AHA Session 146
Conference on Latin American History 33
Labor and Working-Class History Association 14
Conference on Latin American History 33
Labor and Working-Class History Association 14
Friday, January 8, 2027: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Studio 4 (New Orleans Marriott, 2nd Floor)
Chair:
Jerry Dávila, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Papers:
Comment:
Luah Tomas, York University
Session Abstract
This panel explores shifting metaphorical and physical landscapes in Brazil and Puerto Rico, examining how land and infrastructure were repurposed to serve competing visions of progress in twentieth-century Latin America. By looking at the reinvention of wilderness, contests over drained swamplands and adjacent forests, and the afterlives of industrial sites, the presenters investigate the intersections of leisure, labor, and national identity as notions of progress and capitalist development changed over the course of the century. Collectively, these papers reveal how physical spaces—from mountain peaks to sugar-factory towns—were imagined, created, and repurposed from the early-twentieth century through the end of the Cold War. Ben Cowan’s presentation examines the construction of mountaineering and outdoor sport in Rio de Janeiro, showing how early-twentieth century climbing clubs did not simply scale mountains; they coterminously reinvented landscape, space, and national identity through the creation of archives and narrativized commemorations. This process was deeply rooted in Eurocentric standards of civilization, as athletes sought to incorporate mountaineering into a glorious, domestic legacy of adventure that was inscribed into racialized and gendered timelines. Gillian McGillivray shifts the focus to Rio’s northeastern sugar-zone of Campos dos Goytacazes, where a public health initiative drained swamplands at precisely the moment when local sugar-factory owners introduced industrial machinery to eschew new 1960s labor laws. These changes prompted major conflicts over land as demands for land reform were reverberating across Brazil. Hundreds of former sugar workers, replaced by tractors and industrial machinery, flocked to the newly-accessible forest lands of Imbé. French and Brazilian sugar-factory owners tried to claim these lands as their own, earning the label “land-grabbers” (grileiros). While workers sought land for survival, factory-managers wanted the same territory for leisure activities like hiking, hunting, and fishing, and as a reserve for future cane-fields. The struggle pitted Communist Unions, Peasant Leagues, and populist political leaders at the local and national levels against one another. The conflict provides a window into the politics that preceded Brazil’s 1964-85 dictatorship and can be seen as predecessor to today’s Landless Worker Movement (the MST). Jose Sola’s presentation widens the panels’ focus to the global landscapes of sugar, investigating the “international afterlives” of Puerto Rico’s sugar industry from 1945 through the 1990s. As the island transitioned toward light industrialization, many of its famous sugar factories (centrales) were dismantled. Sola tracks the sale and shipment of machinery to a global second-hand sugar machinery market that reached as far as the Philippines, Haiti, and Venezuela. He also highlights the tension between industrial contraction at the national level, and the efforts of Puerto Rico’s remaining factory owners at the local level to resist the industry’s decline through modernization. Together, this panel that includes authors, a commentator, and a chair from the California, Canada, Brazil, and Puerto Rico, offers a multifaceted view of how Latin American environments were transformed by altitude-based athletics, the mechanization of agriculture, and the globalization of capitalism.
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