Labor Movements in Latin America

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico M. Rossi
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Relational Approach ◽  
Informal Workers ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Labor

The history of Latin America cannot be understood without analyzing the role played by labor movements in organizing formal and informal workers across urban and rural contexts.This chapter analyzes the history of labor movements in Latin America from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. After debating the distinction between “working class” and “popular sectors,” the chapter proposes that labor movements encompass more than trade unions. The history of labor movements is analyzed through the dynamics of globalization, incorporation waves, revolutions, authoritarian breakdowns, and democratization. Taking a relational approach, these macro-dynamics are studied in connection with the main revolutionary and reformist strategic disputes of the Latin American labor movements.

FARC, Shining Path, and Guerillas in Latin America

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Becker
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Local Population ◽  
Guerrilla Warfare ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Grassroots Organizing ◽  
Guerrilla Movements ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S

Armed insurrections are one of three methods that the left in Latin America has traditionally used to gain power (the other two are competing in elections, or mass uprisings often organized by labor movements as general strikes). After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, guerrilla warfare became the preferred path to power given that electoral processes were highly corrupt and the general strikes too often led to massacres rather than a fundamental transformation of society. Based on the Cuban model, revolutionaries in other Latin American countries attempted to establish similar small guerrilla forces with mobile fighters who lived off the land with the support of a local population. The 1960s insurgencies came in two waves. Influenced by Che Guevara’s foco model, initial insurgencies were based in the countryside. After the defeat of Guevara’s guerrilla army in Bolivia in 1967, the focus shifted to urban guerrilla warfare. In the 1970s and 1980s, a new phase of guerrilla movements emerged in Peru and in Central America. While guerrilla-style warfare can provide a powerful response to a much larger and established military force, armed insurrections are rarely successful. Multiple factors including a failure to appreciate a longer history of grassroots organizing and the weakness of the incumbent government help explain those defeats and highlight just how exceptional an event successful guerrilla uprisings are.

Labor and the New Millennium: Class, Vision, and Change. The Twenty-second North American Labor History Conference

2001 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 212-215
Author(s):  
William J. Mello
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Labor Movement ◽  
North American ◽  
Labor History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
State University ◽  
Wayne State University ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Labor

Wayne State University, in Detroit, Michigan, once again hosted the twenty- second North American Labor History Conference (NALHC). Held between October 19–21, 2000, the conference was an incursion into cutting-edge scholarly research, examining the history of working-class and labor movements in the United States, Europe, Canada, and Mexico, as well as Central and Latin America. NALHC explored the deep-rooted relations among work and race, gender, ethnicity, citizenship, and the economy. A unique and particularly interesting aspect of the conference was that many of the panels were composed of both activists and academics of the labor movement, which made the examination of past and present issues of working-class life highly informative.

Language as a Key to Latin American Historiography

1955 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 517-539
Author(s):  
Richard M. Morse
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
New World ◽  
Old World ◽  
History Of

Latin americanists have in recent years become increasingly concerned with constructing the basis for a unified history of Latin America. Frequently this enterprise leads them to contemplate the even larger design of a history of the Americas. While the New World may still be, in Hegel’s words, “a land of desire for all those who are weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe,” it is now recognized as having an independent heritage; its history is no longer experienced as “only an echo of the Old World.”

Notes on Emerson in Latin America

PMLA ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Englekirk
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Extended Treatment ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Literary Relations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Good Coverage

A number of chapters—some definitive, others suggestive—have already appeared to afford us a clearer picture of the reception of United States writers and writings in Latin America. Studies on Franklin, Poe, Longfellow, and Whitman provide reasonably good coverage on major representative figures of our earlier literary years. There are other nineteenth-century writers, however, who deserve more extended treatment than that given in the summary and bibliographical studies available to date. A growing body of data may soon make possible the addition of several significant chapters with which to round out this period in the history of inter-American literary relations. Bryant and Dickinson will be the only poets to call for any specific attention. Fiction writers will prove more numerous. Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Hearn, Hart, Melville, and Twain will figure in varying degrees of prominence. Of these, some like Irving and Cooper early captured the Latin American imagination; others like Hawthorne, and particularly Melville, were to remain virtually unknown until our day. Paine and Prescott and Mann will represent yet other facets of American letters and thought.

Informality, Class Structure, and Class Identity in Contemporary Argentina

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rodolfo Elbert
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Significant Proportion ◽  
Preliminary Evidence ◽  
Informal Workers ◽  
Self Employment ◽  
America Latina ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Los Grupos

The dynamics of peripheral capitalism in Latin America includes the employment or self-employment of a significant proportion of the working class under informal arrangements. The neoliberal transformations of the 1990s deepened this feature of Latin American labor markets, and it was not reversed during the period of economic growth that followed the collapse of neoliberalism. In this context, sociological debates have focused on the relationship between the formal and the informal fractions of the working class. Examination of the biographical and family linkages between formal and informal workers in Argentina and the effect of these connections on the patterns of class self-identification of individuals shows that lived experience across the informality boundary makes formal workers similar to informal workers in terms of class self-identification. This research provides preliminary evidence that the two kinds of workers belong to the same social class because of the fluidity of the boundary that separates them. Instead of a class cleavage, this boundary is better defined as the separation between fractions of the working class. La dinámica del capitalismo periférico en América Latina implica la informalidad laboral (sea entre trabajadores contratados o autónomos) de una sustancial parte de la clase obrera. Las transformaciones neoliberales de los años noventa profundizaron esta característica de los mercados de trabajo latinoamericanos, y el problema no se revirtió durante el período de crecimiento económico que siguió al colapso del neoliberalismo. En este contexto, los debates sociológicos se han centrado en la relación entre los grupos formales e informales de la clase obrera. Un análisis de los vínculos biográficos y familiares entre los trabajadores formales e informales en Argentina y el efecto de dichas conexiones en los patrones individuales de autoidentificación de clase muestra que la experiencia vivida en los límites de la informalidad hace que los trabajadores formales se consideren similares a los informales en términos de identificación de clase. Esta investigación brinda evidencia preliminar de que los dos tipos de trabajadores pertenecen a la misma clase social.

scholarly journals Pueblos originários y educación: De la colonialidad a las experiências decoloniales en Brasil y Chile

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 163
Author(s):  
Juan Guillermo Mansilla ◽  
José Rubens Lima Jardilino
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Indigenous Education ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Return Of Results ◽  
Documentary Analysis ◽  
Abstract Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
Written Sources

This article on the education of indigenous peoples in Latin America is a synthesis of an approximation of studies on the history of Education of indigenous peoples (schooling), taking Brazil and Chile as a case study. It represents an effort of reflection of two researchers of the History of Latin American Education Society (SHELA), who have been studying Indigenous Education or Indigenous School Education in Chile and Brazil, from the theoretical perspective of “coloniality and decoloniality” of indigenous peoples in Latin America. The research is based on a comprehensive-interpretative paradigm, whose method is linked to the type of qualitative historiographic descriptive research considering primary and secondary written sources, complemented with visual data (photographs). The documentary analysis was made from material based on primary written sources, secondary and unobtrusive personal documents. The study included three distinct phases in the process of producing results: 1) a critical review of the data of our previous research, in addition to the bibliographic review of research results regarding the presence of the school in other indigenous cultures of the Americas; 2) capturing and processing of new data; and 3) validation and return of results with the research participants. Content analysis was carried out in order to reveal nuclei of central abstract knowledge, endowed with meaning and significance from the perspective of the producers of the discourse, as well as knowledge expressed concretely in the texts, including their latent contents.

Infrastructure

2020 ◽  
pp. 181-197
Author(s):  
Nicola Miller
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Common Belief ◽  
Infrastructure Projects ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Latin American Countries

This chapter recounts the Latin American countries that welcomed foreign innovation and expertise for technically demanding infrastructure projects. It mentions how the American continent's first railways were built by Spanish American engineers under contract to the respective states, contrary to the common belief that British or US American companies always led the way. It also focuses on the visibility and intensity of public concern about the relationship between science and sovereignty in late nineteenth-century Latin America. The chapter reviews the overlooked history of resistance in Latin American countries on handing over infrastructure projects to private companies, especially if they were foreign owned. It disputes conceptions of the role of the state and provides further evidence for the argument that free-market liberals did not have their own way in nineteenth-century Latin America.

State Musical Populisms

2020 ◽  
pp. 98-138
Author(s):  
Pablo Palomino
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Music Education ◽  
Latin American ◽  
State Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Comparative History ◽  
Cultural Activism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Masses

This chapter shows the emergence of a regional sense of Latin America as part of the musical pedagogy of the nationalist states at the peak of the state-building efforts to organize, through a variety of instruments of cultural activism, what at the time were called “the masses.” It analyzes particularly the cases of Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina—the three largest countries of the time in population and economic development—from the 1910s through the 1950s. It proposes a comparative history of Latin American musical populisms, focusing in particular on policies of music education, broadcasting, censorship, and experiences of state-sponsored collective singing.

Presidential Term Limits in Latin America: c.1820–1985

2019 ◽  
pp. 103-122
Author(s):  
Leiv Marsteintredet
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Term Limits ◽  
Third Wave ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
Democratic Rule

Latin America holds a 200-year-long history of presidential constitutions. The region’s constitutional and democratic experimentation throughout history makes it an interesting laboratory to study the origins, development, and effects of presidential term limits. Based primarily on data from constitutions, this chapter provides an overview of presidential term limits in Latin America from independence until 1985. The chapter shows how term limits have varied across countries and time, and that the implementation of strict term limits often came as a reaction to prior dictatorial rules. Whereas both proponents and critics of consecutive reelection invoked arguments of democracy in their favour, the Latin American experience up until the Third Wave of Democracy shows that stable, republican, and democratic rule has only been possible under a ban on immediate presidential re-election.

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