This special issue on the working classes and urban public space presents readers with an opportunity to view new scholarship at the intersection of urban and working-class history and to explore the spatial dimensions of class, race, and gender analysis. The authors of the essays present us with important case studies of how the working classes in Latin America, Europe, and the United States defined, contested, and occupied public spaces, urban terrain designated for common or public transportation, communication, and economic exchange uses. In doing so, they define and implement the concepts of public space and the public sphere from a range of theoretical and methodological approaches, including those of urban sociology and cultural analysis. In all of the essays, public space has both political and rhetorical dimensions. Further, the essays analyze how working-classmen and women claimed these spaces–markets, streets, public squares, and churches–for their own use and how they defended this class terrain politically through public protest and debate.

For the residents of the former model town of Pullman, Illinois, 1994 was an important year. In May, 100 years earlier, a strike had broken out that pitted workers at the Pullman Car Works against George M. Pullman and the company that bore his name. Before the strike finally collapsed in August, it shutdown railroad traffic across much of America, brought federal troops into Chicago and cities as far away as Los Angeles, and led to the imprisonment of Eugene V. Debs, the president of the American Railway Union (ARU). It also brought to a close the long-standing debate on the most famous of the company’s social experiments: the model town located on Chicago’s far south side. Since 1880, George Pullman had trumpeted the architecturally and socially crafted town and life inside it as solutions for the problems of urban, industrial America, and large numbers of observers had concurred with that evaluation (Wright 1884; Smith 1995: 177–270; Reiff and Hirsch 1989: 104–6). For almost as long, its critics had excoriated the town as representing the worst excesses of a capitalist society where one man and his company could dominate every aspect of a worker’s life in their dual roles as landlord and employer (Ely 1885; Carwardine 1973 [1894]).

The history of the city in twentieth-century Latin America can be seen as a long contest over the exercise of urban public space. While the nature of this space is often less physical than it is social and situational, the struggle between different elements of the city to manipulate its politics and control its daily life has often been violent, leaving deep imprints in the collective memories of places as culturally and physically diverse as Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Havana, Bogotá, and Rio de Janeiro.

If approached from the perspective of contested space, the urban milieu offers an intriguing site for the historian interestedin exploring changing relations of power, class conflict, opposing visions of the future, breakdowns of social order, gendered spaces, health and disease, visual culture, spectacle and symbolic codes, and ultimately, the creation of community. Yet until the 1980s, most Latin American historians who were interestedin these themes confined their studies to the countryside. As late as 1975, Jorge Hardoy (1975:44) could write that “the urban history of the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth is virtually unknown, in spite of the extremely rich material left to us by innumerable travelers, scientists, and men of state.” While historians and social scientists working from the 1950s through much of the 1970s delineated the complex relations between peasant villages and national states, the ideologies of rural rebellion, and the sources of identity and community in a countryside transformed by the demands of export capital, cities in twentieth-century Latin America were accorded secondary treatment, sometimes at the level of popular anecdotal narratives.

The politics of public space are often conceptualized in terms of social geography. Scholars have shown how the crowd’s invasion of municipal spaces, the transgression of local ethnic boundaries, or the rituals of particular street festivals have structured political protest. Public space can also be discussed in more general terms. Space has always served as a means of pressuring state or local authority, an arena in which subaltern groups—women, workers, sansculottes— expressed and enforced their moral economies. By the nineteenth century, these immemorial uses of public space had undergone significant change. In many cases, riots and charivari were complemented by soldierly public marches, quiet meetings, and well-disciplined strikes.This respectable use of public space was linked to subaltern groups’ increasing exploitation of a new form of political authority: that of public opinion and public debate, the realm of the “bourgeois public sphere.”

In 1908 Señora Teodora Muñoz Viuda de Trejo, with the assistance of a public scribe, wrote to the city government regarding her business selling cakes on the streets of Mexico City. An inspector for the Department of Slaughterhouses and Markets had recently told her that as a vendor of prepared food she could no longer conduct business on the streets. This directive, if carried out, would have dire consequences for Señora Muñoz Viuda de Trejo.In her fourth letter to municipal authorities she wrote, I have mailed three letters and all without a favorable outcome. Today that circumstances compel me, I have made myself vulnerable once again to scorn, but a secret voice tells me to have faith. … Señor Governor, I have been a vendor of cakes since Señor Benito Juárez governed, then Señor Lerdo de Tejada came to power; and I continued making a living without interruption after our current president rose to power. I didn’t meet with any set-backs until three years ago when they took from me three licenses with which I supported myself. … I suffer an ailment of my arms; eight months ago I lost my only daughter who supported me, and she left me with three orphaned children—you see, she was widowed. And so, finding myself in this situation I am obliged to plead to the father of us the poor, that he concede what would be for me a fortune, that I be allowed to sell my cakes, and God will compensate you for this act of nobility. Your humble servant, Teodora Muñoz Viuda de Trejo.(AHCM 1910. 1735: 777)

In August 1927, the Virgin Mary made a surprise appearance in Providence, Rhode Island. Her image mysteriously hovered on the wall of a building on Federal Hill, the city’s central Italian American neighborhood. Streets were filled and businesses disrupted as crowds assembled to regard the phenomenon. When the Narragansett Electric Company removed the bulb from a nearby street lamp, the image disappeared, but thousands of believers continued to assemble nonetheless.The Providence Journal finally sent a reporter to Federal Hill to get to the bottom of the mystery. Several onlookers told the reporter that Mary had appeared in Providence because God was unhappy about the impending execution of Italian radicals Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (Providence Journal [PJ] 10 August 1927).

Two political cartoons from the 1905 Chicago Tribune portrayed how some elements in society viewed the rise of a powerful Teamsters Union.On 29 April 1905, the front page cartoon depicted a husky teamster engaged in a sympathetic strike while the caption read, “The Dictator in His Old Act of Blocking Commerce” (Figure 1). A month later, on 3 June 1905, a cartoon played on the coincidence of the June 1905 uprising in Russia and a grand jury investigation of Teamster strike leaders in Chicago. The title caption read, “The Grand Dukes of Russia and the Grand Dukes of Chicago” (Figure 2). Both cartoons emphasized the theme of irresponsible power—either that of a dictatorship or of an unprincipled grand duke. Teamster leaders were tyrants, these images said.The sphere in which this irresponsible power was wielded extended beyond the realm of union affairs, and the relay the true menace conveyed by these images.They asserted that Teamster leaders held it in their power to stop the flow of business activity in Chicago.

In the early evening of 3 June 1943, just as the sun set over a city darkened by a blackout, about 50 sailors stationed at the Naval Reserve Training School in Los Angeles stormed through the mostly Mexican American neighborhoods that lay between the school andd owntown L.A. Their actions that night, which consistedm ostly of stripping zoot suits off young civilian men, set off more than a week of rioting as thousands of military personnel poured into Los Angeles from the surrounding bases and attacked anyone wearing zoot suits. The Los Angeles Police Department did nothing to stop the rioting servicemen, claiming that they lacked jurisdictional authority, and instead jailed hundreds of young men (mostly Mexican American but also black and white) “for their own protection.” It was not until the Army and Navy commanders in southern California took seriously the difference between “revelry” and riot and canceled military leave that the rioting stopped.

Nicknaming his city “Dear Old Lady Thrift,” Milwaukee Journal writer Richard Davis chastised city leaders for failing to build a “great city.” His unflattering portrait pictured post–World War II Milwaukee as a “plump and smiling city . … [sitting] in complacent shabbiness on the west shore of Lake Michigan like a wealthy old lady in black alpaca taking her ease on the beach.” He continued, “All her slips are showing, but she doesn’t mind a bit” (Davis 1947: 189, 191). Reprinted in the Milwaukee Journal two weeks before voters went to the polls to decide if the city would reverse its debt-free policy to finance postwar development, Davis’s depiction warned that Milwaukee was a chaotic andin efficient metropolis in danger of falling behind(“Not So Fair Is America’s Fair City” Milwaukee Journal [hereafter MJ], 16 March 1947). Her thriftiness bordered on stinginess, her complacency slipped into indolence, and her neglected femininity bespoke disorder. City leaders’ frugality, rooted in a tradition of cautious municipal fiscal policies, big city problems mismatched with small town attitudes, and public “indifference,” Davis contended, threatened the postwar city.