This volume consists of essays on the Chilean agrarian question between 1850 and the beginning of the Aylwin administration (1990-94). As the editors point out, the great outpouring of studies stimulated by the agrarian reform of the 1960s and early 1970s stopped abruptly with the military coup, which made the rural milieu both dangerous and difficult to study. Cristóbal Kay and Patricio Silva here attempt to present an integrated long view of complex processes, policies, and results, so as to identify “elements of continuity and change in the evolution of the Chilean agrarian question” (p. viii). This chronological span is the book’s most significant contribution.
Most of the essays, by 13 Chilean, U.S., and British authors, are reprinted or reworked and shortened, and several are well known to students of Chile and of Latin American agrarian matters. Arnold J. Bauer, Brian Loveman, Maurice Zeitlin, Richard Ratcliff, and Kay offer insights into the “hacienda period” of 1850 to 1964, discussing the timing and processes of capitalist development, rural unionization and party politics, social classes in the countryside, and agriculture and the state. David Lehmann, Patricia Garrett, Ian Roxborough, and Kay then discuss social and political dimensions of the “land reform period” of 1964 to 1973.
The section on the “neoliberal period” may interest the general reader most, because the contemporary scene is less well known outside Chile than the earlier periods. Lovell Jarvis provides a comprehensive overview of the counterreformist and neoliberal policies that resulted in the return of much land to previous owners and the remarginalization of the agricultural work force, while simultaneously creating the dynamic export sector and virtually eliminating the traditional hacienda. Silva’s essays on peasant unions and landowner organizations demonstrate the consolidation of capitalist hegemony in the countryside. José Bengoa discusses the legal subdivision of Mapuche communal lands, through which the military hoped to solve the “Mapuche problem,” and the partial reversal of this policy under Aylwin. María Elena Cruz examines the “depeasantization” of the rural working class and the formation of a new social sector in the countryside: the rural shantytown dwellers. María Soledad Lago studies the dramatic increase of women in the agricultural workforce.
Kay and Silva have created a relatively cohesive whole out of these 17 essays. Their introductory and concluding chapters synthesize, respectively, the scholarship on rural Chile and the prospects for change under neoliberal elected governments. The 18-page comprehensive bibliography is a contribution in its own right. There are occasional lapses, such as the editors’ statement, “the agrarian question only entered the public domain from the later 1930s” (p. 4), which Loveman contradicts in his essay discussing government responses to rural unionization from the 1920s. Nevertheless, the editors have contributed to the literature on Latin American agrarian issues by gathering important essays that elucidate major trends in rural Chile on both sides of the great divide of 1973.
