Edward Brudney | University of Tennessee Chattanooga (original) (raw)

Publications by Edward Brudney

International Labor and Working-Class History, 2023

This article analyzes the lasting effects of privatization on public-sector telecommunications wo... more This article analyzes the lasting effects of privatization on public-sector telecommunications workers in Argentina's rural interior. I draw on over fifty hours of oral histories carried out from 2015 to 2017 with former ENTel and Telefónica workers in General Pico, in the interior province of La Pampa, Argentina. This unique source base reveals how the material objects themselves acquired symbolic weight in the minds of workers, and how the introduction of new technologies and labor regimes after privatization in 1990 eroded workers' feelings of loyalty toward and ownership over the previously state-run company. This article specifically explores notions of trauma as related to the destruction of the physical materials of work, and the association between that destruction and the mass layoffs that followed. David Harvey's engagement with creative destruction in late capitalism has suggested that "continuous innovation"-whether technological or practical-has meant the devaluation and/or destruction of existing labor relations. I expand this concept to show how this logic of "creative destruction" maps onto spatialized ideas of modernity. The trauma that workers experienced in the 1990s is most productively understood vis-à-vis the unfulfilled promises of "progress" which claimed to bring efficiency, growth, and long-term stability but instead delivered job loss, atomization, and the breakdown of social relations of labor.

Clase obrera y dictadura militar en Argentina (1976-1983): Nuevos estudios sobre conflictividad y cambios estructurales, 2021

Luso-Brazilian Review, 2020

Abstract By the mid-eighteenth century, the Portuguese empire confronted a precipitous decline i... more Abstract

By the mid-eighteenth century, the Portuguese empire confronted a precipitous decline in both its colonial authority and its standing as compared to other European powers. This crisis prompted government officials and public intellectuals to offer diagnoses of and solutions to the current situation. Among these analyses, the Cartas sobre a Educação da Mocidade (Letters on the Education of the Youth) (1760), by António Ribeiro Sanches, provide unique insight into Portugal’s circumstances. Trained as a medical doctor, Ribeiro Sanches spent nearly his entire adult life outside Portugal, and his interactions with Enlightenment philosophy profoundly shaped his opinions of his homeland. To date, the Cartas have most often been associated with the educational aspects of the Pombaline Reforms during the late 1700s. However, this article suggests that the main contribution of this text lies not in its recommendations for educational overhaul, but rather with its emphasis on labor as the mediator of the relationship between the individual and the state. The centrality of work as practice for Ribeiro Sanches’s vision of this relationship, which recent scholarship has argued is fundamental to the evolution of citizenship, distinguishes his contribution from those of his contemporaries. I argue that not only was Ribeiro Sanches’s perspective exceptional in his moment, but also that it anticipated the direction of debates over citizenship during the following decades, as independence swept across the Americas. This article thus both recovers the primary goal of the Cartas and resituates the text within broader conversations on the rise of citizenship and nationhood.

Resumo

Em meados do século XVIII, o império português enfrentou um declínio abrupto em sua autoridade colonial e sua posição em comparação com outras potências europeias. Esta crise levou oficiais do governo e intelectuais públicos a oferecer diagnósticos e soluções para a situação atual. Entre estas análises, as Cartas sobre a Educação da Mocidade (1760), de António Ribeiro Sanches, fornecem uma visão única sobre as circunstâncias de Portugal. Treinado como médico, Ribeiro Sanches passou quase toda a sua vida adulta fora de Portugal e as suas interações com a filosofia do Iluminismo moldaram profundamente as suas opiniões sobre a sua terra natal. Até hoje, as Cartas têm sido mais frequentemente associadas aos aspectos educacionais das reformas pombalinas do século XVIII. No entanto, este artigo sugere que a principal contribuição deste texto não está em suas recomendações para a reforma educacional, mas com sua ênfase no trabalho como mediador da relação entre o indivíduo e o Estado. A centralidade do trabalho como prática para a visão de Ribeiro Sanches dessa relação, que os estudos recentes têm argumentado é fundamental para a cidadania, distingue sua contribuição das de seus contemporâneos. Eu argumento que não apenas a perspectiva de Ribeiro Sanches foi excepcional em seu momento, mas também que antecipou a direção dos debates sobre a cidadania durante as décadas seguintes, à medida que a independência varria as Américas. Este artigo, portanto, recupera o objetivo principal das Cartas e reposiciona o texto em conversas mais amplas sobre o surgimento da cidadania e da nacionalidade.

Labor: Studies in Working-Class History in the Americas, 2019

Journal of Global South Studies, 2019

by analyzing these expansionist campaigns through the lens of the ideology of manifest destiny in... more by analyzing these expansionist campaigns through the lens of the ideology of manifest destiny in the United States. Using the racial, religious, and nationalist concepts constructed in the United States as part of the broader discourse of manifest destiny, I examine both the history of the Conquest of the Desert, focusing on how official narratives from the period created and sustained a notion of alterity, and more recent controversies over claims of "ownership" of the pampas and Patagonia, especially as they relate to ideas of originality and autochthony. The article draws on first-person accounts of the military expeditions of the late nineteenth century and situates these descriptions using literatures on whiteness, ethnicity, and nationalism in Argentina and the United States. I suggest that as a physical, discursive, and even religious space, the frontier became a critical site for national production in both countries. Further, "divine providence" played an integral role in justifying both the need for and the moral imperative of the state's expansionism. This combination of religion and territoriality raises questions about the place of the Indian/el indio in the future imagined nation. I argue that reading these cases together provokes new

Journal of Religion & Society, 2018

This article analyzes how religion shapes Argentine memory of the period of state terror (1976-19... more This article analyzes how religion shapes Argentine memory of the period of state terror (1976-1983). The analysis focuses on the commemorative practices at the Church of Santa Cruz, a target of the former regime’s violence. The article describes the mechanisms through which the church undertakes its commemoration. These processes produce a “martyrological memory” that links the secular political past to core Christian narratives about “the giving of blood” for the sake of justice and “the kingdom of God.” A vision of a reconciled Argentina that centers the oppressed and the martyrs thus emerges.

Revista del Trabajo, 2014

Book Reviews by Edward Brudney

American Historical Review, 2024

Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia examines the century of conflicts, and ultimately wars... more Property, and Revolution in Modern Bolivia examines the century of conflicts, and ultimately wars, over water that led to this auspicious accomplishment in the drought-riddled Cochabamba Valley region from the 1870s through the 2000s. Using purchase agreements and expropriation records, agrarian reform cases, and extensive interviews, Hines argues that everyday Cochabamba communities used collective water engineering, planning, protest, and seizures to break up elite hoarding of water resources and secure water as community property (2). Home to Bolivia's largest agricultural valleys and third-largest city, unpaid laborers built the dams and canals, or hydraulic infrastructure, that channeled water from the mountains to the Cochabamba Valley's agricultural fields for over a century. However, the fight for water in the region begins, as revealed in chapter 1, when elites used a new property rights law that tied water to land ownership amid a major drought in the 1870s to hoard the region's water (21, 30). Formally stripped of legal access, peasant workers continued to build and maintain the region's water infrastructure. Their labor honed a "vernacular hydraulic expertise" that anchored claims of collective ownership in practice over the next four decades (39). What Hines lays out thereafter is a power struggle between elites who owned the water, peasants, Indigenous communities, and urban dwellers who push for expanded water access, and the state that tries to appease both sides. For example, chapter 2 examines how growing urban demands for water pushed the military governments of the 1930s to attempt to implement large irrigation and water expropriation projects to expand urban water access. Yet government officials' unwillingness to challenge large, landed interests undermines these appeasing projects (49-50). In the wake of these failed efforts, neighborhoods regularly protested continued water scarcity and unequal access in the 1930s and 1940s (62). In chapter 3, Hines reveals how revising water policy was central to agrarian reform efforts during Bolivia's 1952 revolution (82). Even when state commitment to reform reached its limits, peasants actively fought to regain water access from large landowners through tireless legal battles in agrarian courts in the 1950s (104). As chapter 4 illuminates, even during Bolivia's dictatorial era in the 1960s-1980s, these diverse groups of water users mobilized to collectively oppose water restrictions and inflated water-use prices through unions and neighborhood committees (107). These early efforts to reclaim water rights laid the historical foundation for the water wars of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the 1990s, a democratic Bolivian government tried to relinquish its responsibility to resolve this standoff between everyday water users and elites by privatizing state

Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina, 2021

Hispanic American Historical Review, 2020

scientists, the qualities for being a good public employee, and the material and subjective condi... more scientists, the qualities for being a good public employee, and the material and subjective conditions believed to be required to become a new professional or an entrepreneur. Conscripts of democracy were then all those men and women involved in reorganizing the labor relationships, those who were "charged with bringing about proper democracy for the Americas" (p. 176).

Conference Presentations by Edward Brudney

SECOLAS Annual Meeting, 2020

This presentation examines the intersection between labor legislation and shop-floor labor relati... more This presentation examines the intersection between labor legislation and shop-floor labor relations in Argentina between the death of Juan Perón in July 1974 and the end of the de facto presidency of General Jorge Rafael Videla in 1981. The March 24, 1976 coup d’état that inaugurated the self-styled Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (Process of National Reorganization) has long been considered an inflection point in Argentina’s recent history. However, I suggest that analyzing the creation, enactment, and application of labor law across this periodization illuminates the goals of the military regime and, more importantly, why the Proceso was unable to achieve those goals. Although the dictatorship sought to redefine the capital-labor relationship, its efforts—and especially its legislative agenda—had limited impact on the day-to-day rhythm of the shop floor. To the extent that Argentine labor relations underwent a significant transformation during the late 1970s, that transformation reflected other factors at least as much, if not more than, the regime’s goals. This paper makes two related arguments. First, I show that this metaphor of the “rules of the game” enjoyed widespread use from the factory floor to the halls of the Ministry of Labor, and that these diverse actors invested the concept with something close to a shared meaning. This, in turn, highlights what the Proceso hoped to accomplish vis-à-vis labor relations. Second, I argue that William Roseberry’s definition of hegemony as a means for controlling conflict offers new insight into why the dictatorship failed to implement its ambitious national reorganization.

Cornell University Latin American History Workshop, 2019

On a sunny afternoon in 1991, in the town of General Pico in La Pampa province, employees at Tele... more On a sunny afternoon in 1991, in the town of General Pico in La Pampa province, employees at Telefónica (formerly the Empresa Nacional de Telecomunicaciones, or ENTel) watched as the computers and machinery on which they had been trained and with which they worked for the previous two decades were hurled from the windows of the company’s main offices into the street below. Some eighteen months earlier, newly-elected President Carlos Menem had helped facilitate the sale of ENTel, the state-run telephone company, to a pair of European enterprises: the French Télécom, which took over the northern half of Argentina, and the Spanish Telefónica, in charge of the country’s southern half. The growing pile of broken technology offered a stark physical representation of the transformation of the relationship between the state and capital, and its consequences for the workers who had made their careers at ENTel.

My research examines this tripartite relationship between state, capital, and labor through the lens of modernization and technology over the second half of the twentieth century. Focusing on the promise of new communications technologies in rural Argentina, I draw on more than fifty hours of oral histories with ex-ENTel (and Telefónica) employees to unpack the transformation of labor regimes over several decades of political, economic, and social upheaval. The history of ENTel has been studied largely within the confines of Argentina’s urban centers, and in particular Buenos Aires, and with special emphasis on the effects of privatization in the 1990s. This project, however, takes a different approach, moving away from the country’s industrial corridor and positing a different periodization that opens new analytical possibilities. Following the longer historical trajectory of state-capital relations, I trace the evolution of this dynamic through a series of civilian and military administrations and consider how technology, and its close association with modernity and progress, influenced perceptions of development and labor for rural public-sector workers. Ultimately, I argue that successive governments used telecommunications as a critical symbol of modernization, and that their failures to fulfil the promises of progress—especially in rural areas—exacerbated historical tensions between the “center” and the “periphery.” For rural workers, the transformation of ENTel from state industry into two private companies epitomized the trauma of this failed possibility.

SECOLAS Annual Meeting, 2019

Between March 24, 1976 and December 1977, the security forces of the self-styled Proceso de Reorg... more Between March 24, 1976 and December 1977, the security forces of the self-styled Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (Process of National Reorganization, or PRN) kidnapped at least nineteen employees from Mercedes Benz Argentina (MBA), fifteen of whom remain disappeared. Over the past three decades, academics and human rights’ advocates have highlighted these moments of state violence, executed with the involvement of MBA management, as paradigmatic examples of how Argentina’s most recent military dictatorship terrorized citizens. Far less studied, however, is the response of these workers to the regime’s campaign of terror. While scholars have suggested that the disappearances of their colleagues effectively broke the oppositional spirit of MBA’s 4,000 workers, I argue that a closer reading of the reconstitution of representative bodies after 1978 indicates a different story. Certainly, the PRN’s violence against MBA employees was horrific, and permanently changed the tenor of shop-floor relations. Yet this does not directly translate to an absence of resistance nor to the “defeat” that is sometimes assumed to have followed this wave of repression. Instead, these workers reformed their internal commission and reopened negotiations with management, even as economic conditions forced the company to reconsider its own position vis-à-vis dialogue with the workforce. Drawing on archival evidence and first-person testimony from former MBA workers, this paper complicates common understandings of how workers respond to state violence and argues for a new interpretation of the complex relationship between the shop floor, the union hall, and corporate headquarters.

AHA Annual Meeting, 2019

The coup d’état that installed the military regime self-styled as the Proceso de Reorganización N... more The coup d’état that installed the military regime self-styled as the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (Process of National Reorganization) (1976-1983) ushered in a period of bloodshed unmatched in modern Argentine history. Scholarship since the 1980s has confronted the legacies and traumas of this repression, often using the tools of oral history to access perspectives and feelings frequently omitted from the historical record. At the same time, questions related to the everyday experiences of Argentines who were not directly impacted by state violence remain at the margins of historical inquiry. This paper interrogates the tensions and paradoxes produced by this specific conjuncture, drawing on a series of four long-form interviews conducted with a prominent former labor leader in 2015. Over the course of nearly eight hours of conversation, numerous inconsistencies regarding details and events surfaced. Rather than dismiss these as simply the failings of memory or see them as evidence of some (un)conscious underlying purpose, I argue that the contradictions between the subject’s and the historian’s interpretations have explicative and analytical value. Discrepancies between the documentary evidence and the subject’s testimony illuminate how we might better understand the consequences of violence on the life histories of those who did not suffer directly, but whose experiences were nonetheless conditioned by these circumstances. In addition, these disconnects highlight important methodological concerns that apply more broadly to historical practice and force us to confront how and why we privilege written over oral sources with respect to critical analysis.

En la mañana del 27 de octubre de 1980, los 800 trabajadores de la fábrica de tractores de Deutz ... more En la mañana del 27 de octubre de 1980, los 800 trabajadores de la fábrica de tractores de Deutz Argentina iniciaron un conflicto laboral que resultaría en la ocupación de la planta lo cual duró casi 100 horas. Enfrentando el anunciado cierre de la fábrica al fin de año, producto de la política económica del Ministro de Economía José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, y con el despido de más de 1,200 colegas desde el golpe de estado del 24 de marzo de 1976. los operarios restantes decidieron lanzar un último esfuerzo para preservar sus trabajos. La empresa, acusándolos de interrumpir la producción, invocó la Ley de Seguridad Industrial, denunciándolos ante la justicia federal por la toma ilegal. Después de cinco días de lucha, el juez asignado al caso decidió no castigar a los trabajadores, y presidió una negociación entre directivos, sindicalistas, y operarios que terminó con un acuerdo decididamente favorable a quienes habían participado en la ocupación.

Este incidente, que hasta ahora ha sido ignorado dentro de estudios de relaciones laborales durante la última dictadura cívico-militar, sugiere un número de asuntos críticos para un mejor entendimiento de este período. Los estudios sobre la clase trabajadora bajo la dictadura han tendido a asumir una ausencia de estructuras legales y/o a centralizarse en cuestiones de activismo de base o represión. El caso de Deutz Argentina desafía ambas suposiciones. Los trabajadores de Deutz Argentina no eran especialmente militantes, y no sufrieron represión ni legal ni ilegal como consecuencia de sus acciones. Además, en distintos formas y momentos el patronal, el sindicato, y los trabajadores mismos intentaron utilizar la ley y las estructuras jurídicas para avanzar su caso. ¿Cómo interpretamos, entonces, este episodio dentro del marco de la historiografía existente? Este trabajo plantea que el conflicto de Deutz Argentina puede servir como un estudio de caso para ayudar a repensar la situación de sectores de la clase obrera bajo condiciones autoritarias. Argumento que, mientras muchos trabajadores industriales se demostraban poco dispuestos a arriesgar sus vidas por ideologías políticas, a pesar de las exhortaciones de los movimientos izquierdistas, la amenaza de perder sus fuentes de trabajo sí los movilizó a tomar medidas drásticas. Enfocando en esto, la historia de Deutz Argentina es un complemento importante que destaca la heterogeneidad de la clase trabajadora y la descomposición de representaciones monolíticas de la última dictadura cívico-militar.

RMCLAS Annual Meeting, 2018

The 1976 coup d’état that ushered in the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (Process of National ... more The 1976 coup d’état that ushered in the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (Process of National Reorganization) marked the onset of the bloodiest period in modern Argentine history. While the dictatorship’s use of extralegal repression has been a frequent object of study, the “legal” mechanisms through which the military attempted to remake the country’s social, political, and economic orders have received far less attention. This paper draws on the considerable legal corpus created during the military regime that aspired to redefine the labor-capital dynamic, and redefine the parameters of citizenship in Argentina. I argue that these laws can be read as more than a mere mask for violence, but instead indicate the vision that some factions of the Armed Forces held for a new and distinct Argentine citizenry. The policies, decrees, and resolutions that limited collective bargaining and workplace organization, set salaries for public- and private-sector workers, and established the number of hours in a standard workweek (among other things) were not simply restrictive, but also productive (or at least aspirationally productive) of a new praxis of citizenship. Labor law proves an especially rich ground for considering these questions because of the particular history of organized labor in Argentina. Work and citizenship have been closely linked for centuries, but following the deliberate imbrication of the labor and new forms of citizenship under Peronism in the 1940s and 1950s, this relationship took on somewhat exceptional characteristics in Argentina. In the wake of the 1976 coup, the military understood the unmaking (or perhaps remaking) of this relationship as critical to their refoundational objective. By analyzing both the enactment and enforcement of labor law after 1976, we can begin to take that objective seriously, and thus better understand its long-term implications and legacies, many of which have endured largely unexamined into the present day.

AAA Annual Meeting, 2017

In the aftermath of the 1976 coup which installed the brutal military dictatorship self-styled as... more In the aftermath of the 1976 coup which installed the brutal military dictatorship self-styled as the Process of National Reorganization (PRN), the new Minister of Economy José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz publicly stated that his aim would be to dramatically reduce Argentina’s public sector. His plan, however, quickly encountered fierce resistance, not only from organized labor, but also from various factions of the Armed Forces. On the one hand, Martínez de Hoz’s free-market liberalism clashed with long-standing traditions of developmentalism which still enjoyed support within the military. On the other hand, having intervened in various state enterprises, officers and officials were also extremely hesitant to surrender their newly acquired positions of power, which could be leveraged for considerable personal gain.

This struggle between the proto-neoliberal “technocracy” and the legacy of developmentalism within the Armed Forces, together with a persistent tendency towards corruption, consistently undermined the objectives of the PRN. Neither Martínez de Hoz, controlling the Ministry of Economy, nor various military authorities who held other high-ranking positions could advance their agendas. Meanwhile, in the middle, military interventors frequently took advantage of this stalemate to grab what they could, while they could. Using this conflict as the background, this paper argues for the necessity of moving past treatments of Argentina’s most recent military regime as a monolithic entity. Instead, I propose that by focusing on these internal dynamics we can promote a (re)consideration of our understandings of how authoritarian governments work, and how we can make sense of their legacies.

On March 24, 1976, the Argentine Armed Forces deposed President Isabel Perón, citing as justifica... more On March 24, 1976, the Argentine Armed Forces deposed President Isabel Perón, citing as justification the breakdown of the nation’s social and political structures, and the recent precipitous economic decline. José Alfredo Martínez de Hoz, the Minister of Economy during the first five years of the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional, took office pledging to rationalize the state sector and dramatically reduce the number of public employees, in an effort to curb rampant inflation and make Argentina competitive in the world market. This project assumed many forms, but despite the continual support of the de facto president, General Jorge Rafael Videla, the so-called plan Martínez de Hoz failed to shrink the public sector in the way he intended.

This paper examines the experiences of workers at the Empresa Nacional de Telecomunicaciones (ENTel) in the town of General Pico, in the province of La Pampa. Drawing on archival and ethnographic work in the province, I explore the changes in daily work routines brought about by the advent of the military regime. Unlike their counterparts in the urban centers of Buenos Aires, Córdoba, and Santa Fe, the ENTel employees in Pico maintained a largely collegial relationship with management during the dictatorship. Even Martínez de Hoz’s efforts had little effect on their daily lives. I argue that this case study offers a significant complementary perspective to research that has focused largely on the experiences of urban laborers, and introduces new and critically important dimensions to our understanding of work during the most recent dictatorship.

International Labor and Working-Class History, 2023

Clase obrera y dictadura militar en Argentina (1976-1983): Nuevos estudios sobre conflictividad y cambios estructurales, 2021

Luso-Brazilian Review, 2020

Abstract By the mid-eighteenth century, the Portuguese empire confronted a precipitous decline i... more Abstract

Resumo

Labor: Studies in Working-Class History in the Americas, 2019

Journal of Global South Studies, 2019

Journal of Religion & Society, 2018

Revista del Trabajo, 2014

American Historical Review, 2024

Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina, 2021

Hispanic American Historical Review, 2020

SECOLAS Annual Meeting, 2020

Cornell University Latin American History Workshop, 2019

SECOLAS Annual Meeting, 2019

AHA Annual Meeting, 2019

RMCLAS Annual Meeting, 2018

AAA Annual Meeting, 2017

This study focuses on the enactment and effects of economic and labor policies during the first f... more This study focuses on the enactment and effects of economic and labor policies during the first four years of Argentina's most recent military dictatorship, the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (1976-1983). Given the historical importance of work as a fundamental criterion for citizenship and political voice, I contend that the regime sough to redraw the ideological boundaries of the nation and redefine what the role of "the worker" would be for this new Argentina. Despite an extensive historiography on violence during the Proceso, the day-to-day operations of the state remain generally uninvestigated. Concentrating on the military government's new labor laws and economic strategies, I argue that the junta attempted to establish a new praxis of citizenship by restructuring the parameters of the practice of work. This research focuses on the labor conflict at the Mercedes-Benz Argentina factory in González-Catán, in the province of Buenos Aires, between 1975 and 1980. Beginning in October 1975, MBA workers engaged in an ongoing struggle with management and the state over the composition of the plant's internal commission. Prior to the advent of the Proceso in March 1976, workers employed a diverse vocabulary that highlighted their social and political voice. After the coup, and the repression that followed, these same workers had to gradually develop a new language of protest, centered on economic concerns. This thesis suggests that the policies of the military government shaped this transformation, which demonstrated the ambitions and consequences associated with redefining citizenship.

Beyond these organizations, numerous individuals gave generously of their time and intellectual e... more Beyond these organizations, numerous individuals gave generously of their time and intellectual energy at various points during this process. In Argentina, I owe thanks to Florencia Osuna, Daniel Lvovitch, Ernesto Bohoslavsky, and the members of the Programa de Historia Contemporánea at the Universidad Nacional General Sarmiento. The PHIC provided a critical space for me to engage in discussion with exciting and emerging scholarship in Argentina, and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to participate. Juan Carlos Torre at the Universidad Torcuato di Tella supported my work on several occasions and helped me think through some of the bigger questions that frame this project. I'm indebted to him for his assistance. Héctor Palomino guided me through my initial forays into the Ministry of Labor and has been a consistent backer throughout. I'm extremely grateful for his support, and for his and Mirta's friendship and hospitality. In General Pico, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to all of the ex-ENTel employees who graciously agreed to sit with me for interviews and informal conversations over three research trips. More than that, I am forever indebted to Alicia Oriani and Santos Torre for welcoming me into their home, for long conversations about their experiences, for facilitating my contacts with their friends and colleagues, and for their incredible kindness. This project could not have happened without them. I also need to thank Juan Pedro Massano for going out of his way to take an interest in my research and taking time to find sources and contacts for me. Finally, Luciana Zorzoli has been a true friend and colleague, and her intellectual production has sparked my own v curiosity and forced me to question my own assumptions and biases. I appreciate her help and friendship. At Indiana University, the number of people to whom I owe thanks goes beyond what's possible to include in this acknowledgments section. However, several individuals merit special recognition. Jason McGraw and Arlene Diaz have consistently supported my work and development since I arrived. Peter Guardino has been steadfast throughout and proved an invaluable sounding board for ideas and concepts, while giving much needed reassurance on several occasions (despite his wild elbows). As Directors of Graduate Studies, Wendy Gamber and Eric Robinson were always available and willing to help with problems large and small, and consistently found resources that were integral to the completion of this dissertation. The History Department staff, and in particular Alexia Bock, Becky Bryant, Nick Roberts, and Deana Hutchins, are incredible and I'm extremely grateful for all of their hard work on behalf of graduate students. And, speaking of graduate students, I've been fortunate to share my experience with some of the smartest and most talented scholars that I can imagine, who also generally recognized those moments when it was necessary to set aside work and find some way to decompress. Although the list is too long to reproduce in its entirety, I want to especially thank Alfio Saitta, Michael Lemon,

Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, Jul 15, 2021

Hahr-hispanic American Historical Review, Nov 1, 2020

Luso-Brazilian Review, 2020

This article examines António Ribeiro Sanches’s Cartas sobre a educação da mocidade (1760) as a c... more This article examines António Ribeiro Sanches’s Cartas sobre a educação da mocidade (1760) as a critical reading of the political and economic crises facing the Portuguese Empire in the mid-eighteenth century. The Cartas have often been associated with the Pombaline Reforms’ educational program during the late 1700s. However, I argue that this text’s main contribution lies with its emphasis on labor as the mediator of the relationship between the individual and the state. The centrality of work for Ribeiro Sanches’s vision of this relationship, which recent scholarship has argued is fundamental to citizenship, distinguishes his intellectual contribution. Not only was Ribeiro Sanches’s perspective exceptional in his moment, it anticipated the direction of debates over citizenship during the subsequent Age of Revolution. This article both recovers an overlooked aspect of the Cartas and resituates the text within conversations on the rise of citizenship and nationhood.

International Labor and Working-Class History

This article analyzes the lasting effects of privatization on public-sector telecommunications wo... more This article analyzes the lasting effects of privatization on public-sector telecommunications workers in Argentina's rural interior. I draw on over fifty hours of oral histories carried out from 2015 to 2017 with former ENTel and Telefónica workers in General Pico, in the interior province of La Pampa, Argentina. This unique source base reveals how the material objects themselves acquired symbolic weight in the minds of workers, and how the introduction of new technologies and labor regimes after privatization in 1990 eroded workers' feelings of loyalty toward and ownership over the previously state-run company. This article specifically explores notions of trauma as related to the destruction of the physical materials of work, and the association between that destruction and the mass layoffs that followed. David Harvey's engagement with creative destruction in late capitalism has suggested that “continuous innovation”—whether technological or practical—has meant the de...

[Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, May 1, 2019

Hispanic American Historical Review, 2020

Labor, 2019

This article examines a series of worker strikes that culminated in the takeover of the Deutz Arg... more This article examines a series of worker strikes that culminated in the takeover of the Deutz Argentina tractor factory in October 1980. These mobilizations occurred under the most violent military regime in modern Argentine history—the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (Process of National Reorganization, 1976–83)—yet they did not provoke legal or extralegal repression. Instead, over a week of highly visible conflicts, the Deutz workforce challenged the company’s decision to close the plant and publicly attacked the dictatorship’s economic policies and failure to defend Argentina’s national interest. This episode has been largely ignored within the history of labor relations during the Proceso. In this article, I advance two related arguments. First, I suggest that while several factors contributed to the lack of violence, the workers’ discourse demands serious analysis and shows important continuities with historical Peronist ideologies. Rather than passive victims or heroic revo...

Journal of Global South Studies, 2019

Commemorative Literacies and Labors of Justice