Crises of Inclusion - Historiography

Piccato on the chronology of Mexican crime

• Crime is a key aspect of interactions between the state and the social groups, essential to studying the history of Mexico City

• Following independence from Spain in 1821, Mexico saw much instability with military uprisings, civil wars and foreign invasions. 

• The Porfirian regime 1876-1911

  • ‘The 1910 cetennial celebration of independence, centred on Mexico City, seemed to demonstrate in the eyes of the world the civilisation and stability achieved by the country.’

    • But a revolution was unavoidable 

• Franciso Madero issued a call to arms after Diaz persisted in imposing his own reelection, turned into an uprising centred around land - later President Madero was overthrown, and in 1917 after the inauguration of a new regime, political stability in the 1930s crystallised into a single party system

Piccato - How different Mexican groups viewed criminality

• Elites - viewed it as the biggest challenge to modernity, jeoparising material progress and social order

• Ordinary people - Integral part of everyday life as it was very disruptive but they relied on communities to guarantee order

  • ‘They knew that transgressions had their reasons - defense of honour motivated violence, economic need prompted theft - and that the criminal justice system catered mainly to the needs and fears of the upper classes, so they had to keep a mindful eye on everyone around’

• They perceived crimes differently - social laws were different to legal laws - ‘crime is a relational category’

Piccato - Historiography of Mexican crime

• Recent historiography has stressed ‘the specific historical circumstances in which the ruling groups imported European and North American strategies of control during the late 19th century’

• ‘The regional elite’s discourse of progress and economic expansion revolved around the racial and cultural ‘regeneration’ of the population and the top down creation of new citizens through immigration and miscegenation, and included fighting backwardness and lack of discipline with hygeine, criminology and penology’

• Scholars have also emphasised the ‘contested nature of power and social control and brought attention to multiple actors who challenge the foundations of class, gender and political rule behind capitalist modernisation’

  • We should understand this interaction as a political process rather than a bifurcation 

• ‘Criminology and repressive state strategies created suspects out of the urban poor; these in turn resisted and negotiated their status vis-a-vis their communities and authorities, whom they also mistrusted. However tense and complex, these relations defined crime in their place and time’

Piccato - the construction of Mexican criminology

• Used to explain the government's lack of control, based upon the desire to discipline and regenerate society - however did not map on to the complexity of everyday life

• Was not a passive interpretation of European ideas - ‘involved the creative effort of writers and the curiosity of a broad Mexican audience’

  • Writers, lawyers, scholars and public officials - claimed scientific validity

• The persistence of crime in urban society challenged the Porifirian elites binary view of good and evil and virtue 

  • ‘Criminology was thus a useful instrument to preserve old prejudices into the observation of new realities’

Piccato on Porfirian observers

• Porfirian observers condensed the life of the lower classes in visual accounts of corporal degradation and wretched housing that contrasted with the ‘‘comfort’’ of progress. 

  • This imagery made a great impact on public opinion through newspapers.

  • The daily press depicted crime graphically and voiced the elite’s indignation at the contrast between their project to create an elegant city and the behavior of a population who did not share those concerns

• ‘Instead of the moralising practiced by respectable newspapers, the popular press satirised the other side of the tension between civilisation and barbarism in the streets of the capital: namely, judicial, administrative and police repression’

Piccato on press coverage

• Press coverage was dependent on the social background of subjects, with common reference to collective phenomena and anonymity for the lower classes - identified the majority as belonging to the indigenous race

  • ‘This perceived simility nullified the identification methods used by Mexican police, based on the declarations of the prisoners and superficial observation of the suspect’s appearance’

  • Methods for identifying criminals were ineffective, with elites instead attributing it to a particular social group

    • ‘Rateros became, in the perception of the law and the authorities, the nucleus of the Mexican criminal profession’

• Crimes of passion garnered the most attention

• ‘Crime also fascinated because it frequently subverted traditional gender roles

Piccato on criminology and social anomalies

• Crimonology’s challenges - ‘because elites facilitated between scientific interest and social fear, however, empirical observations and analyses did not follow a logical sequence and at times were difficult to reconcile’

  • Tensions between everyday perceptions and scientific accounts of crime

• Several different elite groups who answered with their own agenda - e.g ‘in the liberal press aimed at the working class, alcoholism received greater attention than crime because it seperated criminals from industrial workers and artisans’

• Desired as an essential tool to reestablish social order

• ‘Criminology’s classifications were not aimed at constructing a more homogenous and egalitarian society, but at reinforcing the signs of social difference that constituted the foundations of the classifications themselves’

Aguirre’s overall argument about Peruvian prison reform

• The Peruvian prison system ‘embodied the contradictory and exclusionary nature of modernisation in Peru’

• Prison reform

  • Modernising principles that drove it were rarely enacted and instead much abuse of prisoners rather than humane treatment

  • Had become a movement in Europe and the United States in the second half of the 18th century

  • 1820 - the penitentiary ‘combined in a single setting all the elements prison reformers deemed necesary to transform unruly criminals into honest, industrious, law-abiding citizens’

  • Prison employees and authorities operated on commonsensical forms of ‘treatment’ r

Aguirre - Chronological overview

• 1879-83: War of the Pacific

• 1895 - presidency of de Pierola - period of stability, foreign investment, modernisation, ‘emergence of the organied working class and mass political parties’

• Oligarchic state

  • Foreign capital, coastal landowners, patrimonialism, privatisation of power and violence

• 1919 Augusto B. Leguia came to power through a coup d’etat - ‘a political maverick and successful buisnessman closely linked to foreign, especially North American, interests, he challenged the political basis of the Aristocratic Republic’

• Extended the traditional oligarchy to an extent - urban middle classes and working class sections

  • However bureaucratic and patrimonial practices remained

  • ‘Despite its traditional components, however, the modernisation of Peruvian society did occur during the long period between 1850 and 1935, and it was in Lima where it was mostly felt’

    • Urban development, acceleration in infrastructural growth

    • Most significant change - ‘the gradual emergence of distinct class based neighbourhoods’

      • ‘An effort was made to create a distinctive working class culture, with great emphasis on self-education. As a result, the working classes of Lima made their presence felt in the city and decisively shaped the contours of its political and social life’

Aguirre on the unemployed sector of working class

• Sector of the workign class

  • Unemployed and usually lawless - policed 

  • ‘They were either left behind by the modernisation drive or used to be part of it. They lived lives that, in the eyes of authorities and commentators, deserved punishment and containment, if not extermination’

    • Blamed for limited progress in modernisation

  • Regarded by other members of the working class as nuisances

• Historiography on modern prisons has focused on dimensions of power, resistance, racialised discrimination, surveilance, etc.

• Prisons must be put in the context of society

  • ‘Historians must be attentive to the influences exerted by prevailing cultural and mental settings’

• Encounters between the police and the lower classes

• ‘Critical instances in the cultural, legal, and political construction of the criminal classes’

• Hierarchy and stigma were reinforced by daily policing - was a crucial social mechanism

Aguirre on the development of policing

• Early 19th century - policing carried out by army units - much political instability, an dserenos, officials originating from the colonial era

• ‘during the first decades following independence, the fate of police forces became tied to the recurrent political instability resulting from caudillista struggles’

• Several political and presidential changes which affected the nature and operation of police forces

• Organisation of a nationwide police force, neighbourhood organisations, police units throughout public locations, forced recruitment

• ‘because of frequent desertions, discharges for poor discipline, lack of adequate salaries, and the growth of the city and its population, urban and rural police commissiaries always deemed their forces insufficient to deal with allegedly growing crime’

• Became a surveilance machine - beginning of keeping data and directories, fingerprinting techniques, de facto criminal identification cards

Aguirre on the development of political policising

• ‘In 1920, the Leguia administration, under the leadership of Minister of Government German Leguia y Martinez, began a complete overhaul of police institutions as part of its goal of modernising the Peruvian state’

  • Sought help from Spain

  • Three core units but hard to involve rural policing which functioned largely privately

• Strengthening of policial policing - tool of intimidation 

  • Torture, surveillance

  • Much more repressive and intrusive

• Taken to city’s police headwuarters, evaluated, further investigatoon - served as a public event that was witnessed

• Later become private to ensure ‘absolute secrecy’ - police largely acted outside of the law - ‘police brutality was not an issue that excited extended discussion among Lima’s populace, but from time to time it did scandalise a few observers’

• Was also used to benefit others

De La Cadena on the boundaries between race and culture

• Social discrimination has often been justified by ‘cultural practices’ - ambiguity in the boundaries between race and culture

• De-Indianisation’ - claiming ‘mestizo’ identity over an indigenous identity

  • ‘The process through which working-class cuzquenos have both reproduced and contested racism’

  • Not simply assimilating or integrating, but rather the redefinition of culture

  • Relational measures - urban job, literacy, etc

  • ‘Opens up the possibility to ascend socially without shedding indigenous ways’

• The synonymous use of race and culture - discourse across society

  • The working class contributed to discourse - peasants, dancers, market women, street vendors

  • This connection between race and culture has colonial roots in the belief of the ‘purity of blood’

De La Cadena on cuzqueno elites

• Cuzquefio elite intellectuals were highly influential in these dialogues with Europeans over the national racial character. 

  • They were decisive in propagating a ‘culturalist’ definition of race across newspapers, books and speeches in their capacities in educational or legal positions

    • ‘Included both an adamant rejection of biological determinism and the naturalisation of hierarchies that nominally at least, derived from essential moral/ cultural differences

• ‘Mestizaje’, the regional, 19th century word used in debates about the perils or benefits of hybridity, was the epicentre of the racialised structure of feelings of this region of Latin America

De La Cadena on ‘constructive miscenegation’

• Proposed by Peruvian intellectuals - viewed the lower classes as backwards due to being ‘pure’

• Idea that miscegenation would lead to economic growth

  • This was interrogated after the War of the Pacific and the political isntability which followed - new ideas about the power of education - eugenic schemes and immigration of superior races 

• Yet, there was an assertion of mixed identity - 18 ‘this self awareness of skin colour might have inclined them to minimise the relevace of phenotype and privilege instead intellectual merit as they pondered racial hierarchies’

De La Cadena on how the ‘labour’ problem reproduced social hierarchies

• While oil production and plantation agriculture technologically modernized the coastal areas and transformed its working classes from indentured workers into wage laborers, the increase of wool exports - a commodity produced in highland haciendas - did not modernize the sierra. 

• Lacking basic urban infrastructure, highland cities were actually large rural towns, inhabited by absentee landlords of large haciendas who lived in large mansions teeming with indigenous male and female servants. 

• Completing the image of back wardness' servitude was the main labor relationship in the large and medium-sized countryside properties, although there were also free peasant members of indigenous communities, or ayllus

• Significantly, modern Peruvian race-making paralleled a political process of place-making as it assigned races to spaces and evaluated these within evolutionary temporal schemes 

De La Cadena conclusion

• While oil production and plantation agriculture technologically modernized the coastal areas and transformed its working classes from indentured workers into wage laborers, the increase of wool exports - a commodity produced in highland haciendas - did not modernize the sierra. 

• Lacking basic urban infrastructure, highland cities were actually large rural towns, inhabited by absentee landlords of large haciendas who lived in large mansions teeming with indigenous male and female servants. 

• Completing the image of back wardness' servitude was the main labor relationship in the large and medium-sized countryside properties, although there were also free peasant members of indigenous communities, or ayllus

• Significantly, modern Peruvian race-making paralleled a political process of place-making as it assigned races to spaces and evaluated these within evolutionary temporal schemes 

Lopez-Pedros on the subjectivity of the Middle Class

• Fukuyama ‘The End of History’

  • The triumph of liberal democracy

  • The growth of middle class societies rather than working class societies

• Democracy is frequently thought of as a transhistorical measure that is universally applicable to all 

• ‘The putatively ontological relationship between democracy and the formation of a middle class readily goes unquestioned’

• ‘Attempt to historicise the material circumstances, discursive conditions, collective subjectivities, social struggles and political battles through which a midde-class reality came to represent what democracy was supposed to deliver’

• Historiographical bifurcated view of the Cold War in Latin America as a dialectical struggle between revolution and counterrevolution

• Polarised political space with middle classes picking a side - rather

• Middle classes ‘were also a product of subjective formation’ through which people ‘engaged in multiple practices to define’ what it meant to be middle class

Owensby overall argument - Brazillian middle class

• A sense that the middle class represented the key to Brazil’s historical evolution’

  • ‘Individualistic, meritocratic, and progressive middle class’

• Would replace patronage, status and hierarchy with modern values such as individualism, merit and egalitarianism

• Modernisation theories put the middle class ‘at the crux of this process’

• ‘When military regimes, often with broad-middle class support or acquiesience, suspended democratic governments, starting with Brazil in 1964, many scholars lost faith in the prospects for the middle class as a suitable subject for scholarly enquiry’

• ‘I am broadly interested in how the ambiguities of everyday middle-class lives have put the meaning of modernity at issue in Latin America and elsewhere’

Owensby on the connections between the middle class and hierarchy

• collar-and-tie organisations insisted fiercely that their members were a cut above more manual workers, which meant everyone from a literate ditch digger with no access to a sindicato to a literate, highly skilled factory workers who belonged to a union’

• Claimed a higher social standing than workers

• ‘But because hierarchies were not altogether stable, because competition implied the possibility of downward mobility, because so many remained dependent on patronage, and because incomes seemed so often inadequate to the task of keeping up appearances, these people who aspired to security and stability ended up living lives of disquiet’

• To working-class militancy and to elite power the moralism of a fissile middle class counterpoised two imperatives: an insistence on the naturalness of hierarchical distinctions vis-a-vis those below and a leveling desire to hold those above to a standard of behavior incompatible with a politics of egoism. 

• Workers might gain more for themselves and elites might retain power, but the middle-class claim to moral superiority made it possible to believe that neither was a legitimate political outcome. Here was an imagined escape route from irrelevance and-complicity in a dangerous, corrupt, and unresponsive political system. 

• ‘What has made the idea of the middle class so attractive in the twentieth century is its assurance of progress with social peace - unambigous, unpolitical modernisation. As a free-floating idea, it was easily appropriated as a universalizable norm by intellectuals seeking broad truths by ordinary people seeking to make sense of lives in turbulent societies’

Parker on the subjectivity of the Peruvian middle class

• Describes the subjectivity of the Peruvian middle class - importance of attention to language and cultural construction

• Middle class idea emerged between 1910-1920, propagated by white collar workers ‘empleados’ in import-export houses, banks and retail stores of major cities

• They ‘recast long-standing cultural notions of rank and respectability into a cogent explanation of why they, as members of the middle class, deserved special consideration’

  • In pursuit of protective legislation, higher pay and better working conditions

• Inspired a series of legal reforms reinforcing the distinctions between manual workers and nonmanual workers - obreros and empleados

• In the 1930s the influential ARPA Party of Haya de la Torre placed this idea of the middle class at the centre of its political vision

Parker on Peruvian chronology

• 1910s and 1920s - empleados painted their labour disputes as part of a middle class struggle

  • ‘Continued to rely upon earlier ideas of caste and hierarchy, thereby reconciling radical economic demands with a surprisingly anti-egalitarian visin of society’

• 1924 ‘Law of the Empleado’ - emerged from the idea that the middle class had unique needs and deserve special benefits

  • Debate about who was an empleado and obrero

  • Symbolic line between a ‘respectable’ middle class and the mass of workers

  • ‘For those on the border line, designation as an empleado became an important claim to higher status’

  • Special consumption needs as they had to portray a particular kind of status

  • ‘The idea of the suffering middle clas was at heart anti-egalitarian, based on acceptance of a natural social hierarchy, eschewing any possibility of organic identification with the working class’

  • Modern and unmodern

    • Modern in the idea of classes as a function of occupations, but persistence of older rhetorics

• This idea of distinctiveness played a central role in the political debates of the 1930s and 1940s - ‘this chapter pays particular attention to the place of the middle class in the program, rhetoric and worldview of ARPA’

• However, as offices became increasingly unionised, the lines of distinction became unclear and privileges were taken away - but longevity of the ideas of white-collar distinction

Davila on the Brazillian school incident

• 1944 - public debate was incited after a young indigenous girl, Jacyra, was refused admission to a private school on account of being indigenous

• The German nuns claimed that they had refused her admission to ‘protect’ her as they were afraid that the children at the school would discriminate against her

• Sobral Pinto - defend the nuns and argued that ‘the nuns were trying to negotiate the racism already present in Brazilian society; racism that he equated with racial intolerance in the United States’ - people increasingly begin to discuss in newspapers if ‘racism was a foreign or native entity’

Davila on what this incident reveals

• ‘The paradoxical role of race in Brazilian schools’ - 1917-45 - aimed at expanding the education system to ‘perfect the race’

• Viewed the poor and afro-descendants as degenerates, therefore using schools as clinics where their ills could be cured

• Contradictory inclusion and exlcusion - 4 their policies were ‘denying them equitable access to the programs, institutions and social rewards that educational policies conferred’

• The reproduction of colonial hierachies and ideologies - the idea of modernity and progress was inevitably tied to an exclusionary European modernity

•  Race dominated the political consciousness, with a pervasive linear and teleological narrative towards whiteness - seen in an evolutionary context

• Double understanding of race as culturally determined, but also something that could be equated

Davila - Vision of a white-middle class political and economic culture - deliberate and unintentional racial hierarchy within the education system

• ‘Educators availed themselves not only of the sciences allied to eugenics, but they also embraced practices of systematic rationalisation increasingly applied in Brazilian industry. The link between industry and education was more than casual and extended far beyond the sphere of vocational education’

• ‘Both educators and industrialists believed this new society would be created through the reformed attitudes and behaviour of the popular classes

• Education reveals how public policy was engineered, the common experiences of people across Brazil despite a multiplicity of identities

• Ambivalence, elasticity and ambiguity of race relations

• 15 ‘the metanarrative of race in public education naturally influenced and was influenced by the metanarratives of gender, sexuality, social class and nationhood’

Davilla on the idea of a ‘Brazillian race

• Pervasive idea of a ‘Brazilian race’ with a common ethnicity - effectively a whitening

• Puzzling how the myth of a racial democracy existed alongside visible racial inequalities

  • ‘The trick that allowed both Brazilians and foreigners to have accepted this idea lies in the way the practice of eugenics submerged the management of racial hierarchy within social scientific language that deracialised and depoliticised the image of Brazilian society’

•  ‘the public education movement grew out of this new consensus that degeneracy was acquired and could be mitigated’

• Involved a whole network of elite professionals - interdisciplinary preoccupation

Davila on city, race and nation

• 1938 - Ministry of Education and Health built its first permanent headquarters

• Education system was very decentralised - continued to be shaped by various local actors - educators, doctors and social scientists

• New practice of the student health brigade and physical eduation in schools - ‘the Carneiro Leao reforms of both the city of Rio de Janeiro and the state of Pernambuco show how the main principles of reform ultimately rested in the hands of individual educational leaders’

• 1931 - Anisio Teixeira was appointed as director of the Rio school system - consensus on the ability to reverse degeneracy through eugenic nationalism

Davila - Creation of the Institute of Educational Research

• Psychological and intelligence testing that confirmed prejudices

• Radio and film to expand education where the school system was weak

• Orthophrenology and Mental Hygeine was concerned with ‘problem children’

• Anthropometry ‘studied the links between physical and phenotypic characteristics and criminality’

Davila on schools as a laboratory, and a place for examination

• Viewed behaviour problems as the result of home environment - ‘documenting the existence of a culture of poverty buried explanations of racial degeneracy as well as larger structural causes of poverty. Poor children were case studies of inferior culture being passed on generationally’

• Public policy also targeted worker health and hygenine, establishing public health clinics and disdaining healers

• by fulfilling the task of improving the race, teachers became respected and valued agents of the nation’s progress’ - ‘the metaphor that ‘Brazil is an immense hospital’ lent itself easily to describing the teacher’s work in the classroom, healing Brazilians of their bad habits and unhealthy cultures’

• ‘educators saw the nutrition as the most important part of the physical, intellectual and cultural development of the child’

Weinstein on Vargas and Dutra

• 1942 - Vargas created the National Service for Industrial Training

• 1946 - Dutra created the Industrial Social Service

  • ‘These developments were not just new but unusual, since both of these agencies were to be funded and operated by associations of industrialists rather than by the state that had decreed them into existence’

  • ‘By government decree, Brazilian industrialists had acquired jurisdiction over two agencies that would prove central to industrial relations and worker discipline’

  • ‘Industrialists campaign for greater productivity and social peace’

• ‘Several studies of labour and industrialisation in Brazil during the 1920s highlight this new inclination within the industrial elite, viewing it through the lens of class conflict and seeking to unmask it as a thinly disguised strategy for social control’

• Very uneven implementation

Weinstein on Brazillian labour historiography

• ‘Linguistic turn’ has prompted us to analyse the discourse of the elite industrialists - sought to remake themselves and their class image, claiming the necessary ‘professional authority and technical expertise’

• ‘Workers were not the industrialists’ sole concern’ - ‘the industrialists also sought to change the perception of industry among politicians, professionals and middle-class reformers who harboured doubts about industry’s contribution to economic progress and social peace’

• Labour leaders also advocated for modernisation - history of slave labour - emphasised the importance of workers skills and expertise

Weinstein on the revisionism of ‘estado de compriso’ - the compromised state

• ‘From this perspective, it is the state-centred elite, allegedly autonomous from any specific social group, that forges a viable project for industrialisation and social control’

  • Based of interviews with factory workers and industrialists

• ‘Far from turning over their social and intellectual role to a corporatist state, the Brazillian industrialists and their technocratic elites aggressively sought to play a leading part in the reorganisation of industrial relations and in the molding of a new urban industrial society’

Weinstein on remaking the worker at home and at play

• ‘The transition in 1951 from Dutra’s repressive regime to the populist politics of the now democratically elected Getulio Vargas inaugurated a period in which the Brazilian worker occupied an ever more prominent place in public discourse’

• ‘Sharp differences in the assumptions that informed the industrialist-sponsored agencies and the rhetorical positions adopted by populist politicians’

• 1951 - Vargas’s regime inaugurated  the urban working masses were the preoccupation of public discourse

• Theme of developmentalism - ‘favoured joint public/private efforts to promote economic development and especially industrialisation’

Weinstein on the idea of the ‘problem worker’

• Brazilian workers were simultaneously viewed as an obstacle to modernisation, often referred to as ‘immature’ and insufficiently prepared

• far from exalting workers and working-class culture, FIESP spokesmen and their technocratic allies adopted programs that aspired to construct an alternative nonproletarian culture within and beyond the factory’

• Conducted several studies on workers to figure out why they dropped out of their apprenticeships and programs

  • Found that the working class didn’t display the correct values - aimed to make them responsible citizens aware of their obligation

Weinstein on fixing the problematic working class

• Rational measures such as - ‘careful budgeting, rational consumption habits, good nutrition, improved hygiene and healthy recreation’

• 1950 - greater intensidication - ‘systematic social education’, family education, shaped by a social education agenda

• Illustrations depicted a white worker - ‘of course, Sao Paulo’s working class population still included many European immigrants whose appearance may have approximated that of the illustrated figure, but they could hardly be regarded as typical. Meanwhile, the substantial portion of the working class that was black or pardo went completely unrepresented in the SESI reader and in most of the organisation’s other publications’

Weinstein on concern with worker’s free time

• Undesirable worker culture - ‘corner bar’

•  May Day Workers Olympics, workers clubs, provided funding, connections with amateur sports federations

• ‘By the 1950s, SESI had expanded its technical and organisational services in the recreational sphere to include boxing, handball, Ping-Pong, basketball, bicycling, swimming, track, volleyball and chess’

• ‘SESI also offered various forms of wholesome entertainment to fill the working class family’s leisure hours. Among the most popular programs were screenings of recent films of union halls, workers’ clubs, and other gathering places’

• SESI also began organising ever more elaborate ceremonies to mark workers’ graduation from its various courses. When a factory cosponsored a literacy course, for example, the teacher urged the owner not only to attend the closing ceremonies but also to award small gifts to those who achieved certification and provide refreshments for a celebration’

Weinstein on the hygienic housewife

• Regarded women as responsible for facilitating cultural respectability, good health practices, financial management - even sent representatives if asked for money for health treamtent

• SESI offered various cooking, sewing, household management courses

• ‘With varying degrees of subtlety, the home economics course taught their students that housewives, though not wage earners, were largely responsible for the standard of living and quality of life in their homes’

• Many women attended these courses - why? Genuinely relevant? Place for working class gathering and socialisation?

• ‘celebrated women’s current or future roles as wives and mothers while downplaying or denigrating their status as members of the working class’

Weistein on youth socialisation

• Concerned itself with the proper socialisation of working class youth - especially in the gap between formal schooling and factory employment

• May have been a constructed proble, - many worked in their family businesses but preoccupied with ‘abandoned children’ turning to vice streets

• Organised scouting troops, supervised parks, factory schools but where rther modest

Drinot overall on industrialisation and racialisation

• The need for industrialization was widely recognised, but Peruvian elites also feared the ‘spread of subversive ideologies, which led to social unrest’ - ‘the labor question’

• How should they industrialise and make Peru a modern, civilised nation without risking destruction

• Industrialization was understood in a very racialised manner - industrialisation extended to being a ‘cultural aspiration’ of racial improvement

  • National progress was identified with a new man - capacity to transform indigenous people into civilised white and mestizo workers

• It is clear that this conception of citizenship is non-indigenous

Drinot on ‘Two Perus’

•  ‘challenges the binary construction of Peruvian society as two worlds, unconnected and antagonistic, one coastal and white/ mestizo, the other Andean and indigenous; a construction that, for the most part, historians of Peru, particularly those working on its 20th century, and particularly those working on its labor history, have left unchallenged’

• Labor policy was built on racialised assumptions related to regional factors

• ‘The ways in which Peruvian elites envisioned and developed labor policy, and statecraft more generally, as a way to overcome the binary nature of Peruvian society’

Drinot - Labour policy, elites believed that capitalist contradictions created susceptibility to left-wing ideologies, but also believed it was necessary to protect the poor from becoming susceptible

• Labor Section of the Ministry of Development - union agency 

• Barrios obrerors/ worker districts which provided housing

• ‘Restaurantes populares’ - a group of state funded eateries whose function was to provide cheap food for a working class clientele

• Seguro Social Obrero - worker social insurance - ‘provided workers with near comprehensive social insurance and access to free hospitalisation’

Drinot on governmentality

• Influenced by a range of social actors - not just elite interests - part of a a governmental aspiration

• ‘Governmentality therefore usefully captures the process whereby workers came to be seen as a valuable resource that needed to be produced and enhanced’

• become part of statecraft to advance Peru’s national progress - through industrialisation

Drinot - Redeemed Indians were never imagined as an agent of progress, bur rather simply redeemed to move any obstacles

• ‘As they had done since the colonial period, when the category Indian and its associations with backwardness were first established, throughout the period under study the indigenous in Peru challenged their exclusion and negotiated their governmentalisation’

• ‘The exclusion of the Indian has been and is immanent to the project of Peruvian nation-state formation, which was in many ways continues to be premised on the overcoming of indigeneity, that is to say on the de-Indianisation of Peru’

Kublock overall on copper mining and Chile

• The importance of copper mining to the Chilean economy

  • Gives the miners large economic and political influence

• Social scientists have debated the concept of a ‘labor aristocracy’ - the idea of elites among this popular majority suggests Foucaldian understandings of power

• Following the strike in 1973, social scientists increasingly argued that workers in the ‘advanced’ capitalist sectors of dependent economies are concerned with social mobility and the maintenance of their privileged standard of living and are unreceptive to appeals for solidarity with other sectors of the working class’

• 5 ‘in addition, both the ‘vanguard’ and ‘labor aristocracy’ approaches propose normative models of class consciousness that obscure the complicated and contradictory forms of miners’ everyday culture and political practice forged in the specific historical contexts of workplace, home and community’

Kublock - hegemony

• Raymond Williams’ reading of Gramsci -  argues that hegemony is constituted through "structures of feel ing;' the symbolic arrangements through which formal ideology shapes everyday experiences, thoughts, and values. 

• 6 ‘this understanding of hegemony calls our attention to the interplay of ideology, politics and the informal cultural worlds of day-to-day life and underlines the importance of examining the dialectical relationship between ordinary people’s ‘structures of feeling’ and political identity and practice’

• Plurality of consciousnesses and identities - not autonomous or unified identity

Kublock - The development of the North American mining enterprise, the origins of El Teniente’s early workforce, and mine workers’ strategies of resistance to proletarianisation

• Anthropologists have shown how miners and peasants in Latin America employed autonomous village traditions to judge the exploit ative social relations of agrarian or industrial capitalism and then acted collectively to transform them

• Chilean copper miners had no common peas ant traditions or community structures to draw on as they confronted the grim social realities oflabor in a modern capitalist enterprise. 

  • Diverse social origins and part of a transient labour force that searched for employment

• Migration of male workers was accompanied by a parallel movement of single women to the El Teniente copper mine and the informal settlements in search for wage labour

•  Men and women established informal sexual/romantic relationships and par ticipated together in a tumultuous everyday culture. Drinking, fighting, and the expression of an unruly sense of masculine virility shaped the contours of miners' opposition to company and state authority.

Kublock - Following WW1, the copper company enacted repressive labour policies adn a porgram of corporate social welfare - hoped to eliminate workers’ disruptive forms of sociability, transience and labour militancy

• Corporate welfare programs in the EI Teniente mine focused on the regulation of sexuality as the cornerstone of cultural reform and labor discipline. 

• he North American company located the source of workers' instability in the fluid world of working-class gender relations and prescribed the "modern" nuclear family and the domestic space, drawn from a middle-class ideal, as an antidote to male and female workers' transience and disorderly habits. 

• These corporate welfare policies resonated at the national level to the interest of Chilean social reformers in establishing social and labor legislation in response to the labor up heavals of the 1919 postwar recession. 

Kublock - The formation of a permanent working class community in the mining campas and the elaboration of a leftist labour tradition rooted in the history of the northern nitrate mines following the 19301-932 world recession

• The inter national economic crisis dealt a final blow to the nitrate industry that had fueled Chilean economic development since the late nineteenth century.

•  Many former nitrate miners found work in the copper mine and brought with them the experiences of labor conflict and leftist political activism gained in the northern desert. 

• With the inducements provided by the North American company's corporate welfare system, men and women started to marry and form families with greater frequency.

• As they began to make their lives in the mining camps during the 1930S, the labor traditions of the north supplied a coherent, shared symbolic past that served as the basis for the developing community identity of the mining families. 

Kublock - Tensions between accommodation and resistance in the workplace

• Miners built a culture surrounding masculine pride and self assertion, codes of honour and manhood created solidarity and served as the foundation for collective action

  • Sought to assert control over their nonwork lives in such social practices as drinking, gambling and illicit sex, in which they reproduced their masculine work identity and workplace solidarities and expressed opposition to company authority

• But masculine pride was also based in their capacities of labour and work

  • Promise of social mobility and ideal of middle class respectability disseminated in the welfare programs fashioned a new form of masculinity

• ‘Miners’ sense of manhood thus provided the basis for both formal forms of opposition to company authority and workers’ adaption to the company’s demands for production and the organisation of the labour process’

Kublock - Newly formed mining families laid the basis for a powerful union movement during the 1940s

• Looked to the state and the company welfare system

• ‘But to fulfill their aspirations to a better life to make the promises of citizenship, social welfare and middle class respectability material reality, men and women also turned to collective action’

• ‘Miners’ unions drew strength from the intimate ties that bound their families and community together around a set of common interests and in opposition to a shared enemy’

Gotkowitz - Bolivian struggles for land and justice

• The history of indigenous social movements

  • The anticolonial rebellions of the late 18th century - continuity in the modern state

  • Several revolts until the 1958 revolution - several different forms of rural political action such as lobbying, poltitical strikes, assemblies

• Historiography

  • Bolivian revolution is usually associated with class based movements - emphasises rural mobilistiation instead

  • 1940 period of military populism - pact between politicians and Indian and peasant activists

  • Demanded collective and individual rights and representation, articulated their own interpretation of the law

• Following the Chaco War of 1932-1935, a new generaltion of rural leaders emerged who lobbyed against heightened labour oppression on rural estates and continued abuse

  • Indigenous Congress of May 1945 - brought leaders together to discuss grievances and create proposals for reform

• 1947 strikes and uprisings - ‘Indians and peasant rebels envisioned and in some cases enacted a revolutionary transformation of society that augured the end of a state perceived to be ruled by landlords

Gotkowitz - Labor and Servitude on Cochabamba Haciendas

• The Colonaje System: This severe form of service tenantry required resident workers (colonos) to toil on the landlord’s land in exchange for a small subsistence plot (pegujal).

• Service Obligations:

  • Pongueaje: Compulsory, uncompensated domestic service for men, often involving long travel to the landlord's urban residence.

  • Mitanaje: Similar domestic service or shepherding duties required of women, particularly widows and single women.

  • Additional Tasks: Colonos had to provide their own tools, oxen, and manure, and fulfill tasks like repairing irrigation, spinning wool, and delivering messages.

• Hierarchy of Control: Landlords used a mix of non-Indian administrators and appointed Indian authorities (alcaldes, kurakas, hilacatas) to enforce work and discipline.

Gotkowitz - The Chicha Economy and Indigenous Autonomy

• Central Economic Driver: The production of chicha (maize beer) was Cochabamba's primary industry.

• Muko Production: Making muko (chewed corn, a key ingredient) was a major labor burden placed on colonas (women), children, and the elderly.

• Female Entrepreneurs: The industry was largely controlled by chicheras (female entrepreneurs) who managed production and acted as moneylenders.

• Taxation Conflict: Municipalities frequently levied taxes on chicha and muko, leading to widespread disputes over whether indigenous production for private consumption was taxable.

Gotkowitz - Emerging Resistance and the Language of Rights

• Constitutional Appeals: Rural activists increasingly used the 1938 Constitution to demand freedom and rights, specifically citing Article 5 which prohibited uncompensated personal services.

• Shifting Identities: Mobilization merged the category of "worker" with "Indian," emphasizing class while retaining ethnicity.

• Written Agreements: In areas like Ayopaya (e.g., Hacienda Yayani), colonos fought for written labor contracts to limit landlord abuses and standardize duties.

• The Role of Lawyers: Activists often collaborated with sympathetic urban lawyers and leftist parties to draft petitions and navigate the legal system.

Gotkowitz - New Forms of Protest: Sit-Down Strikes

• Huelgas de Brazos Caídos: These "sit-down strikes" involved colonos refusing to work the landlord's fields, instead tending their own plots or withholding the harvest.

• Boycotts and Refusal: Strikes also included withholding grazing fees, refusing pongueaje, and boycotting the muko tax.

• The Power of Rumors: News of "revolutionary laws" allegedly abolishing pongueaje or distributing land spread rapidly, often fueled by ambiguous government circulars or returning migrants.

Gotkowitz - Indigenous Congresses and Urban Alliances

• Labor Links: The Bolivian Confederation of Labor Unions (CSTB) and the Party of the Revolutionary Left (PIR) began direct organizing in the countryside.

• Sucre Congresses (1942–1944): A series of regional indigenous congresses advocated for the abolition of pongueaje, agrarian labor codes, and the review of stolen communal land titles.

• Legacy of the Caciques: These congresses revived the 1920s demands of the cacique apoderado networks, such as the legal recognition of indigenous authorities.

• Military Socialism as a Double-Edged Sword: While new laws gave colonos a legal platform for protest, state officials were often corrupt or unwilling to enforce reforms against the interests of landlords