Lost Worlds of the Chilean Pampa
Wander through the north of Chile and you may very well see evidence of Things That Are No More. Communities, cultures, industries that have disappeared and been replaced. Saltpeter mines supplanted by lithium mines as technology caused upheavals throughout the world. Before all of that, were the people who created this geoglyph, El Gigante de Atacama. El Gigante, the largest of its kind in the world, is perhaps a scrawled stone message to the gods, perhaps it is an astronomical calendar.
No road sign directs you to El Gigante — we followed directions from a guidebook to a bumpy road off the highway and drove into the emptiness until we saw the hill. The giant stone creation is simply there, impressed upon the brown and sandy hillside, leaving the visitor to imagine the ancient people who created it.
Perhaps the people who created El Gigante were the last occupants to claim the land for themselves. The Chilean desert, like much of the altiplano of Chile, Bolivia and Peru, was plundered of its mineral wealth by European and then American mining companies. By World War, two-thirds of Chile’s national income came from the export of nitrates, including saltpeter (potassium nitrate). Saltpeter had driven industrial progress for centuries — essential to both gunpowder and fertilizer. But in 1913, a German chemist invented a process to make saltpeter in a lab and, as Eduardo Galeano wrote in Open Veins of Latin America, the Chilean economy was sent into a tailspin. The saltpeter mines located in this arid vast desert began to close. As Galeano writes:
Since the pampa is without moisture or moths, it was not only possible to sell the machinery as scrap, but also Oregon pine boards from the best houses, zinc sheets, and even intact nails, nuts, and bolts. Workers specializing in taking towns apart appeared on the scene….I saw the debris and the empty holes, the ghost towns, the dead tracks of the nitrate railway, the skeletons of nitrate fields mangled by the bombardment of years, the cemetery crosses buffeted at night by the cold wind, and the whitish hills of slag piled up beside the excavations.
Not far from the port city of Iquique, with its faded Belle Époque downtown, lies the ghost town of Humberstone, one of the only company towns not dismantled and sold off. In this arid desert, the abandoned town stands almost as it did when the last miners left, save for the ravages of heat and sun and the looting that occurred until Humberstone became a national monument in 2000.
The UNESCO designation states that Humberstone, and its nearby sister village Santa Laura, are “ the most representative remaining vestiges of an industry that transformed the lives of a large proportion of the population of Chile, brought great wealth to the country”. The official story doesn’t mention that much of the wealth actually left the country, enriching the North.
But for the hour or two you visit Humberstone, you are drawn into the world of the people whose backbreaking labor created that wealth, the “workers, drawn from Chile, Peru and Bolivia, to this hostile environment,[who] ..forged a distinctive communal Pampinos culture, manifest in their own rich language, creativity and solidarity and above all in pioneering struggles for social justice, that had a profound impact general on social history.” You can see easily see the former — the richly forged culture in an arid, self-contained and remote place, but, whether by omission or intent, the story of a lasting contribution of the workers to social justice is left untold
The ghost town instead tells the story of Humberstone workers salvaged artifacts and rusted and peeling structures. You see the creativity of children who fashioned toy “guns” fashioned out of scraps of wire so they could play “Cowboys”.
A 1930’s faded Art Deco theater built for local and visiting performances is still adorned with a red velvet curtain. A simple church with sea-green walls and burnished wood pews still displays a larged carved crucifix and a painting of the Virgin Mary on the altar. One building is named the “Museum” and inside this structure, the company store has been recreated, complete with wax figures of shopkeepers, antique scales and tin cans lining the shelves.
I left Humberstone with a twinge of sadness but also wonder. I saw a glimpse of the Chilean past that is essential to its history, but not the Chile that presents itself to the outside world. I left wanting to know more.
