Cities Of Hope: People, Protests, And Progress In Urbanizing Latin America, 1870-1930

Cities of Hope

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Cities of Hope People, Protests, and Progress in Urbanizing Latin America, 1870-1930

Edited by

Ronn Pineo and James A. Baer

Jfestiwew Irntss A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. Printed in the United Stales of America. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Copyright © 1998 by Westview Press, A Member of the Perseus Books Group Published in 1998 in the United States of America by Westview Press, 5500 Central Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80301-2877, and in the United Kingdom by Westview Press, 12 Bid's Copse Road, Cumnor Hill, Oxford OX2 9JJ

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cities of hope: people, protests, and progress in urbanizing Latin America, 1870-1930 / edited by Roen Pineo and James A. Baer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8133-2443-2 (he) —-ISBN 0-8133-2444-0 (pb) 1. Working class—Latin America—Political activity. 2. Urbanization—Latin America. 3. City and town life—Latin America. 4, Working class—Housing-—Latin America, 5. Working class—Medical care—Latin America. I. Pineo, Ronn R, 1954— . II. Baer, James A. HD81J0.5.C56 1998 322.4'4'098—dc21

97-45103 CIP

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed library Materials 239.48-1984.

PERSUES PERSEUS

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To my parents, Martha P. Baer and Charles A. Baer, whose support and love have been with me always James A. Baer To Ardis and Tommy Ronn Pineo

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Contents

List of Illustrations Foreword, Samuel L. Baily Acknowledgments Introduction, James A, Boer and Ronn Pineo

ix xi xiii I

1 Political Impulses: Popular Participation in Formal and Informal Politics, Bogota, Colombia, David Sowell

2 Dangerous Streets: Trolleys, Labor Conflict, and the Reorganization of Public Space in Montevideo, Uruguay, Anton Rosenthal

3 Mexico City: Popular Classes and Revolutionary Politics, John Lear

4 Viva La Revolution Social! Postrevolutionary Tenant Protest and State Housing Reform in Veracruz, Mexico, Andrew Grant Wood

5 Buenos Aires: Housing Reform and the Decline of the Liberal State in Argentina, James A, Boer

129

6 Civilizing the City of Kings: Hygiene and Housing in Lima, Peru, David S. Parker

153

7 Public Health Care in Valparaiso, Chile, Ronn Pineo

179

8 The Sick and the Dead: Epidemic and Contagious Disease in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sam Adamo

218

9 The Cities of Panama: Sixty Years of Development, Sharon Phillipps CoUazos

240

10 Urbanization, the Working Class, and Reform, Ronn Pineo and James A, Boer

258

About the Editors and Contributors Index

275 277 vli

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Illustrations

Tables 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6

Comparative Latin American urban population growth: 1791-1914 Births and deaths in Bogota, 1877-1892 Comparative male occupational structure, Bogota, 1851,1888 Comparative female occupational structure, Bogota, 1851,1888 Manufacturing and factory workforce, Bogota, 1870-1978 Trends in cottage shop and factory employment in manufactures, Bogota, 1944-1945 to 1973

4.1

Population of Port of Veracruz, 1878-1930

5.1 5.2

Unemployment percentages: Argentina, 1912—1918 Emigrants in excess of immigrants per year: Argentina, 1914-1918 Cost of living, rent, and real wages: Argentina, 1910-1922 Strike activity and participation: Argentina, 1910-1917

5.3 5.4 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 8.1

Total patients treated and total number of hospitals in Chile, selected years, 1860-1950 Infant mortality in Valparaiso, selected years, 1897-1925 Infant mortality in Chile, selected years, 1885-1950 Deaths and death rates in Valparaiso, selected years, 1854-1925 Deaths and death rates m Chile, selected years, 1850-1930 Comparative urban death rates, Valparaiso and selected cities, selected years, 1854-1925 Comparative death rates, Chile and selected nations, selected years, 1876-1925 Intercensal population growth in Rio de Janeiro, 1872-1920

17 17 19 19 20 20 91 136 136 136 137 189 200 201 202 203 206 207 219

9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4

Illustrations

Periods of economic boom and bust in Panama Population and population growth rates of the cities of Panama and Colon Workers on the French efforts to build a canal; Panama Employees in the U.S. Panama Canal construction

243 244 247 250

See Also

35 Must Visit Places In Towson

Figures 8.1 8.2 8.3

Mortality in Rio de Janeiro, 1904-1939 Tuberculosis mortality in Rio de Janeiro, 1904—1926 Deaths from diarrhea and enteritis in Rio de Janeiro, 1904-1926

229 231 232

Photos The collision of public spaces The dangerous streets Heron Proal Members of the tenant syndicate, 1923 Members of the tenant syndicate, 1923 A quebrada in Valparaiso, Chile, 1914 An ascensor in Valparaiso, Chile, 1916 Milk carriers in Valparaiso, Chile, 1923

39 39 97 105 105 183 184 193

Maps Latin America Montevideo, Uruguay, about 1930 Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1900 Valparaiso, Chile, about 1894

xiv 35 133 181

Foreword Samuel I. Baily

Although cities have always been important to the societies of Central and South America, they have been especially so since the last quarter of the nineteenth century. At that time the rapid growth in the export economies of the region stimulated an unprecedented increase in the pace of urbanization, and this phenomenon has continued with some fluctuation ever since. Because of improved health conditions the existing local populations expanded. In addition, between 1870 and 1930 millions of foreign immigrants (primarily Italians, Spaniards, and Portuguese) flocked to Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Sao Paulo, and to a lesser extent to other urban areas. Subsequently millions of migrants from the rural sectors of these countries moved to the cities and contributed increasingly to their growing populations. Today Latin America is a predominantly urban area and has some of the largest cities in the world. In the twenty-first century, Latin America will contain even more of the world's largest cities. The populations of the urban areas of Latin America grew so rapidly during the past century and a quarter primarily because the cities held out the promise of jobs and economic advancement. To many a move to the cities seemed to be the best option to improve one's economic position, but there were no guarantees that those who came would be able to take advantage of the available opportunities. Clearly there was opportunity for some, but not necessarily for all. Much depended on which city they moved to, when they moved, the nature of the labor market at the time, the skills they had, and who else was in the city to compete with them. Despite the wide variation in personal fortunes, a sufficient number of individuals succeeded well enough that others continued to believe in the promise and to move to the cities. Pineo, Baer, and their colleagues offer valuable insights into the nature of urban life in nine Latin American cities of various sizes and types at the turn of the past century. They are concerned primarily with the living conditions of working people, how working people responded to the problems they encountered, and what collective strategies were most successful, in addressing these problems. They skillfully show the constant tension between, on the one hand, the promise and opportunity of the city and, on the other, the reality of city life, which rewarded some but not others. The growing number of urban dwellers confronted strucxi

xii

Foreword

tures (labor and housing markets, wages, prices) over which they had little control, but they were not helpless. They protested against bad working and living conditions and fought to improve them. Combined, the chapters in this volume provide a very solid basis for understanding the impact of urbanization on the working classes of Latin American cities and the variety of their responses to their situations. One of the major contributions of this book is to draw attention to the importance of consumer- as well as job-related issues for the urban working classes. We are presented with detailed information on housing and health conditions and on working-class responses to them in a number of places. For example, we see a pattern of a specific type of protest regarding housing. Between 1907 and 1925 working-class residents were so angered by housing conditions in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Veracruz, Mexico City, and Panama City that they informally organized rent strikes. In Buenos Aires (1921) and Veracruz (1923) this informal workingclass organization was sufficient to encourage the governments to become involved and to pass rent laws. Although only some of the numerous strikes and other forms of protest were successful, the authors conclude that the working classes seemed less threatening to the elites when they organized as consumers and therefore were more likely to achieve their objectives in that context. This collection contributes much to our knowledge and understanding of the impact of urbanization on the working classes of Latin America and their efforts to improve their living and working conditions. It is essential reading for those concerned with the contemporary cities of the area and their problems, for these problems, clearly rooted in the period around the turn of the century, are ably discussed in this book.

Acknowledgments Many individuals have helped the authors in preparing this book. Among those who have provided the most assistance are the National Endowment for the Humanities, for introducing the authors through a Summer Seminar and for providing additional funding through Summer Stipends and Study Grants; David Rock at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Barbara Tenenbaum and the staff at the Hispanic Division at the Library of Congress; Barbara Ellington; Sam Baily; and Elizabeth Lambert Johns, chair of the Social Science and Public Service Division of Northern Virginia Community College, Alexandria Campus. James A, Boer and Ronn Pineo

xiii

Latin America, Reproduced and adapted by Elizabeth F, Paskey from Cathryn L. Lombardi and John V. Lombardi, with K, Lynn Sterner, Latin American History: A Teaching Atlas (Madison, Wise.: Conference on Latin American History, University of Wisconsin Pre$$, 1983).

xiv

Introduction James A. Baer

and Ronn Pineo

This collaborative book brings together new research, analysis, and comparison on a critically important but little studied topic: the dawn of modern urbanization in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Latin America, We have focused our attention on the ordinary people of these cities, the working men and women who faced the task of dealing with the ramifications of the broad social, political, and economic transformations that were taking place all around them. This book offers a sense of what life was like for these urban residents, examining the conditions they confronted and exploring their experiences. We consider the myriad ways that these people responded to the problems of urban life and analyze how these actions affected the politics and the dynamics of urban reform at the time. Our goal is to offer a deeper understanding of the links between urban conditions, the informal politics of urban working men and women, and the process of urban social reform. Cities are places of excitement. In the cities that we have built one can find nearly everything people have invented that make life most exhilarating. Seemingly all of these creations are offered up, are pressed upon us at the very same time in the city. Cities present opportunities: a better chance for getting work, for meeting people, or for hearing the latest news. But more, cities provide opportunities that cannot exist elsewhere. In cities one can find work in rare, even odd, specializations; meet people who share an unusual, even peculiar, interest or hobby; and find fully and loudly expressed a bewildering cacophony of novel, even bizarre, ideas. The noise, the music, the odors, the food, the criminals, the lovers—the city. Cities are all of us at our best and worst. Cities may best be distinguished from their rural surroundings by emphasizing several key characteristics, each of which may be thought of as being set on a continuum from urban to rural. Of course, cities are places of more people, of higher population density, and of greater building density. But more than that, cities are places of functional specialization: in "law, government, religion or economic exchange" but not farming or mining.' Cities are places where the hands and face of the clock have eclipsed the sun and the seasons in marking the periods of our lives. 1

James A. Baer and Ronn Pineo

Background: The Urban Traditions of Latin America For Latin America cities have long been of paramount importance. In both the Hispanic and pre-Columbian traditions, the city served as a critical economic, social, and political center. In medieval Spain cities obtained fueros (special legal rights) that included taxation and law-making privileges, and the vecinos (citizens of the cities) guarded these prerogatives jealously. Indeed, Spanish citizenship was not of the nation but of one's municipality. Wherever the Spanish went, they established new towns and ruled the countryside from their cities. Even prior to the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, cities already functioned as great centers of civilization and empire. Cuzco, the Inca capital in the Peruvian Andes, served as the center of an empire that spanned nearly all of the western side of South America. In Cuzco the ruling Inca lords brought together and enjoyed the tributes collected from many subject peoples. The Inca mandated that ail local chiefs make a yearly pilgrimage to Cuzco and required that the sons of the chiefs receive their schooling in Cuzco. The Aztec city of Tenochtitlan in the Valley of Mexico was a vast city of more than 200,000 inhabitants, with many great pyramids and temples, The Aztec capital developed as the religious, political, military, and economic center of an empire that stretched to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico on the east and to the Pacific coast on the west. Tenochtitlan was larger than many European cities of the 1500s and, according to Bernal Diaz, a foot soldier who accompanied conquistador Herndn Cortes, grander than many of the cities he had seen in the Mediterranean. Cortes began his campaign of conquest in Mexico by founding the city of Veracruz, which gave him the power to establish a political authority based on the Spanish municipality. His soldiers became the citizens and elected him leader, giv ing him legitimacy in his relationship with the king of Spain. After he had destroyed the Aztec capital after a long siege, Cortes was determined to build the capital of New Spain on the ruins of TenochtitMn, despite its location hundreds of miles from the coast and in the middle of a lake. Cortes understood that symbolically this placed the new authority of the Spanish above that of the Aztecs. His action also recognized the importance of the site as the center of power in Mexico. Throughout the conquest and the creation of empire, the Spanish built cities as anchors for their control of territory. Francisco Pizarro created Lima as a new capital in Peru, Pedro Avila de Arias built Panama City on the South Sea (the Pacific Ocean), and Pedro de Valdivia founded Santiago to control the central valley of Chile. Later, on the periphery of empire, smaller cities like Saint Augustine, San Antonio, Santa Fe, and Los Angeles served as the focal points from which the Spanish projected their power. The colonial Spanish were quintessentially urban people, living in cities and directing their exploitation of the Americas from cities. Throughout the colonial period, Latin American cities continued to serve as the centers of imperial control

Introduction

of politics, commerce, and society, even if most wealth derived from the mines and land worked by natives and African slaves and even if most people still lived in rural areas. Spanish colonial life was centered in the city. Symbols of church and state, the great cathedrals and viceregal palaces in Mexico and Lima stood together on the central square of each colonial city. Universities and theaters, shops and workshops, hospitals and monasteries, homes of the wealthy and the poor lined the evenly spaced streets on rectangular blocks. In this way the Spanish imposed their vision of order upon the land and over the people throughout the city. The independence movements in South America began among the juntas of Creoles and merchants of Buenos Aires and Caracas, and the newly formed governments were established in these and other cities. After independence, one of the most critical issues for many of the new republics was that of the domination of a capital city and central government over the countryside and the provinces. In the early nineteenth century, civil wars and political battles were fought over the importance of the capital city and its relationship to the countryside. This period of turbulence would not be resolved until the middle of the century in most Latin American countries. With the nineteenth-century creation of the mining and agro-export economies tied to European and U.S. markets, port cities emerged as centers of wealth, and if they were not the capital cities they vied for power with the capital. Exports brought a general increase in economic activity and urban growth. This, in turn, led to immigration from abroad and migrations from the interior that completely altered many cities, ultimately making them overwhelmingly large centers of population. During the nineteenth century it was Western Europe that first underwent rapid urbanization. Urbanization and industrialization are concomitant developments. Still, even though nearly all of the largest cities in the world at that time were located in the center of the world economy, that is, in Western Europe and the eastern United States, parts of Latin America nevertheless shared in the general trend toward urbanization. In 1890, when London was the largest city in the world (4.2 million), Latin America still boasted two cities, Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, among the world's largest twenty. By 1900 Latin America counted thirteen cities with populations of 100,000 or more and eighty-two more that numbered in excess of 20,000, By the next decade, Buenos Aires had a population of about 1.6 million, and Rio de Janeiro had a population of about 1.2 million. By 1920 more than one-quarter of the population of both Uruguay and Chile lived in cities with populations greater than 20,000, as did one-third of the Argentine population. Of all the less-developed regions of the world, Latin America was the most urbanized. Latin America was more urbanized than East Asia, South Asia, or Africa, and by 1930,17 percent of the Latin American population lived in cities of 20,000 or more.2 Today the cities of Latin America have grown to spectacular size, Mexico City is the world's single largest city; Sao Paulo has more people than New York City, But

James A. Baer and Ronn Pineo

many problems have come with this growth. The dilemmas are manifest, from cholera raging through the sprawling "young towns" of Lima to the suffocating air pollution of Mexico City to the unwanted and cruelly abused street children of Rio de Janeiro, Policymakers and scholars have usually sought to understand these enormous concerns as strictly post-World War II phenomena, the powerful immediacy of the contemporary crises leading them to emphasize short-term causes. But although the extent of the present challenges must not be denied, their roots ran deeper, reaching back to the critical period between 1870 and 1930.3 We believe that the urgent urban problems of today can only be successfully addressed if we first achieve a far better understanding of their historical origins.

The Genesis of Modern Urban Latin America: 1870-1930 Beginnings can count for a great deal in most things, and for Latin America the period from 1870 to 1930 was an especially important beginning. This period marked the start of the modern urban age. Visitors to Latin America in the years before the 1870s often commented that the cities "generally ... appeared small, poor and broken down," but "during the last decades of the nineteenth century, ... the urban landscape of Latin America was completely transformed."4 The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought exciting changes and new challenges to Latin America. Rising raw material exports generated riches, but the concomitant process of rapid urbanization inexorably created heightened social tensions. During these years, most Latin American cities rebounded from their postindeperadence slump in population and economic growth, responding to export opportunities in the international economy. Large markets emerged in Western Europe and the United States for Latin American exports. Raw materials from Latin America became much more sought after as industrialization spread. Latin America sent copper, tin, rubber, cotton, nitrates, and wool to Western Europe and the United States, At the same time, the rise in the number of middle-class employees and better-paid workers in Western Europe and the United States meant more consumers of other Latin American exports, such as coffee, sugar, wheat, beef, cacao, and tobacco. With this broad surge in global demand, the value of Latin America's total exports increased remarkably: Brazil's nearly doubled from 1869 to 1905, Mexico's rose seven times over in the years between 1877 and 1911, and Argentina's increased 800 percent from 1873 to 1910. Overall, world trade rose twenty-five times over in the years from the mid-nineteenth century to the start of World War I.5 This trade increase also depended upon the development of new technology. Steamships with iron hulls greatly reduced the time and costs of transoceanic shipping. Railways fanned across the Argentine pampa, the Brazilian coffee country, and elsewhere, further reducing transport costs, especially for bulky commodities. Barbed wire kept cattle away from crops, modern windmills brought up

Introduction

groundwater, new plows broke virgin sod, and repeating rifles killed off the remaining native Americans who still thought the land belonged to them. Telegraph cables reached across the Atlantic to South America and enabled foreign investors to get the latest word on the progress of their investments. Technology effectively brought Latin America closer to the centers of world commerce. As Latin America's exports rose in these years, cities of different functions emerged. Many Latin American cities developed as vital entrepdts. Export-preparation industries—for example, the meat-packing industry in Buenos Aires—developed in cities where the export item required processing prior to shipment. Further industrialization followed in some cities, as in Buenos Aires; Sao Paulo; and Santiago. Still, this manufacturing usually remained limited to relatively small-scale enterprises, chiefly oriented toward serving domestic needs for consumer nondurables, such, as inexpensive textiles or processed foods. Finally, capital cities grew in size and power as government bureaucracies expanded with rising import and export taxes. Together, economic change and urbanization began to generate new patterns of politics for Latin America in the years from 1870 to 1930. Previously, in the chaotic years following independence, tough, charismatic, rural strongmen had come to dominate national politics in much of Latin America, and their endless personal wrangling had left most of the young republics in a state of near-perpetual disorder. But by the late nineteenth century, political stability, requisite for continued economic growth, had become a more urgent concern. As states employed their increased resources to centralize and expand their power, the achievement of stability at last become possible. The emerging urban elite, more prosperous and more numerous than ever before, successfully ended the disruptive governance of the old rural caudillos. Indeed, the landed elite now often moved to the cities, the principal venues for conspicuous consumption by the elite, old and new. As cities now assumed a more central role in the economy, they also assumed a more central role in government. In these years, then, the locus of political power in Latin America shifted away from the countryside and toward the city, in effect, a restoration of their prior colonial position of ascendancy. Critical changes also came in elite attitudes toward the urban underclass in the years prior to the turn of the century. Traditional paternalistic acceptance of a measured responsibility for the welfare of the urban poor began to erode; the colonial, elite-directed urban social order was collapsing. As Michael Conniff has noted: An important attribute of colonial Latin American cities ... [had been) social solidarity. This meant that everyone, no matter how poor or wretched, had a definite place. To be sure, places were hierarchically arranged. Though inequality was accepted, charity and concern for the downtrodden were important, and this responsibility became vested in both Church leaders and the wealthy.6

In the swiftly changing social milieu of the growing cities of Latin America before the turn of the century, a new culture of individualism was arising, replacing

James A. Baer and Ronn Pineo

colonial notions of shared communal concern. It no longer seemed necessary to care as much about the urban underclass; fewer now took pity upon them; fewer now saw their many hardships as something the community had to address. If some people were poor, their own sloth must have caused it, many now believed. The dominant philosophic view of government and business leaders regarding the proper role of the state was to favor a laissez-faire government. That is, most opinion shapers and policymakers generally held that the government should not be too large and that it should not interfere in the natural currents of trade. Nevertheless, the capacity for state action was daily increasing as government revenues rose swiftly from taxes on the rising foreign commerce. But if there were more state funds to spend, this did not mean that urban reforms to benefit the poor followed. Instead, city fathers had other agendas: plans for urban renewal that they believed would make their cities look more attractive (that is, more like Paris) or plans for public works that favored elite interests. Still, sometimes the elite pressed for citywide sanitation reform that benefited everyone, especially if epidemics led to quarantines that closed off commerce or killed the loved ones of rich and poor alike. Most important of all, the sweeping economic changes brought by rising exports led to a basic reconfiguration of the social structure in Latin America. As a consequence, Latin American patterns of politics began to change, reflecting the new distribution of power in society. New-money elites emerged from the exportimport trade or from mining and industry. These new wealthy interests now pressed to join Latin America's landed elite and the other members of the traditional oligarchy, the church and military, in ruling their nations. The middle class, that quintessentially urban grouping, also grew in size and changed in its composition in these years. The middle class was no longer just a small collection of skilled handicraft workers and professionals who lived on the edges of elite lives, dependent upon the patronage and favor of the well-to-do. Advances in commerce and the increasing size of government created a wider demand for clerks, accountants, and bureaucrats to sort and keep track of the rising profits and tax revenues. Middle-class opportunities also opened up in small businesses. As the middle class emerged, its members would demand political inclusion. In these years a modern urban working class also began to appear with the many new laborers in the railways, on the docks, in factories, and in other advanced economic sectors. Such workers began to forge modern labor unions and to press for better conditions, for urban reform, and in time for political inclusion. Such demands might be repressed, but as the unions grew in size they could no longer simply be ignored. Nevertheless, in this period most workers, even the most advantaged ones, failed to win the right to vote in Latin American nations, with but a couple of noteworthy exceptions. As a result, workers had little choice but to express their politics informally and thus generally less consistently and effectively. The elite generally viewed these new organizations of workers with great discomfort, seeing their presence as threatening. The elite at the beginning of the

Introduction

twentieth century in Latin America typically turned to repression as the appropriate manner for dealing with increasingly obstreperous workers. For the first time, modern police forces were necessary to control the urban underclass; ordinary people would no longer be usually self-policing as had generally been the case in the colonial cities of the past. By the 1920s and with gathering speed in the 1930s and after, these mounting changes in the social structure finally ruptured most of the old-style political arrangements of elite hegemony across Latin America. By this time the urbanized population in many nations began to reach a critical threshold; The urban working class had grown and with increasing momentum was pushing for political inclusion. The old political pattern of oligarchic exclusion was breaking down. The era of populist-style politics that followed in the late 1920s and after was, in the words of historian Michael Conniff, an attempt "to correct abuses of elitist government and accommodate rapid urbanization."7 Thus began the transition to urban working-class political incorporation, albeit under clientistic, less than fully democratic, populist arrangements. Populism emerged as an answer to the threat of working-class insurrection from below, especially after the violent general strikes during and after World War I in cities across Latin America. The populist governments that appeared were multiclass coalitions, distributive if not redistributive, channeling benefits to loyal supporters. However, populist leaders had no plans to challenge urban elite interests in order to benefit the masses (although rural elite interests were sometimes looted). Therefore, to pay for the programs needed to assure popular support, populist leaders usually had to hope for an export boom that would boost revenues. Failing this, they turned to loans or, ultimately, just printed the money they needed. Charismatic populist leaders wanted everyone to benefit and no one to pay. Some early examples of populism can be found in Jose Battle's Uruguay or Hipdlito Yrigoyen's Argentina, but as Conniff correctly noted: "The general prosperity of the 1920s fostered the new urban politics that became populism."8 This change was fitful, uneven, and often reversed, but in time the transition to the new politics was complete. This book explores the patterns of urban workingclass lives and politics in the years that stood between the old and the new; between the old of traditional elite paternalism and exclusionary politics and the new of mass-based, multiclass, inclusionary populist politics and an active state.

Studies of Urban Latin America Given the central role of the city in the Latin American experience, it is remarkable that they have been so little studied. In the words of leading scholars, works are "few and far between" and there are so many gaps that the entire field must be judged "relatively unexplored."9 The critical 1870-1930 period presents further historiographical concerns. Although the economic history of Latin America's export-led growth of the late

James A. Baer and Ronn Pineo

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been the subject of serious study (Roberto Cortes-Conde and Stanley J. Stein provide an extensive discussion and guide to the literature in their 1977 publication Latin America: A Guide to Economic History 1830-1930), the social history of Latin America for this era remains extremely underdeveloped.10 We need better historical treatment of working-class life and living conditions in the cities. We need to know much more about the employment patterns, the social conditions, and the politics of housing, health care, and general urban social reform for late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cities of Latin America. As it stands, we have only a very rough sense of conditions in turn-of-the-century cities and, more seriously, only a limited understanding of the difficult and complicated process of effectively responding to these conditions with needed social reforms. The lack of study of Latin American social and urban history stems partly from the lack of source material. Several serious difficulties have complicated the research task. Historians exploring the social history of urban Latin America for this era have discovered to their dismay that the rich sources mined by urban scholars of Western Europe and the United States seldom exist in Latin America,1 > This is especially true for the smaller and economically less successful nations, which could not always afford the costs of ordinary record keeping. There are few synthetic sources of the kind that yield convenient tabulations covering a series of years. To obtain information about health care, births, deaths, population, and other topics, researchers are forced to dig the information out year by year. In some cases, though documents exist they are not organized; they are piled up in storage rooms filled with boxes of various scattered papers.12 One especially important contribution of this book is to provide a strong empirical account of basic conditions in the city: housing, transportation, potable water, sewage disposal, sanitation, vaccination, health care, and other aspects of urban life. The chapters will similarly provide long-needed basic information on urban demography: population size, growth rates, ethnicity, gender ratio, age, marriage, and births, among other topics. This book brings together difficult-togather data on critical aspects of the Latin American urban experience. The existing literature is especially weak in making comparisons, discerning patterns, and constructing theories. Because urbanization has been more extensively studied for Europe and North America, theories drawn from that experience have often been employed in an effort to understand Latin America. This is unwise, for these theories are ill-suited to Latin America, where cities were historically less industrialized and far less politically inclusionary than those of the United States and Western Europe. Within Latin America, generally only the few great primate cities have been studied; historians have given little consideration to the many nonindustrial, nonprimate cities. Unfortunately, too many scholars have made the convenient assumption that the economic, political, and social patterns found in the few large cities must also hold for the many medium-sized ones.

Introduction

We believe that this book helps take urban social history in an important new direction, and in so doing it directly addresses the major historiographical gaps in urban history and in Latin American social history. Moreover, by exploring urbanization in Latin American cities, in both industrial and nonindustrial cities, in primate and nonprimate cities, this work brings into question many of the assumptions of what existing historiography there is. It is our hope that this study will help to stimulate further inquiry and to suggest a path for future research on urban Latin America.

Methodology This book seeks to provide a basis for understanding the relationship between the impact of urbanization on the working class in Latin American cities and the variety of responses by that group in the critical years between 1870 and 1930. In the chapters that follow, we also explore the many factors that contributed to or hindered urban social reform in these years. Each of the authors has produced an original chapter based on his or her own research. Each author in this book has taken one city and highlighted a key urban issue for that city. All the chapters are new, not previously published, and have been written especially for this book. The case study sites selected for this volume provide a mix of Latin American city types. We have included capital cities of large nations (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Mexico City, Mexico; Lima, Peru; and Buenos Aires, Argentina) and capital cities of medium-sized or smaller nations (Bogota, Colombia; Panama City, Panama; and Montevideo, Uruguay). We have selected for study a secondary city in a large nation (Veracruz, Mexico) and a secondary city in a medium-sized nation (Valparaiso, Chile). We have included a tropical city of non-European immigrants (Panama City). In this way the urban experience in all the largest nations of Latin America is covered, and we still offer a sampling of cities from the medium-sized and smaller countries. Because we could not cover every Latin American city, we have instead directed our attention to a sampling of those that experienced the most urban growth, even if this means that some regions that saw less urbanization, notably the Caribbean, are not covered here. The case studies address a variety of critical topics, engaging an array of issues in working-class conditions, the patterns of worker politics, and the process of urban social reform. We have clustered several chapters around two key workingclass concerns, housing and health care, in order to facilitate comparison between case studies. Unfortunately, we cannot offer complete coverage for all issues that affected workers. Some themes, such as crime and education, will have to await further research and treatment elsewhere. This volume is cooperative in the richest sense. Although every author developed her or his own emphasis and argument, we found common territory in our shared analytical approach and research agenda. Three core questions inform all

James A. Baer and RonnPineo

of the chapters in this study. First, what were the living circ*mstances for working women and men in the growing cities at the end of the nineteenth century in Latin America? Second, how did this population respond actively to the problems they faced and act to improve the quality of their lives? And, third, what circ*mstances and what strategies were most likely to have a lasting impact? It is our contention that although each city contained unique characteristics, a pattern of working-class response emerged during this period that affected the political process of the nation. Each of the chapters in this volume focuses on one aspect of that variegated and intermittent reaction. In looking for answers to these questions, no single, dominant cause has risen above all others. Causes vary with local circ*mstances. For instance, an inadequate city transport system might be explained by an impoverished city government, by too-hilly terrain, by disruptive civil wars, or by a combinations of these or other factors. Likewise, high city death rates might be attributable to an uncaring city government, to inadequate revenues, to a lack of local sources of potable water, or again to a combination of these and other factors. To be sure, it is possible that for a particular problem in a particular city one sole factor stands out in explaining why the problem existed or why reform came or did not come. But what works to explain what happened in one city can often be irrelevant in another. Accordingly, in the case studies that follow each author has sought to examine conditions, politics, and reform and to build an argument that is sensitive to the exigencies of local circ*mstance. In the concluding chapter we will explore the combinations of cause and the explanatory patterns that have begun to emerge from these case studies. David SowelTs study of urban growth in Bogota and its impact on the social structure emphasizes the importance of the city's working class in the shaping of Colombia's political culture. He shows the years between 1870 and 1930 to be a period of dramatic population growth for Bogota, especially after the War of the 1,000 Days (1899-1902). This growth produced problems for the working class: lack of housing and municipal services in workers' neighborhoods. It also created opportunities for skilled laborers. This combination provided the opening for informal as well as formal political impulses by members of the city's working class. These activities included riots, assassinations, and public intimidation, as well as strikes and demonstrations. Nevertheless, working-class demands for reform, although often uncoordinated and not sustained, did have an impact on the two major political parties, which either sought the votes of urban workers or attempted to repress urban disturbances. Contention over urban space in Montevideo is highlighted in Anton Rosenthal's chapter on the introduction of the electric streetcar. Rosenthal shows how the need to improve urban transportation not only transformed the physical characteristics of Montevideo but also shaped social interaction and altered labor relations. The electric streetcar produced many changes in Montevideo's society.

Introduction

City residents traveled more often and farther on the electric streetcar: to beaches and resorts on the edge of the city and to entertainments within the city. They suffered death and injury from accidents with electric streetcars, which were faster and quieter than the old horse-drawn trolleys. The streetcar became a billboard for advertisem*nts and political electioneering and a stage for public spectacle where crimes of passion were committed. The electric streetcar companies, both foreign owned, emerged as the largest landowners in the city as well as employers of a workforce that grew from 2,000 to 5,000 between 1911 and the 1930s. This important labor force, in turn, would provide critical support to the Colorado party, which had ousted the Blancos in 1904, So critical to this regime were both the streetcar workers and the cheap transportation provided by the trolleys that prices for tickets remained unchanged from before World War I until 1936, even as the government gave the workers a 15 to 25 percent raise in 1922 to settle a strike. The importance of labor issues combined with urban growth and social transformation is underscored by John Lear in his chapter on the working class of Mexico City during the Mexican Revolution. Lear addresses the previously unexplained relationship between the defeat of the general strike by organized labor in Mexico City in 1916 and the pro-labor codes written into the 1917 Constitution. By reviewing the structure of work and community in Mexico City after 1870, Lear finds that working-class mobilization became most effective when it extended beyond the traditional issues of the workplace and included questions of food supply for the capital during the revolution. He shows how this network of support resurfaced in a tenant strike in 1922, revealing the importance of viewing Mexican workers as active participants in political contention even though their official institutions become subject to the influence of the ruling party. Housing is the focus of the research by Andrew Grant Wood. He finds that the tenant strike in Veracruz in 1922, which began a nationwide movement that included Mexico City, illustrates the significance of consumer issues within the ongoing development of postrevolutionary politics. The events in Veracruz brought together anarchist traditions of direct action by labor, a growing crisis in the availability of affordable housing, and the political opportunity provided by Veracruz State governor Adalberto Tejeda. This intricate combination allowed members of the working class to demand urban reforms of the emerging postrevolutionary party and provided a common focus of complaint that led to collective action. This relationship between increasing urban problems, especially in housing, and the entry of the working class into the political arena, albeit in a nonformal manner, is taken up by James A. Baer in his study of the 1921 rent law in Argentina. Baer indicates that housing issues had evolved over time, leading to tenant leagues, a rent strike in 1907, and a National Commission on Affordable Housing. However, the postwar crisis of rising rents created an ad hoc and even unintentional coalition of Catholic reformers, conservative politicians, the leaders

James A. Baer and RonnPineo

of the Radical party, the Socialists, and working-class women and men who rented. This coalition of groups, each for its own reasons, came to support legislation for governmental regulation over housing costs and rental agreements that was nothing short of a radical departure from the past laissez-faire approach of Argentine governments. Baer suggests that this event should be seen as one element in the emergence of Argentine populism and that it is necessary to recognize the importance of working-class action for change. David S. Parker expands the analysis to include both housing and public health in Lima, showing why urban reform in that city was so much less successful than in Veracruz and Buenos Aires. The key, he believes, was the racism of reformers, who held that poor hygiene and tenement life were the fault of inferior peoples, both indigenous native populations and immigrant Asians. He shows that attempts at reform inevitably refused to recognize the structural roots of many urban problems and often were thinly veiled attempts to impose greater control over the urban working class. That this did not lead to a unified response from Lima's working class owed in part to the racial divisions among its disparate members. The city of Valparaiso, Chile, presents both contrasts and similarities to Lima with respect to the failure of urban reforms. Ronn Pineo uses detailed analyses of hospital records and other sources to show that public health officials in Valparaiso and Chile knew what measures needed to be enacted. However, the dynamics of national politics and the inherent belief in the inferiority of the city's working class produced a multiplicity of responses that failed to improve effectively the lives of the urban poor. Thus Valparaiso, although it was Chile's most important seaport and second largest urban center, continued to lag behind in public health improvements. Sam Adamo focuses on the campaign to improve both the image and the public health of Rio de Janeiro and its citizens. As a national capital and port city, Rio reflected on Brazil as a whole. The country's leaders wanted to overcome their capital's image as a disease-ridden tropical backwater and set about to transform the city. Public works projects forced poor residents, most of them Afro-Brazilians, out of the city center and added to an already serious housing shortage. Public health measures attempted to improve the health of the city's residents and make the city more attractive to European capital and immigration. Although these reforms did improve the looks and the sanitation of the city, their impact on the population varied, often by race. The city's poor generally suffered from nutritional deficiencies and a lack of sanitation in their marginal neighborhoods that affected their health. The success of urban reform in Rio thus needs to be measured by race. The final case discussed in this book is Panama City, where the issue of race was a key component in the development of the urban working class. Sharon Phillipps Collazos studies the impact of the immigrant Caribbean workers who were brought to Panama to help dig the Panama Canal. English-speaking, Protestant,

Introduction

and black, these Caribbean immigrants settled in the Canal Zone and in Panama City, becoming a significant yet distinct part of the working class. These divisions within the Panamanian working class and between the Canal Zone controlled by the United States and the city controlled by Panamanians made it more difficult for labor organizations to unite workers. Again, the problem of housing provided one of the few issues that brought together much of the Panamanian working class. It is our overall goal for this volume to offer a broader understanding of urban history and to make a significant contribution to Latin American social history. By adding to our knowledge of ordinary people in everyday life, we not only achieve a fuller and more complex understanding of our collective past, we also develop a more democratic vision of history. By exploring the genesis of modern Latin America's urban explosion, we gain a valuable perspective and hence greater insight into the severe urban dilemmas that are the challenge of the present.

Notes 1. See the discussion by Philip D. Curtin in his preface to Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850, ed. Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), xi. 2. During this era, Latin America's population increased markedly: from 30.5 million in 1850 to 61 million by 1900 and nearly doubling again by 1930 to 104 million people. Latin America's population grew at a rate faster than that of Europe or North America in the years from 1900 to 1930; James Scobie, "The Growth of Latin American Cities, 1870-1930," in Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell, vol. 4, C. 1870 to 1930 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1986). Also see John J. Johnson, Political Change in Latin America: The Emergence of the Middle Sectors (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 32; Eric E. Lampard, "The Urbanizing World," in The Victorian City; Images and Realities, ed. H. J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, vol. J (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 9, 33; Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 66. 3. This point was suggested by Gerald Michael Greenfield, "The Development of the Underdeveloped City: Public Sanitation in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1885-1913" The Lmo-Bmzilian Review 17 (Summer 1980): 107. 4. Scobie, "Growth of Latin American Cities." See also Knight and Liss, Atlantic Port Cities, 5, and passim. 5. William P. Glade, The Latin American Economies: A Study of Their Institutional Evolution (New York: American Book, 1969), 215-216; Desmond Christopher Martin Platt, Latin America and British Trade 1806-1914 (London: A. and C. Black, 1972), esp. chap. 4; Celso Furtado, Economic Development of Latin America, trans. Suzette Macedo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), esp. chap. 4; Nicolas Sanchez-Albornoz, The Population of Latin America: A History, trans. W. A. R, Richardson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 168, 178-179; Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena, 59. W. Arthur Lewis, The Evolution of the International Economic Order (Princeton: Princeton

James A. Baer and RonnPineo

University Press, 1978), notes that the last part of the nineteenth century marked the point when the world divided into primary-product exporters and industrial exporters. With this "second" industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century, the developed world come to depend upon the less developed nations for supplies of many basic raw materials, 6. Michael L, Conniff, "Introduction: Toward a Comparative Definition of Populism," in Latin American Populism in Comparative Perspective, ed. Michael L. Conniff (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982), 9. 7. Michael L, Conniff, Urban Politics in Brazil; The Rise of Populism, 1925-1945 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), 3. 8. Conniff, "Introduction," 6. 9. Gerald Michael Greenfield, "New Perspectives on Latin American Cities," journal of Urban History 15, no, 2 (February 1989): 213; Richard J. Walter, "Recent Works on Latin American Urban History"Journal of Urban History 16, no, 2 (February 1990): 205. See also John K. Chance, "Recent Trends in Latin American Urban Studies," Latin American Research Review 15 (1980): 183-188; Richard M, Morse, "Trends and Patterns in Latin American Urbanization, 1750-1920," Comparative Studies in Society and History 16, no. 4 (September 1974). 10. Roberto Cortes-Conde and Stanley J, Stein, Latin America: A Guide to Economic History 1830-19X (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). Exceptions include Peter DeSfaazo, Urban Workers and Labor Unions in Chile 1902—1927 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); June Hahner, Poverty and Politics: The Urban Poor in Brazil, 1870-1920 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986). On the evolution of writing on the social history of Latin America from 1870 to 1930, see John J. Johnson, "One Hundred Years of Historical Writing on Modern Latin America by United States Historians," Hispanic American Historical Review 65, no. 4 (1985): 745-765; Geoffrey Barraclough, Main Trends in History (New York Holmes and Meier, 1978), 117; Eugene Sofer, "Recent Trends in Latin American Labor Historiography" LARR 15 (1980): 167; K. P. Erickson, P. V. Peppe, and Hobart Spalding, "Dependency vs. Working Class History," LARfi 15 (1980): 177-181. 11. See the comments by Hahner, Poverty and Politics, xli, 168. 12. See the discussion in Julia Kirk Blackwelder and Lytnan L. Johnson, "Changing Criminal Patterns!' Journal of Latin American Studies 14 (1982): 70-371. For example, the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare in Ecuador started to collect such information only after 1925; Alan Middleton, "Division and Cohesion in the Working Class: Artisans and Wage Labourers in Ecuador," Journal of Latin American Studies 14 (1982): 185.

1 Political Impulses: Popular Participation in Formal and Informal Politics, Bogota, Colombia David Sowell "Of all the South American capitals, Bogota1 has remained the most backward, and it cannot be compared with Caracas, Lima, Santiago, or Buenos Aires." Miguel Samper described 1860s Bogotd as a city in which homeless people filled the streets, the poor existed on public charities (and therefore had no desire to work!), economic conditions were deplorable, Conservatives manipulated a guileless society, and a flawed, violent political culture prevented civic advancement,' Thirty years later, Samper commented upon the much-improved state of public welfare, economic conditions, civil order, and civil amenities. Still, he viewed the city as behind other Latin American capitals, especially in its political culture.2 The elite-dominated Conservative and Liberal parties had proven unable to sustain a political life that avoided periodic bloodshed, such as would soon occur in the disastrous civil war, the War of the 1,000 Days (1899-1902). However, in the first decades of the twentieth century, a political stability unknown to Samper's time dominated the nation. Studies of Colombian political culture are very rich. In particular, the unusual longevity of the Conservative and Liberal parties (1840s to the present) has focused scholarly attention upon the relationship of the parties to the nature and formation of the Colombian political system. Partisans are keenly interested in their particular organizational, intellectual, and personal histories; others tend to be more concerned with the relationships of the laboring classes to parties and political power.3 Charles Bergquist, drawing upon dependency theory, suggests that coffee laborers forced partisan political accommodations that shaped contemporary Colombian politics.4 Bergquist places less importance upon the pro15

David Sowell

found changes wrought by rapid urbanization,5 although David Bushnell notes that the resurgence of the Liberal party after the 1930s is directly associated with the rapid growth of urban centers, where that party is historically more influential.6 Ruth and David Collier, in their influential Shaping the Political Arena, identify the expanded demographic base that accompanied urban and commercial development, especially that of the capital city, as central to the socioeconomic context of twentieth-century politics,7 Their top-down analysis, however, fails to fully appreciate the active role of laborers m shaping the political process, a serious misreading of Colombian political culture avoided by Bergquist This chapter relates the "condition of the city" to the world of politics. How did Bogota's demographic and economic growth between 1870 and 1930 affect the city's social structure? How were the interests of the "popular" classes articulated? How did their actions affect the political culture of the city and nation? These sixty years constitute a critical stage in the socioeconomic and political development of the Colombian capital. Small producers, including artisans, engaged in a wide variety of formal and informal political expressions that forced the dominant Conservative and Liberal parties to at least partially accommodate their interests. Just as small producers in the coffee sector forced the parties to respond to their social concerns within the polity, so too did the urban artisans win a voice in shaping Colombia's twentieth-century political culture.

Demographic and Socioeconomic Change After its foundation in 1538 in one of the most heavily populated regions of the northern Andes, Santa Fe de Bogota grew slowly, reaching a population of about 20,000 by the start of the nineteenth century. The city served as a center of religious, political, and institutional authority for much of northern South America,8 Bogota, like Lima and other cities of the interior, began to expand in the second half of the nineteenth century, primarily because of a quickening pace of economic activity, the increased importance of the city as a political center, and the establishment of nascent manufacture. (See Table l.l.)9 Although Bogota never had a reputation as being particularly unhealthy, it did suffer from periodic epidemics and from diseases common to highland Latin American urban centers. Even in the late nineteenth century, population growth occurred because of migration from the countryside, not because of an excess of births over deaths, (See Table 1.2.) Not until the early twentieth century did public health conditions and other factors improve so that the number of people who were born outnumbered those who died in the city. In addition, economic opportunities in factories and construction began to draw more and more people from the countryside, especially from the rural areas of Cundinaraarca and Boyaca. Improved urban health conditions generated internal population growth that, when combined with the increased rates of in-migration, accounted for the rapid rate of urban growth.10 The city's population reached 235,421 in 1928 (a sixfold increase over its 1870 to-

Political Impulses TABLE 1,1 Comparative Latin American Urban Population Growth: 1791-1914

Bogotd 21394 40,000 40,883 95,813 121,257

Lima

(1801) (1843) (1870) (1895) (1912)

52,627 54,628 89,434 100,194 143,000

(1791) (1836) (1862) (1895) (1908)

Buenos Aires 40,000 55,416 177,787 663,854 1,575,814

(1801) (1822) (1869) (1895) (1914)

SOURCES: Peter Walter Amato, An Analysis of the Changing Patterns of Elite Residential Areas in Bogota, Colombia (Ph.D. diss,, Cornel] University, 1968), 138; Richard E, Boyer and Keith A, Davies, Urbanization in 19th Century Latin America: Statistics and Sources (Los Angeles: Latin American Center, 1973), 7,37-39,59-41; Anderson, "Race and Social Stratification," 215, TABLE 1,2 Births and Deaths in Bogota, 1877-1892 Year

No. Births

Ma Deaths

1877 1881 1885 1886 1887 1889 1890 1891 1892

1,370 1,769 2,050 1,975 2,295 2,264 2,557 2,305 2,402

2,188 2,274 3,088 2,754 2,591 2,570 2,231 3,159 2,344

SOURCES: Diario de Cundinamarca, January 25,1878; El Heraldo, January 22,1890; January 16,1892; January 11,1893; £1 Orden, January 1,1891.

tal), topped 700,000 by 1951, and had more than doubled to 1,697,311 in 1964." The 1985 census counted 4,207,657 residents in the city. These rates of expansion applied to other cities as well, so that whereas only 30 percent of the nation's populace lived in urban areas in 1938,52 percent did so in 1964, and a full two-thirds were urbanites in 1985.12 Bogota served as a highland economic hub throughout the colonial period, although its most important function was as the seat of government. Mid-nineteenth-century liberal economic policies stimulated momentary growth, although the export economy was subject to alternating booms and busts, a situation compounded by civil wars, such as that of 1859—1862, which helped produce the conditions cited by Samper in La miseria.. The economy fluctuated through the end of the century as capital from tobacco and then coffee exports ebbed and flowed into the city. After the War of the 1,000 Days, the capital entered a period of expansion that lasted, with a few short recessions, through the 1920s. Capital from increasingly profitable exports and from the growth of internal

David Sowell

manufacture and an influx of foreign capital served as the stimuli for this economic growth. The site of the Colombian capital greatly affected its spatial development. The city lies hundreds of kilometers from the nearest coast and is located at an elevation of 2,600 meters on the vast Sabana de Bogota. Hacendados divided this fertile plain into large estates for the production of cattle, vegetables, and grains early in the colonial period. These estates, in combination with a mountain ridge that rises to the east of the city, dictated the city's growth along a generally northsouth axis. The city's initial four barrios (wards) contained the population until the period of late-nineteenth-century expansion, when population growth forced the creation of new barrios. By 1930 the number of barrios had increased sixfold and included the once-autonomous town of Chapinero, about two kilometers north of the central plaza.13 Most of those who moved northward were more affluent, whereas the working classes and poor settled near the older central and southern sections of the city, where costs tended to be lower. This spatial distribution of socioeconomic groups contrasts with that of the colonial period, when the elite dominated the urban core, which was ringed by commercial, artisanal, and poorer social classes.14 Bogotanos faced various socioeconomic pressures caused by the growth of the city. A shortage of housing for workers became a public concern in the 1890s; ten years later a variety of groups clamored for some sort of public action on this need. Barrios obreros (workers' neighborhoods), which lacked municipal services, developed in the southern and western areas of the city. These neighborhoods were dominated by single-story brick shops that often doubled as stores.15 In 1908 the editors of El Artista urged that the city council extend basic services to the southwest portion of the city, as many laborers were forced to live in their shops in unhealthy and unsafe conditions.16 Similar requests were made in the early 1910s, but not until 1913 did the city council authorize such construction. The barrio Antonio Ricaurte was officially dedicated as a barrio obrero in 1914, although water lines did not reach the barrio until several years later, a problem shared with many of the newer areas of the city populated by the working classes and the poor.17 By 1920, at least eighteen barrios obreros existed throughout the city.18 Significantly, economic processes in both rural and urban settings enhanced the numbers and socioeconomic status of small producers, a change that had profound political consequences. Although Bergquist focuses on the growth and importance of small rural producers,19 their urban counterparts have received less attention. In the early nineteenth century, most urban males worked in manual trades as skilled or unskilled laborers or in the public sector, and women tended to labor in domestic service or in sewing activities, mainly as unskilled workers. (See Tables 1.3 and 1.4.) Artisans enjoyed a socioeconomic position that both afforded them more economic independence and sustained their sense of social worth.20 The small consumer industries that developed in the last third of the nineteenth century utilized low technology and unskilled labor and did not com-

Political Impulses TABLE 1.3 Comparative Male Occupational Structure, Bogota, 1851,1888

1851 Category Unskilled Semiskilled Skilled Commercial Religious Professional Other* Total a

1888

69 13 196 57 21 26 158 540

12.7 2.4 36.3 10.5 3,9 4.8 29.3

89 11 163 52 5 17 105 442

20.1 .9 36.9 11.8 1.1 3.8 23.7

Includes police and military.

SOURCES: Manuscript Returns, 1851 Census, AHN: Reptiblica, Miseelanea, vol. 17, pp. 65-165; El Telegmma, data extracted from October 1887 through December 1888; Cupertino Salgado, Directorio general de Bogota: Ana IV, 1893 (Bogota: n.p. 1893). TABLE 1.4 Comparative Female Occupational Structure, Bogota, 1851,1888

1851 Category Unskilled Semiskilled Skilled Commercial Religious Professional Other Total

1888

574 55 7 89 1 6 2 734

78.2 7.54 .9 12.1 A .8 .3

316 221 11 38 4 5 4 400

79.0 5.5 2.7 9.5 1.0 1.3 1.0

SOURCES: Manuscript Returns, 1851 Census, AHN: Reptiblica, Miscelanea, vol. 17, pp. 65-165; El Telegmma, data extracted from October 1787 through December 1888; Cupertino Salgado, Directorio general de Bogotd: Atw IV, 1893 (Bogota: n.p., 1893).

pete with skilled labor; nor do they appear to have reduced the percentages of skilled laborers in the workforce.21 In the early twentieth century, as construction activity increased, mechanical shops developed, and early manufacturers were established, the numbers of skilled laborers both in and out of the factory setting grew.22 Not until the late 1930s did factory production slowly begin to replace handicraft production in most trades. (See Tables 1.5 and 1.6.) These changes recast, the city's occupational profile. By the beginning of the twentieth century skilled (artisanal) and unskilled workers were joined by increasing numbers of wage laborers and industriales (producers on the cusp between skilled and managerial status). Just as they had in the nineteenth century,

David Sowett

TABLE 1,5 Manufacturing and Factory Workforce, Bogota, 1870-1978

1870 1900 1938 1950 1978

Manufacturing % of Total Workforce

Factory % of Total "Workforce

Factory % of Manufacturing Workforce

20 18-18.5 14 12 16-18

1 2

7-8

NOTE: A factory is a plant with five or more workers. SOURCE: Albert Berry, "A Descriptive History of Colombian Industrial Development in the Twentieth Century" in Essays on Industrialization in Colombia, ed. Albert Berry (Tempe: Center for Latin American Studies, Arizona State University, 1983), 9,22. TABLE 1,6 Trends in Cottage Shop and Factory Employment in Manufactures, Bogoti, 1944-1945 to 1973 (in thousands)

Cottage Shops 1944-45 1953 1964 1973

308.4 287.0 327.5 496.2

(66.5%) (59.2%) (51.4%) (50.4%)

Factories 155.6 199.0 310.0 488.8

(33.5%) (40.8%) (48.6%) (49.6%)

SOURCE: Cortes, Berry, and Ishaq, Success in Small and Medium-Scale Enterprises, 444—445.

artisans sought to obtain effective political representation and tariff protection for their industries. Unskilled workers, joined by wage laborers, expressed concerns about the rate of pay, housing conditions, the price of food, and other quotidian issues. Industriales, a new segment of the labor force, shared an interest in tariff protection and political influence with artisans. Each of these groups had different socioeconomic interests and assumed distinct political stances, although small producers continued their socioeconomic and political prominence.

Political Impulses Informal and formal political impulses were closely associated with partisan politics, Bogota's social structure, and the socioeconomic tensions caused by the city's rapid population growth. Forma] politics refers to the routine, accepted, institutionalized structures of authority through which "legitimate" political claims are made upon a government. Elections, political parties, city councils, and legislatures, for example, fit within this category. Informal politics lie outside the bounds of formal politics and include such behaviors as riots, assassinations, and public intimidation. Some political actions, such as strikes or demonstrations, can be either formal or informal, depending upon the political culture of a particular place or time.23

Political Imp wises

A set of highly diffuse and weakly articulated regional political networks operated within a remarkably light state structure to shape Colombia's colonial political culture. Generally quiescent middle-class and popular sectors supported an "unwritten constitution" in which Spaniards, Creoles, middling, and popular groups maintained a balance between formal and informal politics. Early-nineteenth-century elites and some middle sectors added formalized political organizations that hinged on (I) relations to colonial bureaucracy, (2) independenceera associations, and (3) regional political networks. The Conservative and Liberal parties struggled with issues of political economy, mechanisms of social control, and the nature of the state structure (especially centralism versus federalism). The Constitution of 1886, interpreted by the Conservative-dominated governments of the late nineteenth century, resolved most of these issues. Liberal opposition to the Conservative agenda resulted in the War of the 1,000 Days, whose outcome was to cement Conservative control of the national government, albeit under more moderate leadership. During the twentieth century, the control of the state, the incorporation of new political interests into the polity, and social tranquillity have dominated the agendas of the dominant parties. Nineteenth-century partisan contention led to a more widespread participation in formal politics. In urban areas, both Conservatives and Liberals attempted to tip the scale in their own favor in the struggle for political control during bitterly contested elections by recruiting eligible voters. Craftsmen played an important role in this process, first as subordinated voters and then in a more independent manner. After the Democratic and Popular Societies (in the 1850s) and the Alliance (in the 1860s) threatened to emerge as autonomous popular movements, elite political parties attempted to channel popular political expressions into formal (and nonthreatening) activities. Select representatives of artisanal and other sectors were offered low-level, uninfluential positions in city or departmental governments. In the twentieth century, both the Conservative and Liberal parties, especially the more leftist Liberals, made strong overtures toward urban dwellers, particularly the artisanal sector. Not all popular political expressions fit within formal boundaries. Popular groups often used direct action to make their interests known, making informal politics a central component of the city's political culture. After considerable contention in the late colonial period,24 direct action by crowds diminished in frequency until the 1870s, when a series of public "disturbances" upset social tranquillity, revealing the tensions of a "modernizing" city. Food, public order, and wages were among the concerns that motivated popular sectors to engage in formal and informal politics. The political economy of food was one realm of contention. In January 1875, the "pan de a cuarto" riot developed after a coalition of bakers combined to drive up the price of wheat flour and bread by over 20 percent and to eliminate the production of a small loaf consumed by the popular sector. Thousands of people, mostly workers and other members of the popular classes, flocked to the Plaza de

David Sowell

Bolivar on January 23, where they demanded that President Santiago Pe'rez drive down prices. He refused, whereupon the crowd stoned more than thirty bakeries and houses of offending monopolists. Injuries in the riot were limited, but heavy damage was inflicted on several properties. Shortly thereafter, the price of wheat and bread began to drift downward,25 Explanations for the riot suggest some of the relationships between formal and informal politics. For individuals, such as President Perez, who were vested with power and had a particular ideological agenda (in his case liberalism), formal political expressions best addressed their interests. As they had done so often in the past, two factions of the Liberal party sought partisan advantage by attempting to draw artisans into the debate over the riot's causes, tactics that suggest the value of that class in the upcoming presidential elections. However, craftsmen who participated in various formal, political organizations, from distinct partisan orientations, refused to criticize the violence, instead condemning the monopolistic practices of the bakers.26 Rather than noting a partisan cause for the riot, these social commentators saw in the event a clash between liberal economic ideology and the "moral economy of bread," divisions that often disrupted the city's marketplace.27 Members of the crowd, for whom the price and availability of bread had an immediate impact upon their lives, could interpret the presidential refusal to intercede on their behalf as evidence of the futility of formal politics and the usefulness of direct action in obtaining lower prices. Elite plans to create an "orderly city" also contributed to informal political violence. The effort to "professionalize" Bogota's police force by the importation of a French agent to supervise and reorganize the police force in 1892 redefined the relationship between the capital's populace and the police, all in the effort to instill an elite vision of proper urban order. Many Colombian elites, as did their counterparts elsewhere in Latin America, envisioned Paris as the epitome of urban development and sought to reproduce its architecture, street layout, cultural centers, and system of policing.28 At the same time, the growth of the city and drastically increased food prices put pressures upon urban consumers.29 Further, the presidential campaign of 1891 had splintered the National party of Rafael Nunez, encouraging Liberals to renew their partisan mobilizations. These changes, especially in policing, sought to redefine a sense of urban order. They did not, however, spark the riot of January 16,1893. Instead, the riot originated in artisanal anger at an author who had blamed the city's moral decay upon the gambling and alleged abuse of alcohol by the capital's artisans and other laborers. This touched a sensitive nerve among craftsmen, who were under increasing pressures from foreign imports and economic change that together helped to undermine their productive, social, and political status. As had happened in 1875, an attempt was made in the early stages of the unrest to appeal to formal political authorities to redress some of the crowd's grievances. The refusal of acting executive Antonio B. Cuervo to censure the offending author led artisanal delegates back into the streets, where violence ensued. The riot left almost fifty people dead,

Political Impulses

resulted in countless injuries, led to mass arrests, and caused considerable property damage and the destruction of all police stations save one.30 The 1893 tumult was fundamentally a reaction to the policing reform and to the slander of the artisanal class and was grounded in the city's unsettled economic and political conditions. As it had in the past, the failure of formal politics to satisfy popular expressions again preceded direct, informal action. The 1893 riot heralded a fifteen-year crackdown on both informal, and formal political dissent. Conservatives, who had joined the Nunez regime in 1886, were now fearful that partisan divisions in the ruling alliance might allow a Liberal resurgence. As a result, police and governmental authorities became increasingly vigilant against "conspiracies." For example, workers were implicated in a Liberal attempt to overthrow the government in January 1895, a movement that was easily suppressed.31 The deep fears of popular conspiracy against the government resurfaced after the War of the 1,000 Days. The nominally Conservative president, Rafael Reyes, limited partisan violence and restrained potential popular challengers with his heavy-handed rule. In the first years of the Reyes regime, artisans and others placed a great deal of pressure for tariff protection upon the administration.32 The Reyes regime allowed very little public dissent, so that an alleged conspiracy resulted in the arrest on June 1,1906, of several newspaper editors and dozens of workers, many of whom were sent to military colonies or prisons in other areas of the country.33 The city's increasingly differentiated labor structure resulted in several new labor initiatives. Owners of small handicraft factories (industriales), artisans, and workers founded the short-lived Union of Industriales and Workers in 1904 to support higher tariffs on goods that were seen as competitive with domestic production. This organization faded under the repression of the Reyes regime, but many of its leaders appeared again in the National Union of Industriales and Workers (UNIO) in 1910. The UNIO expressed a traditional demand for tariff protection, but it also called for higher wages, workers' compensation, a reduction in the number of working hours, and Sunday off, while pointing out its concerns about inadequate education, housing, and other welfare programs. These new concerns are directly related to the rapidly expanding city and the changing character of the workforce, in which the needs of wage laborers now supplemented the concerns of artisanal workers. Despite serious differences in the objectives of these labor groups, the UNIO promised to work with the established parties, but it also strove to establish itself as an independent political force. Other workers' organizations of the 1910s and 1920s sought similar ends either through cooperation with dominant parties or through their own efforts.34 By the end of the 1910s, a fledgling Socialist party had emerged in the city, an organization that wielded considerable political clout in the next decade. However, divisions among laborers often weakened the overall political influence of Socialist and other labor organizations. Bogota's dismal socioeconomic conditions in the wake of the War of the 1,000 Days led various groups to organize to assist those in need. Mutual aid societies,

David Sowell

which had first been organized by artisans and white-collar workers in the 1870s, attempted to organize food kitchens and to arrange health and welfare benefits for their members. The Catholic church led this effort, helping to establish several important societies, including the Sociedad de la Protectora (1902) and the Sociedad de Santa Orosfa (1907).35 Catholic mutual aid societies tended to distance themselves from overt political action, whereas those organized by artisans cooperated with other organizations. Strike activity increased as the numbers of wage laborers grew, an example of an informal political action that would in time be formalized. Workers on the savannah railway struck in 1916 for higher wages, while workers at the national capital project walked off the job in 1913 in an effort to force the government to allow them to take part in a local festival.36 Six years later workers won a conditional right to strike, but the full right to organize and strike would not be granted until 1931.37 Workers on the savannah railroad were among the most active strikers in the 1920s, engaging in at least six major walkouts, some of which stimulated sympathy strikes among the capital's workers,38 Strike activity increased dramatically in the 1930s, especially after the election of Alfonso Lopez Pumarejo in 1934. All major political alliances appealed to workers in an attempt to win their allegiance and votes. Conservatives, especially those closely related to the Catholic church, in keeping with the Social Action movement, used mutual aid organizations as their initial overture. In addition, the Jesuit-sponsored Workers' Circle (1911) created a savings bank, a restaurant, a school, and various other social services for its members,39 The Workers' Circle remained active in Bogotd through the end of World War II, and although it had an uncertain impact, it certainly provided important material support to a needful populace. In combination with the strong loyalty to the church among the city's craftsmen, these initiatives provided a firm base of support among wage laborers for the Conservative party. In the aftermath of their defeat in the War of the 1,000 Days, Liberals seemed less concerned with the material and religious concerns of workers and more concerned with acquiring workers* votes to sustain their political restoration. In 1904 the Liberal leader Rafael Uribe Uribe declared in favor of "socialism from above" that would expand the role of the state in economic development, in the protection of workers, in the establishment of savings banks, and in the protection of national industries.40 In 1911 before the UNIO, Uribe Uribe articulated his concern for electoral reform, better public education, improved public hygiene, and "rational protection" of the nation's industries.41 Uribe Uribe appears to have made serious progress in gaining political support among Bogota's workers, but his 1914 assassination blunted reform sentiments within the Liberal party. His death opened the political space in which more autonomous popular mobilization could take place, especially among the nascent socialist groups. By the mid19205, however, a new generation of Liberals, "Los Nuevos," led by Jorge Eliecer Gaitin and Gabriel Turbay, again made direct overtures toward the popular sectors and achieved important electoral successes.42

Political Impulses

Local and departmental elections revealed the increasing value of workers' votes to traditional parties. Although efforts to forge an independent workers* political party failed because of the varied concerns of different types of laborers, Liberals and leaders of the short-lived Republican party actively courted groups such as the UNIO, the Colombian Workers' Union, and the Workers party. Successful alliances among these groups, such as during the 1915 congressional and municipal council elections, resulted in the defeat of the dominant Conservatives and the election of several workers to public office. When workers' organizations urged their supporters to withhold their votes, as they did during the 1917 departmental elections, their political importance was equally evident in the easy Conservative victory.43 This same pattern continued into the 1920s, when the fledgling Socialist party emerged as an electoral force that was short-lived but that won several seats in Congress in the 1921 elections, a victory that shaped the "new liberalism" of Gaitan and Turbay. Informal political behavior did not stop after the turn of the century, but it increasingly paralleled formal political concerns. For example, the UNIO helped to organize the 1910 20 de julio centennial parade, which, according to most accounts, proceeded smoothly. The evening bullfight, by contrast, was the scene of a violent confrontation between spectators and the police as spectators left the bullring upset with a disappointing fight. Police overreacted to these public emotions and opened fire on the crowd, leaving at least nine people dead and scores injured. Once again, the workers' organization bore the burden of blame for the violence, although objective commentators noted the overreaction by untrained police as the primary cause of the violence.44 The events of March 16,1919, clearly united workers' formal and informal political activities. Spiraling inflation resulting from the economic dislocations of World War I had generated a tremendous wave of strikes on the northern coast of the nation the previous year.45 The nation's first socialist Workers' Assembly opened in late January, an unsettling turn of events for President Marco Fidel Suirez. The March protest originated in workers' opposition to the importation of military uniforms and other supplies that could be produced domestically. A Workers' Assembly demonstration on March 1646 turned violent as prepositioned army troops fired on the protesters, killing at least seven and wounding many others. Numerous workers' leaders were arrested, and the government imposed martial law.47 The March violence accelerated the pattern of confrontation between organized workers and the state. The Conservative party, in control of the nation's executive branch until 1930, demonstrated increasing willingness to use lethal forc against labor and other emerging sectors. Considerable violence surrounded labor disputes in the 1920s, notably in the Barrancabermeja oil fields and in the banana groves of Santa Marta. The Socialist party grew after its 1919 congress but could not make electoral inroads into the constituencies of either major party. Younger elements of the Liberal party, led by Jorge Elie"cer Gaitin and Los Nuevos, renewed Uribe Uribe's overture toward laborers but could accomplish lit-

David Sowell

tie given their political weakness. The Liberal presidential victory of 1930 signaled a new era in Colombian politics, one in which labor would figure prominently.

Conclusion The "modernization" of Bogota and Colombia necessitated the reformation of the country's political culture. Social classes grew or were created by sodoeconomic changes in both urban and rural settings. Members of the expanded artisanal sector and newly created industriales reacted to the conditions of the "new" city by way of petitions, mutual aid societies, informal violence, demonstrations, and political organizations. Artisans and industriales often joined in formal politics, and informal expressions came from a broader segment of the laboring classes. Workers' political organizations were commonplace but tended to be most influential when they allied with the dominant parties, although they were very effective in placing items of concern to workers on the parties' agendas. Partisan electoral mobilizations both continued nineteenth-century traditions and shaped the framework of twentieth-century Colombian political culture. Socioeconomic problems, such as the need for housing, were addressed only after a lengthy process that tended to demonstrate partisan disinterest. The violence of March 16 signaled the readiness of the government to quell "subversive" challenges, especially when sponsored by a socialist organization that called for fundamental changes in the country's political economy, an unfortunate feature of twentiethcentury political culture shared by both parties. Political impulses "from below" forced the Conservative and Liberal parties into a critical juncture; they had to develop repressive mechanisms more fully or reach an accommodation with these growing urban sectors, Ruth and David Collier, in their authoritative Shaping the Political Arena, suggest that the Colombian "incorporation period" occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, as the state legitimated and shaped an institutionalized labor movement.48 The institutionalization of the labor movement took place as the Liberal party helped to organize the Confederation of Colombian Workers (CTC) in 1935, after which the Conservative party facilitated the organization of the Union of Colombian Workers (UTC) in 1946. These unions served as channels through which organized workers could express their interests vis-a-vis the state, albeit in a manner that subordinated their interests to the needs of the parties. Smaller, more radical unions coexisted with these large confederations, but with less effective political voice. Artisans and small producers most frequently participated in socialist, Communist, or left Liberal political initiatives, tendencies that came to fruition in the 1930s as Gaitdn tapped the energy of this long-ignored social sector,49 Gaitan emphasized the importance of independence and self-worth in his political messages, themes that paralleled the ideology of many artisans.50 The increased capitalization of production that occurred after the 1920s seriously undermined the socioeconomic independence of this crucial social sector, especially as immigrant

Political Impulses

and national entrepreneurs developed a domestic putting out system and imported finished goods.51 By the rnid-1940s Gaitan had come to dominate the Liberal party and thus was able to represent the interests of urban small producers, which were often quite distinct from those of the wage laborers of the CTC and UTC. With his April 9, 1948, assassination, however, labor's influence was blunted, leaving the traditional Conservative and Liberal parties in a position of dominance over organized labor. The tragic failure of Colombian political culture lies not in the willingness of its citizens to formally assert their interests vis-a-vis the polity but in the insistence by institutionalized leaders that nonelite interests be subordinated to their own. In this, the urban crucible of the Colombian capital revealed patterns of political accommodation that would be reshaped and extended throughout the nation.

Notes An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1995 Latin American Studies Association. The author would like to thank James Baer, Ronn Pineo, and Sharon Phillipps Collazos for their helpful comments. 1. Miguel Samper, La mixria, en Bogota y otros escritos (Bogota: Universidad National, 1969), 7-13, passim. 2. Ibid., 135-193. 3. See, for example, Martin Alonso Pinzon, Historia del Camervatismo, 2nd ed, (Bogota: Ediciones Tercer Mundo, 1983); Gerardo Molina, Las ideas liberates en Colombia, 3 vols. (Bogota: Tercer Mundo, 1970-1977); Edgar Caicedo, Historia de las luchas vindicates en Colombia (Bogota: Ediciones CEIS, 1982); or Jonathan Hartyln, The Politics of Coalition Rule in Colombia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 4. Charles Bergquist, Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). 5. Ibid., 291-293.

6. David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 199-200.

7. Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 63-64. 8. Juan Friedel and Michael Jimenez, "Colombia," in The Urban Development of Latin America, 1750—1920, ed, Richard M, Morse (Stanford: Center for Latin American Studies, Stanford University, 1971), 61-76; William Duane, A Visit to Colombia, in the Years 1822 & 1823 (Philadelphia: Thomas H. Palmer, 1826), 464-465. 9. Richard E. Boyer and Keith A. Davies, Urbanization in 19th Century Latin America: Statistics and Sources (Los Angeles: Latin. American Center, 1973), 7,9-10,37-39,59-61. 10. Alfredo Iriarte, Breve historia de Bogota (Bogota: Fundadon Mision Colombia, Editorial Oveja Negra, 1988), 145.

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11. Alan UdalJ, "Urbanization and Rural Labor Supply: A Historical Study of Bogota, Colombia, Since 1920," Studies in Comparative International Development 15, no, 3 (Fall 1980): 71. 12. Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia, 277,287, 13. Iriarte, Breve historia de Bogota, 137. 14. Peter Walter Amato, "An Analysis of the Changing Patterns of Elite Residential Areas in Bogota, Colombia" (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1968). 15. Mauricio Archila Neira, Cultum e identidad obrera; Colombia, 1910-1945 (Bogota: CINEP, 1991), 58. 16. El Artista, July 11,1908. All newspaper citations are from Bogota. 17. David Sowell, The Early Colombian Labor Movement: Artisans and Politics in Bogota, 1830-1919 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 145; Union Industrial, August 21, 1909; El Resumen, March 1,1913. 18. Archila, Cultura e identidad obrera., 58. 19. Bergquist, Labor in Latin America, 275-276. 20. For a discussion of nineteenth-century artisanal ideology, see Sowell, Early Colombian Labor Movement, chap. 4. 21. Luis Ospina Vasquez, Industria y protection en Colombia, 1810-1930 (Medellin: FAES, 1987), 264-269,303-314. 22. Gary Long, "The Dragon Finally Came: Industrial Capitalism, Radical Artisans and the Formation of the Colombian Working Class, 1910-1948" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1994), 11, passim. 23. This conceptualization borrows from the work of Charles Tilly. See Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly, and Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975). 24. See, for examples, Anthony McFarlane, "Civil Disorders and Popular Protests in Late Colonial New Granada " Hispanic American Historical Review 64, no. I (February 1984): 17-54. 25. La America, January 26, 27, 29, 30, 1875; La ttmtmtidn, January 25, 26, 1875; El Tradicionista, January 26,29,1875, 26. David Sowell, "The 1893 bogotazo: Artisans and Public Violence in Late-Nineteenth Century Bogota," Journal of Latin American Studies 21 (May 1989): 267-282; La America, January 30,1875. 27. La Ilustracion, January 26,1875. 28. Oscar de J. Saldarriaga Velez, "Bogota, la Regeneracton y la policia, 1880-1900," Revista Universidad de Antioquia 37, no. 211 (January-March): 37-55; Alvaro Castano Castillo, La policia, su origen y su destino (Bogota: Lit y Edit "Cahur" 1947), vol. 8,12-18. 29. On prices see Miguel Urrutia,"Estadisticas de precios, 1846-1933," in Compendia de estadfsticas historicas de Colombia, ed. Miguel Urrutia and Mario Arrubla (Bogota: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1970), 85. 30. Sowell,"The 1893 bogotazo" passim. 31. Charles Bergquist, Coffee and Conflict in Colombia, 1886-1910 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1978), 44-45,49; El Telegmma, January 12, 1895; Los Hechos, January 23, 1895. 32. Eduardo Lemaitre, Rafael Reyes: Biografia de un gran colombiano (Bogota: Banco de la Republica, 1981), 246-255, 316-324; Bergquist, Coffee and Conflict in Colombia, 219-223.

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33. El Correo National, June 4,5,6,8,13,1906. 34. Sowell, Early Colombian Labor Movement, 137-147; La Capital, February 7,1911. 35. Sowell, Early Colombian Labor Movement, 134-135. 36. Gaceta Reptiblicana, January 27,1913. 37. Miguel Urrutia, The Development of the Colombian Labor Movement (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1969), 158-159. 38. Archila, Cultura e identidad obrera, 221-231; Daniel P^caut, "Colombia," in The State, Industrial Relations and the Labour Movement in Latin America, ed. Jean Carriere, Nigel Haworth, and Jacqueline Roddick (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989), vol. I, 264-266; Urrutia, Development of the Colombian Labor Movement, 64-68. 39. Guillermo and Jorge Gonzalez Quintana, El Circula de Obreros: La obra y su espiritu, 1911-1940 (Bogota: Editorial de la Litografia Colombiana, 1940), 9-21; Primer congreso eucartstico national de, Colombia (Bogota: Escuela Tipografia Salesiana, 1914). 40. Jorge Orlando MeIo,"De Carlos E. Restrepo a Marco Fidel Suarez. Republicanismo y gobiernos conservadores," in Historia politico, part 2, vol. \ of Nueva historia de Colombia, directed by Gloria Zea, 8 vols. (Bogota: Planeta, 1989), 223. 41. El Liberal, October 27,1911; Vincent Baillie Dunkp, "Tragedy of a Colombian Martyr: Rafael Uribe Uribe and the Liberal Party, 1896-1914" (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1979), 221. 42. Urrutia, Development of the Colombian Labor Movement, 76-80. 43. Sowell, Early Colombian Labor Movement, 144-145,148, 44. La Gaceta Republicans, July 5, 21, 24, 27, 29, 1911; El Tiempo, July 22, 25, 1911; El Dia Noticioso, July 22,25,27,1911; Colombia, July 8,1911; La Unidad, July 27,1911; El Liberal, July 25,1911; Comentarios, July 21,1911. 45. Urrutia, Development of the Colombian I.M,bor Movement, 56-59; Rene de la Pedraja Toman, "Colombia," in Latin American Labor Organizations, ed. Gerald Michael Greenfield and Sheldon L Maram (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987), 181. 46. El Correo Liberal, March 14,1919; La Gaceta Republicana, March 14,1919. 47. La Gaceta Republicana, March 22,1919; El Correo Liberal, March 17,18,1919; Urrutia, Development of the Colombian Labor Movement, 63-64. 48. Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena, 7,289, passim. 49. Herbert Braun, The Assassination of Gaitdn: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 9, 49; Long, "The Dragon Finally Came," 235. 50. Long, "The Dragon Finally Came," passim; Sowell, Early Colombian Labor Movement, chap. 4 and passim. 51. Long, "The Dragon Finally Came," 255-259.

Dangerous Streets: Trolleys, Labor Conflict, and the Reorganization of Public Space in Montevideo, Uruguay Anton Rosen thai The city of Montevideo experienced a phenomenal rate of growth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a growth driven by immigration from Europe, particularly from Italy and Spain, as well as by migration from Uruguay's rural interior. Montevideo expanded from a backwater capital of about 70,000-105,000 inhabitants in the 1870s to a small port city of 267,000 in 1900 to a thriving metropolis of 655,000 by 1930,1 The strains of this six- to ninefold increase in population were felt in a variety of sectors: A scarcity of housing for these immigrants led to the proliferation of conventillos (slum tenements) both in the center and on the periphery of the city; epidemics, some a direct consequence of this poor housing, became a constant fixture of urban life; construction of both private and public buildings proceeded at a fever pitch between the turn of the century and the Great Depression as the city stretched northward and eastward; a new mass transit system was created, featuring the electric trolley as its centerpiece; and finally, public space became more delineated, more contained, and more contested by masses and elites. This chapter examines the intersection of space and class by showing how the electric streetcar became a lightning rod for social conflict in the opening decades of the twentieth century. The trolley redefined order in the streets of Montevideo and reconfigured the social nature of public spaces in the city. The streetcar's speed shrank distances and brought outlying areas within the grasp of center-city residents. This led to the emergence of new suburbs and recreational beaches 30

Dangerous Streets

along the eastern shoreline, the incorporation of previously independent towns to the north, and increased accessibility to large parks, the zoo, soccer stadia, and other public areas for the city's working class. In short, leisure areas became democratized by the electric streetcar,2 Furthermore, the streetcar helped foster a vibrant urban culture that drew on the tango and jazz, cafes and cabarets, theaters and the cinema. By 1921, the city's two trolley companies were offering all-night service on several routes to feed the growing demand for transportation to these entertainments.3 The annual number of riders on the network in that year surpassed 126 million, more than six times the number carried on the old horse trams in 1904.4 But the increased speed offered by the electric trolleys also had a downside. As the trolley competed with other forms of transport and as vehicular traffic increased, the street became an increasingly dangerous locale for pedestrians, children, cart drivers, and even streetcar passengers. The high incidence of accidents resulting from this traffic alarmed the public and the press well into the post-World War I era. By 1930, traffic fatalities had risen to over 60 per year.5 The street, and by extension the streetcar, also became objects of fear during epidemics and crime waves throughout the early twentieth century. But the most terrifying aspect of life in the street came with the advent of severe labor strife in 1918. As Montevideo was hit by the global wave of postwar inflation and a severe increase in unemployment, streetcar workers, port workers, and their supporters took to the streets in the city's second general strike. In plazas, intersections, and on streetcar platforms, workers and police fought to preserve differing notions of social order, with tragic consequences. This chapter focuses on a central paradox—a privately managed, foreignowned public utility that served the needs of urban masses and stockholders— and demonstrates its differing impacts on a reformist government, a rapidly changing working class, and an evolving middle class that sprang from the expanding state bureaucracy. The chapter also examines the development of the streetcar as a public space in its own right, the scene of mixing between different social groups as well as the locus of political and commercial interactions. Lastly, the chapter details the 1918 general strike and the consequent emergence of the streetcar as a contested terrain between its workers, the two foreign companies that owned the network, the city government, the police, and the public.

Economic and Political Change At the turn of the twentieth century, Uruguay was just emerging from a long period of destructive civil wars and political instability. The chief consolidator of peace and security was President Jose Batlle y Ordonez (1903-1907 and 1911-1915), who dominated the nation's politics for the first three decades of the century and was the architect of the first welfare state in the Americas. He promoted centralized state authority, secularization, and the modernization of the

Anton Rosenthal

capital, at the expense of the rural sector, which had been a hotbed of revolt during the late nineteenth century. Batlle made a name for himself by experimenting with the forms of government (proposing, for example, the replacement of the presidency by an executive committee), by instituting reforms that redressed imbalances in wealth and power, and by showing sympathy for the working class's struggles with utility companies and factory owners. Between his two terms of office, he traveled extensiyely in Europe and drew ideas on political management and democracy from the Swiss, When he returned home, he embarked on a campaign to restructure Uruguayan society along European lines, delving into the family as well as the economy. University education was opened to women, capital punishment and bullfights were abolished, and divorce was liberalized so that it could be initiated by wives. The state bank was reorganized, and state monopolies in insurance and some utilities were created. Workers were protected by an eight-hour-day law, a compulsory day of rest after five days of work, state regulation of workplace conditions, prohibition of night work for women, and the establishment of pensions, workmen's compensation, severance pay, and universal public education.6 But the pace of change in the economic sphere often outdistanced the scope of these reforms and of the government bureaucracy that monitored them. Workers organized unions and pressed hard for changes in the conditions of work, taking advantage of the reduced levels of police repression of the labor movement during Batlle's presidencies. Montevideo underwent a highly compressed industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as new technology for freezing meat, a modern railroad network, and a modernized port drove the expansion of an export economy based on livestock. By 1930 there were nearly 80,000 industrial workers in 4,859 establishments in Montevideo, 90 percent of which had been founded since 1900,7 Militant workers emerged among meat packers and transport workers. These industrial workers joined artisans in construction, bakeries, furniture and shoe factories, and print shops to form a very active labor movement imbued with radical ideologies such as anarchism and socialism. Large strikes became common, and by the late 1920s they had crept into the public sector, with police and firemen staging walkouts. Into this boiling cauldron of social discontent, the electric streetcar was introduced, with immediate consequences for urban disorder.

Creating Public Space Prior to the introduction of electric trolleys in 1906, Montevideo had a distinctly rural character. While thousands of European immigrants entered its port in search of factory work or commercial opportunities in the last decades of the nineteenth century, waves of new residents also poured into the city from Uruguay's interior, contributing to the persistence of rural culture in the capital.8 The city's streets were filled with horse carts of all types, horse-drawn carriages,

Dangerous Streets

and horse trams. The pace of life was still leisurely, and the daily press carried few complaints about traffic congestion. The horse trams, operated by seven different companies, ran at irregular schedules at slow speeds, stopping for passengers who hailed them from their houses.9 The arri¥al of the faster and larger electric streetcars in December 1906 was warmly greeted by the press and was seen by the city's elite as an opportunity to bury Montevideo's rural component, to zone the municipality into controllable sectors, and to socialize the masses into more predictable urban behavior.10 The trolley also lessened the elite's fear of disease and crime by permitting the construction of new quarters on the outskirts of the rapidly expanding city for the emerging working class and thus promising to help eliminate the conventittos. But the ellctrico could fulfill only part of this promise of a more "civilized" future. As speculators drove up land prices and inflation cut the real wages of the working class, the conventillos persisted and grew even more densely populated.11 Indeed, it was mostly the elite who followed the trolley lines out to the new seaside suburb of Pocitos. Furthermore, the growth of the city occurred in an uncontrolled fashion, following the dictates of land auctioneers and developers rather than a central plan. By 1919 the magazine Mundo Uruguayo complained that public spaces and plazas, hygiene, and beauty had received little attention from developers, who had opened up streets and avenues "without order or harmony" in their search for wealth.12 But this complaint ignored a key fact about the streetcar companies themselves: They were the largest landowners in the city and from the first had sought to convert some of their land into public attractions that would boost ridershlp. The consolidation of the 157-mile streetcar system in the hands of two companies, one British and one German, permitted the creation of new public spaces across the city. La Sociedad Comercial, the British company, rebuilt the Hotel Pocitos at the terminus of its line on what became the city's premier swimming beach; they equipped the hotel with 600 rooms, a French restaurant, and a terrace that extended over the water.13 This perfectly placed hotel became a meeting place for young middle-class and upper-class couples, who flocked to the locale on Sundays. The company also built a soccer field next to its station in Pocitos in 1921; it drew thousands of Sunday riders. In addition, the company developed the lands of the Parque Central, a major city recreational area that eventually became the home of an 80,000-seat stadium, the largest in South America at the time, and the scene of the first World Cup of soccer in 1930.14 La Transatlantka, the German company, converted its land at Capurro Beach into a park with a terrace and bandstand and built two soccer fields of its own. In addition, each company developed routes to tourist areas such as Playa Ramirez, Parque Rodo, the Prado Hotel, and the zoo at Villa Dolores, as well as routes that linked the city's twelve plazas. Special services were also run to the cemeteries, and the companies reportedly carried 600,000 people on the weekend commemorating the Day of the Dead in 1909.15 Within a short time, Montevideo's residents

Anton Rosenthal

became completely dependent upon the trolley, and annual ridership grew from just over 30 million in 1906 to a peak of 154 million in 1926.16 In this latter year, the traffic represented nearly thirty monthly trips for each man, woman, and child in the city,17 Such usage led at least one foreign observer to remark that Montevideo was "over-trarnmed."18 The immense increase in the movement of people along the city's streets set off a chain of developments. The city embarked on an extensive program of street paving, it extended sewer services to suburbs, and a building boom commenced that changed the city's architectural image along its main avenues and plazas. Among the notable events: In 1908 the Standard Life Insurance building, soon to house a major department store, was Inished; the next year the renovation of the port was completed and the 200-room Parque Hotel was opened across from Playa Ramirez; in 1911 the penitentiary at Punta Carretas and the new university were erected and the Prado Hotel was opened; and in 1913 the British Hospital was inaugurated and the Mercado Agricola in La Aguada was finished.19 In the 1920s the architectural face of the city underwent a complete renovation with the construction of landmarks such as the Palacio Salvo on the Plaza de Independencia, the new customs house overlooking the port, the stunning Palacio Legislative and the Hotel Carrasco, and a beach resort and casino on the eastern edge of the city. In addition, work was undertaken on the downtown headquarters of the Banco de la Republica and the Jockey Club. This building boom was financed by both public and private capital. (See Map 2,1.)

The Street as Public Spectacle The Uruguayan chronicler Luis Enrique Azarola Gil remarked in his memoirs that men and women in twentieth-century Spanish America were street-oriented. Men left home to seek entertainment in cafes, clubs, bars, restaurants, theaters, or the racetrack, and women went to the movies, shopping, dancing, or visiting at teatime.20 Other chroniclers and newspaper reporters suggest that Uruguayans in particular sought out simple pleasures in public spaces—from the bustle of the Sunday market at Tristan Narvaja to the afternoon promenade of women along Calle Sarandf, from card-playing at neighborhood cafe's to outdoor concerts in the Parque Capurro, Streetcars were at the center of the city's daily rituals and special events, bringing the populace from their homes and workplaces into these public spaces. The street and its connected spaces were a source of constant entertainment in the preradio and pretelevision era. Markets offered an array of diversions along with their produce, including snake charmers and fortune-tellers. Lottery tickets were sold throughout the city in cafes, illegally until the 1930s.21 Beggars, hawkers, and prostitutes roamed the streets of the Old City, occasionally, as reported in the newspapers, disturbing the middle class's sense of urban order, which resulted in police sweeps. One department store offered a lunchroom on the fourth floor,

MAP 2,1

Montevideo, Uruguay, about 1930. Drawn by Werner Rosenthal.

Anton Rosenthal

so that hungry shoppers did not have to wander back out onto the street, where they might be accosted by the small armies of child beggars who periodically worked that district,22 The city's streets were also plagued by rabid dogs into the 1920s.23 Almost anything could happen in public spaces, without warning, which was no doubt part of their attraction. In the prewar period, newspapers carried many accounts of Montevideans committing suicide in parks and plazas, sometimes taking trolleys to these sites. In one case, a man rode a trolley to the penitentiary, sat on a bench in the plaza across from it, and put a bullet in his head, leaving a note in his clothing.24 In another example, a twenty-year-old man riding a streetcar along Calle Uruguay waited until the trolley came to a stop, pulled out a revolver, and shot himself, dying instantly.25 Even foreigners engaged in public suicides, as evidenced by the case of a violinist with the visiting Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra who slit his wrists and then flung himself out of a third-floor window of the Hotel Globo, falling across the trolley line on busy Calle 25 de Mayo and killing himself instantly.26 Waves of such incidents occasionally led to calls for legislation to restrict newspaper coverage of these deaths, since such coverage was thought to be encouraging an epidemic of suicides.27 Some public demises, however, were less intentional. In the middle of an autumn afternoon in 1916, a young Italian peanut vendor died when he made the mistake of closing an escape valve in his portable stove, in order to sound the whistle, and blew himself up in Plaza Matriz.28 In general, however, small plazas were places of exchange and socialization for the city's immigrants: The small plaza is the scene where human anguish develops: The discussions are her fruit, as are the fights, a typical manifestation of passion. In the lonely nights, when the soul is invaded by an inexplicable desire to go there, to see the fights, to listen to the picturesque commentaries spoken in different dialects, forming an appealing spectacle, it is a pleasurable pastime which makes one forget everything.29

The nights were also filled with entertainments as the streetcar extended its hours of service; the new, nighttime activity propelled the city to improve its lighting. Montevideo's first twenty-four-hour pharmacy opened to a large crowd of onlookers in 1918. It was located across from the Teatro Soils and was named La Gran Farmacia Norte-Americana.30 But the zone that radiated out from the Plaza de Independencia already featured late-night bakeries, gambling dens, cabarets, and houses of prostitution disguised as soda fountains. In the period from 1913 to 1917, the tango moved out of the vice-ridden Bajo district and into respectable establishments in the Centro district and competed with jazz in caf

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