Ways of Thinking about Labor History in Latin America: Debates and Frontiers between Gender and Work

This presentation analyzes problems in the area of labor history when taking into account the gender dimension. In order to highlight the complexity of the historiography produced in the South American Cone, based on my research on the labor world in Argentina, I intend to establish the areas of dialog and confrontation with a larger academic production that generated a thinking structure that has dominated the area since the second half of the 19th century. I depart from my study (Historia de las trabajadoras en Argentina, 1860-1960, Edhasa, 2007) in which I outline the emergence of the issue of women in the labor world, types of work, family-work relations, the role played by the State, forms of protest, and the representations of women's work. The current debate about changes in the labor world and in the approaches to history-making imposes difficulties to the area of labor history. One of the main challenges is the opposing and exclusive stances between the research proposals in Latin America, but also in Europe, the United States, and elsewhere. All these changes lead to a broader reflection on the meaning of paid labor, the future development of labor in general, as well as its role in defining the nature of contemporary capitalism. The transformations that took place over the past twenty five years in the work market and their social consequences are the key points of these new concerns, which give rise to many studies, in several countries, on the relationship between these changes and the new profile being developed in our societies. Thus, the discussion I will propose aims at sharing ideas from some historiography perspectives within a problematic field marked by complementary focuses, taking into account the different theoretical concerns and academic and research traditions, rather than by unbridgeable barriers and oppositions.