http://www.history.umd.edu/Faculty/DWilliams/Spring04/HIST251/paper2.html
The second writing assignment is due at the beginning of lecture on Wednesday, May 5, 2004 [ New Due Date ]. Your paper should follow all the conventional formatting guidelines (i.e. typed; double-spaced; reasonable margins and fonts; stapled; numbered pages). Binders are not necessary. Late papers will be subject to the late policy stated in the syllabus.
Rough drafts are actively encouraged. You are encouraged to seek out assistance from the Writing Center.
Do not hesitate to call upon Professor Williams, Ricardo López, or Sarah Sarzynski for guidance.
On February 24, 1947, Argentine President Juan Domingo Perón issued a "Declaration of Workers' Rights." Although the "rights" described in the Declaration applied solely to the Argentine working classes, the document might be seen as typical of populist labor and social policy throughout Latin America in the 1940s and 1950s.
Drawing upon the critical arguments about the lives of working-class women and men, presented in the assigned readings in The Gendered Worlds of Latin American Women Workers, critically analyze the 1947 Declaration.
In your analysis, treat the Declaration an idealized vision of the workers' rights and working-class life. Read this ideal against the historical experiences of working class people in the meatpacking plants of Berisso, Argentina, the industrial belt outside São Paulo, Brazil, and in the copper mines of El Teniente in Chile.
Begin with a thesis that states how accurately you believe the ideals of the 1947 document corresponded to the lived experience of the working classes during the populist era, and then draw upon the assigned readings to demonstrate how and where ideal and lived experienced related to one another.
HINT: In language typical of populist discourse, Perón's 1947 Declaration treats Argentine workers as individuals or as an undifferentiated collective. Class, ethnicity, gender, family status, and occupation have no place in defining the rights of the worker. In the lived experience, as John French and Daniel James tell us in the first chapter of The Gendered Worlds, gender, in fact, had a deep impact on how "rights" were experienced. Closely reread the Introduction The Gendered Worlds to see how and why we must understand populist "rights" in relation to factors such as gender, marital status, class, ethnicity, and/or occupation.
A translation of the "Declaration of Workers' Rights" appears on pp. 234-36 in John Charles Chasteen and James A. Wood, eds. Problems in Modern Latin American History: A Reader [on Course Reserves].
A slightly different translation appears online at
http://edsall-historypage.org/html/workers_bill.html
You may use either version, with
the caution that the online translation uses a British English that may
sound slightly strange to ears attuned to Standard American English.
Popular culture is a special concern for historians who write about the qualities of "revolution" in modern Mexican political history. Alan Knight looks to various cultural practices among everyday people to analyze the formation of the post-Revolutionary state in the 1920s and 1930s. Eric Zolov looks at rock-and-roll music and other manifestations of counterculture to analyze the breakdown of the "Revolutionary Family" in the 1950s and 1960s.
Drawing upon the Knight and Zolov readings, write a critical assessment of the cultural projects associated with revolution in modern Mexico. Important dimensions to these cultural projects, raised in the readings, concern religious practice, family life, educational policy, sport, popular music, and patriotic rituals.
Your essay should begin with a thesis about the cultural dimensions to "revolutionary" politics in post-1917 Mexico. The thesis should frame an argument to the question: what is the significance of popular culture in defining the "Revolution"? The body of the essay should demonstrate how the evidence and arguments presented in the assigned readings support your argument.
HINT: Closely read the opening section of Knight's Hispanic American Historical Review article, where he describes "the cultural project of the nascent revolutionary state" coming out of a generation of struggles between the new state and civil society. Read the introduction to Zolov's Refried Elvis, which describes challenges to a patriarchal "cultural framework" imposed by the official party of the Revolution. These passages point directly to the question of culture within a politics of revolution in modern Mexico.