Free Time Labor Cultures in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay in the First Half of the Twentieth Century: Methodological Challenges and Historiographical Debates

This presentation will explore changes and continuity in different popular cultural expressions of urban workers in their free time in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay in the first half of the 20th century. Thus, the evolution of alternative cultural practices that promoted different organizations and socialist, anarchist, and communist groups amid the working class will be addressed. Reconstructing the peculiar world of the working people in its heterogeneous complexity (class, gender, ethnicity, cultural traditions) by focusing on their free time and everyday life brings challenges regarding location and use of sources “from below”, as well as application of suitable procedures (oral history, image and text-discourse analysis). The press (labor and commercial), magazines, pictures and recorded images, oral sources, archive documents (from social and neighborhood associations, and national and private institutions) constitute the basis to analyze these themes. A historiographical record of the main representatives and investigations about the theme will help to reveal the specific state of the art and to identify the issues and debates in the studied region, thus allowing their comparison and integration to the analyses carried out in other international academic environments. Popular culture and radical labor practices constantly intertwine and separate. This paper attempts to suggest several paths to analyze these changes and a record of the historiographical developments and deficiencies in the studied geographical space and time.