Infrastructures of Dignity: Life and Labor Inside a Chilean Industrial Belt, 1872–1990

In 1972, the residents and workers of Santiago’s industrial belts pioneered a new form of working-class organization. Rather than relying on the representational structure of industrial federations, shop floor unions established pan-industrial networks of direct action within the space of the belts themselves. These new organizations went by the name Cordones Industriales, and they transformed Santiago’s industrial belts into places of socialist experimentation and worker control. The Cordones formed part of the larger Chilean Revolution launched by the election of Salvador Allende in 1970. My poster, based on my current book project, visualizes the history of the Vicuña Mackenna industrial belt located in Santiago's southeast. The industrial belt’s built environment produced a set of the social relations that I refer to as a social infrastructure, which began in 1872 as part of Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna’s urban transformation of Santiago that built the original stretch of Vicuña Mackenna Avenue.

My poster highlights how the street offers a new method for researching how class consciousness emerges through the movement of both bodies and ideas across the different spaces of daily life. The poster reveals two understudied actors within the existing historiography: the Catholic Church and the urban poor (pobladores). Catholic labor activists and pobladores injected the discourse of dignity and a dignified life into Vicuña Mackenna’s social infrastructure. The struggle for a dignified life inside Vicuña Mackenna included more than struggles for worker control over production: it also encompassed the realms of distribution and consumption. The Cordones continued to play an important, and understudied, role during the period of dictatorship – despite their formal destruction by the Chilean military in 1973. The dictatorship tried and failed to destroy Vicuña Mackenna’s social infrastructure. Factory workers inside Vicuña Mackenna helped reconstitute Chile’s labor movement during the dictatorship and transformed organized labor into a leader of Chile’s pro-democracy movement. The Cordones acted as a living memory during the dictatorship, and they directly inspired a new generation of local labor leaders to take up the torch of territorial labor organizing. The new territorial labor federation aided local shop floor struggles and re-democratized spaces of daily life along Vicuña Mackenna Avenue.

This poster presents a multimedia history of the Vicuna Makenna Industrial Belt between 1872 and 1990. Using urban plans and archival maps, the poster visualizes the industrial belt’s history across four moments: 1872, 1960, 1972, and 1988. Each ‘moment’ includes demographic data, identifies the constitutive elements of the Cordon’s social infrastructure, and includes primary source materials. The poster demonstrates the importance of spatial analysis to historical study, while also serving as a powerful visual reminder for increased conversations between the fields of urban history and working-class history.