Among students of modern Latin American history and politics, few moments have captured the imagination more than the rise and fall of democratically elected Chilean socialist president Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity coalition (1970–73). Scholarship abounds regarding how Chilean institutions failed, what went wrong at the top, what external meddling was afoot, and the “democratic revolution from below.” Yet historian Camilo Trumper’s book is a fresh, sophisticated, multidisciplinary, and wide-gauge lens into this period. In a creative conceptual integration of urban, visual, cinematic, and performance studies and more, Trumper brings the politics of the streets to the fore. He argues that the enlivened, participatory politics of the streets, this symbol of explosive action and possibility in the public sphere, constituted the central threat that the dictatorship (1973–90) sought to cease and reorder.
Trumper attempts to transcend most portrayals of the Popular Unity (UP) years as polarized, preferring to think of the period as one of “kinetic” politics (3), of a public sphere in movement. He suggests that we might think of everyday reality as far more nuanced, and that by examining such arenas as innovative and inclusive industrial design and use, creative protest making, collaborative production and distribution chains, art brigades, and revolutionary filmmaking, we can appreciate the politically charged moment as more vibrant, textured, and contingent than a mere left versus right analysis will allow.
Trumper’s work joins what could be seen as a spatial turn in Latin American studies, in which cityscapes, architecture, and sites become the analytical focus. Ephemeral Histories also emphasizes the movement of such scapes and the fleeting or ephemeral nature of political, visual, performative expression. This is seen, for example, in the ways that political-cultural groups battle to convey a message on a wall, which is then whitewashed yet continues to hold the palimpsestic traces of what came before. Ephemera, a term now widely used in performance studies, is meant here to capture the lingering feel or affect after a heady protest, mural-making action, or street theater performance.
As a social historian, Trumper is interested in the class and gendered dimensions of struggles for the streets, which, he suggests, do not always neatly align on one side of the left-right political spectrum. While he would not argue that Chile’s social elite was not reactionary, he does signal left as well as right classism, sexism, and racism across parties and movements. Similarly, while the Chilean working class aligned in far greater numbers with the left, Trumper analyzes the imagery and sentiment of popular class participation in the streets and in bread lines against as well as for the UP.
In his first chapter, “Of Spoons and Other Political Things: The Design of Socialist Citizenship,” Trumper mines and analyzes little-referenced primary documents from government ministries, state-sponsored technical magazines, reports from the government-created Industrial Design Group, and defunct architectural plans for the Allende government’s building to host the United Nations Congress on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). He explores the massive collaboration among designers, artists, and construction workers on everything from the socialist vision for an egalitarian working and socializing space to the intricate details like the affordable wooden furniture and painted fixtures and faucets. Trumper demonstrates how the structure is also integral to the urban landscape as a socialist centerpiece.
Reminiscent of Eden Medina’s wonderful study, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (1976), from which Trumper also draws, the book makes a strong case for the UNCTAD site as a powerful metaphor of cross-class connection and possibility, which then had to be destroyed and repurposed by the dictatorship as its own massive headquarters. Once again renovated and repurposed postdictatorship, today’s Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center is a testament to Chile’s return to democracy, albeit with a very neoliberal face anchoring a hip, gentrified downtown Santiago neighborhood.
Both chapters 2 and 3, “Streets, Citizenship, and the Politics of Gender in Allende’s Chile” and “A ganar la calle: The October Strike and the Struggle for the Streets,” invite new readings of well-visited moments; namely, the March of the Empty Pots and Pans and the October 1972 truckers’ strike. In his analysis of the women’s march against the UP—and while he appreciably borrows from important previous analyses—Trumper foregrounds gendered debates and fears of the public in the streets, as well as the afterlife of such fears in relation to urban (as opposed to party) politics.
In chapter 3, Trumper closely examines networks of urban production, distribution, and consumption in relation to the cordones industriales, the “industrial belts” of factories that surrounded the city—areas where Santiago’s shantytown dwellers also lived and worked. Unlike Peter Winn’s brilliant Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism (1986), a now-classic historical account of the Yarur mill as a window on the working class and the political moment (and an important reference for this study), Trumper’s book focuses on spatial politics across Santiago’s urban landscape. He urges attention to “political geography” and to the ways the networks among poor residents and workers addressed both basic consumer needs and vital industrial production inputs. The cordones involved a radical, and what Trumper also reminds us was a significantly large, sector of the city’s periphery, and his account of this radical vitality helps explain why the 1973 military coup d’état was so brutal and the dictatorship so long.
The chapters “Political Palimpsests: Posters, Murals, and the Ephemeral Practice of Urban Politics” and “The Politics of Place in the ‘Cinema of Allende’” are most squarely in the realm of visual and performance studies. Trumper traces the participatory, technical, and affective practices of the many UP-affiliated mural brigades. He emphasizes the power of mural and poster making to hammer home basic political and cultural messages in both the city center and periphery, linking the urban landscape with the socialist project even for short moments at a time. In addition, Trumper closely analyzes how new Latin American cinema worked to animate, frame, and mobilize revolutionary political and social imaginations while centering the everyday materiality of place in Chile. These chapters indicate what seems to have been an important initial focus of Trumper’s research, and they perhaps explain the book’s subtitle, which undersells his work’s more expansive reach.
Trumper’s concluding chapter, “The Image of a Coup Foretold: Violence, Visual Regimes, and Clandestine Public Spheres,” somewhat predictably examines the dictatorship’s brutal visual and material refounding of the country. He returns to the sites and materiality from his previous chapters to assess how they became dramatically refashioned, distinctly repoliticized, or erased. Trumper also explores spaces of resistance to the dictatorial project, including street photography, the avanzada conceptual artists’ works, and graffiti as political praxis. He argues that rather than viewing these practices as radically new, the ephemeral expressions represent creative continuity from the precoup period. One can appreciate Tumper’s wish to reperiodize, though more might be said about the serious limits of such expression, particularly in relation to his earlier emphasis on popular incorporation and reach.
Ephemeral Histories is not so much a book about what might have prevented the violence of the right-wing reaction to the UP as it is suggestive of what might have been. At points, Trumper’s analysis borders on romanticization of street politics (to which I am sympathetic). He points out that there were violent confrontations and that some in the streets were ready to defend the UP with arms if necessary, while many were not. Yet again, as many of us do, he evades the question of what defending and sustaining such revolutionary visual and performative production might really mean, what the cordones industriales truly modeled on a broad scale, what it would take to incorporate the vibrant, heady mobilization of the public sphere into ways of being that threw down the gauntlet at the ruling class establishment. Trumper’s convincing, intensive analysis of Patricio Guzmán’s documentary film La batalla de Chile (1975, 1976, 1979) indicates his disappointment that the film crew ultimately avoided the question of the implications of poder popular. To address this head-on himself would have been a tall order, yet we can look through Trumper’s rich, nuanced interdisciplinary lens and imagine what might have had to be tempered and what was championed in quite beautiful ways.
