Latin American Labor History

Author(s):  
James P. Brennan

Latin America has a long urban tradition. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, it has been more urbanized than any other region on the globe except North America, northwestern Europe, and Australia/New Zealand. This has produced large urban working classes, large labor movements, and an equally large—and by now traditional—labor historiography, particularly in Latin America itself. This article discusses trends that have shifted the focus from organized labor to workers themselves and their sociocultural world inside and outside the factory. It covers working-class formation during the second half of the nineteenth century, the influence of anarchism and socialism on labor and urban life from the 1880s to the Great Depression, the relationship of organized labor and populist regimes from the latter event to the 1960s, and the emergence since then of what has been called “new unionism,” a more politically independent and grass-roots form of labor mobilization.

1991 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 71-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leslie Bethell

It is in my case a particular honour to address the Royal Historical Society. As president of the Society for four years in the 1960s, Professor R. A. Humphreys, the first holder of the Chair of Latin American History in the University of London which I have been privileged to hold since 1986 (and, incidentally, my teacher both as an undergraduate and as a postgraduate student), gave a series of distinguished presidential addresses on aspects of British and United States policy towards Latin America, and Anglo-American rivalries in Latin America, during the nineteenth century. But it seems that I am the first historian of Latin America to present a paper to the Society on a specifically Latin American theme.


PMLA ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 76 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Englekirk

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 83
Author(s):  
Yakov Shemyakin

The article substantiates the thesis that modern Native American cultures of Latin America reveal all the main features of "borderland" as a special state of the socio-cultural system (the dominant of diversity while preserving the unity sui generis, embodied in the very process of interaction of heterogeneous traditions, structuring linguistic reality in accordance with this dominant, the predominance of localism in the framework of the relationship between the universal and local dimensions of the life of Latin American societies, the key role of archaism in the system of interaction with the heritage of the 1st "axial time», first of all, with Christianity, and with the realities of the "second axial time" - the era of modernization. The author concludes that modern Indian cultures are isomorphic in their structure to the "borderline" Latin American civilization, considered as a "coalition of cultures" (K. Levi-Strauss), which differ significantly from each other, but are united at the deepest level by an extremely contradictory relationship of its participants.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 056-064
Author(s):  
María Belén Riveiro ◽  

This essay poses a question about the identity of Latin American literature in the 21st century. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Latin America Boom received recognition both locally and internationally, becoming the dominant means of defining Latin American literature up to the present. This essay explores new ways to understand this notion of Latin America in the literary scene. The case of the Argentine writer César Aira is relevant for analyzing alternative publishing circuits that connect various points of the region. These publishing houses foster a defiant way of establishing the value of literature.


Author(s):  
Nicola Miller

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Luis Roniger

The introduction addresses the idea of “Latin America” as a constructed concept of transnational and comparative significance. It introduces the reader to the dynamic character of regional perspectives, with questions that have grown increasingly complex given the contested nature of borders, increasing globalization, multiculturalism, and transnational migration. Although diversity defines Latin America, supporting comparative approaches within and beyond its fluid boundaries, it is equally important to note the shared geopolitical, sociological, and cultural trends that have shaped a transnational domain of connected histories, recurrent interactions, and continental visions. These transnational trends have emerged time and again, affecting the nation-states that crystallized in the nineteenth century. It is to the analysis of this Janus face of Latin American development that the book’s chapters turn.


Author(s):  
Stephen Dove

Latin America is a region where traditional dissenting institutions and denominations have a relatively small footprint, and yet the ideas of dissenting Protestantism play an important, and expanding, role on the religious landscape. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, Latin America has transitioned from a region with a de jure Catholic monopoly to one marked by religious pluralism and the disestablishment of religion. In the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries, this transition has been especially marked by the rapid growth of Pentecostalism. This chapter analyses the role of dissenting Protestantism during these two centuries of transition and demonstrates how ideas and missionaries from historical dissenting churches combined with local influences to create a unique version of dissent among Latin American Protestants and Pentecostals.


2009 ◽  
Vol 66 (01) ◽  
pp. 81-106
Author(s):  
Howard J. Wiarda

The field of Latin American Studies owes much to Professor Howard J. Wiarda, whose pioneering work on “corporatism” and political culture during the 1960s and 1970s helped establish a new conceptual paradigm for interpreting the persistence of corporately defined, institutional identities throughout Latin America, despite the purported triumph of the “Liberal Tradition.” A child of Dutch parents, his early travels throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America sparked a keen interest in the question of “third world development.” Entering graduate school in the early 1960s, Professor Wiarda gravitated to the newly emergent field of modernization studies at the University of Florida, where he received his masters and doctorate degrees in Latin American politics. It was a time of tremendous social ferment in Latin America and his early fieldwork took him to the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Brazil, among other places. In each instance, he found recognizable patterns that transcended geographic locations, patterns that seemed to directly challenge the predominant arguments set forth in the modernization literature at the time.


1986 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicos Mouzelis

Despite marked geographical and sociocultural differences, Greece and the two major southern-cone Latin American countries share a significant number of characteristics which distinguish them from most other peripheral and semiperipheral societies. Although they began industralisation late and failed to industrialise fully in the last century, all three countries managed to develop an important infrastructure (roads, railways) during the second half of the nineteenth century, and they achieved a notable degree of industrialisation in the years following each of the two world wars. Moreover, until the beginning of the nineteenth century, all three countries were subjugated parts of huge patrimonial empires (the Ottoman and the Iberian) and thus had never experienced the absolutist past of western and southern European societies. Finally, all three acquired their political independence in the early nineteenth century and very soon adopted parliamentary forms of political rule; and despite the constant malfunctioning of their representative institutions, relatively early urbanisation and the creation of a large urban middle class provided a framework within which bourgeois parliamentarism took strong roots and showed remarkable resilience. It persisted, albeit intermittently, from the second half of the nineteenth century until the rise of military bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes in the 1960s and 1970s and, as the Greek and Argentinian cases suggest, such regimes do not necessarily entail the irreversible decline of parliamentary democracy.


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