These two books on grassroots organizing and revolution in Chile share many characteristics. Both are based on oral histories, and both approach the history of Chile’s tumultuous late twentieth century, including the three-year revolutionary presidency of Socialist Party leader Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity coalition, by focusing on the grassroots rather than political parties and politicians and on the local rather than the national arena. Both study the working, or popular, classes, paying particular attention to the informal settlements, or poblaciones, founded by recent migrants to Chile’s burgeoning cities who organized collectively to invade unused land and establish communities. Both emphasize the vibrancy of Chile’s working-class culture, which encompassed multiple identities and transcended party and sectarian lines. Both examine the complex relationships between Marxist ideologies, Marxist parties, and this heterogeneous working class. Both explore how the 1973 coup and reign of terror that followed it attempted to expunge...

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