Descripción:
In Contested Communities Thomas Mifler Klubock analyzes the experiences of the El Teniente copper miners during the first fifty years of the twentieth century. Describing the everyday life and culture of the mining community, its impact on Chilean politics and national events, and the sense of self and identity working-class men and women developed in the foreign-owned enclave, Klubock provides important insights into the cultural and social history of Chile.

Klubock shows how a militant working-class community was established through the interplay between capitalist development, state formation, and the ideologies of gender. In describing how the North American copper company attempted to reconfigure and reform the work and social-cultural lives of men and women who migrated to the mine, Klubock demonstrates how struggles between labor and capital took place on a gendered field of power and reconstituted social constructions of masculinity and femininity. As a result, Contested Communities describes more accurately than any previous study the nature of grassroots labor militancy, working-class culture, and everyday politics of gender relations during crucial years of the Chilean Popular Front in the 1930s and 1940s.


CONTENTS:

Preface......vii

Acknowledgements......xi

Introduction......1

Part I. Gender and the Process of Proletarianization, 1904-1938......17

1. The Formation of a Modern Mining Enterprise......19

2. Labor Strife, Social Welfare, andt eh Regulation of Working-Class Sexuality......49

3. Community, Politiecs, and the Invention of a Labor Tradition......81

Part II. Gender, Culture, and the Politics of Everyday Life......101

4. Miners and Citizens. The State, the Popular Front, and Labor Politics......103

5. Conflict and Accommodation at Work. Masculinity and the Labor Process inside the Mine......127

6. ‘Rotos Macanudos’ and Football Stars, Popular Culture, Working-Class Masculinity, and Opposition in the Mining Camps......155

7. Women, Marriage, and the Organization of Sexuality......188

Part III. Mena dn Women on Strike: The Mining Community and the Demise of Populism, 1942-1948......223

8. Workers’ Movements, Women’s Mobilization, and Labor Politics......225

9. The Radicalization of Working-Class Politics, United States Intervention, Miners’ Strikes, and the Crisis of Populism......254

Conclusion......282

Notes......297
Bibliography......337
Index......347