Recent events in Latin have underscored the political impor tance of the urban working class, whether as protagonists of social protest or as targets of military repression. At the same time, the development of promis ing new approaches to the study of urban workers in Europe and the United States has transformed a neglected subject into a frontier of scholarship, an example which has begun to inspire a new generation of Latin Americanists. This conjunction of political concern and scholarly opportunity promp ted a workshop on Urban Class and Social Protest in Latin America at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., on November 30 and December 1,1978. The workshop was convened at the intiative of Eugene Sofer and Alexander Wilde of the Center. Eighteen specialists from the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Cuba, and Italy participated in the meeting. Most of them contributed papers, which were circulated in advance of the gathering and which will be available from the Center as Working Papers. The workshop's underlying hope was that bringing together some of the leading students of the urban working class in Latin with representa tive practitioners of the new labor studies in Europe and the United States would facilitate an assessment of the state of the field, an exploration of the most promising new approaches, and a definition of the most important ques tions for future research. Although the colloquium did not fulfill all of these expectations, it gave promise of important new developments in the field. A mixture of the old and the new in labor studies, the workshop itself exemplified the Janus-headed character of contemporary scholarship. Al though several examples of new approaches were presented, most of the papers were limited to the traditional focus on unions, leaders, and parties. The workshop prospectus, prepared by Sofer, had encouraged participants to abandon this older perspective in favor of the concern with culture and cons ciousness viewed from below that typifies the new labor studies in Europe and the United States. It was striking how difficult this reorientation proved to be in practice. In some cases, the spirit was willing but the pull of tradition was