Neighborhood Associations and Citizenship: New Challenges for Labor History in Latin America

Studies on Labor Worlds in Latin America have undergone a clear change since the mid 80s, and the initial focus on leadership, unions, and political ideologies gave way to new topics and research objects. On the one hand, studies have scrutinized the particularities of work conditions and experiences, in an attempt to understand how the plant floor informed and shaped political fights and collective organization. On the other hand, some studies have investigated the specificity of “life outside the plants” – in neighbor relationships, soccer clubs, festive associations, election participation, etc. These studies have increasingly focused on the theme of popular associations. Thus, questions regarding the relationship between ethnic composition, gender, and class became important in studies about labor worlds. This paper aims at discussing the rising of popular associations (associativismo popular) in Brazil during the Second World War, especially in São Paulo city, which had the largest concentration of workers in the South Cone region in that time period. This was also the moment when the populist phenomenon emerged in Latin America and Brazil, especially. Many studies about the populist phenomenon, in the time span of 1945-1964, have stressed that its success is due to the leadership charisma and manipulation capacity, as well as their relationship with the workers without the mediation of traditional political institutions. Although these issues are important, they have neglected the decisive role played by a local contact network that was articulated and established in the working class neighborhoods, which was mostly developed before the emergence of the populist leadership. I believe that this network of local organizations (also called associativismo) has frequently shaped and informed the populist leadership being formed in Brazil Based on these facts, it is important to investigate possible relationships between the popular associations and themes such as ethnicity, gender, and class.