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Ann Farnsworth-Alvear has written an elegant, theoretically sophisticated analysis of the industrialization process in Medellín’s textile mills during the first half of the twentieth century. The Colombian case constitutes an important study both for the similarities and differences that distinguished it from other Latin American industrial experiments. Medellín’s mills were among the first to develop in Latin America, became one of the region’s largest producers, and at their height (the 1940s and 1950s) provided one of the few Latin American examples of secure blue-collar employment and potential mobility for thousands of urban workers. In contrast to the majority of other Latin American mills, moreover, Medellín’s textile sector was distinctive in that it depended on an overwhelmingly female workforce during nearly four decades and was largely funded and owned by local, rather than foreign capital. Within the broader context of Colombian labor history the case of Medellín has also stood out as one notable for the apparent absence of militancy among workers and the seeming endurance of a paternalistic ethic of employer-driven control over the mills. Through a careful reconstruction of workers’ lived factory experiences and company policies, however, Farnsworth-Alvear challenges and modifies this narrow perception of employer-worker dynamics in Medellín’s textile sector.Farnsworth-Alvear identifies two crucial turning points in the history of Antioquia’s mills. The first occurred between 1935 and 1940 when militant unionization efforts targeted previously unorganized textile workers. The second took place in the decade of the 1950s when technological innovations and the rise of newly trained industrial engineers redefined the structure of production and worker-management relations in the mills. Although the events of these two periods ultimately benefited industrialists by enabling them to establish a form of gendered discipline in their factories, Farnsworth-Alvear nonetheless consistently reminds her readers that workers played a critical role in shaping factory life and that industrialists’ power was both contingent and constantly renegotiated. The actions of workers rather than the desires of employers, for instance, were crucial in spurring the emergence of an alliance between Antioqueño industrialists, local authorities, and Catholic social reformers (both lay and religious) intended to stem what was perceived as a growing Communist threat. Indeed, as the author persuasively demonstrates, it was not until structural, ideological, and cultural factors— both domestic and international—converged in the late 1930s that industrialists found it possible to impose their will on the shop floor. Even when factory owners succeeded in developing a labor discipline based on the ideal of female workers’ chastity (la moral ), moreover, Farnsworth-Alvear notes that women workers defied factory regulations and elite attempts to define their identity solely in relation to their conformity to a bourgeois code of sexual propriety.While in principle I find persuasive the author’s argument that women workers conformed to la moral in order to keep their jobs but did not necessarily internalize or adopt elite notions of female sexual propriety, not all the author’s evidence supports such a conclusion. Women workers at the only two mills that were not owned by Antioqueños (Telsa and Tejicondor) and where employment was not predicated upon conformity to la moral, nonetheless went to great pains during their interviews to attribute “misconduct” to women other than themselves. The emphatic satisfaction with which many of the women interviewed highlighted their ability to remain single, buy their own homes, secure employment and a pension, support their extended families, and maintain their independence from men also suggests the vastness of these achievements and how deeply engrained were gendered beliefs regarding the moral danger posed by female independence to Antioqueño society as a whole. Indeed, it was the insidious pervasiveness of the values and preconceptions associated with la moral that made it work. This, however, is a minor criticism of what in all other respects is a work that sets a new standard for excellence in labor and social history.Farnsworth-Alvear’s study reflects the theoretical and substantive concerns of an emergent body of excellent, recent Latin American labor histories in which the structural factors shaping labor history are not considered separately from cultural and social processes. The author’s use of gender as a category of analysis, for example, is particularly insightful and pathbreaking, while her methodological approach enables her to make concrete what might otherwise have remained theoretical babble. Farnsworth-Alvear draws on an impressive and broad variety of sources, including previously untapped factory personnel records, extensive interviews with workers and employers, church and municipal records, and factory supervisor reports. As a result, this work makes evident the ways in which the industrialization process in Medellín was linked to broader regional and international developments while also carefully revising some of the accepted wisdom regarding industrialization in “developing” parts of the globe. Farnsworth-Alvear ably uses the Medellín case to rethink, for instance, unresolved debates regarding the wisdom of Latin America’s adoption of import-substitution (ISI) policies and the ideological and material origins of industrialization in the region. While the author concedes the significance of external influences in determining the shape of the textile industry in Medellín, she also convincingly shows that the industrialization process was ultimately the result of a complex intersection of local, national, international and personal interests and possibilities. In fact, perhaps the most innovative aspect of this study lies in its unrelenting attention to contradiction and nuance and in its insistence on dealing seriously with the problem of historical contingency.Dulcinea in the Factory deserves to be widely read. While many of the basic facts relating to the development of Medellín’s textile industry have been covered in studies written in Spanish by scholars such as Fernando Botero Herrera, Luz Gabriela Arango, Mauricio Archila and Alberto Mayor Mora, Farnsworth-Alvear is the first to undertake a systematic analysis of the mills over time from the perspective of gender and in English. This study will interest scholars of comparative labor history, Colombia, social history, gender history and theory. The writing and analysis is also happily lucid and engrossing, making it ideal for adoption in both undergraduate and graduate courses.
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