Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904-1951 (Comparative and International Working-Class History) - Softcover

"[S]ophisticated, well-researched, and methodologically innovative . . . ." -- Joel Wolfe * Latin American Research Review * "Tracing the history of El Teniente is useful, and the author has based his work upon a rich number of sources. . . . [T]his work reveals an aspect of life that is little known." -- William F. Sater * The Historian * "Thomas Klubock has penned a splendid description and analysis of working-class life in a mining camp run by North American capitalists. Diligently researched and deftly written, Constested Communities focuses on the grassroots. . . . This book will satisfy traditional labor historians with its analysis of the workforce, working conditions, union affairs, and political activism. It will also please more voguish social and cultural historians with its exceptional attention to daily lives, to values and attitudes, and to the neglected roles of women. It will be hailed by both groups of scholars as a sophisticated portrait of the interactions between global capitalist structures and local social forces." -- Paul W. Drake * Labor History * "Klubock uses the lens of gender to cast some of the most self-consciously masculine workers in Latin America-the copper miners of Chile's El Teniente-in a new light. If Klubock's account is cutting edge in its gender analysis, his combining of gender with class analysis and his application of both to the labor history of a masculine Latin American workforce is pathbreaking. . . . Klubock tells this complex story with narrative skill and analytic clarity." -- Peter Winn * American Historical Review * "[A] lucid and persuasive history drawn from local archives, company records, personal interviews, and informed readings of a wide array of substantive and theoretical literature." -- A. J. Bauer * Journal of Interdisciplinary History * "Revealing a defining moment of modern Chilean history, Contested Communities is a crucially important work. First-rate, fascinating labor history . . . remarkable for its boldness and originality."-Jeffrey L. Gould, Indiana University "Combining the explanatory power of theory with rich, evocative narrative, Klubock sets a new standard for the treatment of gender relations and politics in Latin American labor history."-Gil Joseph, Yale University "[S]ophisticated, well-researched, and methodologically innovative . . . ." - Joel Wolfe, Latin American Research Review "Tracing the history of El Teniente is useful, and the author has based his work upon a rich number of sources. . . . [T]his work reveals an aspect of life that is little known." - William F. Sater, The Historian "[A] lucid and persuasive history drawn from local archives, company records, personal interviews, and informed readings of a wide array of substantive and theoretical literature." - A. J. Bauer, Journal of Interdisciplinary History "Thomas Klubock has penned a splendid description and analysis of working-class life in a mining camp run by North American capitalists. Diligently researched and deftly written, Constested Communities focuses on the grassroots. . . . This book will satisfy traditional labor historians with its analysis of the workforce, working conditions, union affairs, and political activism. It will also please more voguish social and cultural historians with its exceptional attention to daily lives, to values and attitudes, and to the neglected roles of women. It will be hailed by both groups of scholars as a sophisticated portrait of the interactions between global capitalist structures and local social forces." - Paul W. Drake, Labor History "Klubock uses the lens of gender to cast some of the most self-consciously masculine workers in Latin America-the copper miners of Chile's El Teniente-in a new light. If Klubock's account is cutting edge in its gender analysis, his combining of gender with class analysis and his application of both to the labor history of a masculine Latin American workforce is pathbreaking. . . . Klubock tells this complex story with narrative skill and analytic clarity." - Peter Winn, American Historical Review

In Contested Communities Thomas Miller Klubock analyzes the experiences of the El Teniente copper miners during the first fifty years of the twentieth century. Describing the everyday life and culture of the mining community, its impact on Chilean politics and national events, and the sense of self and identity working-class men and women developed in the foreign-owned enclave, Klubock provides important insights into the cultural and social history of Chile. Klubock shows how a militant working-class community was established through the interplay between capitalist development, state formation, and the ideologies of gender. In describing how the North American copper company attempted to reconfigure and reform the work and social-cultural lives of men and women who migrated to the mine, Klubock demonstrates how struggles between labor and capital took place on a gendered field of power and reconstituted social constructions of masculinity and femininity. As a result, Contested Communities describes more accurately than any previous study the nature of grassroots labor militancy, working-class culture, and everyday politics of gender relations during crucial years of the Chilean Popular Front in the 1930s and 1940s.