Chile underground

Andra Chastain followed a circuitous path to her study of Latin American history. She took Spanish while growing up in Salem, Oregon and her family hosted exchange students, including one from Chile. After the school year, Chastain traveled to Chile to see her friend.

"We visited her family, and that was a pivotal moment," Chastain said. She was 17, with attitudes typical of American students at the time. A conversation with her friend's family challenged her thinking. She had assumed Chile's political system under dictator Augusto Pinochet was strictly ruinous and primarily an imposition by the United States. But her friend's parents had supported Pinochet and told her how he had modernized Chile. "I learned I needed to listen more," Chastain said.

Because her parents were urban planners, urban history had always been interesting to her. "I was curious about authoritarian modernization," Chastain said. "When I visited Santiago, the metro system seemed really successful, but there was no history of it. I wondered how it had started under one administration and how it continued during all these upheavals-how this project went across regimes and how ideology changed it."

It took a few years before the idea matured into a dissertation and then a manuscript, which is scheduled to be published this year. The title is "Chile Underground: The Santiago Metro and the Struggle for a Rational City."

Chastain majored in English at Reed College in Portland, worked as an organizer registering voters, and then won a Fulbright scholarship to teach English in Chile. In 2010, she started graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, where she earned her M.A. and began her research on the Chilean metro system. She continued her research at Yale, earning her Ph.D. in 2018.

She joined WSU Vancouver in 2018 and is an assistant professor of history. In 2020, she received the Students Award for Teaching Excellence. Her teaching philosophy is suffused with the lesson she got in Chile about learning to listen: "I guide the ship," she said of her classes, "but we are all learning together."

The local is global

To learn about the Santiago metro system, Chastain traveled to France as well as to Chile. "The French government wanted to promote France as the country to go to for the developing world if you wanted to build a metro system in the 1960s," Chastain said. "They sent consultants, engineers and planners as well as provided the loans."

The book focuses on the metro's planners, funders, workers, and critics, as well as the historical contexts that shaped the metro's development. Besides exploring archives in France and in Chile, Chastain conducted oral histories with dozens of individuals. The research was funded in part by a Social Science Research Council grant.

The story of the international politics involved in building a metro system in the developing world had not been told. But equally intriguing to Chastain was how shifting political regimes in Chile continued the development and how each put its stamp on the high-profile project. Despite ideological differences, the metro shored up each new government. Its popularity with the public gave each leader a reason to embrace it.

The project began during the Christian democratic regime of Eduardo Frei Montalva, continued under the socialist government of Salvador Allende and became a symbol of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who used it to help build legitimacy for his regime. "After the transition to democracy in 1990, it became a way for the new government to build legitimacy and power at the turn of the millennium," Chastain said.

Not surprisingly, there has always been criticism of the Santiago metro system and the way it sometimes fosters inequality. There have been many debates about the need for the system to better serve workers and the poor. Some have called it a misplaced priority, considering the poverty in Chile.

Chastain acknowledges the cultural conflict. As market principles like the importance of the bottom line came to matter, the system was able to succeed-but success came at a cost. The project outsourced workers, built the metro more cheaply, and raised fares to cover operating costs.

Now Chastain is embarking on a new project, a history of urban air pollution in the Americas. "To a large extent, environmental histories of Latin America have focused on extractive economies, such as mining and plantation economies," she said. While there are many studies of rural questions and land reform, "urban environmental history is relatively new, and there is important work to be done. Latin America is now one of the most urbanized regions in the world."

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