Together with a group of researchers, over the last five years we have been studying working-class housing developments in southern Chile: the coal basin in Lota, Schwager, and Pilpilco; the textile towns of Bellavista and Carlos Mahns in Tomé; and the working-class settlements in Valdivia and Magallanes.
These neighborhoods bear the heavy impact of deindustrialization in Chile following the implementation of neoliberal and economic liberalization policies by the Pinochet civil-military dictatorship, dismantling the mid-20th-century reformist and industrializing state project. In the Biobío region, this translated from the 1980s onward into the closure or decline of various industries and the abrupt loss of livelihoods for the communities that had grown around them.
