“Wastes of the city”: Urban Disease and Diseased Urbanization in Edward Bello’s El roto

New Directions in Ecocriticism
Fall 2010

“Wastes of the city”: Urban Disease and Diseased Urbanization in Edward Bello’s El roto

On October 22, 1905, between twenty-five and thirty thousand people gathered outside the presidential palace of Santiago, Chile to protest skyrocketing food prices. When President Riesco refused to meet with the protestors, a riot broke out, leading to a general strike throughout the city, which was supported even by the city police. For a week, Santiago was shut down by the “outer city,” those Santiaguinos excluded from the boom times enjoyed by the country’s elite.[1] This event, known as la semana roja (the red week), brought attention to the marked inequalities of the city, as well as the rapidly increasing population of urban poor. In salons, newspapers, and Parliament, intellectuals discussed the “social question” as the next major challenge in Chile’s quest for European-style modernity.

One of the many texts to arise out of these debates was Joaquín Edward Bello’s naturalist novel El roto (1920). The novel portrays a neighborhood that develops when the railroad arrives in Santiago in 1900. It traces the history of a plot of land as it changes over time from unpopulated countryside, to a disease- and brothel-filled slum, to an upscale commercial district. The term roto, which translates literally as “broken,” was commonly used at the time to refer to lower class Chilean men. In national -- and especially nationalistic -- discourse, the roto was ambivalently considered both as a beloved folk hero and a dangerous degenerate. The roto was a soldier, an “indomitable patriot” who defeated Peru and Bolivia in the War of the Pacific, but at the same time he was an unreliable vagrant who must be “Europeanized.”[2] The novel, establishing a metonymic chain between the body of the roto, the slum neighborhood, and Chile, portrays Chilean modernity as essentially diseased and corrupted, that is to say, broken. This message, or its method of delivery, evidently hit a nerve among the elite readership, which responded with outrage to the novel. One scandalized reader wrote: “with such a simple title, as filled with emotion as the emblems of our nation’s flag, Edward Bello’s novel (only) offers a pile of filth, degeneration, and to top off such vulgarity, he extracts the soul of his protagonist from a brothel.”[3]

As such a reception makes clear, Edward Bello overtly coded his novel as an expression of national crisis. Notably, however, the process of urbanization portrayed in El roto is remarkable in terms of its exemplarity, perhaps even its universality. While portraying Santiago as the center of a diseased and broken socio-economic system, the text ends up tracing the process of how urbanization and growth function under capitalism. In this paper, I propose a reading of El roto as an unintended parable of capitalist urbanization and the shifting social and natural ecosystems that it encounters and creates. Drawing on the work of David Harvey and Neil Smith, I argue that the ceaseless movement, instability, and destruction the text describes are internal, structural characteristics of capitalism’s need for continual expansion, that they are the rule rather than Chilean aberrations, as implied by the novel.[4] In addition, I expand on traditional Marxist criticism by integrating into my analysis the interaction of ecological processes with economic, political and social forces, what Benton-Short and Short refer to as the “social-environmental dialectic.”[5] Moving beyond a reading that treats textual representations of the built environment and human health conditions on a purely symbolic level, I employ a perspective that takes seriously the interrelationship of such elements with narrative and socio-economic processes. In this way, I seek a productive middle ground between the clearly problematic environmental determinism written into the text and the dominant tendency of contemporary scholars of Latin American literature to eschew any discussion of ecosystemic factors and processes.

Borja Street

From the first sentence, El roto establishes itself squarely within the space of “The Glory” brothel on Borja Street, a slum on the wrong side of the tracks in Santiago, Chile: “Behind the Central Station for the railroad, called Alameda because it is at the entrance of that spacious avenue that is the pride of Santiago, a sordid neighborhood has arisen, without municipal support.”[6] This neighborhood, rather than any of the characters, becomes the protagonist of the novel. It marks the intersection of what Angel Rama has called the “lettered city” and the “real city,” the place where the modernizing project – emblematized by the Alameda and Central Station – meets the unplanned growth of the slums.[7] Arising out of a moment of social, economic, and physical transition within Santiago, Borja Street stands as a manifestation of crisis provoked by the gap between the rich and the poor, as well as between the ambitious dreams and somber realities of Chilean modernity.

Official attempts to modernize Santiago began in 1872-75 under the leadership of governor Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna. Called “a miniature Haussman,” Vicuña Mackenna redesigned the center of Santiago in Parisian style around the wide boulevard, Alameda.[8] French and Italian architects worked with Chileans to build grand buildings such as the National Congress, Municipal Theater, and Central Market; Santa Lucía hill on the Alameda was transformed into a public park topped by a small castle. On a more practical level, over the next decades, pavementation of city streets commenced and steps were taken to provide access to potable water and sewage.

Then, in 1900, the arrival of the train to the city signaled the inauguration of a new modern era for Santiago. The narrator describes Central Station with awe:

A clock, placed in the center of the triangle that makes up the entire front of the building, marks the hours with the impassible constancy of mechanical things, while the throbbing locomotives pass below, perspiring steam, sweating through their metal pores, sending up to the sky in spongy plumes the turbulent, thick smoke that seems to be the soul of the neighborhood. Innumerable deformed, blackened posts for the telegraph and streetlights stand out everywhere without symmetry, as if they spontaneously sprung up from the asphalt, undulating (EB, 8).

Continuous, overwhelming movement dominates the scene. Although man-made, the train station has acquired life of its own, an unstoppable hybrid of mechanical and organic forces that exceeds human strength. And like pollution from the trains, Borja Street is characterized as an unforeseen and undesired by-product of modernization. This sense of an unwieldy growth, nearly spiraling out of control, was likely shared by many residents of Santiago who witnessed the population of their city increase by more than two-and-a-half times its size from 1885 to 1920.[9] Particularly notable was the development of lower-class neighborhoods on cheap agricultural lands that were bought and divided up by speculators capitalizing on the migratory influx.[10] The narrator describes the drastic change: “That which was an outlying desert, sad in the day and dangerous at night, with crosses and candles at the edge of the roads marking the sites of murders, has become a boiling neighborhood, filled with the noise of machines, motors, the shouting of urchins and street vendors” (EB, 8). The excessive and dangerous isolation of the no-man’s-land between city and country is overtaken by a swirling chaos of noise and motion, which we soon learn is fraught with the risk of theft and murder by urban gang members.

Such extensive poverty was not what upper class Chileans had imagined when they strove for a modern Santiago. However, with city and national government controlled by an oligarchy that placed personal favors before ideology, the vast majority of urban projects had catered to the wealthiest Chileans who built palaces along the Alameda in this time of unprecedented prosperity.[11] Water and sewage systems in Santiago only extended to upper class residences and business areas, leaving the majority of the city unserved by these improvements.[12] Alongside the new mansions and neoclassical architecture of the Municipal Theater or National Congress, the expanding slums marked a stark contrast. Emblematized by Borja Street, these neighborhoods signaled a failure of the modernizing project in Santiago. The novel’s interpretation of this failure, however, is ambivalent, as the narrator vacillates between characterizing Borja Street as an effect of modernity, as in the railway passage above, and seeing it as an incursion of provincial traditionalism that resists the modernizing project. As a result, although the entire neighborhood is new development, the narrator nonetheless describes parts of it as somehow “old”:

It’s as if there is a shell of brick houses, a curtain […] covering up the ignominy of the rotting conventillos and the brothels that are behind, two steps away, and that everyone seems to ignore. The old and new parts differentiate between themselves in a cutting and symbolic way, like the roto and the dandy, the suit coat and the poncho: this phenomenal pairing that makes up Chilean society (ibid., 10).[13]

Here, the roto stands as the negative of the dandy, the part of Chilean society that must be denied in order to achieve progress and modernity. He is the abject expelled from the body politic: the indigenous, the diseased, and the female. (Notably, even though the novel’s title is in the masculine form, most of its characters are women). In this way, El roto coincides with Gabriela Nouzeilles’s analysis of Latin American naturalism as a “skeptical rewriting” of the national romances of the nineteenth century, in a way that questions the possibility of social unity across differences of race and social class.[14] While nationalist discourse, exemplified by Nicolás Palacios’s The Chilean Race, highlighted the roto as the symbol of racial synthesis, Edwards Bello’s novel highlights the roto’s difference and lack of incorporation into the dominant urban society.[15] The narrator describes Borja Street: “You can feel the countryside; you can tell that contact with the real part of the capital is scarce […] These people have their own characteristic style; they are sturdy and rough like green chilies and raw onion, with their skin toasted by the sun” (EB, 9). In contrast to the Chilean oligarchy and expanding bourgeoisie in the “real part of the capital,” the dark-skinned residents of Borja Street are perceived as being closer to nature, the countryside, and the autochthonous, impervious to the refining influence of modern cosmopolitan culture.

Memories of the Countryside

The narrator’s association between Borja Street and the rural, however, is not only a means of describing its residents as backwards and resistant to incorporation into modern society. It is also a result of actual migratory trends from the countryside. This pattern is written into the novel in that nearly all of the women living in “The Glory” brothel were born on farms. In this way, we can see how the past of Borja Street is not to be found principally in the once-deserted patch of land on which the slum was built. To understand the origin of this neighborhood, we must look to the countryside, where a different sort of change was taking place – the industrialization of agriculture. Having increased agricultural productivity through improved irrigation and mechanization, the haciendas (large estates) were in a position to restructure labor relations. In a process that Gabriel Salazar characterizes as “in situ proletarianization,” haciendas consolidated their local economic control, converting tenant farmers into migrant workers.[16] Additionally, haciendas expanded their acreage through the incorporation of small land holdings, uprooting subsistence farmers. Tens of thousands of laborers migrated from the countryside, many seeking work in the nitrate fields in the north, while others established themselves in urban neighborhoods like Borja Street.

In general terms, this process is an example of primitive accumulation, which Marx describes as “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production,” in this case the separation of farmers from their land.[17] However, I do not wish to over-emphasize this moment as the single, decisive transition to capitalism; it was not the first (or final) restructuring of Chilean agriculture, nor did it fully transition to a capitalist formation. Primitive accumulation in Chile must be traced to the conquest of indigenous lands, first by the Spanish and then by Chilean creoles.[18] Therefore, a more appropriate characterization can be found in David Harvey’s term “accumulation by dispossession,” which highlights the internal need of capitalism to continuously repeat the process of primitive accumulation. As Marx explains, while the creation of a free labor force through primitive accumulation is a prerequisite for capitalist production, this first cycle is only the beginning: “As soon as capitalist production stands on its feet, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a constantly expanding scale.”[19] These cycles enable the continuation of capitalism by creating conditions for further growth and extraction of surplus value. As Neil Smith explains, this process interacts with existing spatial formations and creates new geographies. For example, while capitalist accumulation tends towards the increasing concentration of capital in fewer hands, it also enhances the spatial centralization of labor and fixed capital in cities.[20] In this way, the processes of accumulation by dispossession in the Chilean countryside led to the development of new patterns of human migration and settlement, and—as I discuss later—new urban ecosystems.

The characters of El roto, in turn, provide personal stories that trace this process of accumulation by dispossession and the resulting migration into the city. In a moving scene, lacking the cynicism that characterizes much of the text, Ofelia’s mother arrives at the brothel to reunite with her daughter who does not even recognize her. When Ofelia was eleven, her family lost their farm to a corrupt politician, leading to her father’s death. She was sent to the city, where she ended up making her living as prostitute. As her mother tells her story, long-repressed memories of Ofelia’s youth begin to surface: “The woman’s voice was like music from her childhood; her embarrassed movements, those gestures filled with naïve sincerity brought her a vague and painful reminiscence that made a lump in her throat” (EB 171). The typically catty prostitutes fall silent as they eat peaches that the woman brought, each recalling with nostalgia her own childhood in the country. The narrator observes: “Great familiarity reigned among all; the fruit from Quillota united these people of wild origin as friends” (ibid., 169). The presence of Ofelia’s mother recreates a brief moment of pastoral harmony, as the countryside is remembered as a lost Eden of innocence and familial love that was destroyed by the greed and corruption of the Chilean ruling class. Each of the women interprets Ofelia’s experience as representative of her own, and in this way the story becomes emblematic of all migrations from the countryside. The complex forces of socio-economic change are thus explained in a linear causal narrative: politician robs and emasculates innocent country family; peasant girl is forced to survive in the city of vice and corruption. Although this tale is overly simplified, idealized, and makes problematic use of gender and class constructions, it does capture symbolically the central elements of the economic trend occurring in Chile: the separation of workers from their land in a cycle of accumulation by dispossession that prompted migration to the cities. I propose this reading as one way in which this process can be imagined, mindful however, that we must resist an uncritical acceptance of the text’s pastoral, criollista nostalgia, which longs for a paradise that never existed.[21]

The Consuming City

In sharp contrast to the productive, harmonious countryside of the women’s memories, Santiago looms menacingly as a dark pit of over-consumption and waste. In a description that recalls the corrupt politician of Ofelia’s story, the narrator diagnoses the unhealthy relationship between city and country:

The typical Chilean landowner, a hybrid character with a box at the opera and a seat in Parliament, can only see agriculture as a means to get rich and satisfy his vanity in the capital; it is a machine for exploitation. It's no wonder that the farmworker remains in deplorable conditions of ignorance and destitution. What the countryside produces, the city gobbles up in a disheartening way, and neither the back that sweats nor the earth that gives a hundred to one, receive any reward (ibid., 93).

In this context, “the city” refers to what the narrator previously referred to as “the real part of the city” embodied by the dandy, that is to say, Santiago as the seat of the country’s political power and a decadent elite. Absentee landlords were frequently criticized at the time for shirking their responsibilities in the country while living the high life in the city. In this way, the narrator describes the abuse of farmworkers as the result of the “typical Chilean” elite’s love of luxury. Reading this passage through a Marxist lens, however, we can also see how it points to the exploitation of labor under capitalism. Furthermore, if we focus on the geographic dynamic of the passage, we can read it as an expression of uneven ecosystemic flows. Energy inputs, such as food and coal, are brought by railroad into the city where they are consumed and excreted in productive processes, without returning energy or nutrients to the countryside. In his analysis of British industrialization, Alf Hornborg proposes that this process of “time-space appropriation,” in which labor and land resources from one geographic location are consumed in urban centers, is essential to capitalist accumulation and the development of industry.[22] This analysis is particularly relevant given the incipient industrialization of Chile in the first decade of the twentieth century funded with capital from nitrate exports and literally fueled by the expansion of coal mining in the south.

This image of Santiago as an agent of insatiable consumption repeats twice more at central moments in the novel in the form of epiphanies, when for a moment a character understands the complex system in which he is embedded. In this way, the narrator points to this image as the key to interpreting the multiple narrative threads of the novel as a cohesive whole. Esmeraldo’s epiphany occurs near the beginning of the novel when he recovers from a feverish sickness that was caused by witnessing his father’s constant physical abuse of his mother, Clorinda. Turning instead to the local gang leader El Pucho as his role model, Esmeraldo grows strong and gains new wisdom about his surroundings:[23]

The city appeared to him for the first time in its true dimension; he understood the force of this changeable and capricious sea of people that twists fates and imposes history. The city, which he knew more than anything else for its powerful digestive organ that swallows and vomits from morning to night, filled him with anxiety. He understood his smallness in this immensity (EB, 68).

As in previous passages, we are confronted with uncontrollable movement that dwarfs the individual. Rather than technological innovation, here the threat to individual agency comes from the multitude of bodies circulating through the city. Santiago, driven by this anonymous mass of people, is imagined again as incessantly consumptive. However, this “digestive organ” is dysfunctional; it takes things in, but is unable to digest them and must vomit over and over again. The city itself is sick, productive only of wastes and crime.

The second epiphany occurs near the end of the novel, when Señor Madroño, a corrupt politician, betrays Esmeraldo’s stepfather, Fernando. Hoping to get a share of wealth and power, Fernando had done the dirty work to ensure a monopoly for Madroño’s casino, El Popular. He gathered together a group of thugs to cause a brawl in the competing casino, Sporting, so that the police would intervene and shut the place down. (In this way, Madroño’s accumulation of capital is achieved through the dispossession of his competition). However, after Fernando racks up a gambling debt, Madroño cuts off all ties and has him arrested on false charges. Right before he is arrested, Fernando understands the truth about Santiago: “[Fernando] kept walking, walking, walking, and the city buzzing in his ears was undergoing a considerable metamorphosis. He saw it as if for the first time. This was Santiago, the capital, the devourer of men from the South and the North and from the ports and the estates” (ibid., 206). Fernando, who once had been a figure of the virile Spanish conquistador seeking gold in California and impregnating indigenous women in Bolivia and Peru, is finally consumed by the city’s rapaciousness. Notably, “devourer” is written in the feminine form of devoradora, gendering Santiago as a vagina dentata and establishing a parallel between it and Fernando’s lover Clorinda.[24] Fernando’s choice to sacrifice his mobility and settle down to a claustrophobic life on Borja Street was his first step towards his ultimate imprisonment in jail. The tragic end to Fernando’s story shows how the city’s parasitism upon the rest of the country consumes even the bodies of men, sapping the nation of its vital productive energy.

Disease, Parasites, and Death

Images of parasitism and disease proliferate throughout the novel, emphasizing the inherent sickness of the city system as described in passages above. However, disease does not only function as a metaphor; it is also signaled as one of the direct causes of the Chilean social crisis. In 1905, massive smallpox epidemic swept the country, and Santiago experienced periodic outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever.[25] Typhoid fever, tuberculosis, syphilis, diphtheria, measles, influenza were also constant threats. In 1903 and 1905, the city of Valparaíso even experienced epidemics of bubonic plague.[26] To speak directly to the reader about the risks of disease transmission from prostitution, the narrator assumes a journalistic tone. While the characters fornicate in the background, a list of disease statistics emphasizes the magnitude of the problem:

Various parasites wait avidly, among the sheets and wood, for the flesh given up to sickly copulation. The statistics are frightening: in seven years, smallpox has consumed more than 30,000 Chileans, and tuberculosis in its diverse manifestations, more than 60,000 […] Syphilis and other venereal diseases that have set up camp in the disorganized public contribute to the general insanity, leaving behind an ignominious stigma in the contaminated family, stunted and useless (EB, 49-50).

This passage paints an image of moral and physical degradations blending together within the space of the brothel and establishes a direct relationship between illicit physical contact and disease transmission. While the men consume women’s bodies in sex, countless diseases and parasites are consuming their own bodies. As a result, this “disorganized” sexual activity becomes doubly unproductive, because the men bring the diseases home with them to infect the nuclear family. While it is unclear to what extent the “parasites” – fleas and bedbugs – are considered to be vectors of disease, they stand as visible signs of unseen infection. Their omnipresence marks the brothel as an unrestrained, sickly breeding ground for all manner of corrupting agents.

Contributing to this unhealthy environment, the prostitutes are described as excessively inactive, spending most of the day sitting around or sleeping, as their living space becomes always more infested:

This house was a swarm of odious insects. When summer came, this became unbearable. Tomorrow, the girls claimed, they would throw bucketfuls of boiling water on the frames and springs of their cots. They always made these promises, but they never fulfilled them, and year after year the colonies of parasites spread, they ran freely and even during the light of day on the walls and floors of their tiny rooms (ibid., 138-139).

This passivity in the face of “unbearable” circumstances is repeatedly highlighted in the novel as a character trait of lower class Chileans, making them resistant to the forces of social progress: “This hopeless, squalid filth is national, the trademark of the roto […] You could put these people in a modern house, with running water, a bathroom, and a perfect kitchen; before long the bathroom would be a greenhouse and the kitchen a chicken coop They would feel nostalgic for the hot odor of filth that lulled them to sleep in the cradle” (ibid., 133). Here, the text’s environmental determinism is clear. The roto’s character, produced by the “filth” of his environment, prevents him from doing anything but reproducing the same surroundings throughout his life. As a consequence, the text transfers blame onto the roto for perpetuating his poverty and disease-stricken existence.

Nonetheless, despite the text’s tendency to characterize disease as linked to the moral shortcomings or character flaws of humans, it also illustrates the role of the built environment in creating favorable conditions for the spread of pathogens. In this way, the text complements contemporary scientific studies, which find that “urban slums concentrate hazards and risks to health and in many cases increase the baseline rates of morbidity and mortality.”[27] While the novel may paint a worst-case scenario of living conditions, the descriptions coincide with reports by journalists and travelers to the city, one of who characterized Santiago as an “indescribable sewer.”[28] At the time, about forty percent of people in Santiago lived in conventillos, which were made up of a series of small rented rooms around a narrow center patio, and generally lacked sewage, electricity, and running water.[29] After visiting a series of Santiago’s conventillos in 1925, the U.S. ambassador to Chile wrote, “It is impossible to exaggerate in talking of the insalubrity and lack of sanitation in the great majority of Chilean homes […] The housing problem is the greatest that confronts Chile.”[30] In the next section of my analysis, therefore, rather than following the deterministic chain of causation suggested by the text in which the environment produces a type of people whose actions spread disease, I wish to explore ways in which the socioeconomic and ecosystemic processes represented in the text interact and influence each other in complex, multidirectional ways.[31]

For example, the narrator describes the absence of a sewage system on Boja Street. Lacking any lavatories, the residents and customers at The Glory relieve themselves in chamber pots or “an enormous metal bucket, located on one side of the patio,” (EB, 21) which are “emptied by María in the middle of the street.” (ibid., 133). The prevalence of raw sewage in the environment is a significant health hazard. Sewage contamination of drinking water and food, which would be inevitable in such circumstances, contributes to the spread of bacteria such as Vibrio cholerae, Salmonella typhi, and E. coli. The narrator also mentions the infrequency of washstands in The Glory, thus limiting the opportunities for hand washing and other sanitary measures that could have minimized the spread of disease (ibid., 21). A major contributoing factor to the unhealthy conditions of the neighborhood was the acequia (irrigation ditch) that ran down the center of the street, and through which all manner of wastes were flushed, including “emissions from the slaughterhouse and garbage heap.” (ibid., 41). These acequias seem to have provided particularly suitable environments for pathogenic growth. The narrator describes: “A foul-smelling acqeuia runs through here, above which clouds of mosquitoes fly about; at night those imposing rats called pericotes run along the banks and stand up to the cats in the neighborhood” (ibid., 16). In addition to the potential spread of waterborne illness, especially E. coli in slaughterhouse runoff, the clouds of mosquitoes signal an increased risk for yellow fever, a virus that is transmitted from human to human via infected mosquitoes. The acequia could have provided suitable environment for the development of the Aedes aegypti mosquito larvae, which generally grow in puddles of stagnant water.[32] Furthermore, the presence of rats raises the risk of bubonic plague. A 2009 study in Buenos Aires showed that rats exist in higher concentrations in shantytowns where they had access to water in ditches and puddles.[33] This study is important in that it signals the role of the physical environment in producing suitable habitats for rodents. In this way, we can consider that the rats in the text are not only due to the historic tendency to associate rats with poverty. Independent of ideological constructs, rats simply tend to live in conditions like the ones described by the novel. Furthermore, bubonic plague is spread by fleas that are infected by rodents with bacterium Yersinia pestis and then bite humans. As we have seen, there is no lack of parasitic insects in the text. Fleas are specifically mentioned in an evocative image: "On the bedsheets near the window, Fernando could see those stains of dark blood that squashed bedbugs leave behind, or the red interminable trails of the fleas that, after sucking, return to their hiding places, zigzagging like drunks” (EB, 132). In a house dedicated to excesses of sex and alcohol, even the fleas feast immoderately, intoxicating themselves with human blood.

Another significant factor contributing to the high rates of disease on Borja Street is the crowded living conditions in The Glory. In the conventillo, small bedrooms surround an interior patio. However, each woman does not have her own bedroom; instead, as the narrator explains: “In each room there were three or four beds, separated by curtains hanging from ropes that crossed from one wall to the other” (ibid., 21). According to the U.S. ambassador, rooms in conventillos were fifteen square feet or less, so if we consider that two people generally occupy each bed, we are presented with an image of intensely crowded bedrooms.[34] Such close quarters contribute to the spread of diseases including tuberculosis, smallpox, measles, and influenza, all of which can be spread through the air as well as contact with bodily fluids. For example, Wanyeki et al. (2006) show that buildings with reduced ventilation and higher concentrations of inhabitants contributed to increased transmission of tuberculosis.[35]

Laura, one of the prostitutes at The Glory, suffers from tuberculosis (although, curiously enough, she does not transmit it to any of the other residents). In a process of degradation typical of naturalist texts, Laura’s body slowly breaks down as time goes on, signaling the inevitable ugly demise of all the characters in a neighborhood marked by moral and physical corruption. Nevertheless, her death comes as a shock that disrupts the pace of the narrative. Her immobile corpse, eaten by flies and decaying in the summer heat, remains too long in her bedroom, unable to propel the narrative forward. Unlike the destruction of the casino Sporting or even the murder of Sebastián Martí, which facilitated Fernando’s imprisonment, Laura’s death cannot be put to any additional use. Her consumption is just decay and cannot be incorporated for the production of additional value. Only at the most basic ecosystemic level can her remains be reincorporated, as evident in the novel’s final description of Laura’s corpse, which closes with a sense of passive resignation to the inevitable: “Tired of scaring off flies, she [Ofelia] wiped her sweat and saw that the dead girl was turning black. Her eyes remained very closed. The summer, which intensified the call of life, hastened the work of evolution, bringing to this decomposed face a grimace of beyond-human pain” (EB, 187). Nevertheless, despite the uselessness of Laura’s death, time continues and with it cycles of dispossession that propel other women towards the same tragic end: “The poor Laura whose wake they held, and before her other sinners, had lived in this loft which barely fit a bed, made from scraps from the station, rotted planks, old zinc sheets, rusty rails and cobblestones. Now another one would come to replace the dead girl” (ibid., 181-182). Of all the rotos, Laura is the ultimate abject. Separated from the other women in a loft made of trash, she is the prostitute who accepted a customer with scabies that other women refused. Like the scrap materials from the railroad used to make her bedroom, Laura is as a by-product of the forces of modernization, and the unincorporable Real that haunts the narrative of progress.

Urban Renewal on Borja Street

Despite the narrator’s prediction, however, The Glory does not last long enough to see another “sinner” replace Laura in the loft. The novel concludes with a second major cycle of accumulation by dispossession that involves the complete demolition and reconstruction of Borja Street. In a robbery gone awry, gang leader El Pucho kills Sebastián Martí. To save his idol, Esmeraldo claims credit for the deed and is arrested by the police. An idealistic journalist named Lux learns of the case and decides to fight in the boy’s defense, launching a press campaign with “the Esmeraldo affair” as a symbol for the Chilean poor’s struggles (ibid., 237). Six months later, when Esmeraldo is released, Lux takes the boy into his custody. However, Esmeraldo escapes from Lux’s apartment and returns to Borja Street. To his horror, the entire street is in ruins. The public attention that Lux’s articles had brought to Borja Street had prompted the government to mandate the street’s demolition: "The law had condemned the street; it was ordered to knock it down, destroy it, tear it to the ground in order to sanitize the back of the powerful maelstrom that was the Station” (ibid., 245). The slum that had developed in the wake of the railroad’s chaotic arrival must now be erased in order to redirect the city’s development towards the ideal of an orderly modernity. And yet, the train’s very presence in its unceasing motion serves as a reminder that such an ideal is impossible, that the attempt to impose order will inevitably fail: “Every so often a train passed and the slum shuddered like before with the din of the rails… then those wastes of the city animated themselves once again for a moment…” (ibid., 246). The city system that seeks to clean-up Borja Street is the same as that which produced it, and so it will continue to produce other Borja Streets in other locations as it “swallows and vomits from morning to night” (ibid., 68). However, while the text characterizes Borja Street as “wastes of the city,” I propose that it would be more accurate to consider the neighborhood as a product of national and (as we will see) international systems of capitalist development. The conventillos and their roto inhabitants are “wastes of the city” only insofar as Santiago is a local expression of global processes.

It is important to clarify that while the demolition of Borja Street is attributed in the novel to actions of specific characters, it reflects a pattern that was occurring throughout Santiago at the time. In response to increasing worker unrest and a nation-wide outbreak of smallpox, the Chilean Parliament passed the Worker Housing Law of 1906 with the goal of eliminating unsanitary rental housing. National Party politician Agustín Edwards highlighted the sentiment behind the law, the first of its kind in Chile:

Social stability depends on the healthy, moral and legal constitution of the family, the fundamental base of all societies, the cornerstone upon which the peace of society rests. The conventillo is the most terrible weapon that our society wields against its own stability; the family cannot constitute itself morally…unless the working class has healthy and hygienic housing.[36]

From this commentary, we can appreciate how the association between morality, physical well-being, and the built environmentwas a significant factor that shaped the housing legislation of 1906. By constructing buildings with more space, light, and ventilation, politicians sought to neutralize the threat represented by the city’s poor. The new standards required that residences be built of solid materials on dry, level land at least two meters from acequias. There should be one kitchen for each family and access to sufficient potable water “where this service exists.”[37] A Worker Housing Council was established to inspect rental housing and mandate the renovation or demolition of those buildings that did not meet the established standards. Given the high rates of disease, particular concern was focused on buildings that were sites of “permanent infection, capable of harming its inhabitants or those of neighboring houses.”[38]

However, although the law aimed to encourage the construction of sanitary housing, its predominant effect during the period 1906-1924 was the demolition of more than 1,600 conventillos, which had provided housing for nearly 47 thousand people.[39] In contrast, less than sixty percent of the demolished housing was rebuilt under this program.[40] As a result, rent escalated, remaining conventillos became more densely inhabited, and new unapproved housing developed along the city’s periphery, with even less access to municipal services.[41] In the end, the principal beneficiaries of the Worker Housing Law were real estate speculators who used government funds to rebuild conventillos as housing for middle class tenants who paid higher rents.[42]

Overall, the program was part of a larger trend of successive displacement of the poor from neighborhoods in the city center to lands of lower value in increasingly peripheral locations.[43] While it is likely an anachronism to employ the term gentrification to describe the phenomenon, the parallels between this process of urban reform and the gentrification of the late twentieth century are undeniable. Neil Smith describes gentrification as part of the “see-saw movement of capital” where capital investment is shifted into a devalued geographic area where land can be bought on the cheap.[44] As a result, the residents of this area are displaced and must shift to other locations, which subsequently become devalued, allowing the process to continue over again: “capital attempts to see-saw from a developed to an underdeveloped area, then at a later point back to the first area, which is by now underdeveloped, and so forth…Capital seeks not an equilibrium built into the landscape but one that is stable precisely in its ability to jump landscapes in a systematic way.”[45] Foreshadowing the later processes of gentrification, turn-of-the-century urban reform functioned through restructuring urban space in order to achieve the continual growth and destruction, the development and underdevelopment necessitated by capitalism.

Indeed, the story of Borja Street does not end with the neighborhood’s demolition. The government policy opens up new profit opportunities, and entrepreneurs swoop in to take advantage of the centrally located, low-cost land:

At the first light on the next day, a gang of demolition workers, contractors, architects, auctioneers, and buyers would fall upon this rubble. Life would distribute the cadaver amongst itself. The strong, the living that feed on the dead would fall upon this rubble, adding a healthy and vigorous touch to this pale, mute urban disaster. Every morning, clean, strong, well-dressed men would arrive to examine their prey. The carrion was sold, divided, auctioned, awarded to twenty speculators (EB, 246).

Here, the image of a city devouring itself takes the shape of vulture-like individuals who consume the cadaver of Borja Street and utilize the remains of others’ suffering towards new development. Notably, many of the buyers are of foreign origin. An Italian man plans to transform The Glory into a department store; a German and the house of Wilkinson Strand each buy other parts of the neighborhood. In the end, however, while coding these events as a tragic loss, the text maintains a certain level of ambivalence in the face of what seems to be inevitable:

The roto moved on, with syphilis and smallpox, drunk, limping, one-eyed, tragic, dragging the specter of the poor prostitute, leaving behind in those ruins the best of his energies, the strongest parts of his body and soul. He went somewhere else, mute and fatalistic, without asking who he was leaving all of this to, making space for the bourgeois, the gringo and the dandy that came in the name of civilization and Darwin. In the fight for life, which is nothing more than a shoot-out in which the big guy eats the little one for the betterment and the continuation of the species, the roto, strong, intelligent, daring, bold, succumbed incurably because of the conditions in which he lived and his lack of education. The foreigner and those Chileans who acted more like foreigners than the roto, took all of this from him little by little; and he couldn’t even blame them, because generally they defeated him with their virtues: their thrift, sobriety, household organization… (ibid., 246-247).

While criticizing those who legitimize the dispossession of the roto as a sign of progress, the narrator cannot help but sympathize with the agents of dispossession, whose “virtues” make them more fit to survive in a cutthroat world. Perhaps, the narrator considers, the roto’s best contribution to “the betterment and continuation of the species” is to be eaten up by the “big guy.” In this way, the text gives way to its own environmental determinism and social Darwinism, which limits its ability to truly challenge the system of exploitation that it decries.

And what is to become of the rotos? As Esmeraldo leaves Borja Street, he finds Ofelia wandering nearby. Now homeless, she is “also a ruin, like her street” (ibid., 249). Ofelia takes Esmeraldo to a grimy brothel owned by a man known alternately as el chino (Asian) and el paisano (Arab), explaining, “It would have been better if they’d torn down this one that is dirtier and closer to the station. The rich think that this way they made everything better. They ‘estroyed The Glory” (ibid., 252). With The Glory’s destruction, Ofelia and Esmeraldo look back to their former lives with nostalgia. While Borja Street had its share of disease and violence, it had been their home, an alternative matriarchal society that withstood suffering through bonds of culture and community. Now they are scattered about in a city that is being taken over by foreign men. The narrator describes the loss:

Life had gone quickly out of this neighborhood, like water from a pitcher that breaks; nothing remained of that bustle, those shrill colors, those rustling skirts, the pictures and rugs that animated them; the rhythm of the cueca, the shouting and drumming had also fled from this colorful and ephemeral world, leaving the street dead (ibid., 246).

In this way, the text returns to its earlier characterization of Borja Street as an expression of the autochthonous. However, now that this source of Chilean essence has been irrecuperably lost, it longer stands an impediment to modernization. It is simply something to be mourned, a national culture sacrificed to the illusory ideal of progress.

Closing Thoughts

“The city is ‘mobility,’ ‘spillage’: flux. How can it be represented? How can it be contained, if its constitutive impulse is precisely to overrun territories, continents, and perpetuate in a protean fashion a constant ‘change of form’?”[46] This question, posed by Julio Ramos in his discussion of José Martí’s North American Scenes, captures a central challenge that Joaquín Edwards Bello, like Martí before him, seeks to address. The city, caught up in the flows of global capitalism, becomes a site of instability and rapid change. In this essay, I endeavored to read El Roto as a narrativization of the complex flows and interactions of economic, social, political and ecological forces that shaped and reshaped the space of Borja Street in Santiago, Chile during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through a series of interwoven vignettes, the novel portrays the rise and fall of The Glory brothel from its roots in the countryside to its violent makeover as an Italian-owned department store. By drawing on source materials from a variety of disciplines, including history, political economy, geography, urban planning, and public health, I examine the processes described in the novel from multiple perspectives, and consider the ways in which the novel’s own, personalized chains of causation seek to explain larger trends such as migration, disease, and urban renewal. Coded as the expression of a specifically national problem, the novel denounces the political corruption of the Chilean oligarchy, press, and police force while lamenting the laziness and vice of the rotos. In this way, it presents a city system that is essentially broken and doomed to be overtaken by more capable foreign investors. Nonetheless, as I have shown that, the novel allegorizes processes of capitalist accumulation that are not particular to the Chilean situation. Therefore, I argue that we can read the Chilean crisis of the early twentieth century not as a result of national shortcomings, but of the inner necessity of capitalist growth to produce underdevelopment. In our current, neoliberal moment, the issues around urban housing are no less pressing than they were a century ago. As we seek to understand contemporary processes and narratives of capitalist urbanization, a critical reading of El roto shows us that we must not lose sight of the flawed humanity of both narrator and those whose lives are narrated. As it vacillates between nostalgic idealization and disgust of the Chilean lower class, El roto highlights with unflinching graphic prose the centrality of real human suffering in capitalist transformations of the urban environment. In this way, the novel serves as an important reminder that socio-economic and ecological processes are expressed not only spreadsheets or graphs, but more importantly, in city geographies and on the bodies of the rotos all around the world.

Lisa Burner
Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Notes

  • [1] Vicente Espinoza, Para una historia de los pobres de la ciudad (Santiago: Ediciones Sur, 1988), 24.See in Text
  • [2] Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, quoted in: Ericka Beckman, “The Creolization of Imperial Reason: Chilean State Racism in the War of the Pacific.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 18.1 (2009): 85. See in Text
  • [3] Quoted in: Bernardo Subercaseaux, Historia de las ideas y la cultura en Chile, Vol. 4: Nacionalismo y cultura (Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 2007), 36-37 (my translation). See in Text
  • [4] David Harvey. “Notes Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographic Development,” Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Development (New York: Verso, 2006); Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).See in Text
  • [5] Lisa Benton-Short and John Short, Cities and Nature (New York: Routledge, 2008), 213. See in Text
  • [6] Joaquin Edwards Bello, El roto (Santiago: Soc. Imp. y Lit. Universo, 1929), 7 (all translations my own, hereafter cited in text as EB). The events of the novel take place on the street referred to in the novel as “la calle Borja,” known formally as San Francisco de Borja. Edwards Bello’s fictional brothel likely stood at the current site of the San Borja bus terminal, which is directly west of the Central Station.See in Text
  • [7] Angel Rama, The Lettered City. John Charles Chasteen, trans. (Durham: Duke UP, 1996).See in Text
  • [8] Claudio Gay, quoted in: Alfonso Calderón. Memorial del viejo Santiago. (Santiago: Ed. Andrés Bello, 1984). See in Text
  • [9] According to the national census, the population of Santiago in was 189,332 in 1885 and 507,286 in 1920. Rodrigo Hidalgo Dattwyler, La vivienda social en Chile y la construcción del espacio urbano en el Santiago del siglo XX (Santiago: Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos, 2005), 25; Richard J. Walter, Politics and Urban Growth in Santiago, Chile 1891- 1941 (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005) 74. See in Text
  • [10] Walter, Politics and Urban Growth, 80; Espinoza, Historia de pobres, 16-19.See in Text
  • [11] Michael Monteón, Chile in the Nitrate Era: The evolution of economic dependence, 1880- 1930, (Madison: U Wisconsin P, 1982), 56; Walter, Politics and Urban Growth, 11-12.See in Text
  • [12] Monteón, Nitrate Era, 60.See in Text
  • [13] The conventillo was the most common style of housing among lower class residents of Santiago, made up of a series of small, windowless rooms around a center patio.See in Text
  • [14] Gabriela Nouzeilles, Ficciones somáticas: Naturalismo, nacionalismo y políticas médicas del cuerpo (Argentina 1880- 1910), (Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2000), 15. For an analysis of nineteenth century Latin American romantic literature as imagining social cohesion through heterosexual desire, see Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The national romances of Latin America, (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991).See in Text
  • [15] Nicolás Palacios, Raza chilena: Libro escrito por un chileno i para los chilenos, (Valparaiso: Imprenta i Litografia Alemana de Gustavo Schäfer, 1904). See in Text
  • [16] Gabriel Salazar Vergara, Labradores, peones y proletarios: Formacion y crisis de la sociedad popular chilena del siglo XIX (Santiago: Ediciones Sur, 1985), 156 (my translation).See in Text
  • [17] Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 875. See in Text
  • [18] It should also be noted that the conquest of indigenous lands continued in the south of Chile under the campaign of “Pacification of the Aracuania” (1861-1883), which was concurrent with the restructuring of agricultural relations elsewhere in Chile. The wheat plantations established in the newly conquered lands in the south were corporate-run, thus more closely resembling a purely capitalist agriculture than the older landholdings in the Central Valley, near Satiago. Salazar, Labradores, 156.See in Text
  • [19] Marx, Capital, 874.See in Text
  • [20] Smith, Uneven Development, 123-124. See in Text
  • [21] Criollismo was an important genre of Chilean literary, artistic, and musical production in the early twentieth century. Principally choosing rural settings for their works, criollista artists sought to portray autochthonous Chilean traditions and folklore that was untainted by the influence of modern, European culture. As Subercaseaux explains, these works established a dichotomy between the city and the country, in which the country was idealized as the source of tradition and morality (146-147). See in Text
  • [22] Alf Hornborg, “Footprints in the Cotton Fields: The Industrial Revolution as Time-Space Appropriation and Environmental Load Displacement.” Rethinking Environmental History: World- System History and Global Environmental Change, Eds. Alf Hornborg, J.R. McNeill and Joan Martinez-Alier, (Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2007).See in Text
  • [23] The term pucho refers to a small scrap of something, most often the butt of a cigarette.See in Text
  • [24] As Ericka Beckman writes in her manuscript “Capital Fictions: Writing Latin America’s Export Age (1870-1930),” the image of people being devoured by the forces of capitalism is a repeating trope of Latin American literature, for example in The Stock Market (1891) by Julian Martel and The Vortex (1924) by José Eustasio Rivera.See in Text
  • [25] Espinoza, Historia de pobres, 21-34; Walter, Politics and Urban Growth, 19.See in Text
  • [26] Monteón, Chile in the Nitrate Era, 90.See in Text
  • [27] Neel M. Butala, Michael J. VanRooyen, and Ronak Bhailal Patel, “Improved health outcomes in urban slums through infrastructure upgrading,” Social Science & Medicine 71 (2010): 935.See in Text
  • [28] Albert Malsch, The Last Corner of the World: Two years in Chile (1907), quoted in Walter, Politics and Urban Growth, 18.See in Text
  • [29] Walter, Politics and Urban Growth, 13-14.See in Text
  • [30] Quoted in ibid., 13-14.See in Text
  • [31] I do not intend that a reading of the text as representative of a material ecosystem to replace the metaphoric readings of the text I propose above, but rather for the multiple reading to coexist and inform each other.See in Text
  • [32] “Yellow Fever Fact Sheet,” Center for Disease Control and Prevention, United States Department of Health and Human Services, accessed December 4, 2010, http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid /yellowfever/YF_FactSheet.html.See in Text
  • [33] Regino Cavia, Gerardo Rubén Cueto, and Olga Virginia Suárez. “Changes in rodent communities according to landscape structure in an urban ecosystem,” Landscape and Urban Planning, 90 (2009): 17.See in Text
  • [34] Walter, Politics and Urban Growth, 13.See in Text
  • [35] Ian Wanyeki, et. al. “Dwellings, crowding and tuberculosis in Montreal,” Social Science & Medicine, 63 (2006): 508. See in Text
  • [36] Quoted in: Hidalgo Dattwyler, Vivienda social, 54-55 (my translation). See in Text
  • [37] Ibid., 59 (my translation). See in Text
  • [38] Ibid., 58 (my translation).See in Text
  • [39] Ibid., 67.See in Text
  • [40] Ibid., 53.See in Text
  • [41] Ibid., 87; Espinoza, Historia de pobres, 19.See in Text
  • [42] Monteón, Nitrate Era, 91. See in Text
  • [43] Espinoza, Historia de pobres, 18.See in Text
  • [44] Smith, Uneven Development, 148.See in Text
  • [45] Ibid., 149.See in Text
  • [46] Julio Ramos, Divergent Modernities: Cultural Politics in Nineteenth- Century Latin America, Trans. John D. Blanco (Durham: Duke UP, 2001), 191.See in Text

Works Cited

  • Beckman, Ericka .“The Creolization of Imperial Reason: Chilean State Racism in the War of the Pacific.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. 18.1 (2009): 73 90.
  • Benton-Short, Lisa and Short, John. Cities and Nature. London: Routledge, 2008.
  • Butala, Neel M. VanRooyen, Michael J. and Patel, Ronak Bhailal. “Improved health outcomes in urban slums through infrastructure upgrading.” Social Science & Medicine. 71 (2010): 935-940.
  • Calderón, Alfonso. Memorial del viejo Santiago. Santiago: Ed. Andrés Bello, 1984.
  • Cavia, Regino, Cueto, Gerardo Rubén and Suárez. Olga Virginia. “Changes in rodent communities according to landscape structure in an urban ecosystem.” Landscape and Urban Planning. 90 (2009): 11-19.
  • Edwards Bello, Joaquin. El roto. Santiago: Soc. Imp. y Lit. Universo, 1929.
  • Espinoza, Vicente. Para una historia de los pobres de la ciudad. Santiago: Ediciones Sur, 1988.
  • Hidalgo Dattwyler, Rodrigo. La vivienda social en Chile y la construcción del espacio urbano en el Santiago del siglo XX. Santiago: Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos, 2005.
  • Harvey, David. “Notes Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographic Development.” Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Development. New York: Verso, 2006.
  • Hornborg, Alf. “Footprints in the Cotton Fields: The Industrial Revolution as Time Space Appropriation and Environmental Load Displacement.” Rethinking Environmental History: World- System History and Global Environmental Change. Eds. Alf Hornborg, J.R. McNeill and Joan Martinez-Alier. Lanham: AltaMira Press, 2007.
  • Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 1. London: Penguin Classics, 1990.
  • Monteón, Michael. Chile in the Nitrate Era: The evolution of economic dependence, 1880- 1930. Madison: U Wisconsin P, 1982.
  • Nouzeilles, Gabriela. Ficciones somáticas: Naturalismo, nacionalismo y políticas médicas del cuerpo (Argentina 1880- 1910). Rosario: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2000.
  • Palacios, Nicolás. Raza chilena: Libro escrito por un chileno i para los chilenos. Valparaiso: Imprenta i Litografia Alemana de Gustavo Schäfer, 1904.
  • Rama, Angel. The Lettered City. John Charles Chasteen, trans. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.
  • Ramos, Julio. Divergent Modernities: Cultural Politics in Nineteenth- Century Latin America. Trans. John D. Blanco. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.
  • Salazar Vergara, Gabriel. Labradores, peones y proletarios: Formacion y crisis de la sociedad popular chilena del siglo XIX. Santiago: Ediciones Sur, 1985.
  • Smith, Neil. Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.
  • Sommer, Doris. Foundational Fictions: The national romances of Latin America. Berkeley: U of California P, 1991.
  • Subercaseaux, Bernardo. Historia de las ideas y la cultura en Chile. Vol. 4: Nacionalismo y cultura. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 2007.
  • Walter, Richard J. Politics and Urban Growth in Santiago, Chile 1891- 1941. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.
  • Wanyeki, Ian et. al. “Dwellings, crowding and tuberculosis in Montreal.” Social Science & Medicine. 63 (2006): 501-511.
  • “Yellow Fever Fact Sheet.” Center for Disease Control and Prevention, United States Department of Health and Human Services. Accessed December 4, 2010. http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid /yellowfever/YF_FactSheet.html.