The historiography of Argentina has traditionally focused on Buenos Aires, with the rest of the country treated as almost an afterthought. This has been especially true of labor history, which has often reflected the centralizing traditions of Argentine unions. Recent trends have begun to reverse this pattern. With the publication first of James P. Brennan’s The Labor Wars in Córdoba, 1955-1976: Ideology, Work, and Labor Politics in an Argentine Industrial City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), and now Mónica Gordillo’s book, we know more about labor in Córdoba in the 1960s than we know about it in the capital. While these two books overlap and present different views, they are complementary in many ways. (The authors have worked together.)
Gordillo has written an intelligent book that attempts to explain the creation of a culture of resistance and confrontation in Córdoba in the period between the overthrow of Perón in 1955 and the Cordobazo of 1969. She does this not to explain the Cordobazo, the large worker-student riot that changed the fate of the Onganía regime, but to explain the radicalization that occurred in the Córdoba labor movement. Gordillo believes that to understand the radicalized perspective of the workers in the 1970s it is not enough to examine the nature of the dominant industry (automobile manufacturing). Here lies her principal difference with Brennan.
Gordillo focuses on the development of the ideological world of the workers, using both extensive written sources and numerous interviews. She looks at the national and local political scenes, as well as the nature of industry and work. She carefully examines the development of unions, both at the national level and in Córdoba. Among other points, she discusses their interaction with governmental structures, particularly their struggle to revive Peronism in a political system that had rejected it. Gordillo emphasizes the desire of the Córdoba unions to remain independent of Buenos Aires. She also examines the growth of the Left within political movements and inside the church. In Córdoba there existed considerable interaction between students and workers. The book ends with an interesting description of the Cordobazo drawn largely from the oral histories of participants.
This book is well done. The two criticisms that I have are contradictory in some ways. First, I would like to have seen an acknowledgment that radicalization was, in part, a worldwide phenomenon, especially among students, and that this undoubtedly contributed to what took place in Córdoba. Second, at times when discussing the workers’ cultural and ideological world, the author relies too much on what happened in Buenos Aires rather than in Córdoba. Undoubtedly this reflects the nature of the secondary sources, but it is problematical.
Despite these caveats, Gordillo has written an interesting and important book that needs to be read by those interested in labor in Latin America, as well as by those interested in the tumultuous Argentina of the 1960s.
