Pampino Chinese in Chilean Tarapacá During the 1890s

This paper considers Chinese lives in Tarapacá province in the immediate aftermath of Chile’s seizure of the nitrate-rich territory from Peru during the War of the Pacific (1879-1884). It analyzes attacks on Chinese merchants during a massive general strike in 1890 and the related civil war in 1891. It reinterprets those events in relation to a broader social history of Chinese insertion within pampino society (working-class culture on the desert pampas.) It challenges enduring assumptions that most Chinese in northern Chile were merchants and social pariahs. Instead, it argues that most Chinese were workers and participated in the militant labor mobilizations and everyday forms of working-class community for which Chile’s nitrate region became famous. It traces solidarities among Chinese, Peruvians, Bolivians, and Chileans that mediated episodes of violence and class conflict. In particular, it highlights the importance of Chinese-run taverns to working-class sociality and the importance of Chinese men’s relationships to Peruvian, Chilean, and Bolivian women. Conceptually, it proposes that recognizing Chinese labor and commerce as constitutive of pampino culture challenges area studies formations and upends Chilean and Peruvian historical narratives of nation, mestizaje, and the making of the working class.