Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile's El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904-1951

Comparative and International Working-Class History

by Thomas Miller Klubock

In Contested Communities Thomas Miller Klubock analyzes the experiences of the El Teniente copper miners during the first fifty years of the twentieth century. Describing the everyday life and culture of the mining community, its impact on Chilean politics and national events, and the sense of self and identity working-class men and women developed in the foreign-owned enclave, Klubock provides important insights into the cultural and social history of Chile.
Klubock shows how a militant working-class community was established through the interplay between capitalist development, state formation, and the ideologies of gender. In describing how the North American copper company attempted to reconfigure and reform the work and social-cultural lives of men and women who migrated to the mine, Klubock demonstrates how struggles between labor and capital took place on a gendered field of power and reconstituted social constructions of masculinity and femininity. As a result, Contested Communities describes more accurately than any previous study the nature of grassroots labor militancy, working-class culture, and everyday politics of gender relations during crucial years of the Chilean Popular Front in the 1930s and 1940s.

Genres: Latin American History

392 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 1998

About the author

Thomas Miller Klubock is professor of history at the University of Virginia. He is the author of La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile’s Frontier Territory and has won numerous awards, including a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship.