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1 results

  • Chapter 2 - Guano and Nitrates

  • from Part I - Commodities
  • Edited by Fernando Degiovanni, City University of New York, Javier Uriarte, Stony Brook University, State University of New York
  • Book:
    Latin American Literature in Transition 1870–1930
    Published online:
    14 January 2023
    Print publication:
    08 December 2022, pp 30-43

  • Summary

    Exports of the agricultural fertilizers guano and nitrates spurred bursts of economic euphoria and decline on South America’s Pacific coast, first in Peru and then in Chile. This chapter analyzes fiction and economic essays from Peru’s guano era (1840s–1870s) and Chile’s nitrate era (1880s–1920s). In both contexts, intellectuals voiced concerns that the financial abundance brought by fertilizer exports would reveal itself to be “fictitious prosperity,” both ecologically and economically unsustainable. These anxieties, moreover, infuse novels that dramatize urban elite society in times of fertilizer-driven abundance: Benjamín Cisneros’s Julia (Peru, 1861) and Luis Orrego Luco’s Casa grande (Chile, 1908). By tracing shared tropes across literary genre as well as temporal and national context, the chapter illustrates how elites expressed concerns about economic booms marked by debt, financial speculation, and the export of a single, exhaustible natural resource.