The Sweat of Their Brow: A History of Work in Latin America (review)
What is one to think about the meanings assigned to these essays? From my admittedly outmoded and unfashionable perspective, I had a hard time understanding the significance claimed by several contributors. The editors and contributors claim they “form a discursive community” (the frequency and density of jargon in this volume certainly shows this to be true) and they appear to be interested in communicating only within the community of like-minded professors and graduate students. Is Latin American history writing becoming unintelligible to undergraduates and general readers? If this volume is any indication, the answer is yes and no. The authors of these essays seem to begin and conclude their pieces with overly complicated and jargon-laden arguments. If one can skip the introductions and ignore some of the terminology and conceptionalization, however, what follows are often quite interesting, straightforward, and readable analyzes and explanations of past worlds that demonstrate excellent research and make sense even to me. Pilcher provides a good summary of cooking and the food industry in twentieth century Mexico; for Alex Saragoza its a good summary of the state-directed tourism industry; for John Mraz picture magazines, for Seth Fein cinema, for Steven J. Bachelor autoworker culture, for Heather Levi professional wrestling, for Omar Hernández, Emile McAnany, and Alison Greene television, and so on. These fragments give us some pretty good views of Mexico, especially Mexico City, after 1940. These essays and others like them, dissertations, new books, and recent articles will be invaluable to the next generation of historians who will fashion these fragments into new narratives (we used to call them syntheses) of twentieth century Mexican history. By then hybridity, decentering, multivalency, and subjectification will most likely seem as natural to historical discourse as ecology, gender, and hegemony do today. And those who have been around awhile will complain about the latest jargon that is permeating history, the discipline that is supposed to employ ordinary language.