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Oral History and the Factory Study: New Approaches to Labor History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Peter Winn
Peter Winn*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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The study of Latin American labor history is at a crossroads. It is now an established field, with a growing body of scholars and research and opportunities for major advances. At the same time, it is in danger of isolating itself from promising intellectual and methodological currents and confining itself to institutional chronologies and ideological controversies. To avert this danger and take advantage of these opportunities, Latin American labor history must both become more fully the history of labor and transcend the limitations of that definition.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , 1979 , pp. 130 - 140
Copyright
Copyright © 1979 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

1.

Except where noted otherwise, this paper is based upon my research in the business, personnel, and union archives of the Yarur cotton textile factory in Santiago and, in particular, upon more than two hundred oral history interviews with its past and present blue- and white collar workers, supervisors and technical personnel, managers and owners, as well as other interviews with labor, political, and business leaders. It is also based upon my research in various Chilean government archives (Ministry of Labor, Corporación de Fomento, Superintendencia de Sociedades Anónimas, judicial and notarial) and in my reading of legislative debates and the contemporary press.

References

Notes

2. See, for example, the works of Moises Poblete Troncoso, of which his volume with Ben Burnett, The Rise of the Latin American Labor Movement (New Haven, 1960) is the most accessible, for a liberal anticommunist interpretation of this kind. Other surveys in this genre are Robert J. Alexander, Organized Labor in Latin America (New York, 1965) and Victor Alba, Politics and the Labor Movement in Latin America (Stanford, 1969). Interpretive surveys from a socialist perspective are offered by Jorge Barría Seron in several works, the most recent and comprehensive of which is his El movimiento obrero en Chile (Santiago, 1971). A communist view of the nineteenth century, Hernán Ramírez Necochea's Historia del movimiento obrero en Chile (Santiago, 1956) is useful as are Barría's Los movimientos sociales de Chile desde 1910 hasta 1926 (Santiago, 1960), Trayectoria y estructura del movimiento sindical chileno, 1946–1962 (Santiago, 1963), and Historia de la CUT (Santiago, 1971). Also interesting are the interpretive essays of Marcelo Segall, Desarrollo del capitalismo en Chile (Santiago, 1953) and Julio Cesar Jobet, Ensayo crítico del desarrollo económico-social de Chile (Santiago, 1955). Mention should also be made of Enrique Reyes' work on the nitrate industry, intended as a first step toward a regional history of the Norte Grande, El desarrollo de la conciencia proletaria en Chile: el ciclo salitrero (Santiago, 1970). A convenient summary of the literature is provided in Alan Angelí, Politics and the Labour Movement in Chile (London, 1972), while a critical evaluation of the state of knowledge in the field is given in Kenneth Erickson, Patrick Peppe, and Hobart A. Spalding, Jr., “Research on the Urban Working Class and Organized Labor in Argentina, Brazil and Chile: What is Left to Be Done?,” LARR 9, no. 2 (Summer 1974):115–42.

3. For wages and prices, see Peter Gregory, Industrial Wages in Chile (New York, 1967); Markos Mamalakis and Clark Reynolds, Essays on the Chilean Economy (Homewood, Illinois, 1965); and Mamalakis' four volumes of unpublished historical statistics at the Yale Economic Growth Center library. The best analysis of strike patterns can be found in Manuel Barrera, “Perspectiva histórica de la huelga obrera en Chile,” Cuadernos de la Realidad Nacional (Santiago), 9 (Sept. 1971). Voting behavior of Chilean workers is discussed in James Petras and Maurice Zeitlin, El radicalismo político de la clase trabajadora chilena and in Petras' article, “The Working-Class Vote in Chile: Christian Democracy versus Marxism,” in Workers and Managers in Latin America, S. M. Davis and L. W. Goodman, eds. (Lexington, Mass., 1972). It is also assessed from a very different perspective in several more conservative studies, which are conveniently summarized in James Prothro and Patricio Chaparro, “Public Opinion and the Movement of the Chilean Government to the Left, 1952–1972,” Journal of Politics (1974):2–43.

4. For labor relations, see, for example, James Morris, Elites, Intellectuals and Consensus: A Study of the Social Question and the Industrial Relations System in Chile (New York, 1966) and J. Samuel Valenzuela, “The Chilean Labor Movement: The Instituationalization of Conflict,” in Chile: Politics and Society, Arturo and J. Samuel Valenzuela, eds. (New Brunswick, N.J., 1976), pp. 135–71. For labor and political parties, see James Petras, Politics and Social Forces in Chilean Development (Berkeley, 1969) and especially Angelí, Politics and the Labour Movement in Chile, in addition to the works cited in the previous note on voting behavior and the Peppe dissertation cited in the following note.

5. The most illuminating biographies are Julio Cesar Jobet's broadly conceived Recabarren y los orígenes del movimiento obrero y del socialismo chileno (Santiago, 1955) and the autobiography of Elias Lafertte, Vida de un comunista, 2d ed. (Santiago, 1971). Among the most interesting analyses based upon survey research are Patrick V. Peppe, “Working-Class Politics in Chile” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia Univ., 1971) and “The Aristocracy of Labor Thesis: Relative Deprivation and Working-Class Consciousness in Chile” (unpublished MS., 1973); Andrew Zimbalist and Juan Guillermo Espinosa, Economic Democracy: Workers' Participation in Chilean Industry, 1970–1973 (New York, 1978); and Jacques Zylberberg and Christian Lalive d'Epinay, “Dimensiones ideológicas de la conciencia de clase” (Cuadernos de Investigación, No. 5, Univ. de Concepción, 1973) and “Dichotomie sociale et pluralisme culturel: La desperasion politique de la classe ouvrière chilienne,” Paper presented to the IXth World Political Science Congress, Montreal (Aug. 1975).

6. William S. Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town (Chicago, 1965).

7. For a summary of other aspects of my research at the Yarur mill, see my “Workers into Managers: Worker Participation in the Chilean Textile Industry,” in J. Nash, J. Dandler, and N. Hopkins, eds., Popular Participation in Social Change (The Hague, 1976), pp. 577–601, and “Loosing the Chains: Labor and the Chilean Revolutionary Process, 1970–1973,” Latin American Perspectives 3, no. 1 (Winter 1976):70–84. For a fuller exploration of these themes, see my forthcoming book, Yarur: The Chilean Revolution from Below.

8. For state-of-the-art reports on oral history in Latin America, see James W. Wilkie, “Postulates of the Oral History Center for Latin America,” The Journal of Library History (Jan. 1967):45–55, and “Alternative Views in History: Historical Statistics and Oral History,” in Research in Mexican History, Richard E. Greenleaf and Michael C. Meyer, eds. (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1973), pp. 52–62; Eugenia Meyer, “Oral History in Mexico and Latin America,” Oral History Review (1976):56–61, and with Alicia Oliveta de Bonfil, “La historia oral: origen, metodológia, desarrollo y perspectivas,” Historia mexicana (Oct.-Dec. 1971):372–87; George P. Browne, “Oral History in Brazil Off to an Encouraging Start,” Oral History Review (1976):53–55; Donald McCoy, “University of Kansas Oral History Project in Costa Rica,” LASA Newsletter (March 1973):36–37; and Lyle Brown, “Methods and Approaches in Oral History: Interviewing Latin American Elites,” Oral History Review (1973):77–86.

9. Although an expensive reel-to-reel recorder will produce a superior recording, a good cassette machine with a built-in condenser microphone is generally adequate. With nonelite subjects, moreover, the presence of a large tape recorder and visible microphone may inhibit and distort the interview. A small cassette recorder with a built-in microphone is much easier for most subjects to ignore or forget.

10. Theodore Rosengarten, All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (New York, 1974).