Desert Memories: Alemania? Chuquicamata?

Somewhere in the Desierto de Atacama, Ariel Dorfman
"I am standing in the middle of what used to be Oficina Alemania, a nitrate town where thousands of workers toiled at hammering caliche and pulverizing it and boiling it until it released its treasure of white gold, I am standing where millions of tons were lifted onto carts pulled by mules and then onto trains and finally carried year after year over to the port of Taltal so the fields of Europe could bloom with sugar beet and grains and vegetables, I am standing in front of a small monolith with the statue of a human figure on top representing the pampino who harvested this desert as if it were a field of green and not a crust of hard granite rock, I am standing in the middle—or is it to the side?—of Oficina Alemania in the driest desert in the world and I turn and look around and I see … nothing. Not even the husk of an abandoned shack, not the hint of a silhouette of a ruin, not a photo op, nothing.

Just the horizon stretching into emptiness. And the garbage. Left by travelers who stop, gawk, unwrap their candy bar, take a bite, and hurry along on their way.

An ice-cream wrapper, a broken beer bottle, some crumpled toilet paper clinging to a piece of flint, that is what I see in Oficina Alemania. Even the name that persists, a misnomer.
The first hubs of human activity erected to exploit nitrate, when they made their appearance in 1810, the year that most of Latin America proclaimed its independence, were originally called oficinas de compra, because they acquired (compraban) the slag brought in by independent workers. But they were transitory structures that hastily moved on as soon as the surrounding fields were exhausted, whereas Oficina Alemania, like so many similar nitrate towns, was a bustling permanent community with all the amenities of a small city.

Supposedly permanent.

Now less than a ghost town. Where are the streets first traced in 1905, the residences with their tin roofs of calamina, the company store sprawling over a whole block, the grand theater where the residents used to line up to watch Greta Garbo and Tallulah Bankhead and Pedro Armendáriz while a woman tinkled away on a piano to accompany the silent celluloid?

I remember Tom Dillehay’s experiment in Monte Verde, his curanto picnic that had left no sign of its existence three years later. It has been over thirty years that this oficina—in fact, since it closed in 1970—has not had a soul sleeping or awakening here. What can possibly be left of the other nitrate production centers, hundreds of them, that ceased all activity many years before Alemania? How can not even the foundations of a building be left behind?"

[Image: Estadio Anaconda, Chuquicamata, Chile. Connie Mendoza, 2007]