For generations, Chilean historians have framed the 1934 Ránquil rebellion as an outlier in a pattern of democracy and stability in modern Chile. This historical narrative of Chilean exceptionalism has dominated historiography on Chile and shaped our assumptions about seemingly anomalous phenomena like the Ránquil rebellion and the UP government of Salvador Allende in the 1970s. In this book, Klubock argues that, on the contrary, the Ránquil rebellion was a not an outlying event in twentieth-century Chilean history, but rather “the most visible and pronounced clash in a long history of conflicts between campesinos and estate owners” (2). Klubock contends that placing the Ránquil rebellion in historical context reveals the limitations of historical narratives of Chilean democratic exceptionalism. Modern Chilean democratic politics, he argues, “were built, at least in part, on a foundation of political violence and authoritarian rule” (4). Klubock draws on previously unused archival documents and also analyzes already-known material to access the voices of those who participated in the rebellion, reading state sources against the grain and with an eye to silences and power.
Each chapter builds a layer of historical context for the events of 1934, beginning with the nineteenth-century formation of large estates in Southern Chile. This structure underscores Klubock's emphasis on continuity and also highlights key themes in each time period that are ultimately braided together to frame the rebellion in the book's penultimate chapter. Klubock's analysis throughout is extremely impressive. He offers a careful analysis of contradicting land claims, court records, labor organization documents, and other sources. The array of human actors in this multigenerational history is likewise dizzying, and their relationships with one another are often complex and change over time. There is something Macondo-esque about these networks at times, and Klubock succeeds in balancing individual people with the larger social patterns in which they moved.
This book also offers a compelling discussion of how ontology and memory have shaped the way generations of Chilean historians have understood the Ránquil rebellion. The final chapter, in particular, draws on the deep historical context laid out in the rest of the book to explain why contemporary observers were unwilling or unable to see the events in Ránquil as organized, deliberate political action, and instead framed it through the lens of external communist agitation, or as an abrupt and visceral eruption of rural anger in the face of specific and short-term local tensions. These assumptions shaped the surviving written records (created by law enforcement, politicians, journalists, and others), creating a feedback loop that resulted in profound misunderstandings of Ránquil as a sudden, violent aberration against the backdrop of modern Chilean democratic politics.
This book is most effective in its analysis of campesino labor organizers, landowners, and state actors. Other groups—notably women and Indigenous peoples—appear here in clearly bounded paragraphs that feel somewhat peripheral to the book's main themes. The experiences of women and Indigenous people are not as thoroughly developed as those of other actors, nor are these sections consistently integrated into the central argument. However, this may be unavoidable, and it is certainly understandable, in light of the source material available for this study. Readers seeking in-depth analysis of gender or indigeneity in southern Chile will not find it here. Their inclusion was clearly not the author's intention for this study, and bringing those experiences into the analysis is perhaps a point of departure for future researchers.
In sum, this is an outstanding contribution to scholarship on modern Chilean history. This book is essential reading for serious students of Latin American history and international labor history, and it invites productive debate on central frameworks of Chilean history as well as transnationally relevant questions about the power of memory and mindset in shaping historical understanding.
