Chilean society at the turn of the twentieth century had a phrase for what was happening in its mining regions and cities: la cuestion social, the "social question" -- a polite euphemism for worsening conditions that were anything but polite. The nitrate miners of the Norte Grande worked in the driest desert on Earth, extracting sodium nitrate under brutal conditions for wages often paid in fichas, tokens redeemable only at company stores that charged inflated prices. The workers came from across the region -- about 40,000 were active in the nitrate industry in the provinces of Tarapaca and Antofagasta by 1907, roughly 13,000 of them Bolivian and Peruvian. Unrest had been building for years: a dockworkers' strike in Valparaiso in 1903, meat riots in Santiago in 1905. The syndicalist movement in Chile had its roots among these very miners, people whose labor powered the national economy while their families lived in conditions that economy refused to address.

The strike began at the nitrate works and grew as it moved toward the coast. By the time the miners reached Iquique in mid-December, several thousand people filled the plaza and the schoolyard of the Domingo Santa Maria School. They had brought their families because there was no one to leave them with -- the company towns offered no alternative. The strikers' representatives met with Intendant Carlos Eastman and presented their grievances. The interior ministry, under Rafael Sotomayor Gaete, had no interest in negotiation. Orders came to relocate the strikers to the horse racing track, where they would board trains back to the mines. The workers refused, understanding that returning without concessions meant returning to nothing. On December 20, as their representatives met with the intendant, a state of siege was declared, suspending constitutional rights. That same day, soldiers opened fire on a group of workers and families attempting to leave near the railroad tracks, killing six.

General Roberto Silva Renard commanded the troops surrounding the school. Following the interior ministry's plan to crush the strike by force if necessary, he informed the strikers' leaders that they had one hour to disperse. The hour passed. The leaders and the crowd stood firm. Silva Renard gave the order to fire. The first volley cut down the negotiators standing at the front. What followed was a sustained barrage of rifle and machine gun fire directed into a crowd of men, women, and children packed into a schoolyard. The exact number killed has never been determined -- estimates exceed 2,000 people. The massacre did not merely break the strike. The ensuing reign of terror crushed the Chilean workers' movement for more than a decade. Organizers were hunted, records destroyed, and knowledge of what happened at the school was systematically suppressed by successive governments.

For most of the twentieth century, the Santa Maria School massacre existed in official silence. The government did not commemorate it, textbooks did not teach it, and the dead had no memorial. But memory proved harder to kill than the people who carried it. Artists and musicians kept the story alive. In 1970, composer Luis Advis premiered his Cantata de Santa Maria de Iquique, performed by the group Quilapayun -- a work that became one of the most important pieces in Chilean musical history. Novelist Hernan Rivera Letelier published Santa Maria de las flores negras in 2002. Poet Francisco Pezoa had written Canto a la Pampa as early as 1915. These works carried the memory through decades when speaking of the massacre openly remained dangerous. It was not until 2007, a full century after the killings, that President Michelle Bachelet declared a national day of mourning for December 21 and the government conducted a public commemoration, including the reinterment of victims' remains.

The site of the Domingo Santa Maria School still stands in Iquique. It is a place where ordinary people -- miners who wanted fair pay, mothers who had no choice but to bring their children, Bolivian and Peruvian workers far from home -- were killed for asking their government to acknowledge their humanity. The massacre belongs to a pattern in Chilean history, alongside the Marusia massacre and the Forrahue massacre, of state violence against working people whose labor built the nation's wealth. That the memory survived decades of suppression speaks to the depth of what was lost that December morning, and to the determination of those who refused to let it be forgotten.