Labor Organization and Protest: Challenges for Labor History in Latin America

From time to time, doubts concerning the relevance of North-Atlantic models, especially those produced by the British and American labor history, for the study of labor history in Latin America are expressed. From Charles Berquist proclaiming the need to rediscover the theory of dependence to more recent interest in Subaltern Studies by Latinmericanist scholars, the main argument has been that North Atlantic models are inadequate to study Latin American realities, so new and sometimes old theories must be sought. While new general theories might prove useful, none the less when focusing on the forms assumed by labor organization and protest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in countries such as Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, these cases still remain very much like the European examples that inspired them. More than general theory, what Latin-American Labor History seems to lack are efforts at close empirical comparison between different national and regional cases, capable of helping to better understand similarities, differences and transnational phenomena.