Beyond the Vanguard: Everyday Revolutionaries in Allende's Chile (University of California Press, May 2018) by Marian Schlotterbeck, assistant professor of history, explores popular politics in Chile in the decade before Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and provides an in-depth account of how working-class people transformed the existing social order by embracing radical politics. This book is about radical politics in the decade before the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. For 1,000 days in the early 1970s, Chileans experienced revolution not as a dream but as daily life. Alongside Salvador Allende’s institutional project for a democratic transition to socialism, a multiplicity of understandings of revolutionary change emerged. Beyond the Vanguard provides the untold history of how everyday people worked to transform the existing social order. It examines the lost opportunities to create a democratic revolution and the ways that the legacy of this moment continues to resonate in Chile and beyond.
 

Marian Schlotterbeck is an historian of modern Latin America, specializing in 20th-century Chile. Her next book-length research project, Making Neoliberal Citizens: Childhood in Pinochet’s Chile (1973-1990), examines the Chilean military dictatorship through the lens of childhood. Far from being minor players, the Chilean military regime saw children as important constituents of its larger project to depoliticize society. I argue that military rule transformed Chilean children’s everyday lives as the regime sought to remake families, schools, and workplaces. Between 1979-1981, General Augusto Pinochet implemented his market-driven vision to transform Chile into a laboratory of neoliberalism. The dictatorship’s privatization and decentralization of most social services, including education, healthcare, and housing, had real consequences for children. Neoliberal austerity measures marked a significant departure from the twentieth-century welfare state’s gendered social policies, which had favored marriage and the formation of male-headed nuclear households.

View the book at the University of California Press