Urban Space and the Making of the Working Poor in Santiago, Chile, during the 20th Century

This paper joins recent calls for a new periodization of Cold War history in Latin America, one that extends back to the 1910 Mexican Revolution. It does so by examining the interlinked urban and social transformations of the capital of Chile, Santiago. Over the course of the twentieth century, Santiago’s rapid urban growth consolidated its place as the nation’s center of political and economic power. During this time, the Chilean metropolis would come to hold over 40% of the country’s population, highlighting the mutual imbrication of city and nation. This paper traces the physical and symbolic place of the working poor in Santiago from the end of the nineteenth century through to the mid-twentieth century. I show how the incipient process of industrialization informed and proliferated discourses about the social place of the urban poor within longer histories of capital accumulation, dispossession, and modernization. I therefore argue that earlier conceptions of spatial order and nation-making laid the foundations for the emergence of state programs, urban planning, and Catholic Church initiatives to modernize and integrate popular sectors throughout the century. This paper places the urban landscape at the heart of the process of state and elite agents’ construction of pobladores (poor, urban dwellers) in class and racialized ways. In so doing, it examines historical moments when political categories, everyday life, and labor became conflated. This allows us to follow the trajectory of the categorical formation of the “respectable” working class in Chilean society while also foreshadowing the repercussions of state repression during the Cold War toward pobladores’ political mobilizations.