This is the grave of the members of the Sindicato Industrial Cerverceria Unidas.

So, I have nothing useful to say here really. I just thought this was cool enough to have a post on. I was walking around Santiago’s main cemetery, which provided me a lot of good material for this series, some of which I’ve posted and some of which I have yet to post. I saw this. The Sindicato Industrial Cerverceria Unidas was the brewery union of Chile in what I guess was the mid 20th century. And all these guys decided to be buried together as union members. I don’t know who any of these people are. I know nothing about them. In fact, I know nothing about the union. You’d have to get into the archives for that. Maybe there is something in Chilean labor history. I know that field a little bit and I’ve used some of those books in the This Day in Labor History series in the past, but I’ve never seen anything written on the brewery workers. That’s not surprising; there’s fairly sizable unions in the United States that have little scholarly written on them, mostly craft unions who aren’t engaged in a lot of larger political struggles. I have no idea to what extent that’s true here.

But the idea of prioritizing your class identity so much that you want to be buried with your brothers, I just think that’s pretty cool. Today, such a thing is almost impossible to imagine in the United States. It might be impossible to imagine in Chile too. It probably is, in fact, but I couldn’t say that with any certainty. The decline in ideas of solidarity (today, “solidarity” almost always means “I want you to do something for me and it is exactly what I demand and also I owe you nothing in return” which is not exactly the real meaning of the word) and the growth of extreme individualism (we are all neoliberal individual brands now, on the left as much as anywhere else in society) means that the idea of being so into your union that you would want to be buried with these people feels like a really unusual situation. Hell, I wouldn’t want to be buried with the members of my union!

This is also a time to talk about this cemetery. Most of the graves I’ve covered in Chile are of famous people–presidents, generals, resistance leaders. These have fairly fancy graves. But that’s just the front part of the cemetery. Once you get past there, it goes on forever with the graves of the poor, or poorish at least, I’m not completely sure how much money you need to be buried there. Now, there’s a lot of reason to go back there for me, in that, and I will get to this eventually, this is where the dictatorship buried the bodies of those they murdered in the mid 70s. It’s also the site of a lot of the nation’s leftists who were killed and are now commemorated. I mention this because in this photo you can see some broken open slots for people. That could just be age. It also could be that people were reburied by their families later. The reason I say that is that there’s a famous leftist who had a slot in one of these things in a different part of the cemetery. I found the slot. All the people around him were the same. But he was not there. Someone else was. So that’s unusual.

The other thing I’d say about this cemetery is that there was a lot of work being done in some parts clearing new sites for graves. Except that they were obviously not new sites. They were old sites. Some of the old markers were even still up but the slots to put the coffins were open. I have no idea what Chilean law or customs look like for burials. But then we also have to remember the reasons cemeteries exist as a primary function–it’s not to commemorate and it’s not for nice walks. It’s a public health issue. You have to do something with the bodies. If I had to guess–and this is only a guess–after a time, long forgotten sections are dug up and the coffins and bones–no longer a public health hazard–are disposed of and the land reopened for new people and their families to mourn and this new public health hazard to be dealt with. Maybe in 80 years, it will change again and they will be dug up again. Like Hamlet with the skull.

So yeah, I thought it was worthy to have a quick post about all of this. I don’t often get very meta with the grave posts. I don’t in fact care one way or the other about cemeteries. I don’t want to spend time in them. I want in and out as fast as possible. They are a way for me to tell stories. You notice things, but I never went into cemeteries unless absolutely necessary before I started this series. And if this series was to end, I would never go into a cemetery unless absolutely necessary. But in this case, between the coolness of the unionists being buried together and thoughts on what was happening in this cemetery, I thought there was some room for discussion.

The members of the Sindicato Industrial Cerverceria Unidas are buried in Santiago General Cemetery, Santiago, Chile.

If you would like this series to visit some U.S. brewers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. David Gottlieb Yuengling, founder of one of the worst American breweries in existence and which also somehow has even worse beer AND worse politics than Coors and its owners, is in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Frederick Miller is in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

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