Fighting Unemployment in Twentieth-Century Chile by Ángela Vergara

Author:Ángela Vergara [Vergara, Ángela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Latin America, South America
ISBN: 9780822988311
Google: fHgvEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: 2021-04-13T03:09:15+00:00

FINDING SOCIAL AID IN 1940S CHILE

In December 1941, a local judge in the town of Ovalle, province of Coquimbo, found José de la Cruz Miranda guilty of the crime of vagrancy and sentenced him to 180 days in prison. De la Cruz, also known as “gallina muerta” (dead chicken), was 35 years old and illiterate, had no job or permanent address, and had been living in the streets of Ovalle for the past two years. The police officers who arrested him testified that he was a vagrant. In light of new evidence, the Court of Appeals of La Serena reopened the case in March 1942. De la Cruz, the judge argued, was “insane” (enajenado mental) and physically disabled. Because the culprit was unfit to work, he was not a vagrant or a criminal, but a person in need of assistance. The judge concluded that it “is society that should worry about providing social assistance to this man. Legally, he is not a vagrant because he lacks work skills, and he is forced to ask private individuals for help and sleeps outdoors because he does not have a place.”59 The Court of Appeals absolved De la Cruz, reaffirming the legal distinction between vagrants and people who required social assistance.

The criminal case against José de la Cruz Miranda illustrates Chileans’ historical fears about vagrancy, as well as how society decided who deserved social aid. The need to differentiate between the deserving and undeserving poor, workers and vagrants, and between those fit and unfit for work determined the distribution of aid to people out of work in the country. During the Great Depression, previous chapters demonstrated, the Chilean state had established basic services to confront unemployment, distribute aid, regulate the labor market, and assist people to find work. Social workers had organized and professionalized relief and, at the Casa de Socorro in Santiago, tested modern forms of social intervention and assistance. Fearing that the unemployed would become idle and turn into vagrants, the state sent men to public work sites and limited relief to women and children. By 1933, the Unemployment Board (Comisión General de Cesantía) offered food, lodging, and clothing to unemployed families; paid transportation costs for migrant workers; and coordinated the placement of the unemployed in public construction sites, gold panning sites, and the private sector.60

Between 1933 and 1940, the Unemployment Board attended the immediate needs of the unemployed as well as the indigent. Along with helping workers to find employment, the Board assisted “children in need, abandoned women, the elderly, and men unfit for work.”61 In 1936, for example, the Board reported the following activities: four food rationing centers in Santiago and eight in the provinces of Tarapacá and Antofagasta; temporary housing and medical attention for about 300 families in collective building (colectivos) in Santiago; housing subsidies for families in need in Antofagasta; distribution of clothes; cash subsidies for white-collar employees; and a full-service public shelter in Santiago. The Board had also opened two popular restaurants in Santiago, offering inexpensive and nutritious daily meals to about 1,000 workers.

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