Although such classic nineteenth-century authors as Sotomayor Valdes, Domingo Cortés, María Dalence and René Moreno devoted considerable attention to the economic and social developments of the new Bolivian republic, later historians have totally neglected this subject. The works of Alcides Arguedas are exclusively concerned with narrative political history, and except for a chance book such as Casto Rojas’ unique financial history of the nineteenth century, little research has been devoted to this crucial era. Such developments as the rise of modern silver mining at mid-century have not been studied, nor do we know anything of the numerous and massive peasant revolts of the period, save for the work of Condarco Morales on the 1899 altiplano uprising.
Thus the first installment in Guillermo Lora’s projected multivolume history of the Bolivian labor movement is doubly welcome. It not only offers the first systematic research on this topic, but is also the best introduction available to the general economic and social history of nineteenth-century Bolivia. For despite the limited title, Lora is intent on surveying the broad context in which the labor movement developed. His discussion of the conflict over free trade, of Belzú’s economic and social policy, and of the leading silver miners and their companies are the first detailed accounts of these problems in the secondary literature. But the heart of the work remains the exhaustive enumeration and documentation of all the labor organizations, societies, press, and prolabor intellectuals in this period, based on an extraordinary pamphlet survey.
The history of organized labor in Bolivia began under the sponsorship of President Manuel Belzú (1848-1855) with the creation of carpenter and tailor guilds in La Paz. The populist government of Belzú also encouraged the creation of the first labor press and major mechanics’ and artisans’ schools. But the early guilds were dominated by an extreme protectionist mentality and were exclusively the affairs of master shop-owning craftsmen. Thus when several guilds got together to form a Junta Central de Artesanos de La Paz in 1860, they excluded journeymen and apprentices from membership. The same occurred when a similar organization was founded at Oruro in 1876. For the majority of urban artisans, effective organization did not occur until the last decades of the century and then under the direct control of such nonlabor groups as the Masons and the Jesuits. This broader movement, which began with the founding of the Sociedad Fraternal de Artesanos de Socorros Mutuos of La Paz in 1877, was oriented toward mutualist and fraternal goals. Unlike the gremios, however, these societies often included an indiscriminate membership of workers, intellectuals, and even middle-class elements. They were also the first public organizations in Bolivia to have active female participation.
But even with the formation of numerous guilds and fraternal societies in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Bolivian labor movement remained a tiny and extremely conservative affair even by Latin American standards. They had no impact on the vital mining industry, and their membership was confined to a fragment of the national labor force.
In his use of the previously unexploited nineteenth-century pamphlet literature and in his painstaking documentation and research on basic themes of early republican social and economic development, Guillermo Lora has achieved a major breakthrough in this previously neglected subject. While much remains to be done on mining, demography, and the development of the economy in this period, Lora’s study now provides a crucial foundation upon which all future studies will be based.
