Chile faces heavy doses of state violence that reconstruct collective memory. In Lessie Jo Frazier’s Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence, and the Nation-State in Chile, 1890 to the Present, the author traces and explains the evolving history of state violence and the melancholic memory morphology associated with state brutality in the process of Chilean nation-state formation. Salt in the Sand does not only refer to the extraction of mineral wealth and the sodium-nitrate mining in the Chilean Tarapaca desert, it also represents the blood, tears and the sweat of human beings that make their history significant.