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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  and
Alexandre Fortes
John D. French
Affiliation:
Duke University
Alexandre Fortes
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro
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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
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 82 , Fall 2012 , pp. 117 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2013

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References

Notes

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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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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.

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46. Archila, “Latin American Social Movements.”

47. Ibid., 65, 74, 71.