UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines Chilean relations with Japan from their founding in the 1890s to their wartime rupture in the early 1940s. During this period, numerous Chilean officials, diplomats, businessmen, and intellectuals attempted to reorient Chile’s national sodium nitrate fertilizer industry towards Japan. These officials believed that if they could open massive, untapped fertilizer markets in Japan and contract Japanese workers to mitigate Chile’s labor shortage, they could reverse the fortunes of a formerly booming but currently fading industry and fund their state. Simultaneously, these Pacific-minded actors argued that Japan also offered a compatible blueprint for development among nations on the geopolitical periphery through which Chileans could model their nationhood and achieve autonomy from European and US interventionism. Yet, as they pursued this Pacific pivot for commerce and development, Chileans contended with racial anxieties about Asia that proliferated throughout the Americas in this period. They fiercely debated the prospect of an influx of Japanese immigrant laborers for the nitrate industry and worried about protecting Chile’s self-declared exceptional white homogeneity.

I build several key arguments and interpretations throughout this dissertation. First, I divert from the scholarly trend of viewing Latin American nation-building through the shadow of North Atlantic imperialism by illustrating how Chileans sought to integrate with Japan in the Pacific as they pursued development and as a method for contesting North Atlantic power. Second, I argue that Chilean visions for commerce, labor, and sovereignty through relations with Japan mapped onto and intensified local and national contests over what historians describe as Chile’s social question—the bitter contest to set the terms for Chilean nationhood waged between workers, elites, and the state. I thus introduce racial and international concerns into scholarly conversations on Chile that often focus exclusively on class or gender within predominantly national frameworks. And finally, this dissertation offers a new way of approaching the transition between Latin America’s nineteenth-century era defined by export-driven development models to the rise of nationalist movements in the 1920s and 1930s. Seen through Chile’s Pacific project to turn Japan into a, if not the, principal international relationship for Chile, this transition was neither smooth nor sudden (that is, emerging only with the Great Depression) and it was not a foregone conclusion that it would be the US who would outlast Britain and Japan to capture unchallenged dominance in Latin America and the Pacific.