Work, Identity, and Protest in 20th Century Latin America. VINCENT PELOSO (ed.): Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003.

Abstract

Vincent Peloso's new edited volume, with thirteen empirical essays and three synthetic chapters, positions itself in an ongoing debate within labor history. Peloso argues in the introduction that using identity as an organizing theme springs from "the historian's turn from economics to culture in the study of Latin American labor history" (xiii). In a 1990 article Ronald Chilcote lamented that "classes and class struggle are being displaced by an emphasis on political pluralism, political organizations, and interest groups." However, as political scientist Kenneth Roberts observes in the volume's final chapter, recent years have seen "a modest revival of interest in class relations and class actors in Latin American scholarship" (324).