Introduction

Abstract

The articles in this special issue by María Teresa Fernández-Aceves, Heather Fowler-Salamini, Susan Gauss, and Jocelyn Olcott reflect a new interest in feminist analysis of gender among Latin American labor historians trained in the United States. Together they prompt a reconsideration of the history of the working class, the labor movement, and the corporatist system of state-directed labor relations in twentieth-century Mexico. In addition, while Mexico's historical trajectory has largely been viewed as distinct in Latin America owing to the 1910–1917 revolution and near century-long rule of the official party of the revolution, the focus on gender suggests important commonalities among Latin American countries that experienced significant levels of industrialization during the twentieth century, especially Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. The essays also underline the ways in which the processes of state formation and industrial modernization in post–1930 Latin America bear a striking resemblance to the establishment of welfare states and corporatist labor arrangements in advanced industrial economies in the United States and Europe. The use of feminist analysis to examine the histories of working-class and state formation, the labor process, and capital accumulation during a period of industrial modernization reveals broader histories of class and gender that are international and cannot be understood solely within national histories and historiographies.