| In a narrative that takes as its departure the world of work on the ships and on the docks during the first half of the twentieth century, this study explores trade union traditions, patterns of migration, ethnicity, urban and civic identities, as well as class conflict and State-labor relations in the port of Buenos Aires. The incidence of ideologies (anarchism, social Catholicism, syndicalism, communism, socialism, conservative nationalism and populism) is measured against the backdrop of everyday life, labor processes and collective action in La Boca, a populous working-class neighborhood located on the shores of the Riachuelo River, and Puerto Madero, a more modern port facility stretching northward to the downtown riverfront area of the city. Applied to an extended period of fifty years, this monographic approach to early trade union formation in the port reveals a startling resiliency, well into the 1940s, of turn-of-the-century anarcho-syndicalist traditions among dockworkers, mariners and merchant seamen. It also assesses the competition they faced from more moderate unions, and their economic and political patrons, for control over hiring and working conditions, as well as for influence over the course of modernization, national development and government-sponsored labor reforms in Argentina. Finally, rather than a radical departure from earlier social aspirations and organizational forms, the emergence of Peronism is cast as the culmination of decades of class conflict, spatial and symbolic turf wars, clashing local traditions and changing patterns of life and work. The dissertation shows that the influence of organized dockworkers, mariners and merchant seamen on Argentine labor history extended far beyond the local quayside community in Buenos Aires, and concludes with an assessment of the relevance of “class” as a heuristic device for understanding the collective memory of workers in the formative years of the modern Argentine State. |
