Workers, Labor, and Transnational Politics in Latin America

Session Abstract

In recent years, one of the most important historiographical trends has been the turn towards transnational work.  This trend has allowed new kinds of questions to be formulated and new groups of people to be studied; it has also prompted a re-examination of areas of study that might have been previously researched in national or local isolation.  This panel gathers together four papers that use the techniques of transnational historical study to write new histories of workers and labor in Latin America’s twentieth century.

Because the conditions of workers in other countries affects national working conditions, labor unions have long cared about international politics.  Several of the papers here examine specific efforts by unions to affect international politics.  Ernesto Semán examines the overlooked case of Argentine labor attaches, put in place by president Juan Domingo Perón as part of his project of projecting influence abroad.  The papers by Rafael Ioris and Patrick Iber both deal with efforts by the A.F.L. in the 1940s and 1950s to steer labor politics in a direction that was congenial to both their interests and those of U.S. government anti-Communist politics in the region.  Each of these papers goes beyond the frame of “labor diplomacy” by considering the multiple effects of these efforts and the complex motives that created them.

At the same time, the papers all deal with cultures of labor.  John Lear’s paper on radical art, the Spanish Civil War, and the Electricians’ Union in 1930s Mexico most directly looks at working-class culture and international politics.  But the other papers also take culture and ideology as central categories of analysis: Semán in examining the way that Peronist labor attaches contributed to constructing a Peronist cultural identity at home; Iber in looking at the ways that the labor movement established channels that would later be used to support Cold War cultural movements; and Ioris in looking at the way that modernization mixed with Cold War politics in 1950s Brazil affected working-class identities and capacities for mobilization.

Collectively, these papers show labor as a key actor in shaping politics and culture in twentieth century Latin America.  Two scholars who have done pioneering work on Latin American labor and are currently at work on transnational projects, Angela Vergara and Joel Wolfe, will serve, respectively, as chair and commentator.  The panel should be of interest to historians of modern Latin America, of labor, the Cold War, and to those who are interested in the promise of transnational approaches.