Abstract

It is describing and analyzes a process that strained the new way of living in the saltpeter pampa under the Guggenheim empire inaugurated in 1926. In particular, it is describing and analyzes the emergence of the free village of Las Bombas in the vicinity of the Pedro de Valdivia saltpeter office, between 1930 and 1931, an autonomous and short-lived settlement that strained the project of the new habitation projected by the Americans in the framework of the application of a new sovereignty and economic, political and social hegemony in a desert that was remodeled since the middle of the 1920s. The details of the conflict, the moral semantics that operated and the violent modes of resolution of a conflict, where the State officials turned into subalterns of the businessman, contributed in a violent chain to make the town disappear, considered as another space, are presented. © 2023 Authors. All rights reserved.