Abstract

The illustrated weeklies belonging to the magazine genre, constituted an important display case for the social imaginaries promoted by the Latin American elites during the first decades of the 20th century. In the Chilean case, important magazines belonging to this popular print contributed to the dissemination of a virtuous image of the modernization process among its reading public, preferably located in the main cities of the country. This article aims to account for this staging, specifically analyzing a series of graphic reports referring to the nitrate cycle during the first three decades of the 20th century, all of them appeared in the magazines Sucesos and Zig-Zag, pioneering publications of this genre In our country. In it, it is stated that through these representations, both magazines disseminated an aseptic image of the nitrate exploitation process, which placed its emphasis on making visible the industrializing feat in the desert, highlighting the technical advances and the productive capacity of nitrate offices and their workers, making invisible, on the other hand, the social problems generated by the development of this economic activity, as well as the wealth of forms of political sociability and daily life that emerged in the pampas.