Salvador Allende and the Villa San Luis Icons of the Just City

Through the history of this housing complex, this book illuminates Salvador Allende’s dedication to the imperative of the right to the city for Chile’s marginalized people. Built in affluent Las Condes in Santiago, on what is arguably the most expensive parcel of land in Chile, the Villa San Luis was one of Salvador Allende’s most visible and dramatic social projects. Allende’s six-year term was ended in the middle by a military coup d’état on 11th September 1973. Yet, material culture from Villa San Luis remains to convey the legacy of his commitment to providing disadvantaged families with dignified housing. It is a national lieu de mémoire and an iconic space, a reminder of a truly remarkable innovation in social housing and of Allende’s personal and political commitment to making Santiago a just city. Postcoup, the remains of the complex also relate the wider injustice of the Pinochet regime. Many of its families were violently evicted during the dictatorship. Some were dispossessed, taken away from Las Condes in garbage trucks, and dumped in poor communities around Santiago. The land was usurped by Pinochet on behalf of the army and later sold to developers to construct high-rise symbols of a new, neoliberal Chile. Over the decades, however, former residents fought back and, in 2020, they succeeded in making its one remaining structure, remnants of Block 14, a memorialized place of justice and reconciliation. It now a national monument and museum.

A New Way of Living for the Working Classes

From Marginalized Citizens to Pobladoras and Pobladores

Apartment Block 14: A Monumental Construction

Chapter Contents

2 Chile and Its Spaces of Difference

Santiago and Covid-19

The 1800s, Martín Rivas, pelucones and pipiolos

Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, Intendente of Santiago

Love, Friendship, and the Social Divide in Palomita Blanca and Machuca

On the Mapocho River, Cats Are Brought to Die

3 The Years of Constructing Daringly

Dis/Locating the City

Tomas and campamentos, 1960s and 1970s

The Making of the Villa San Luis

4 The Just City Invaded

Construction, Affect, and Fear of tomas

A Site of Despojos

Paradise Lost

5 From Social Experiment to Chile’s Most Expensive Paño Geográfico

Pinochet’s Hand in a Capitalist Imagined Community

Pinochet and the Villa San Luis in Democracy

Under the Nose of a New Democracy

The Inmobiliarias Build a Habitus

Contested Meanings for the Same Soil

Allende’s Just City

6 The Villa San Luis: Five Decades Later

A National Monument

The Monumento Histórico Nacional and the Estallido Social

A Tale of Two Cities

The Social Spaces of Allende’s Presidential Candidacies

A Promise Builds a Legacy

Patricia Vilches earned her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago. She is Professor of Spanish and Italian at Lawrence University, from which she retired. Her research focuses on Latin American cultural history, socio-political literary studies, material culture, and space studies with an emphasis on nineteenth-century Chile, through the work of Alberto Blest Gana, and twentieth-century Chile through Salvador Allende, Violeta Parra, Víctor Jara, and the Nueva Canción Chilena. Her publications include Blest Gana via Machiavelli and Cervantes: National Identity and Social Order in Chile (Cambridge Scholars 2017); an edited volume on Parra, titled Mapping Violeta Parra’s Cultural Landscapes, to which she also contributed a chapter (Palgrave McMillan 2018). She has also edited and contributed a chapter to the book Negotiating Space in Latin America (Brill 2020). Vilches edited and contributed a chapter to Blest Gana at 100, published by Open Cultural Studies (2021). This latter piece explores the social space of nineteenth-century Santiago, with themes that include the marketplace, consumerism, and sensorial stimuli. Vilches’s current research is on Chilean twentieth-century cultural and musical history via spatial, material, and geographical mapping.