reform implemented by the “Chicago Boys” during the Pinochet regime facilitated the creation of new groups and hence the renovation of the country’s elites. Using new data we find that firms sold during this privatization later became part of new business groups, process aided by an economic crisis that debilitated traditional elites. Moreover, some firms were bought by Pinochet’s allies and were later used as providers of capital within groups. We conclude that privatizations can empower outsiders to replace business elites.

Jane D. Griffin, The Labor of Literature: Democracy and Literary Culture in Modern Chile (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), pp. ix + 218, $85.00, $25.95 pb.

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The form of government in modern Chile: a case of balanced latin- american presidentialism

This paper deals with the form of government existing in the Chilean Constitution, in the light of Latin American presidentialism, as a dogmatic category of comparative law. It is intended to prove that the Chief Executive has significant counterweights in the legislative function, given by the existence of constitutional organic laws and their subsequent mandatory preventive control by the Constitutional Court that, in short, will moderate the Chilean government regime. To prove such a question, we will resort to comparative law, to the revision of national doctrine, while we will analyze judgments of mandatory preventive control of constitutional organic laws. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21017/Rev.Repub.2019.v26.a58

The Evolution of Ownership Structures: Privatization, Business Groups, and Pyramids

Business groups are the predominant organizational structure in modern Chile. This article tests the long-standing hypothesis that the privatization reform implemented by the “Chicago Boys” during the Pinochet regime facilitated the creation of new groups and hence the renovation of the country’s elites. Using new data we find that firms sold during this privatization later became part of new business groups, process aided by an economic crisis that debilitated traditional elites. Moreover, some firms were bought by Pinochet’s allies and were later used as providers of capital within groups. We conclude that privatizations can empower outsiders to replace business elites.

The Labor of Literature: Democracy and Literary Culture in Modern Chile by Jane D Griffin

Griffin, Jane D. The Labor of Literature: Democracy and Literary Culture in Modern Chile . Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016.

The Labor of Literature: Democracy and Literary Culture in Modern Chile. By Jane D. Griffin. Amherst and Boston: U of Massachusetts P, 2016, p. 218, $25.95/$85.00.

The Labor of Literature: Democracy and Literary Culture in Modern Chile. By Jane D. Griffin. Amherst and Boston: U of Massachusetts P, 2016, p. 218, $25.95/$85.00.

Fuentes y herramientas para el estudio de la formación del niño lector en Chile (1860-1960)

En este artículo se propone establecer las coordenadas para el estudio de la formación del niño lector en Chile a partir del análisis de las publicaciones periódicas comprendidas entre 1860 y 1960, periodo conocido como el del Estado Liberal hasta los tiempos de la Reforma y Revolución. Se revisan algunas fuentes bibliográficas básicas para la comprensión de la problemática lectora en el Chile moderno junto con la consideración de ciertas herramientas teórico-conceptuales que ayudarían al estudio de un corpus ejemplificado con tres publicaciones periódicas de tres diferentes momentos, que muestran el proceso de modernización de las prácticas lectoras que dan paso al ejercicio de la lectura como actividad de entretenimiento

The Mapuche in Modern Chile: A Cultural History

In Joanna Crow’s cultural exposition of Chile’s largest indigenous population, The Mapuche in Modern Chile: A Cultural History, she makes a concerted effort to highlight the cultural components of the group’s identity and presence both in negotiation with and in resistance to the larger Chilean state throughout history. As a primary target of her research, the post-colonial approach illuminates the agency-driven Mapuche as being continuously reimagined in the nation’s history—not necessarily restructured but more to the point of being reconsidered. In order to elicit this type of reconsideration, Crow exposes the prominence of the “historic Mapuche” image as the dominant cultural marker of their existence. One particular manner in which she stresses this reality is in her highlighting of the performative nature of the touristy postcards of present-day Chile and their harkening back to late nineteenth century “indigenous identity” in the way that the contemporary audience desires to conceive of them permanently. The effect that these tourist-driven, souvenir items have in cementing a desired narrative is similar to the problematic historiographic procedures in many global scenarios of colonial and post-colonial relationships. It highlights the mythos-laden identity of an indigenous people as one that is permanently construed as a “people of the past” and therefore negates their place in the present and reinforces the conception of their status as precarious. By further analyzing the historic relationship between the Mapuche and the Chilean state, Crow’s book aims to garner a deeper understanding of not just the Mapuche resistance to oppression and being “myth-made” but also the efforts to integrate themselves into modern-day political and social arenas.

The Mapuche in Modern Chile: A Cultural History - by Crow, Joanna

The Mapuche in Modern Chile: A Cultural History - by Crow, Joanna

The Mapuche in Modern Chile: A Cultural History. By Joanna Crow University Press of Florida, 2013, p. 272, $74.95.

The Mapuche in Modern Chile: A Cultural History. By Joanna Crow University Press of Florida, 2013, p. 272, $74.95.

La Quintrala's Confessions: The Contesting of Female Agency and Indigeneity in Two Popular Chilean Visual Narratives

Doña Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer, known as ‘La Quintrala,’ a seventeenth-century aristocratic woman of mixed ancestry accused of torture, witchcraft, and murder, has persisted as a recurring figure in the Chilean imaginary. While literary representations of this figure have been well explored, this article contributes an examination of two visual narratives, paying particular attention to the manner in which genre and context influence the repurposing of this violent woman: the 1986 teleserie La Quintrala, produced by Chile's state-owned television station (TVN), and the Chilean newspaper Las últimas noticias's 2008 comic ‘La Quintrala y el Cristo de Mayo.’ The teleserie, a product of the Pinochet era, positions her as an antithesis to the ideal Chilean woman, simultaneously denying her agency and condemning her. The comic echoes the rhetoric of the Concertación governments as it prominently links La Quintrala's downfall and redemption to the genesis of modern Chile at the cost of her distinctive racial and gendered characteristics. Ultimately, each work employs the structure of confession to recall her crimes while rejecting the female agency and racially mixed heritage La Quintrala represents.