Niños trabajadores y vida cotidiana en Medellín, 1900–1930

Abstract

García Londoño’s study of Colombia’s leading industrial center identifies the initial decades of the twentieth century as a critical period of change in both attitudes and legislation concerning working children. During those years, youth in Medellín began to be seen less as little adults of the “colonial” environment and more as the distinct children of the “modern” city. The author seeks to illustrate the impact of those changes in both the workplace and social institutions that attended to the specialized interests of minors. García Londoño is particularly interested in children who worked in the emerging factory system and in ambulatory jobs in the city.Niños trabajadores y vida cotidiana contains three chapters and an extensive appendix of legislation on child labor. The city doubled in population between 1900 and 1930, largely due to the arrival of immigrants from surrounding areas, seeking jobs in the emerging industrial plants and in the coffee processing industry. These immigrants brought traditional attitudes toward child labor into the city, whose inhabitants shared similar views. Despite a steady rate of population growth throughout the entire period, only the 1920s witnessed significant changes in the urban infrastructure, improvements in the standards of living, and a marked expansion of the labor force. Children below the age of 15 constituted approximately 6 percent of the documented workforce through most of this period.The Antioquian legislature created an “Office of Factory Inspectors” in 1918 at the urging of the Catholic Church and, especially, Jesuits associated with the Social Action movement. The archives of these “factory police” provide García Londoño with his most valuable information, as oversight of child labor was the responsibility of these inspectors. The church’s concern with morality in the work-place generated data on social relations within this early phase of industrialization and helped forward the segregation of child and adult laborers. The author’s use of these archives to document the church’s concern for the educational, moral, and social conditions of child laborers constitutes one of the strengths of the book. So too is his attention to street workers—shoe shiners, fruit venders, and coffee sellers—that are often absent from labor studies.Attitudes toward child laborers began to change in the 1920s, in large part due to church efforts to separate child and adult laborers. Numerous legislative acts on child welfare, education, and work conditions, including the 1924 Declaration on the Rights of Children, are reproduced in the appendix. A greater linkage between the political process that generated this legislation and social changes would have been valuable.This slender volume accomplishes its stated goal of placing child labor within the daily life of a changing urban context but the project, which began as a master’s thesis, needed additional research to fulfill its promise. The volume is, nevertheless, a source of useful information, especially when used in conjunction with Ann Farnsworth-Alvear’s Dulcinea in the Factory. Together these two works provide a solid overview of child labor patterns in this era.