History Theses and Dissertations
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Item "Foreboding Circumstances": U.S. Labor Intervention and the Chilean Labor Movement during the Cold War, 1964-1973(2024) Gutmann Fuentes, Andrea Nicole; Rosemblatt, Karin A.; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recent scholarship in Cold War and transnational labor history has examined the role played by U.S. organized labor in neutralizing left-wing labor movements around the world, contributing to U.S. State Department goals of anti-communist containment in the Third World. Research from both within and outside the academy has examined how the AFL-CIO, operating primary through the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), acted to undermine the socialist Unidad Popular government in Chile, helping to set the stage for the U.S.-backed coup d’etat on September 11, 1973. However, this scholarship has suffered from a relative lack of Chilean primary source material and a failure to ground historical analyses in the local Chilean context. This has impeded a full view of how the AFL-CIO’s labor intervention project unfolded in Chile, how it was perceived and responded to by Chileans, and the extent to which it was ultimately successful. This thesis makes use of Chilean national press, books, and trade union and left-wing media, in addition to new source material pulled from the U.S. State Department and the AFL-CIO archives, to assess the successes and failures of the AFL-CIO’s labor intervention project in Chile. The thesis demonstrates that while the AFL-CIO failed to accomplish many of its concrete goals in Chile due to overwhelming opposition to its project among Chilean labor, the AFL-CIO’s relationship with particular sectors of the Chilean labor movement effectively advanced a more general political goal of fomenting labor opposition from labor in strategic sectors of the economy to undermine the Unidad Popular government, thereby contributing to the success of the 1973 coup. By examining AFL-CIO’s complicated and paradoxical relationship with the centrist Christian Democratic Party, this thesis argues that the vast majority of Chilean workers from a broad array of ideological tendencies rejected the AFL-CIO’s promotion of “free trade unionism,” an explicitly anti-communist ideology advocating that workers reject a politics of class struggle in favor of class harmony between labor and management. This thesis then demonstrates that the AFL-CIO encouraged and validated the decision of some conservative labor leaders in the stevedore labor movement to ultimately join the anti-Allende opposition. Under the intensely polarized political context of early 1970s Chile, in which conservative labor leaders faced social and political pressures to move leftward with the majority of the labor movement and to support the Unidad Popular, the decision of these labor leaders to join the right-wing opposition with support from the AFL-CIO was a significant event contributing to the 1973 coup.Item TOWARDS A TRANSANDEAN MAPUCHE POLITICS: RITUAL AND POWER IN CHILE AND ARGENTINA, 1792-1834(2017) Zarley, Jesse; Rosemblatt, Karin A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Towards a Transandean Mapuche Politics examines how unconquered indigenous groups in the Southern Cone of South America impacted the transition from colony to nation (1792-1834), a moment when European and indigenous sovereignties were thrown in to question. It focuses on the intersection of indigenous politics and Latin America’s Age of Revolution. This project intervenes in the growing debates over transnational history and borderlands studies to demonstrate how the transandean Mapuche-Spanish frontier was both a political and an epistemological space. Mapuche sovereignty resisted categorizations by empires and nations, impeded the political and economic projects articulated by Europeans and creoles, and compelled foreign actors to participate in Mapuche diplomatic rituals much longer than previously thought. It begins by looking at a late colonial treaty negotiation in 1793 to reconstruct diplomatic rituals developed by Mapuche leaders to defend their sovereignty. This project then extends these insights on both sides of the Andes mountain range until a military campaign led by Argentine President Juan Manuel de Rosas against Mapuche and other indigenous groups inhabiting the Pampas in 1833-1834. By looking at military, ecclesiastical, and Mapuche correspondence from Chile, Argentina, and Spain, it demonstrates that groups like the Mapuche, who inhabited the seemingly marginal frontiers of Spain’s American empire, were in fact central actors in its transformation. Analyzing Mapuche diplomacy in southern Chile and western Argentina from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century demonstrates how indigenous relations in a border region provide different genealogies for our understanding of sovereignty in the Age of Revolution. Mapuche sovereignty ran parallel too, but intersected with the fraught end of empire and formation of nation states. These interactions along the old Spanish/Mapuche frontier, which stretched across the continent from the Pacific Coast of Chile to the mouth of the River Plate, were but the tip of the iceberg in the broader, transandean Mapuche political world that confounded the spatial imaginaries of empires and nations.Item The Democratic Self: Gender, Memory, and Human Rights under the Augusto Pinochet Dictatorship and Transition to Democracy in Chile, 1973-2010(2015) Townsend, Brandi Ann; Rosemblatt, Karin A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The Democratic Self asks how ideas about gender shaped the ways that Chileans reconstructed the affective, social, and political bonds the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) sought to destroy. It intervenes in debates about the degree to which right-wing military regimes in Latin America eroded social ties during the Cold War. Torture targeted gendered and sexual identities and compelled victims to re-assess their roles as men, women, militants, husbands, wives, sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers. This dissertation argues that to reconnect the individual to collective struggles for democracy, survivors and their allies drew on longstanding, heteronormative gender ideologies within the left. Those ideologies gradually changed over the course of the dictatorship, and in turn, influenced memories during the subsequent transition to democracy (1990-2010). The dissertation draws on government and non-governmental documents and oral interviews with survivors, their families, and human rights workers. Between 1978 and 1990, mental health professionals working within human rights organizations provided psychological therapy to approximately 32,000-42,000 Chileans to help them work through their traumatic experiences as part of a collective project to repair the social connections that state violence ripped apart. These professionals translated psychoanalytic concepts of “the self” into the language of pre-1973 frameworks of citizenship grounded in the heterosexual, male-headed nuclear family. By the mid-1980s, Chile’s feminist movement changed the terms of the debate by showing how gendered forms of everyday violence that pre-dated the dictatorship shaped political violence under the dictatorship, as well as the opposition’s response. Slowly, mental health professionals began to change how they deployed ideas about gender when helping survivors and their families talk about state violence. However, the narratives of violence that emerged with the end of the dictatorship in 1990 and that were enshrined in three separate truth commissions (1990, 2004, and 2010) only partially reflected that transformation. The democratic governments’ attempts to heal Chile’s painful past and move forward did not always recognize, much less dislodge, entrenched ideas that privileged men’s experiences of political militancy. This dissertation shows how Chileans grappled with their memories of state violence, which were refracted through gendered discourses in the human rights movement.Item Reason and Faith: A Study of Interwar Chilean Eugenic Discourse, 1900-1950(2013) Walsh, Sarah; Rosemblatt, Karin A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines how social reform discourse that rationalized gender difference allowed Chilean Catholics to play a critical role in the development of eugenic science between 1900 and 1950. Building on scholarship relating to the development of a modernized, patriarchal system during the 1920s and 1930s and the rise of eugenics among scientists during the same period, this dissertation posits that eugenic science in Chile was the result of a complex interaction between Catholic and secular intellectuals vying for dominance in the reconstruction of the modern Chilean social order. Political liberals characterized the Catholic Church as a dogmatic monolith that was antithetical to social progressivism and disconnected from the realities of modern life. At the same time, Chilean Catholics used the social disruptions caused by capitalist industrialization to assert their social, moral, and scientific superiority. The dissertation asserts that anti-clerical discourse popular among progressive actors served to obscure the scientific and social contributions, both conservative and progressive, of the Catholic Church and its supporters in Chile. Each chapter in this dissertation examines how Catholics responded to secular efforts to oust them from their traditional places of social influence - hospitals, orphanages, schools, charities, and family life - through the application of eugenic science. Secular reformers contrasted their own presumably rational, scientific responses to social problems while feminizing religious practice and Church or Catholic perspectives. Chilean Catholics responded by asserting the compatibility of science and religion, particularly in the field of eugenics. Catholic scholars suggested, for instance, that they had to be involved in eugenic practices to ensure the most ethical application of scientific principles.