The Politics of Port Labor in 20th-Century Peru

An oddity of Peruvian labor history is the relative absence of port labor. Even though dock workers in Callao were the first group of workers to win the eight-hour workday, port laborers tend to only receive a tangential mention in most labor histories of Peru. What might twentieth century Peruvian politics look like if re-examined through the lens of port workers? This paper argues that centering port workers helps to re-periodize portions of twentieth century Peru while also drawing our attention to port inflections of process studied by scholars but in other regions of Peru. This paper delves into strike waves, internal migration to port-cities, and political trends from the late nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. I show how labor organizing among port workers pushed other social movements, shaped local politics, and inspired new types of policing. After dockworkers in Callao won the eight-hour workday, for instance, many other parts of the Lima-Callao labor movement centered this new win as a goal for them as well. Police in Callao, too, had set up a local system for tracking and documenting laborers in the early twentieth century, in part due to labor organizing and in part due to the cosmopolitan nature of laborers in the port—a population they often referred to as a “población flotante.” Their framework of categorizing people was then taken up by the police of Lima in 1913. These new parts to the story of Peruvian labor shifts our focus toward ports and the maritime world while still connecting them to the broader Peruvian context.