History of South America Archives

Pampa Unión, today, is a ghost town lost in the Atacama Desert, a mile high and halfway between the Chilean mining centers of Antofagasta and Calama. Founded over a century ago as a medical way station, it quickly became a resting place for nitrate miners on their days off, complete with all the supplies and entertainments that working men required. With two main streets and just one tree, the 2,000 stable inhabitants entertained a floating population of up to 15,000. The town was abandoned in 1954. All that is left today are the ruins of adobe walls with broken bits of signage and a cemetery.

Diego was the one with the artistic inspiration. They were humble ideas, at the beginning, but he took them seriously. He could move heaven and earth to make something out of whatever it was he had in his head.

So, he went up to the pampa with fifteen classmates and a couple of movie cameras, the best they could get their hands on. It was quite the production. For Pampa Unión. The idea was a short feature about a young man who goes there to meet his ghosts, the hidden history of his rootless family, buried in the toxic sands of an abandoned mining town.

Pampa Union — Pampa Unión (via Wikimedia Commons)

They even had a visit from Diego’s baby sister. She couldn’t stay, of course, but she went for the day. They dressed her like a doll from the nineteenth century and they filmed her with flowers in her hand wandering around among the tombstones. It was traumatic for her, because some of the graves had been disturbed. For art’s sake. The point was that suffering ran deep in Chilean veins. We were a nation of exiles, slaves, and survivors. Or something like that. It would be disconcerting to be from a ghost town, I guess.

The boys went up there to rough it, but they also went to have a good time. The desert is enchanting. It has a magic that wakes up all your neurons. When you are from the city, the purity of color, light, and shadow connects your soul with the depths of life and death, past and present. I drove up to see them, about the fifth day of their odyssey. They said, whatever else I brought, to please bring water. They were running out.

A mausoleum that exhibits years of decay — Pampa Unión (via Wikimedia Commons.)

There was a scene with a hot-air balloon. The protagonist needed to send a message, an urgent, desperate call for help. Like when someone lost at sea might send a message in a bottle, but airmail. As if everyone just had a hot-air balloon stashed in their billfold for emergencies. As if wind-born balloons ever made it to their intended addressees. The story didn’t have to be realistic, comrade, just visually pleasing.

Hot-air balloons were a thing, right about then, in the artistic community of Santiago. The dictatorship had been over for almost a decade, and even Plaza Ñuñoa had become a center for a new species of night life that posed as politically aware. Starving artists, the kind Neruda called, anarcocapitalistas, would show up with marionettes, walking on stilts or pointlessly lifting off hot-air balloons, in exchange for pocket change from passers-by, and demanding that a Ministry of Culture be created to fund the fog of marijuana smoke in which they floated. Diego got his hands on three hot-air balloons, bright red and white, and he took them up to Pampa Unión.

All three had to look the same, so that his team could film the scene three times from different angles and create the illusion of just one balloon. And they had to film at dawn, because that was the only time of day that the wind wouldn’t abduct their temperamental prop and send it tumbling sideways across the desert. There were about fifteen minutes of quiet just as the sun came up. After that, the wind began to swirl around like the noxious gas on the surface of Jupiter until the sun went down.

Two men stand between two walls. The walls have faded painted advertisements — Photo via the author.

It was the first time that all fifteen of them had ever gotten up that early. Some had hardly slept. To buffer the dopamine, they drank at night. Not a good idea, not in that climate. Alcohol dehydrates you. But it was tradition. Sebastián, nicknamed el Perro, would crawl out of his sleeping bag, muttering, If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times. I will never drink again. It was like the folksong from Carnaval in Bolivia, the one that says, they were nice boys, but they just couldn’t stop drinking.

The scene with the hot-air balloons was a success. They spent the rest of the day in the cemetery, where they got to know the whole town: names, nationalities, dates of birth and death. People died young. There were cemetery ghettos of Croatians, English, Mapuche, and even Chinese. I brought their dirty clothes home to wash. Imagine, fifteen twenty-year-olds, no showers, drinking at night and filming in the cemetery during the day. They reeked of sand, sweat, alcohol, and cadaver.

José and his brother, Francisco, went with me. They weren’t from Santiago. They were from Antofagasta. Well, they weren’t from Antofagasta, either, comrade. Their father and grandfather had grown up on the pampa. They were desert people from way back.

Walking around in the ruins, it was easy to figure out which was the street with the hardware stores, and which one had been for cantinas and bordellos. Most of the roofs had fallen in, but there were still signs painted on the walls of the once-thriving businesses. And there was junk on the ground. Kitchen middens of the future, an archeologist’s dream that we were disturbing. There were spoons and saucers, most of them bent or broken. There were wine bottles, shattered with the cork still in. There were tin plates, costume jewels, bits of clothing and other residue of a forgotten humanity from almost a century ago.

Two men stand between two walls — Photo via the author.

Among all the junk, we found some bent pieces of tin, one shaped into a star, another that looked like a ship, and one that was shaped like a child. The boys from Santiago, smart as they were, had no explanation. José picked one up, as if to examine it in the light, the very bright desert light, and he said, this is a toy. My grandfather used to make these. A loaded silence of amazement descended over the boys from Santiago. José had given himself away. He had revealed his roots and the endless desert sand into which they sank, publicly claiming the pampa as his own. For him, this was no short feature film. For him, la pampa was the real thing.

Though the original population in Pampa Unión had been inordinately skewed toward masculinity, there were females. Children were born. Sometimes, they survived the diarrhea and the diphtheria. They got old enough to need something to play with.

Supplies came up from down below. There was wine and aguardiente. There was beef, kept on the hoof, as there was no refrigeration. There were satin dresses for the prostitutes and Victrola Talking Machines to create a romantic ambiance for fantasy love affairs. But it never occurred to anyone to send up a doll, a stuffed bear, or a toy truck.

So, grandparents would take their tin shears—they had those—and try to make something nice to stimulate the imagination of the toddlers who had never known anything other than the infinite horizon, the blinding clarity of midday and the starlit dark of night. In la pampa, grandparents were often no older than about thirty-five. Anyone who lived to be forty got the hell out of there.

In Antofagasta, José’s grandfather kept making toys out of empty tin cans. A long time ago, few toys made it there, either. No toys, no fruit and no conjugated verbs. People with money took trips to Santiago if they wanted something nice. Poor children did without. Raising children was not the objective, there. You had to get the ore out of the ground. You had to get it down the mountain, onto ships, into trains and out of there. That was all. Playful little brats were slag, byproducts of some miner’s love affair on his day off.

Even so, grandfathers found tender spots for toddlers and got busy with their tin shears. Compared to X–boxes, the tin-can toys might have seemed like nothing at all. But, compared to nothing at all, comrade, well, that was another story. They were the first thing that delighted the eye of virgin innocence. For the semi-abandoned babies of the desert, tiny tin toys were shining treasures, an opportunity to imagine the garbage dump where they lived transformed into burgeoning beauty. They were a chance, maybe their only chance, to ever contemplate the world as it might have once been, as it could someday become. Those toys did tend to have sharp edges and pointy places. They were dangerous toys that prepared children for life in the Norte Grande, a life with lots of rough edges.

The guys from Santiago grew quiet. José’s revelation gave them pause. They realized the deficiencies of their own elitist upbringing. José became silent, too. He understood, in that moment, the cultural and geographical abyss that separated him from the sons of wealth, privilege, and power. He had played with those toys. Francisco had, too.

More From Nathan Stone:

Three-year-olds on the world stage

Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

Miss O’Keeffe

For further reading, see Hernán Rivera Letelier’s novel about Pampa Unión, Fatamorgana de amor con banda de música. (Santiago: Planeta, 1998)

By Haley Schroer

Nineteen-year-old Antonio de Ulloa set sail for the Americas in the spring of 1735. Ulloa was traveling as one of two assistants to a contingency of French scientists appointed to South America. The observations Ulloa and his counterpart, Jorge Juan, made on the excursion culminated in Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional. The Relación Histórica is a five-volume work published in 1748 that provides in-depth cultural descriptions of the Spanish colonies’ major cities. As a traveler’s account, Relación Histórica made the colonies accessible for the considerable literate Spanish population who knew little of the empire’s overseas territories. For contemporary readers, it proves fundamental to understanding the socio-racial caste hierarchy that defined the colonies.

Antonio de Ulloa y de la Torre-Giral became a general of the navy and a colonial administrator. He was later the first Spanish governor of Louisiana (via Wikimedia Commons).

By the eighteenth century, Spanish colonial society comprised a diverse socio-racial landscape. Intermarriage and sexual unions among Indigenous, African, and Spanish populations produced a society that could not easily be categorized according to conventional European social and economic privileges. Establishing a sociedad de castas (caste society), elite Spaniards recognized upwards of twenty racial castes with behavioral qualities unique to each group. Implementing the hierarchy relied primarily on public forms of social control, such as the prohibition of certain castes from administrative and commercial positions and laws that excluded certain fashions from non-Spanish castes. Colonial elites, however, faced challenges in enforcing strict racial stratification, and, as Ann Twinam has shown, loopholes broke down the efficacy of the racial hierarchy. Traveler’s accounts of the Spanish colonies offer key outside perspectives on these inconsistencies that allow us to evaluate how deeply socio-racial limitations permeated through colonial society.

Antonio de Ulloa’s fifth chapter, “Understanding the People of Quito; the Castes Found; Their Customs, and Riches” addresses the realities of implementing the caste system in a complex urban environment. Immediately, Ulloa asserts a high level of stratification found within society, noting that noble families “have kept themselves in their luster, connecting themselves with each other and not mixing with the people of low birth.” Ulloa further defines “low birth,” describing “four classes: that are Spanish, or whites; mestizos; Indians, or Naturals; and Blacks with their descendants” (363). While Ulloa’s racial classification affirms the presence of racial separation, the description of only four racial castes points to larger questions of the racial demography found in Peru. Ulloa presents Africans as a distinct group in society, but they are “not as abundant, as in other places in the Indies,” suggesting that Quito did not rely as heavily on African slave labor as perhaps other colonial cities.

A casta painting from ca. 1770. It depicts a Spanish father and an indigenous mother with their mestizo baby (via Wikimedia Commons).

Ulloa deepens his discussion of the socio-racial dynamic found in Quito by describing stereotypical behavior associated with the most prominent racial groups. Ironically, he condemns Spaniards as “the most unhappy, poor, and miserable; because the men do not apply themselves to any business” due to their superior racial quality (365). He praises mestizos who “work with perfection,” but ultimately fall prey to “the defect of Laziness and sloth, of which dominates them strongly” (365). These observations of work ethic mimic popular conceptions of how race influenced personality and behavior. Finally, Ulloa evaluates the visual appearance of Quito’s inhabitants, claiming, “people dress ostentatiously; and fabrics of gold, silver, fine scarves, and other types of silk and wool are not uncommon” (366).

800px-Paisaje_periferico_de_Lima_en_1744_-_AHG

An illustration from Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional of the peripheral countryside of Peru (via Wikimedia Commons).

Ulloa’s account also addresses larger questions concerning the conceptualization of race in both colonial and peninsular Spanish society. His depiction relies heavily on exterior evaluations of race, such as status, behavior, and appearance, suggesting that society largely defined racial classification through overt visual markers. Ulloa’s description demonstrates that implementation of the racial caste system had some influence in Quito. For example, according to Ulloa, mestizos frequently worked in artisanal occupations such as “painters, sculptors, silversmiths, and others,” demonstrating a sense of racial occupational organization (365). He reinforces ideas being produced within the Spanish colonies by proving that racial stratification was clearly noticeable to foreigners.

Despite confirming widespread stratification in daily society, Ulloa’s account proves even more valuable for the inconsistencies that it records. He writes that, “many mestizos appear to be of the same color as legitimate Spaniards, being white, and blonde; and they are considered as such, even though in reality they are not.” (353) In this one brief sentence, Ulloa recognizes a fundamental weakness in the socio-racial hierarchy. Despite the creation of at least twenty racial castes in society, ambiguous physical markers allowed some social mobility along the racial spectrum. Mestizos with European complexions could sometimes assimilate into the Spanish demographic, which undermined the rigidity of the caste system.

Bust of Antonio de Ulloa in modern day Quito, Ecuador (via Wikimedia Commons).

Traveler accounts such as Ulloa’s are useful to historians in determining how colonial society presented itself to foreigners, but authors of such accounts carried preconceived notions of the Spanish colonies. Ulloa’s account inherently reflects peninsular prejudices and preconceptions of the colonies. Historians must determine to what extent Ulloa imposed peninsular ideologies upon the colonial social structure. As an outsider, for example, since Ulloa most likely only gained access to public society, he can demonstrate the racial stratification seen in public but cannot speak to the intimate realities that occurred in private.

Antonio de Ulloa’s analysis of Quito’s residents exists within a broader attempt to categorize and identify the unique racial make-up of the Spanish colonies. Colonial society continuously tried to grapple with its own racial ambiguity, often relying on public campaigns like casta paintings that depicted mixed race families and the racial variety of the caste society and whitening decrees that attempted to regulated social structures. However, travelers’ accounts like that of Ulloa offer an outsider’s perspective to the multi-colored reality. Answering key historical questions about race in Peruvian society while raising further inquiries into the realistic validity of the caste system, Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional places modern readers in the thick of colonial Quito society.

Sources for this article and for further reading:

Magli M. Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.

Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional. Madrid: 1748. The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, University of Texas Libraries.

Irving A. Leonard, Introduction to A Voyage to South America, by Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa. Translated and Abridged by John Adams. Tempe: Arizona State University, 1975.

Ann Twinam, Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.

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Antonio de Ulloa’s Relación Histórica del Viage a la America Meridional

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