'Hasta Que la Dignidad Se Haga Costumbre': Life, Labor, and the Struggle for Dignity in the Vicuña Mackenna Industrial Belt, 1872-1990 14 views

In 1972, the residents and workers of Santiago’s industrial belts pioneered a new form of working-class organization. Rather than organizing solely through industrial federations, they began to organize territorially within the space of the industrial 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. This dissertation offers a new approach for studying the Cordones through a targeted study of the Vicuña Mackenna industrial belt. I expand the periodization beyond the existing historiography’s exclusive focus on the 1970-1973 period. To extend the periodization, I propose a spatial framework for understanding the Cordón’s history. I argue that the belt’s-built environment produced a specific set of the social relations that I refer to as Vicuña Mackenna’s social infrastructure. Seen from this perspective the history of Cordón Vicuña Mackenna began in 1872 as part of Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna’s urban transformation of Santiago that laid the first stretch of Vicuña Mackenna Avenue. The spatial approach further decenters the factory as a privileged space for understanding the formation of class consciousness. I argue that the street offers a new way to understand how class consciousness emerges through the movement of both bodies and ideas across the different spaces of daily life. The spatial framework and longer periodization bring into focus 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. I trace how the struggle for a dignified life inside Vicuña Mackenna included more than struggles for worker control over production. The struggle for a dignified life also encompassed the realms of distribution and consumption. Even if the Cordones formally ended in September 1973, with their destruction by the Chilean military, I argue that their history played an important, an and understudied, role during the period of dictatorship. The dictatorship tried and failed to fully extinguish 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 dissertation marks the first history of the Cordones to integrate archival materials from Chile’s Labor Ministry, Archbishopric Archives, and local labor presses produced inside Vicuña Mackenna during the nineteen-eighties.

PHD (Doctor of Philosophy)

Cordones Industriales; Unidad Popular; Salvador Allende; Labor and Working Class History; Cordón Vicuña Mackenna; Social Infrastructure; Juventud Obrera Católica (JOC); Chile; Transitional Democracy; Urban History

English

2025-09-02