"I Sweat the Flavor of Tin": Labor Activism in Early Twentieth-Century Bolivia (review)

Given the primacy of ethnic politics in the Andes today, and particularly in Bolivia, it is easy to forget, or perhaps minimize, the historical role of urban working classes and workers in the export sectors in shaping the politics of Latin American countries with large indigenous populations. Current analyses tend to privilege ethnicity over class, not only because the ethnic appears more politically salient (and focus on it may prove more advantageous in one's career) but also because class-based interpretations appear not to have weathered well the shift away from the Marxian paradigm. But, as Charles Bergquist masterfully showed for the cases of Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Venezuela a quarter of a century ago, workers matter. True, in most countries and in particular in Bolivia, they represented an infinitesimal proportion of the overall laboring population. But their social and political imprint tended to be disproportionate to their size both because of their strategic role in key economic sectors (resource extraction, transport, industry), but also (though this is less often examined) because of their symbolic role as perceived expressions, and agents in the obtainment, of "modernity" or "progress."

For these reasons, Robert L. Smale's careful and close study of labor activism in the city of Oruro in the first three decades of the twentieth century is to be welcomed. Drawing on a range of primary sources, but particularly on prefectural correspondence—for a particularly useful vantage point on local and regional politics—Smale explores in detail the multiple forces shaping the emergence of the working class movement around the tin mines of Oruro. Although organized chronologically, the chapters explore a number of themes that will be familiar to students of the labor history of other Latin American countries, including paternalism and worker resistance to coercive forms of employment, the role of artisans in shaping the early labor movement, labor migration (in this case between nitrate and copper camps in Chile and Bolivia) and the effect of such transnational experiences of work on labor militancy, the adoption of the strike as a method of struggle, the influence of radical ideologies (anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, socialism, Marxism, etc.) on an increasingly organized labor movement, and the see-saw between "progressive" policies regulating the workplace and repressive measures regulating workers and unions as characteristics of evolving state labor policy.

These themes notwithstanding, Smale's approach is largely narrative and at times excessively detailed. It is driven by a chronology wherein political events (changes of government, strikes, massacres) are given pride of place. There is little attempt to frame the discussion in a comparative perspective (with respect to other Latin American cases or beyond) or to engage with the broader historiographical debates that this study intervenes in and potentially contributes to. The final chapter, or epilogue, summarizes the history of Bolivia from the Chaco War to the 1952 revolution in eight pages, but does not constitute a conclusion as such. The book also lacks an introduction (Smale opts instead for a short prologue). There is a wealth of information here, and it is carefully documented and well written and its narrative of struggles of the Oruro workers is compelling. But the reader is left asking what historiographical work it is doing—where does this book fit in the context of Bolivian or Latin American labor history? In what ways does it challenge or confirm previous interpretations of, say, state-labor relations in Bolivia? In what specific ways does it inform our understanding of Bolivia's early twentieth-century history? By failing to address these questions explicitly, Smale does his fine social history of labor in early twentieth-century Oruro a disservice.