CHAPTER 1

Environment and History

Chile does indeed appear at first glance to be a country with "a crazy geography,"in the famous words of the essayist Benjamín Subercaseaux.Straddled by two mountain cordilleras, the Andes and the coastal range,the country extends 2,600 miles in length along the Pacific Ocean coast andaverages only just over 100 miles in width. The Pacific on the west, the Andescordillera to the east, the Atacama Desert to the north, and Cape Hornin the far south are ecological barriers that make Chile an island, isolated,both in political and environmental terms, from its neighbors. Yet in spiteof its apparent isolation, Chile has also been something of a thoroughfare:until the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, the straits of Magellan werethe only waterway connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, giving Chileanports tremendous maritime and commercial importance. Chile's crazygeography includes the world's driest desert, in the north, one of the world'slargest remaining temperate rain forests, in the south, the frozen wastes ofAntarctica, and a Mediterranean climate in the center. Chile also has twodistant Pacific island possessions, Easter Island (Rapa Nui) and the JuanFernández Islands (the setting for Robinson Crusoe, the fictionalized accountof a shipwrecked sailor), both hundreds of miles off the coast.

This unusual geography has played an outsized role in Chile's nationalimaginary from the days of the Spanish conquest to the present. It is not bychance that when Chilean schoolchildren study their nation's past, the subjectis called history and geography. Ever since its conception as a colonialpossession, Chile's boosters have publicized the products of nature's bountythere, from the wheat cultivated on central Chile's large estates and thelivestock pastured on its meadows during the colonial period and the nineteenthcentury to the nitrates and copper extracted from the Atacama desertand Andes cordillera during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The earliest conquistadors, beginning with Pedro de Valdivia, the founderof the Spanish colony, extolled the natural beauty and bounty of Spain's newpossession. Similarly, the builders of the modern nation-state during thenineteenth century linked the singularity of Chile's identity as a nation, andthe apparently exceptional trajectory of its history, to its geography. Today,as Chile mines it forests, oceans, and soil to produce timber, fruit, fish andshellfish, and copper for markets abroad, triumphalist accounts of nature'sbounty continue to celebrate the country's model free-market economy anddemocratic government. In a similar vein, modern writers like BenjamínSubercaseaux and the poet Gabriela Mistral have often looked to Chile'sgeographic isolation and remote location "at the extreme end" of the world,in the words of conquistador Pedro de Valdivia, to explain its purportedlyunique position within Latin America. Both Subercaseaux and Mistral celebratethe country's isolation as the foundation of an exceptional politicaland economic history, as well as a robust national identity.

Narratives of Chilean historical and geographic exceptionalism havebeen tempered by three crosscutting discourses about Chile's nature or thenature of Chile. The first is an acute awareness of the changing configurationof the nation. Frontiers, like nature more generally, have played amajor role in Chile's national formation. Until the late nineteenth century,Chile's northern border lay in its "near north," or norte chico, south of theport of Antofogasta. What is today considered northern Chile, consistingof the provinces of Tarapacá and Antofogasta, belonged to Bolivia and Peruand was acquired by conquest during the War of the Pacific (1879–1883). Tothe south, the territory sandwiched between the Toltén and Bío Bío rivers,known as "the frontier" or "Araucanía" (for Chile's native araucariapine tree), was independent of the nation, ruled by indigenous Mapuchegroups until the late nineteenth-century military campaigns known as "thepacification of the Araucanía." In Patagonia to the far south, disputes withneighboring Argentina have made defining Chile's southernmost bordersa conflictive process since colonial days. The question of where the linesbetween the two nations would be drawn in Patagonia was only resolvedin the early twentieth century and has left bitter feelings on both sides. Sotoo has Chile's conflict with Peru and Bolivia (which continues to demandaccess to the Pacific Ocean) and forcible incorporation of Mapuches intothe nation at the close of the nineteenth century. By some accounts, Chile'sunstable borders and the history of violent national integration of frontierterritories, from the Atacama to the Araucanía and Patagonia, have underwrittenan exceptionally stable national identity and robust nationalism.As in the United States, Chile's exceptional place in the Americas has oftenbeen attributed to its frontier experiences and its aggressive expansionismsince the mid-nineteenth century.

Second, while nature has often appeared to endow Chile with exceptionalbeauty and limitless wealth, natural disasters—from earthquakes, volcaniceruptions, and tidal waves to floods, droughts, and epidemics—have beenan ever-present reminder, like the shifting national borders, of the nation'sfragility. For some writers, such as the historians Cristián Gazmuri and RolandoMellafe and essayists like Subercaseaux, constant natural disasters,like the chronic frontier wars with Mapuche groups and the country's geographicisolation, have created a specifically Chilean "mentality," one definedby stoicism, sobriety, and modesty, as well as the capacity to overcomeadversity and "begin again." 1 These national characteristics were acclaimedin responses to the 2010 earthquake in southern Chile and have been a stapleof writing about Chilean national identity for...