Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men, and Women in Colombia's Industrial Experiment, 1905-1960 (review)

Dulcinea in the Factory: Myths, Morals, Men, and Women in Colombia's Industrial Experiment, 1905-1960. By ANN FARNSWORTH-ALVEAR. Durham: Duke University Press. Photographs. Maps. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xvi, 303 pp. Cloth, $59.95. Paper, $19.95.

Ann Farnsworth-Alvear has written an elegant, theoretically sophisticated analysis of the industrialization process in Medellín's textile mills during the first half of the twentieth century. The Colombian case constitutes an important study both for the similarities and differences that distinguished it from other Latin American industrial experiments. Medellín's mills were among the first to develop in Latin America, became one of the region's largest producers, and at their height (the 1940s and 1950s) provided one of the few Latin American examples of secure blue-collar employment and potential mobility for thousands of urban workers. In contrast to the majority of other Latin American mills, moreover, Medellín's textile sector was distinctive in that it depended on an overwhelmingly female workforce during nearly four decades and was largely funded and owned by local, rather than foreign capital. Within the broader context of Colombian labor history the case of Medellín has also stood out as one notable for the apparent absence of militancy among workers and the seeming endurance of a paternalistic ethic of employer-driven control over the mills. Through a careful reconstruction of workers' lived factory experiences and company policies, however, Farnsworth-Alvear challenges and modifies this narrow perception of employer-worker dynamics in Medellín's textile sector.

Farnsworth-Alvear identifies two crucial turning points in the history of Antioquia's mills. The first occurred between 1935 and 1940 when militant unionization efforts targeted previously unorganized textile workers. The second took place in the decade of the 1950s when technological innovations and the rise of newly trained industrial engineers redefined the structure of production and worker-management relations in the mills. Although the events of these two periods ultimately benefited industrialists by enabling them to establish a form of gendered discipline in their factories, Farnsworth-Alvear nonetheless consistently reminds her readers that workers played a critical role in shaping factory life and that industrialists' power was both contingent and constantly renegotiated. The actions of workers rather than the desires of employers, for instance, were crucial in spurring the emergence of an alliance between Antioqueño industrialists, local authorities, and Catholic social reformers (both lay and religious) intended to stem what was perceived as a growing Communist threat. Indeed, as the author persuasively demonstrates, it was not until structural, ideological, and cultural factors--both domestic and international--converged in the late 1930s that industrialists found it possible to impose their will on the shop floor. Even when factory owners succeeded in developing a labor discipline based on the ideal of female workers' chastity (la moral), moreover, Farnsworth-Alvear notes that women workers defied factory regulations and elite attempts to define their identity solely in relation to their conformity to a bourgeois code of sexual propriety.

While in principle I find persuasive the author's argument that women workers conformed to la moral in order to keep their jobs but did not necessarily internalize or adopt elite notions of female sexual propriety, not all the author's evidence supports such a conclusion. Women workers at the only two mills that were not owned by Antioqueños (Telsa and Tejicondor) and where employment was not predicated upon conformity to la moral, nonetheless went to great pains during their interviews to attribute "misconduct" to women other than themselves. The emphatic satisfaction with which many of the women interviewed highlighted their ability to remain single, buy their own homes, secure employment and a pension, support their extended families, and maintain their independence from men also suggests the vastness of these achievements and how...