Arriba quemando el sol. Estudios de historia social chilena

This collection of essays by young, up-and-coming Chilean historians — all in their 20s and 30s — shows rather clearly that Chilean historiography will be in competent and capable hands during the decades to come. An introduction by Luis Ossandón and engaging essays by Daniel Palma, Fernando Purcell, Rodrigo Henríquez, Cecilia Osorio, Alberto Harambour, Marcos Fernández, and José Iturriaga delve into specific episodes of Chile’s social history, using what Ossandón calls an “old but new way to investigate the past.” While their methods are at least as old as the contributors are, they nevertheless harness the tools of social history to teach us new things about interesting people and problems during a period spanning the “Portalian” era to the Popular Front.Ossandón opens the volume with a useful, well-conceived, and clearly written survey of the roots and trajectory of social history, from E. P. Thompson to the Annales School to, finally, Chile during the latter years of the Pinochet dictatorship, when historian Gabriel Salazar, among others, returned from exile with the methods and sensibilities of social history in tow. Indeed, the book’s essays are very much oriented methodologically along the lines of the social history being produced in Chile during the 1980s and 1990s, including Salazar’s landmark book Labradores, peones y proletarios (1985), although the new generation of Chilean historians has adopted many of the theoretical and analytical perspectives of cultural history and postmodernism.Palma follows Ossandón’s introduction with an insightful essay on the history of thievery in the silver mines at Chañarcillo (province of Coquimbo) between the 1830s and 1870s. The essay shows how silver thieves (cangalleros) became important economic actors as they accumulated capital and helped develop the region’s economy by disseminating and circulating stolen silver by means of “institutions” such as the pulpería and the chingana. Purcell also is interested in miners but casts his eyes on Chileans in California and interethnic relations during the Gold Rush. Purcell focuses on ties between the resident Chilean and Mexican communities, as well as both groups’ interaction with Anglo-Americans, giving us a nuanced view of identity and culture in a society still in formation. Osorio then directs our attention to what it meant to be a man on the pampa salitrera during the second half of the nineteenth century. Her revealing essay links the very nature of work in Chile’s arid north to a conception of masculinity, which reproduced what she calls the “monosexual” world that was the pampa.Henríquez, in turn, focuses his essay on the issue of prostitution in the nitrate region of Tarapacá during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He questions whether social class is a useful category in the study of prostitution, since prostitution was not unique to the working class. Gender, he argues, proves much more analytically useful than class when coming to grips with prostitution as a social phenomenon. Fernández also brings to the discussion questions that may help us understand the lives of workers in the nitrate region. His essay focuses on suicide as a phenomenon that is at once private and public, involving not only the subjectivity of the person who chooses it but also the “social space” in which the subject lives and dies. Essentially, as Fernández shows, the history of suicide demonstrates just how intertwined subject and context are and, moreover, how valuable that relationship is for the social historian.Harambour’s innovative essay takes the reader away from the nitrate zone and to the capital city. His contribution focuses largely on one man, Efraín Plaza Olmedo, an anarchist who shot and killed two “bourgeois” young men in July 1912 in downtown Santiago. Harambour manages, with great skill, to reconstruct Plaza’s life in detail — no small feat, indeed. By piecing together the killer’s life story, from his early childhood onward, Harambour convinces the reader that any person in any given circumstance has a long and complex history that may teach us quite a lot about broader issues, including, in this specific case, political violence. Unfortunately, sources (or the lack thereof) often limit the ability of historians to pursue a reconstruction project like Harambour’s, leaving us with little choice but to focus any of our biographical interests on more conspicuous actors. Overcoming source limitations is the issue at hand in Iturriaga’s essay, which centers on the usefulness of photography in the study of a Valparaíso workers’ strike and massacre in April 1903.Focusing largely on the pampa salitrera, above which the sun burns brightly, the essays in question provide the reader with new angles from which to think about established and well-known areas of Chilean social historiography. While it is somewhat distracting for the reader to jump from the pampa salitrera to northern California and elsewhere, the essays are important contributions to the history of Chile’s working classes and will appeal to historians interested in labor, gender, and cultural history

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