Before Activism: Germanophone Engagements with the Chilean Andes During the First Half of the 20th Century

The point of this talk is to sketch out some of the historical background for the environmental and human rights activism that began to animate Chile during the second half of the twentieth century by detailing German Chileans’ engagement with environmental transformations in Chile during the first half. That engagement includes the history of scientific exploration in the Chilean Andes, the creation of associations devoted to leisure and sports in the mountains (such as climbing, hiking, and skiing), and the settler colonialism in the south, all of which were dominated by German speakers. So too was much of the tourism in northern Patagonia, in what came to be called Chilean Switzerland, which emerged during this period as well. Indeed, the Germanophone participants in all these activities not only helped to radically rethink and recast nearby landscapes for that purpose but also for agriculture and industry, fundamentally transforming those environments. We know a great deal about the devastation that followed the industrialization of the forests, the displacements of Mapuche and other indigenous people during that process, as well as emergence of national parks that began to emerge soon afterwards in the same region during this period. The goal of this presentation is to engage some of the tensions between exploitation and preservation already unleashed at the outset of the process, to consider how they persisted into the second half of the century, and to explore how they continue to channel and shape debates in our present.