Black gold in the red zone: Repression and contention in Chilean coal mining communities from the Popular Front to the advent of the Cold War

This is a study of the coal miners of southern Chile, who played a key role in the national development model of the twentieth century. It focuses on how their battles with their employers and the state contributed to a deepening of Chilean democracy during the Popular Front, when Marxist parties allied with democratic bourgeois parties to battle Fascism. Chile was the only non-European country where such a coalition won the presidency. The Popular Front promoted collaboration between the working class and the national bourgeoisie to advance capitalist development. Coal was a vital commodity for industrialization and the miners were one of the most mobilized sectors of Chilean society.; My study shows that despite their fervent support of the Communist Party and of the Popular Front, the coal miners did not see themselves in collaboration with their bosses, the national coal mining capitalists. With leadership from diverse parties, unions, and churches in the region, the members of these communities—men, women, merchants, miners, longshoremen, bakers—were pushing to utilize new spaces in national political life and were asserting their identity and interests in new ways. This period of contention over democratic openings came to a definitive end in October 1947 when the third of the centrist Presidents elected with critical Communist support brutally repressed a strike in the coal mining zone, citing it as a revolutionary move to overthrow the government. Government policy was literally “reactionary.” It sought not only to repress Communists and labor leaders, but to unweave the entire social, political, and cultural fabric of the coal mining communities, which had come to symbolize a popular threat.; This dissertation is a study of the practices and discourses through which the working class communities of the Chilean coal mining region were mobilized during the decade of the nationalist democratic politics of the Popular Front. My work draws from a breadth of archival sources, used in efforts to narratively reconstruct sequences and meanings of events. I also work with oral interviews and other forms of testimonial and collective memories. As a regional political and ethno-history, this work operates at the methodological boundaries of community and labor history, political and social history, and local and global history.