34 A Troubled Belle Epoque
Maule) registered 33,323 inhabitants in 1895 and only 36,079 in 1920. Chillán,
the capital of the province of Ñuble, saw its population decline from 33,386
in 1895 to 30,881 in 1920.
≤Ω
Laborers arriving in mining districts and cities faced harsh working and
living conditions—the underpinnings of the social question. Housing for
the working class, for example, varied from unhealthy to truly squalid.
Workers crowded into one- and two-story conventillos (tenements) in the
capital and Valparaíso. Some conventillos housed dozens of families at one
time. It is estimated that the adobe or brick walls of some 2,000 conventillos in
1911 were home to 130,000 santiaguinos, a figure that translates to 40 percent
of the city’s total population. The average single-family room measured
19.64 square meters and averaged four residents in 1910.
≥≠
It was not uncom-
mon for conventillo beds to be used around the clock, as families split their
labor between night and day shifts. In Antofagasta, moreover, the housing
situation was called ‘‘the most painful insult to human sentiment’’ and ‘‘in-
adequate for human beings’’ by one working-class organization.
≥∞
Cramped
living conditions facilitated the rapid spread of disease, leading to infant
mortality rates that ranked among the world’s highest during the first de-
cades of the twentieth century.
Official figures of fatal disease are staggering. Chile’s infant mortality rate
in 1909—31.5 percent dead before reaching one year of age—equaled that of
Russia, eclipsed Italy’s, Argentina’s, or France’s by 50 percent, doubled the
rates of Uruguay and Great Britain, and was 200 percent higher than the
mortality rate in New Zealand. Infant mortality rates in the small provin-
cial cities of Curicó and San Felipe were higher than that of Bombay, while
rates in Valparaíso, Talcahuano, and La Serena surpassed Calcutta’s. Of the
626,623 deaths nationwide between 1905 and 1910, 303,417 were children who
failed to reach the age of five.
≥≤
Health officials were especially concerned
with a tuberculosis epidemic that gripped the country’s major urban cen-
ters. Spread through the air mostly indoors, the respiratory ailment claimed
the lives of thousands of children and adults. Between 1915 and 1920 alone,
respiratory diseases caused an average of 33,000 deaths per year. In 1921, a
study of 1,064 children found that 296 suffered from tuberculosis or other
respiratory diseases. Only 52 were considered ‘‘healthy.’’ A smallpox epidemic
in Santiago, moreover, killed 1,000 residents per month in 1921.
≥≥
Of course,
upper-class Chileans were susceptible to disease, but working-class neigh-
borhoods, many of which had sewer water draining down their streets, were
zones of extreme risk. Compounding the situation were preventable mal-