Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“A path-breaking study of history and memory in Chile’s legendary nitrate north that ties together the massacres of miners in the early twentieth century and the human rights abuses of the Pinochet era. A highly original contribution to memory studies, gender studies, and Chilean history.”—Peter Winn, editor of
Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era, 1973–2002“The hot winds of the Atacama desert in northern Chile have not succeeded in erasing what has become the territory of Lessie Jo Frazier’s
Salt in the Sand, a book centered on the meanings of the deep memories of repression, massacres, and executions that contributed to the formation of Chilean popular identity. Well written and theoretically and historically original,
Salt in the Sand reveals the continuous dialogue between events and subjectivities throughout the Chilean twentieth century.”—Francisco Zapata, El Colegio de México
“The modern Chilean state has been linked to violence since its inception, despite official historiography’s assertion that the 1973 coup and the Pinochet regime that followed were ‘aberrations’ in an otherwise democratic order favoring peace. Lessie Jo Frazier illuminates the competing uses of the past across cultural, racial, and class lines. Through her brilliant analysis of memory as a dynamic category employed by clashing collectivities, Frazier demonstrates how the use of memory in post-dictatorial regimes is not in and of itself liberating or new, but rather modeled on previous historical instances of remembering and forgetting.”—Licia Fiol-Matta, author of
A Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral“This is a welcome and serious substantiation of the significance of emotion, soul, and heart that constitutes popular identification with, or rejection of, or outcry against the state.” -- Katherine Hite * Latin American Politics and Society *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction: Ethnography, History, and Memory 1
Part I. Templates
1. Memory and the Camanchacas Calientes of Chilean Nation-State Formation 21
2. Structures of Memory, Shapes of Feeling: Chronologies of Reminiscence and Repression in Tarapaca (1890-Present) 58
Part II. Conjunctures
3. Dismantling Memory: Structuring the Forgetting of the Oficina Ramirez (1890-1891) and La Coruna (1925) Massacres 85
4. Song of the Tragic Pampa: Structuring the Remembering of the Escuela Santa Maria Massacre (1907) 117
5. Conjunctures of Memory: The Detention Camps in Pisagua Remembered (1948, 1973, 1990) and Forgotten (1943, 1956, 1984) 158
6. The Melancholic Economy of Reconciliation: Talking with the Dead, Mourning for the Living 190
Conclusion: Democratization and Arriving at the “End of History” in Chile 243
Notes 261
Selective Bibliography 355
Index 365
