Author: Robert L. Smale
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822973901
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
On June 4, 1923, the Bolivian military turned a machine gun on striking miners in the northern Potosi town of Uncia. The incident is remembered as Bolivia's first massacre of industrial workers. The violence in Uncia highlights a formative period in the development of a working class who would eventually challenge the oligarchic control of the nation. Robert L. Smale begins his study as Bolivia's mining industry transitioned from silver to tin; specifically focusing on the region of Oruro and northern Potosi. The miners were part of a heterogeneous urban class alongside artisans, small merchants, and other laborers. Artisan mutual aid societies provided miners their first organizational models and the guidance to emancipate themselves from the mine owners' political tutelage. During the 1910s both the Workers' Labor Federation and the Socialist Party appeared in Oruro to spur more aggressive political action. In 1920 miners won a comprehensive contract that exceeded labor legislation debated in Congress in the years that followed. Relations between the working class and the government deteriorated soon after, leading to the 1923 massacre in Uncia. Smale ends his study with the onset of the Great Depression and premonitions of war with Paraguay—twin cataclysms that would discredit the old oligarchic order and open new horizons to the labor movement. This period's developments marked the entry of workers and other marginalized groups into Bolivian politics and the acquisition of new freedoms and basic rights. These events prefigure the rise of Evo Morales—a union activist born in Oruro—in the early twenty-first century.
I Sweat the Flavor of Tin
Author: Robert L. Smale
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822973901
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
On June 4, 1923, the Bolivian military turned a machine gun on striking miners in the northern Potosi town of Uncia. The incident is remembered as Bolivia's first massacre of industrial workers. The violence in Uncia highlights a formative period in the development of a working class who would eventually challenge the oligarchic control of the nation. Robert L. Smale begins his study as Bolivia's mining industry transitioned from silver to tin; specifically focusing on the region of Oruro and northern Potosi. The miners were part of a heterogeneous urban class alongside artisans, small merchants, and other laborers. Artisan mutual aid societies provided miners their first organizational models and the guidance to emancipate themselves from the mine owners' political tutelage. During the 1910s both the Workers' Labor Federation and the Socialist Party appeared in Oruro to spur more aggressive political action. In 1920 miners won a comprehensive contract that exceeded labor legislation debated in Congress in the years that followed. Relations between the working class and the government deteriorated soon after, leading to the 1923 massacre in Uncia. Smale ends his study with the onset of the Great Depression and premonitions of war with Paraguay—twin cataclysms that would discredit the old oligarchic order and open new horizons to the labor movement. This period's developments marked the entry of workers and other marginalized groups into Bolivian politics and the acquisition of new freedoms and basic rights. These events prefigure the rise of Evo Morales—a union activist born in Oruro—in the early twenty-first century.
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822973901
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Book Description
On June 4, 1923, the Bolivian military turned a machine gun on striking miners in the northern Potosi town of Uncia. The incident is remembered as Bolivia's first massacre of industrial workers. The violence in Uncia highlights a formative period in the development of a working class who would eventually challenge the oligarchic control of the nation. Robert L. Smale begins his study as Bolivia's mining industry transitioned from silver to tin; specifically focusing on the region of Oruro and northern Potosi. The miners were part of a heterogeneous urban class alongside artisans, small merchants, and other laborers. Artisan mutual aid societies provided miners their first organizational models and the guidance to emancipate themselves from the mine owners' political tutelage. During the 1910s both the Workers' Labor Federation and the Socialist Party appeared in Oruro to spur more aggressive political action. In 1920 miners won a comprehensive contract that exceeded labor legislation debated in Congress in the years that followed. Relations between the working class and the government deteriorated soon after, leading to the 1923 massacre in Uncia. Smale ends his study with the onset of the Great Depression and premonitions of war with Paraguay—twin cataclysms that would discredit the old oligarchic order and open new horizons to the labor movement. This period's developments marked the entry of workers and other marginalized groups into Bolivian politics and the acquisition of new freedoms and basic rights. These events prefigure the rise of Evo Morales—a union activist born in Oruro—in the early twenty-first century.
Conscript Nation
Author: Elizabeth Shesko
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822987384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Military service in Bolivia has long been compulsory for young men. This service plays an important role in defining identity, citizenship, masculinity, state formation, and civil-military relations in twentieth-century Bolivia. The project of obligatory military service originated as part of an attempt to restrict the power of indigenous communities after the 1899 civil war. During the following century, administrations (from oligarchic to revolutionary) expressed faith in the power of the barracks to assimilate, shape, and educate the population. Drawing on a body of internal military records never before used by scholars, Elizabeth Shesko argues that conscription evolved into a pact between the state and society. It not only was imposed from above but was also embraced from below because it provided a space for Bolivians across divides of education, ethnicity, and social class to negotiate their relationships with each other and with the state. Shesko contends that state formation built around military service has been characterized in Bolivia by multiple layers of negotiation and accommodation. The resulting nation-state was and is still hierarchical and divided by profound differences, but it never was simply an assimilatory project. It instead reflected a dialectical process to define the state and its relationships.
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822987384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255
Book Description
Military service in Bolivia has long been compulsory for young men. This service plays an important role in defining identity, citizenship, masculinity, state formation, and civil-military relations in twentieth-century Bolivia. The project of obligatory military service originated as part of an attempt to restrict the power of indigenous communities after the 1899 civil war. During the following century, administrations (from oligarchic to revolutionary) expressed faith in the power of the barracks to assimilate, shape, and educate the population. Drawing on a body of internal military records never before used by scholars, Elizabeth Shesko argues that conscription evolved into a pact between the state and society. It not only was imposed from above but was also embraced from below because it provided a space for Bolivians across divides of education, ethnicity, and social class to negotiate their relationships with each other and with the state. Shesko contends that state formation built around military service has been characterized in Bolivia by multiple layers of negotiation and accommodation. The resulting nation-state was and is still hierarchical and divided by profound differences, but it never was simply an assimilatory project. It instead reflected a dialectical process to define the state and its relationships.
Potosi
Author: Kris Lane
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520383354
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
"For anyone who wants to learn about the rise and decline of Potosí as a city . . . Lane’s book is the ideal place to begin."—The New York Review of Books In 1545, a native Andean prospector hit pay dirt on a desolate red mountain in highland Bolivia. There followed the world's greatest silver bonanza, making the Cerro Rico or "Rich Hill" and the Imperial Villa of Potosí instant legends, famous from Istanbul to Beijing. The Cerro Rico alone provided over half of the world's silver for a century, and even in decline, it remained the single richest source on earth. Potosí is the first interpretive history of the fabled mining city’s rise and fall. It tells the story of global economic transformation and the environmental and social impact of rampant colonial exploitation from Potosí’s startling emergence in the sixteenth century to its collapse in the nineteenth. Throughout, Kris Lane’s invigorating narrative offers rare details of this thriving city and its promise of prosperity. A new world of native workers, market women, African slaves, and other ordinary residents who lived alongside the elite merchants, refinery owners, wealthy widows, and crown officials, emerge in lively, riveting stories from the original sources. An engrossing depiction of excess and devastation, Potosí reveals the relentless human tradition in boom times and bust.
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520383354
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
Book Description
"For anyone who wants to learn about the rise and decline of Potosí as a city . . . Lane’s book is the ideal place to begin."—The New York Review of Books In 1545, a native Andean prospector hit pay dirt on a desolate red mountain in highland Bolivia. There followed the world's greatest silver bonanza, making the Cerro Rico or "Rich Hill" and the Imperial Villa of Potosí instant legends, famous from Istanbul to Beijing. The Cerro Rico alone provided over half of the world's silver for a century, and even in decline, it remained the single richest source on earth. Potosí is the first interpretive history of the fabled mining city’s rise and fall. It tells the story of global economic transformation and the environmental and social impact of rampant colonial exploitation from Potosí’s startling emergence in the sixteenth century to its collapse in the nineteenth. Throughout, Kris Lane’s invigorating narrative offers rare details of this thriving city and its promise of prosperity. A new world of native workers, market women, African slaves, and other ordinary residents who lived alongside the elite merchants, refinery owners, wealthy widows, and crown officials, emerge in lively, riveting stories from the original sources. An engrossing depiction of excess and devastation, Potosí reveals the relentless human tradition in boom times and bust.
The Struggle for Natural Resources
Author: Carmen Soliz
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826366406
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Book Description
The Struggle for Natural Resources traces the troubled history of Bolivia's land and commodity disputes across five centuries, combining local, regional, national, and transnational scales. Enriched by the extractivism and commodity frontiers approaches to world history, the book treats Bolivia's political struggles over natural resources as long-term processes that outlast immediate political events. Exploration of the Bolivian case invites dialogue and comparison with other parts of the world, particularly regions and countries of the so-called Global South. The book begins by examining three Bolivian resources at the center of political dispute since the early colonial period, namely land, water, and minerals. Carmen Soliz, Rossana Barragán, and Sarah Hines show that, as in the colonial and early republican past, these resources have remained the focus of political contention to the present day. Until the end of the nineteenth century, Bolivia's battle over natural resources was primarily concentrated in the highlands and inter-Andean valleys. Beginning in the 1860s, the bicycle and soon the automobile industries triggered demand for natural rubber found in the heart of the Amazon. José Orsag analyzes the impact of this extractive economy at the turn of the twentieth century. The book concludes by examining two resources that are central to understanding the last century of Bolivia's history. Kevin Young examines the fraught business of hydrocarbons, and Thomas Grisaffi analyzes the coca/cocaine circuit. Each chapter studies the social dynamics and political conflicts that shaped the processes of extraction, exchange, and ownership of each of these resources
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826366406
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337
Book Description
The Struggle for Natural Resources traces the troubled history of Bolivia's land and commodity disputes across five centuries, combining local, regional, national, and transnational scales. Enriched by the extractivism and commodity frontiers approaches to world history, the book treats Bolivia's political struggles over natural resources as long-term processes that outlast immediate political events. Exploration of the Bolivian case invites dialogue and comparison with other parts of the world, particularly regions and countries of the so-called Global South. The book begins by examining three Bolivian resources at the center of political dispute since the early colonial period, namely land, water, and minerals. Carmen Soliz, Rossana Barragán, and Sarah Hines show that, as in the colonial and early republican past, these resources have remained the focus of political contention to the present day. Until the end of the nineteenth century, Bolivia's battle over natural resources was primarily concentrated in the highlands and inter-Andean valleys. Beginning in the 1860s, the bicycle and soon the automobile industries triggered demand for natural rubber found in the heart of the Amazon. José Orsag analyzes the impact of this extractive economy at the turn of the twentieth century. The book concludes by examining two resources that are central to understanding the last century of Bolivia's history. Kevin Young examines the fraught business of hydrocarbons, and Thomas Grisaffi analyzes the coca/cocaine circuit. Each chapter studies the social dynamics and political conflicts that shaped the processes of extraction, exchange, and ownership of each of these resources
Blood of the Earth
Author: Kevin A. Young
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477311548
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
Conflicts over subterranean resources, particularly tin, oil, and natural gas, have driven Bolivian politics for nearly a century. “Resource nationalism”—the conviction that resource wealth should be used for the benefit of the “nation”—has often united otherwise disparate groups, including mineworkers, urban workers, students, war veterans, and middle-class professionals, and propelled an indigenous union leader, Evo Morales, into the presidency in 2006. Blood of the Earth reexamines the Bolivian mobilization around resource nationalism that began in the 1920s, crystallized with the 1952 revolution, and continues into the twenty-first century. Drawing on a wide array of Bolivian and US sources, Kevin A. Young reveals that Bolivia became a key site in a global battle among economic models, with grassroots coalitions demanding nationalist and egalitarian alternatives to market capitalism. While US-supported moderates within the revolutionary regime were able to defeat more radical forces, Young shows how the political culture of resource nationalism, though often comprising contradictory elements, constrained government actions and galvanized mobilizations against neoliberalism in later decades. His transnational and multilevel approach to the 1952 revolution illuminates the struggles among Bolivian popular sectors, government officials, and foreign powers, as well as the competing currents and visions within Bolivia’s popular political cultures. Offering a fresh appraisal of the Bolivian Revolution, resource nationalism, and the Cold War in Latin America, Blood of the Earth is an ideal case study for understanding the challenges shared by countries across the Global South.
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477311548
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
Conflicts over subterranean resources, particularly tin, oil, and natural gas, have driven Bolivian politics for nearly a century. “Resource nationalism”—the conviction that resource wealth should be used for the benefit of the “nation”—has often united otherwise disparate groups, including mineworkers, urban workers, students, war veterans, and middle-class professionals, and propelled an indigenous union leader, Evo Morales, into the presidency in 2006. Blood of the Earth reexamines the Bolivian mobilization around resource nationalism that began in the 1920s, crystallized with the 1952 revolution, and continues into the twenty-first century. Drawing on a wide array of Bolivian and US sources, Kevin A. Young reveals that Bolivia became a key site in a global battle among economic models, with grassroots coalitions demanding nationalist and egalitarian alternatives to market capitalism. While US-supported moderates within the revolutionary regime were able to defeat more radical forces, Young shows how the political culture of resource nationalism, though often comprising contradictory elements, constrained government actions and galvanized mobilizations against neoliberalism in later decades. His transnational and multilevel approach to the 1952 revolution illuminates the struggles among Bolivian popular sectors, government officials, and foreign powers, as well as the competing currents and visions within Bolivia’s popular political cultures. Offering a fresh appraisal of the Bolivian Revolution, resource nationalism, and the Cold War in Latin America, Blood of the Earth is an ideal case study for understanding the challenges shared by countries across the Global South.
Handbook Global History of Work
Author: Karin Hofmeester
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110424703
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 719
Book Description
Coffee from East Africa, wine from California, chocolate from the Ivory Coast - all those every day products are based on labour, often produced under appalling conditions, but always involving the combination of various work processes we are often not aware of. What is the day-to-day reality for workers in various parts of the world, and how was it in the past? How do they work today, and how did they work in the past? These and many other questions comprise the field of the global history of work – a young discipline that is introduced with this handbook. In 8 thematic chapters, this book discusses these aspects of work in a global and long term perspective, paying attention to several kinds of work. Convict labour, slave and wage labour, labour migration, and workers of the textile industry, but also workers' organisation, strikes, and motivations for work are part of this first handbook of global labour history, written by the most renowned scholars of the profession.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110424703
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 719
Book Description
Coffee from East Africa, wine from California, chocolate from the Ivory Coast - all those every day products are based on labour, often produced under appalling conditions, but always involving the combination of various work processes we are often not aware of. What is the day-to-day reality for workers in various parts of the world, and how was it in the past? How do they work today, and how did they work in the past? These and many other questions comprise the field of the global history of work – a young discipline that is introduced with this handbook. In 8 thematic chapters, this book discusses these aspects of work in a global and long term perspective, paying attention to several kinds of work. Convict labour, slave and wage labour, labour migration, and workers of the textile industry, but also workers' organisation, strikes, and motivations for work are part of this first handbook of global labour history, written by the most renowned scholars of the profession.
Hemispheric Indigeneities
Author: Miléna Santoro
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496206622
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 447
Book Description
Hemispheric Indigeneities is a critical anthology that brings together indigenous and nonindigenous scholars specializing in the Andes, Mesoamerica, and Canada. The overarching theme is the changing understanding of indigeneity from first contact to the contemporary period in three of the world’s major regions of indigenous peoples. Although the terms indio, indigène, and indian only exist (in Spanish, French, and English, respectively) because of European conquest and colonization, indigenous peoples have appropriated or changed this terminology in ways that reflect their shifting self-identifications and aspirations. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, this process constantly transformed the relation of Native peoples in the Americas to other peoples and the state. This volume’s presentation of various factors—geographical, temporal, and cross-cultural—provide illuminating contributions to the burgeoning field of hemispheric indigenous studies. Hemispheric Indigeneities explores indigenous agency and shows that what it means to be indigenous was and is mutable. It also demonstrates that self-identification evolves in response to the relationship between indigenous peoples and the state. The contributors analyze the conceptions of what indigeneity meant, means today, or could come to mean tomorrow.
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1496206622
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 447
Book Description
Hemispheric Indigeneities is a critical anthology that brings together indigenous and nonindigenous scholars specializing in the Andes, Mesoamerica, and Canada. The overarching theme is the changing understanding of indigeneity from first contact to the contemporary period in three of the world’s major regions of indigenous peoples. Although the terms indio, indigène, and indian only exist (in Spanish, French, and English, respectively) because of European conquest and colonization, indigenous peoples have appropriated or changed this terminology in ways that reflect their shifting self-identifications and aspirations. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, this process constantly transformed the relation of Native peoples in the Americas to other peoples and the state. This volume’s presentation of various factors—geographical, temporal, and cross-cultural—provide illuminating contributions to the burgeoning field of hemispheric indigenous studies. Hemispheric Indigeneities explores indigenous agency and shows that what it means to be indigenous was and is mutable. It also demonstrates that self-identification evolves in response to the relationship between indigenous peoples and the state. The contributors analyze the conceptions of what indigeneity meant, means today, or could come to mean tomorrow.
Fields of Revolution
Author: Carmen Soliz
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822988100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
Fields of Revolution examines the second largest case of peasant land redistribution in Latin America and agrarian reform—arguably the most important policy to arise out of Bolivia’s 1952 revolution. Competing understandings of agrarian reform shaped ideas of property, productivity, welfare, and justice. Peasants embraced the nationalist slogan of “land for those who work it” and rehabilitated national union structures. Indigenous communities proclaimed instead “land to its original owners” and sought to link the ruling party discourse on nationalism with their own long-standing demands for restitution. Landowners, for their part, embraced the principle of “land for those who improve it” to protect at least portions of their former properties from expropriation. Carmen Soliz combines analysis of governmental policies and national discourse with everyday local actors’ struggles and interactions with the state to draw out the deep connections between land and people as a material reality and as the object of political contention in the period surrounding the revolution.
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822988100
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
Fields of Revolution examines the second largest case of peasant land redistribution in Latin America and agrarian reform—arguably the most important policy to arise out of Bolivia’s 1952 revolution. Competing understandings of agrarian reform shaped ideas of property, productivity, welfare, and justice. Peasants embraced the nationalist slogan of “land for those who work it” and rehabilitated national union structures. Indigenous communities proclaimed instead “land to its original owners” and sought to link the ruling party discourse on nationalism with their own long-standing demands for restitution. Landowners, for their part, embraced the principle of “land for those who improve it” to protect at least portions of their former properties from expropriation. Carmen Soliz combines analysis of governmental policies and national discourse with everyday local actors’ struggles and interactions with the state to draw out the deep connections between land and people as a material reality and as the object of political contention in the period surrounding the revolution.
The Three Deaths of Cerro de San Pedro
Author: Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469671115
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325
Book Description
This is a history of precious-metals extractivism as lived in Cerro de San Pedro, a small gold- and silver-mining district in Mexico. Chronicling Cerro de San Pedro's operations from the time of the Spanish conquest to the present, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert transcends standard narratives of boom and bust to envision a multicentury series of mining cycles, first operated under Spanish rule, then by North American industry, and today in the post-NAFTA world of transnational capitalism. The depletion of a mine did not mark the end of its life, it turns out. Evolving technology accelerated the flow of matter and energy moving through the extractive systems of exhausted mines and revived profitability over and over again in Mexico's mining districts. Studnicki-Gizbert demonstrates how this serial reanimation of a non-renewable resource was catalyzed by capital and supported by state policy and ideology and how each new cycle imposed ever more harmful consequences on both laborers and natural ecologies. At the same time, however, miners and their communities pursued a contending vision—a moral ecology—that defended the healthy reproduction of life and land. This book's breathtakingly long view brings important perspective to environmental justice conflicts around extraction in Latin America today.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469671115
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325
Book Description
This is a history of precious-metals extractivism as lived in Cerro de San Pedro, a small gold- and silver-mining district in Mexico. Chronicling Cerro de San Pedro's operations from the time of the Spanish conquest to the present, Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert transcends standard narratives of boom and bust to envision a multicentury series of mining cycles, first operated under Spanish rule, then by North American industry, and today in the post-NAFTA world of transnational capitalism. The depletion of a mine did not mark the end of its life, it turns out. Evolving technology accelerated the flow of matter and energy moving through the extractive systems of exhausted mines and revived profitability over and over again in Mexico's mining districts. Studnicki-Gizbert demonstrates how this serial reanimation of a non-renewable resource was catalyzed by capital and supported by state policy and ideology and how each new cycle imposed ever more harmful consequences on both laborers and natural ecologies. At the same time, however, miners and their communities pursued a contending vision—a moral ecology—that defended the healthy reproduction of life and land. This book's breathtakingly long view brings important perspective to environmental justice conflicts around extraction in Latin America today.
Origins of the Mass Party
Author: Edwin Ackerman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197576508
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Book Description
Mexico and Bolivia in comparative perspective and the sociology of party formation -- Dispossession and the mass party -- The emergence of the PRI in Mexico -- The failure of party formation in Bolivia -- Dispossession and party formation in broader comparative perspective : Germany's SPD and the (absent) British Labour Party.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197576508
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 209
Book Description
Mexico and Bolivia in comparative perspective and the sociology of party formation -- Dispossession and the mass party -- The emergence of the PRI in Mexico -- The failure of party formation in Bolivia -- Dispossession and party formation in broader comparative perspective : Germany's SPD and the (absent) British Labour Party.