A Transnational War on Poverty: The Peace Corps, Chile, and the United States during the 1960s

The paper will explore the transnational connections that American Peace Corps volunteers reinforced when working in Chile and other Latin American countries through community development. Most of the historiography about the Peace Corps focuses either on their motivations or on their experiences abroad. There is a plenty of room to explore with more detail their training experiences in the United States. Many volunteers who went to Chile and other Latin American countries did community development in the US as part of their preparation. New York and Washington D.C. neighborhoods and indigenous communities in Arizona were some of the settings where these volunteers joined US efforts to end poverty before traveling abroad with similar purposes. This became even more relevant during Johnson´s administration because of his War on Poverty. This is important to consider because the work of the volunteers was not just an effort to end poverty and to push towards development in Chile. Their experiences and goals must be framed within a larger scenario (the Cold War) in which the work with poor people was strategic even in the United States. In this scenario both, a center-periphery and a nation-centered approach are too narrow and limited to understand the challenges for socio-economic development in Chile or other places of Latin America because there were ideas, projects and people making multiple kinds of connections that transcended national spaces and were not just unidirectional. This paper will help understanding, through the eyes and experiences of Peace Corps volunteers, how Chilean efforts to help destitute people were directly linked with those of the United States and other scenarios. Regarding Peace Corps volunteers it is possible to argue that they helped shaping important transnational forces to end poverty within the framework of a global phenomenon: The Cold War.