John D. French

The gendered worlds of Latin American women workers : from household and factory to the union hall and ballot box

The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers examines the lives of Latin American women who entered factory labor in increasing numbers in the early part of the twentieth century. Emphasizing the integration of traditional labor history topics with historical accounts of gender, female subjectivity, and community, this volume focuses on the experience of working women at mid-century, especially those laboring in the urban industrial sector. In its exploration of working women’s agency and consciousness, this collection offers rich detail regarding women’s lives as daughters, housewives, mothers, factory workers, trade union leaders, and political activists. Widely seen as a hostile sexualized space, the modern factory was considered a threat, not only to the virtue of working women, but also to the survival of the family, and thus, the future of the nation. Yet working-class women continued to labor outside the home and remained highly visible in the expanding world of modern industry. In nine essays dealing with Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Guatemala, the contributors make extensive use of oral histories to describe the contradictory experiences of women whose work defied gender prescriptions but was deemed necessary by working-class families in a world of need and scarcity. The volume includes discussion of previously neglected topics such as single motherhood, women’s struggle against domestic violence, and the role of women as both desiring and desired subjects. Contributors . Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Mary Lynn Pedersen Cluff, John D. French, Daniel James, Thomas Miller Klubock, Deborah Levenson-Estrada, Mirta Zaida Lobato, Heidi Tinsman, Theresa R. Veccia, Barbara Weinstein

Understanding the Politics of Latin America’s Plural Lefts (Chávez/Lula): Social Democracy, Populism, and Convergence on the Path to a Post-Neoliberal World

Abstract This article explores the academic and public debate on the politics of Latin Americas twenty-first century turn towards the left. It rejects dichotomous categorisations of ‘social democratic’ and ‘populist’ lefts as a disciplinary move by neoliberals that appeals to entrenched liberal predispositions. It suggests that such classificatory taxonomies are directly linked to an impoverished notion of the political, in which a politics of exalted expertise and enlightenment, based on reason, rationality and objectivity is juxtaposed against a lesser sphere of emotion, passion and ‘personalism’. This underlying dualism, which permeates academic disciplines and crosses lines of ideology, tracks established markers of hierarchical distinction in societies profoundly divided along multiple lines of class and cultural capital. This is explored through an analysis of the discourse of Chávez vis-a-vis Lula, while offering an appreciation of the subaltern origin of Lulas distinctive style of political leadership, from trade unionism to the presidency, based upon the creation of spaces of convergence.

“’Another World is Possible: The Rise of the Brazilian Workers’ Party and the Prospects for Lula’s Government”

In October 2002 Brazil elected as president a former metalworker and founder of a socialist party, a man whose family had left the miserable northeastern hinterland fi ve decades earlier to face prejudice and hardship in industrial Sao Paulo. The election of Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT) was a clear signal that deep changes were going on in a country marked by huge social inequalities and a contempt for manual labor engendered by almost four centuries of slavery. In the fi rst round of the 2002 presidential election, the former trade union leader had received 46 percent of the vote and won in twenty-four of twentyseven states. In the runoff election on October 27, Lula received 52.8 million votes, 61.3 percent of the nationwide total, and won in all but one state. With their vote, Brazilians had overwhelmingly supported a candidate and a party who were harsh critics of the procapitalist orthodoxies of neoliberalism and contemporary globalization. In doing so, Brazilian voters defi ed attempts by Washington, London, and the international fi nancial markets to warn them away from this use of their democratic rights, an attempt at blackmail that failed even though the value of Brazil’s national currency went down by 40 percent between the beginning of 2002 and the October elections. The vote for Lula was more than twice as large, in absolute terms, as the vote given to all other PT candidates for political offi ce. Yet it would be misleading to label this triumph as only personal in nature, since one of the most surprising developments was the jump in overall support for the PT. Although the PT and its allied parties did not win control of the Chamber of Deputies, the PT did become, for the fi rst time, the party with the largest number of deputies (91 of 513 seats) and the only one with representatives from all states, also a fi rst. Thus the 2002 election was both a personal triumph of the candidate Lula and a PT party victory (it also doubled its senators), although the PT did less well in gubernatorial races (winning in only three states) and lost control of Rio Grande do Sul (an area of party strength). C O N T E M P O R A RY A F FA I R S

The latin American labor studies boom

The contemporary North Atlantic world has been marked by a waning enthusiasm for and salience of the study of workers. Yet the current ebb “in the traditional capitalist ‘core’ countries” (not to mention eastern Europe), Marcel van der Linden recently suggested, is far from being a “crisis” in the field of labor history as such. Rather, it is best understood as “only a regional phenomenon” since in much of “the so-called Third World, especially in the countries of the industrializing semi-periphery, interest in the history of labor and proletarian protest is growing steadily”. Citing encouraging recent developments in labor history in Asia, he noted how the field has grown in parallel with “the stormy conquest of economic sectors by the world market [which] has led to a rapid expansion of the number of waged workers, and the emergence of new radical trade unions”. Van der Lindens description fits well the study of labor in Latin America and the Caribbean, where the field first gained visibility in the early to mid-1980s and has now won recognition as an established specialization among scholars of many disciplines. After surveying the Latin American boom and its political context, this article offers a Brazilian/North Atlantic example in order to illustrate the intellectual gains, for students of both areas, that come with the transcendence of geographical parochialism.

Industrial workers and the birth of the Populist Republic in Brazil, 1945-1946

Brazilian industrial workers played a central role in the political transition of 1945-1946 that ended the Estado Novo dictatorship and opened the era of electoral democracy known as the Brazilian Populist Republic (1946-1964). Unlike studies that emphasize the continuity of a paternalistic and authoritarian relationship between the government and workers, this essay argues that the events of 1945-1946 are best seen as a radical break with the past marked by the dramatic entry of the urban working class into Brazilian political life. Brazils rapid industrialization since the turn of the century had led to the emergence of an industrial proletariat, numbering over one million in 1945, within a restrictive political system that limited electoral participation and popular inputs. In Brazil, unlike the United States, mass enfranchisement followed rather than preceded the emergence of a wage-earning working class. While the details of the intraelite conflict need not detain us, the faction led by Getulio Vargas was prepared in 1945 to gamble on the political potential of this urban working-class constituency. This article begins by demonstrating that Vargass 1945 electoral legislation was consciously and successfully designed to alter Brazilian electoral life through effective mass enfranchisement in urban areas. It then examines the nature of grass-roots mobilization in the industrial region of greater Sao Paulo, named ABC after Santo Andre, Sao Bernardo do Campo, and Sao Caetano. As Brazils fourth largest industrial center with well over 40,000 workers, ABCs socially homogeneous factory districts represented the most dramatic concentration of modern large-scale industrial production in 1945.

A Poverty of Rights

FISCHER, Brodwyn. A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth Century Rio de Janeiro. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2008. 464 2008. 464 p.

Crafting an International Legal Regime for Worker Rights: Assessing the Literature since the 1999 Seattle WTO Protests

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, critical attention has increasingly focused on the remaining world system, capitalist in nature and anchored in the World Trade Organization (WTO), founded in 1994 as the successor to the 1948 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). As the 1990s progressed, a smattering of exciting new intellectual work began to appear on the social and environmental impacts of the international trade and investment regime, especially given its apparently negative impact on many developing countries and the world’s working people. “The distinction somewhat comfortably maintained by ‘trade hands’ who managed the post-World War II international economy––that trade is strictly a commercial function with no immediate connection to social concerns––has evaporated under the pressure of political and social forces generated by the globalization of the economy.” 1 These incipient currents of political disquiet, at first easily overlooked, would surface with surprising force in late 1999 when large and dramatic street protests confronted the WTO’s Third Ministerial Conference in Seattle. For the first time, a meeting of the mandarins of international trade was met with a massive and unruly expression of democracy in the streets. The Seattle events seized the world’s imagination in part because they were so unexpected in a thriving tradebased US city that was, at the time, the world headquarters of Boeing and Microsoft, giants of the “old” and “new” global economy, respectively. The labor issue even reverberated in the suites of the city, as government representatives debated the inclusion of worker rights in the agenda of the “Millennium Round” of international trade negotiations that was to have started in Seattle. 2 The Seattle protests heightened public and scholarly attention to proposals for social or worker rights clauses in international trade agreements, an issue that had briefly flared up at the 1994 GATT meeting in Marrakesh (though not in the streets). As the new millennium began, the labor question was part of a vital international policy debate that spoke to societal concerns felt well beyond the usual haunts of academic labor specialists. Indeed, the formation of the WTO, with near-universal membership, led a number of labor scholars, as early as 1996, to envisage new possibilities for promoting worker rights on a world scale. 3 Drawing on interdisciplinary reflections going back to the early twentieth century, this review essay offers a point of entry into the pitched debates about globalization, which peaked during the protest cycle

The Travails of Doing Labor History: The Restless Wanderings of John Womack Jr.

This is a book about country people who did not want to move and therefore got into a revolution. They did not fi gure on so odd a fate.” With this pithy observation, John Womack Jr. opened his 1969 book Zapata and the Mexican Revolution. Nominated for the National Book Award in 1970, Zapata has been read by tens of thousands, and its author, while still in his early thirties, was awarded the Robert Woods Bliss Chair in Latin American History and Economics at Harvard University, where he had received his B.A. and his Ph.D.1 Academically, his inaugural monograph sparked a turn toward grass-roots regional studies of the Mexican Revolution. Beyond the Mexicanist fi eld, Zapata helped to inspire the new agrarian social and political history that fl ourished among English-speaking Latin Americanists in the 1970s and it continued to win wide praise, even from Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes. “

How the Not-So-Powerless Prevail: Industrial Labor Market Demand and the Contours of Militancy in Mid-Twentieth-Century São Paulo, Brazil

Andreotti, to two excellent HAHR reviewers of an earlier version of this manuscript, and to Alexandre Fortes, who provided decisive and useful guidance at a key point in the final revision of this article. 1. Marco Aurelio Garcia, “The Gender of Militancy: Notes on the Possibilities of a Different History of Political Action,” in Gender and History: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Leonore Davidoff, Keith McClelland, and Eleni Varikas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 43 – 44, 50. A leader of the Brazilian and Latin American left since the 1960s, Garcia is a longtime advisor to Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and currently serves as Chefe da Assessoria Especial do Presidente da Republica Federativa do Brasil. 2. When I interviewed Andreotti in late 1982, the Brazilian Communist Party was still illegal, if haltingly tolerated, and the country was enjoying greater civil liberties as part of a tense and uncertain shift towards democratization. Our 54 hours of interviews over four months were carefully transcribed by Helena Weiss Goncalves, to whom I owe a great debt of gratitude, with the final transcript consisting of 476 single-spaced pages. Unless otherwise noted, all interviews were conducted by the author in Santo Andre. Translations are the author’s unless otherwise noted.

Wal-Mart, Retail Supremacy, and the Relevance of Political Economy: The Intermestic Challenge of Contemporary Research (Academic, Agitational, and Constructive)

Nelson Lichtenstein’s recent edited collection on Wal-Mart, along with this article, exemplify the best of agitational research as defi ned by labor economist John R. Commons in 1907. In an address to the New York School of Philanthropy, the pioneering historian of U.S. labor laid out a useful research triad, each with its own rationale and utility. Academic research was defi ned in lofty terms as “truth for its own sake” with the aim of developing social science. Agitational research, by contrast, “awakens the public” through highlighting a problem in order to build “the conviction that something must be done.” Putting aside the positivist aura of the academic, agitational research is imperative to reach the third and fi nal category identifi ed by Commons: constructive research to inform public policy and promote positive government action.1 Like Dana Frank’s Buy American (1999),2 Lichtenstein approaches “the global integration of capitalism” by intervening in a current public controversy, in this case the role of Wal-Mart domestically and abroad. He effectively juxtaposes Bentonville, Arkansas, and Guangdong, China, as two “dynamic nodes of transnational capitalism,” “nerve centers of capitalism’s global supply network,” and “anchors of the trans-Pacifi c supply chain.” In doing so, Lichtenstein reminds us of the inescapably intermestic (international/domestic) nature of our transnationalized global political economy. At his most ambitious, Lichtenstein postulates an epoch-making transi-