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When the Plumber(s) Come to Fix a Country: Doing Labor History in Brazil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2013

John D. French
Affiliation:
Duke University
Alexandre Fortes
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro

Extract

Those with a sharp tongue might say that labor historians in contemporary Brazil operate in the shadows or, to be more accurate, the shadow cast by the success of Latin America's most famous trade unionist, who served as president from 2002–2010. The field's growth in the number and quality of practitioners, as well as the breadth of their ambitions, cannot be separated from the memorable metalworkers' strikes of 1979 and 1980, the subsequent defeat of the military dictatorship in 1985, and the construction of a militant trade unionism and the radical Workers' Party that ran Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva for president in five successive elections between 1989 and 2006.

Type
New Directions in Labor History Around the Globe
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2013

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References

Notes

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11. Ibid., 16–7.

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27. For an update on archives on labor and social movements in Brazil, with a broader glance at Spain and Portugal and some other Latin American countries, see the volume that came from a conference cosponsored by the CEDOC, the archival section of the CUT labor confederation, and the Brazilian National Archive: Marques, José Antonio and Stampa, Inez Terezinha, eds., O Mundo dos Trabalhadores e Seus Arquivos (Rio de Janeiro/São Paulo, 2009)Google Scholar.

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30. Lara, Silvia H., “Escravidão, Cidadania e História do Trabalho no Brasil,” Projeto História, 16 (1998): 3538 Google Scholar. Law has proven a wonderful avenue for advancing this unifying agenda from the colonial world to the twentieth century: Lara, Silvia H. and Mendonça, Joseli, eds. Direitos e Justiças no Brasil: Ensaios de História Social (Campinas, 2006)Google Scholar.

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38. This statement is broadly true for the labor history elsewhere in Latin America as in the case of a recent prize-winning monograph by Pavilack, Jody, Mining for the Nation: The Politics of Chile's Coal Communities from the Popular Front to the Cold War (State College, 2011)Google Scholar. Pavilack offers a compelling reinterpretation of the Chilean Popular Front by taking a bottom-up approach to the role of trade unions and the Communist Party in the country's coal mining region between 1938 and 1947. One might also cite the impressive recent study of the 1932 Communist uprising in El Salvador and its violent repression by Gould, Jeffrey L. and Lauria-Santiago, Aldo, To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador (Durham, 2008)Google Scholar.

39. Brennan, “Latin American Labor History,” 343.

40. Ibid., 360.

41. Womack, “Doing Labor History”; Womack, John, “On Labor History, Material Relations, Labor Movements, and Strategic Positions: A Reply to French and James (as Nice and Civil as I Can Make It),” Labor 5 (2008): 117–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42. Brennan, “Latin American Labor History,” 360.

43. Ibid., 359–61, 342.

44. French, John D., “How the Not-So-Powerless Prevail: Industrial Labor Market Demand and the Contours of Militancy in Mid-Twentieth Century São Paulo, Brazil,” Hispanic American Historical Review 90 (2010): 109–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Negro, Antonio Luigi, Linhas de Montagem: O Industrialismo Nacional-desenvolvimentista e a Sindicalização dos Trabalhadores, 1945–1978 (São Paulo, 2004)Google Scholar; da Silva, Fernando Teixeira, Operários Sem Patrões: Os Trabalhadores da Cidade de Santos no Entreguerras (Campinas, 2003)Google Scholar.

45. Rogers, Thomas, “Race, Respect, and Authority in Contemporary Brazil: Interpreting the Stories of Sugarcane Workers,” Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas 8 (2011): 123CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46. Archila, “Latin American Social Movements.”

47. Ibid., 65, 74, 71.