Guano and Nitrates

doi:10.1017/9781108976367.003

Chapter 2 - Guano and Nitrates

from Part I - Commodities

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2023

Lisa Burner

Edited by

Fernando Degiovanni and

Javier Uriarte

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Fernando Degiovanni: Affiliation:
City University of New York
Javier Uriarte: Affiliation:
Stony Brook University, State University of New York

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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.

Keywords

guano nitrates fertilizer exports debt financial speculation fictitious prosperity Peruvian literature Chilean literature Luis Orrego Luco Benjamín Cisneros

Type: Chapter
Information: Latin American Literature in Transition 1870–1930 , pp. 30 - 43

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108976367.003 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2022

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