Three pivotal events took place in Iquique between 1870 and 1930: one of the key naval battles of the War of the Pacific (1879); the establishment of a parallel government that challenged president José Manuel Balmaceda’s desire for greater taxation of nitrate wealth (1891); and the massacre by the Chilean military of striking miners at the Escuela Santa María (1907). This chapter examines the rhetoric of mourning in the literature of Iquique during this period and its link to shifting alliances along national, political, and affective lines. Texts analyzed include articles by Nicolás Palacios; poems and prose by Rubén Darío, who lived in Chile between 1887 and 1889; the novel Juana Lucero (1902) by Augusto D’Halmar; and the writings of labor organizer Luis Emilio Recabarren. The chapter links mourning to questions about workers’ rights, extractivism, and “cosmopolitanism” in Latin America’s first export age – issues still under debate today in the region.

Much of the work that has been devoted to Latin American history of science, as well as the analysis of intersections between literature and science in the long nineteenth century, points toward the flawed relationship that this region has had with science and technology. Science encompassed a series of proposals of new ways of seeing; it was a new platform that allowed writers to assume and retain control of their environment. This chapter explores the emergence of popular science magazines in Latin America – publications in which, it is argued, we find literary accounts of science as well as creative accounts of scientific observation. An improved understanding of this vast body of work helps us, in turn, to think of fin-de-siècle Latin American science as representative of what Bruno Latour defines as the “exegesis,” or constant inscription, that represents the central quality and activity of modern scientific life.

The turn of the century saw the emergence of a host of different entertainment media through which visual culture was industrialized, commodified, and otherwise modernized. New visual technologies, from photography, moving panoramas, stereoscopes, and cinema, to new image-delivery systems in advertisement and the illustrated press crystalized new forms of social organization and transformed visual perception. Following the modern crónicas of modernista writer Rubén Darío, the article explores the ways in which literary writing faced the challenge of the new mass culture and developed new languages and forms to reach a growing readership in the Latin American modernizing cities. Bridging both sides of the Atlantic and crossing over from the aesthete poet to the popular chronicler, Darío’s writing registers not just the intertwinement of high and mass culture, but above all the forms of spectatorship that delineated “the era of the mechanical reproducibility.”

Spanish American writers’ engagement with Decadence in the fin de siècle entailed a careful negotiation of ideas about their own region’s future and its historical evolution within the Western world. Their position regarding Decadence repeatedly turns to a discussion of the New World’s geopolitical and artistic position, keeping an eye on Spain’s decline in the global landscape of the fin de siècle. To illustrate these transatlantic negotiations, Blanco engages with the writing of several Spanish figures from the fin de siècle who dealt with Decadence’s controversial arrival in Spanish America. A central figure in this discussion is the Nicaraguan writer Rubén Darío, spin doctor of modernismo and a principal recipient of the ‘Decadent’ label throughout the 1890s and beyond. A writer who moved across different urban centres from Spanish America to Europe, Darío was a prime theorist of new literary developments in the region. As Blanco argues, while modernismo took in Decadence’s poetic energy as well as its diverse artistic work ethic, it had to become something else to breathe new life in Spanish American letters.