This excellent study provides a groundbreaking history of the Santiago Metro that illuminates pivotal processes in Chilean and international Cold War history. Chastain positions the Metro as a microcosm of dynamics and tensions running through twentieth-century Chilean society, from the 1960s when construction began through the early twenty-first century. At heart, the book examines “what it means to build a rational city, how people use infrastructure for political purposes, and the way these projects reproduce or undo equality” (18).

Three main arguments anchor the analysis. First, Chastain finds that tension between planning and practice characterized the Metro from the start. Ongoing conflict between technological and social priorities changed surprisingly little as governments, economic policies, and the Metro’s engineers and administrators shifted over the decades. Chastain argues that technological priorities and the quest for efficiency usually prevailed over considerations of the Metro’s social value, with the result that the Metro often reinforced social inequalities. Second, the Metro was a microcosm of Chile’s history at specific junctures. As part of the social and political ecosystem of the capital city, the Metro was imbued with meanings, subjected to political critique, and became a site of social struggle. Third, the Metro was not only a “channel for existing tensions” (5), but was also a generative force in the capital city that created tensions of its own. It changed the cityscape and how people experienced their daily lives, and it was not equally available to all. The mass protests of 2019 that began with student demonstrations against a Metro fare hike and expanded into nationwide expressions of grievance against Chile’s political Constitution and economic system is perhaps the most recent example of the Metro serving as both catalyst and lightning rod for social and political conflict. Chastain traces multiple governmental administrations’ attempts to harness the Metro as a symbol of national identity and modernity, underscoring the political and ideological nature of urban infrastructure projects.

Beyond the Chilean context, the study makes important contributions to global histories of the Cold War, urban transport, and neoliberalism. The study of Chile’s international Cold War relations has long focused on the Chile–US dynamic and has more recently expanded to include Brazil, Cuba, and other countries in the region. ^{Footnote 1} Chastain writes France into the equation as a consistent source of technological cooperation and financing for the Metro, irrespective of the regime in power in Chile and throughout the most turbulent years of Chile’s recent history. The Santiago Metro was one of many post-World War II urban train projects around the world, others of which also engaged France’s support and collaboration. In this sense, Chastain notes, the Metro was part of a broader trend of post-war urban transport modernization. However, it was distinct in its relationship to Chilean national identity and the support it received from across the national political spectrum over time.

Chastain’s attention to continuities brings into sharp focus the complexity of Chile’s transition to neoliberalism. As researchers have argued in several other cases, interpretations that posit a sharp rupture between state-led development and neoliberalism in Chile are inaccurate. Chastain finds that decision-making within the agencies responsible for the Metro, as well as its financing, construction, and management, reveal a persistent combination of market logic and state planning that cuts across periods of state-led developmentalism, socialist revolution, and neoliberalism. In addition, this history of the Metro lends further support to historians’ findings that projects touted as triumphs of the Pinochet dictatorship’s neoliberal economy rested upon state-led development enterprises of prior decades. ^{Footnote 2}

Chile Underground connects the Santiago Metro to international processes through a fine-grained examination of local context and dynamics. This extensively researched and well-written study clearly illustrates the value of “rooting global histories in local sites” (206) and the importance of interrogating the intersections of ideology and technology.