Before it grew to become the heart of Latin American drug trafficking, the Colombian urban of Medellín was once recognized as a hit tale of industrialization, a spot the place protectionist price lists had created a “capitalist paradise.” through the Nineteen Sixties, the city’s cloth industrialists have been featuring themselves because the architects of a social balance that rested on Catholic piety and strict sexual norms.
Dulcinea within the Factory explores the bounds of this paternalistic order by means of investigating employees’ innovations of conformity and resistance and by way of tracing the disciplinary practices of managers through the interval from the flip of the century to an enormous reorganization of the turbines within the overdue 1950s.
Ann Farnsworth-Alvear’s analyses of archived team of workers documents, inner manufacturing facility correspondence, published laws, and corporate magazines are mixed with illuminating interviews with retired staff to permit a close reconstruction of the realm in the back of the mill gate. In a spot the place the excellence among virgins and nonvirgins prepared the hard work marketplace for girls, the gap among chaste and unchaste habit underlay an ethical code that formed operating women’s self-perceptions. Farnsworth-Alvear demanding situations the reader to appreciate gender no longer as an competition among male and female yet quite as a normative box, marked by means of “proper” and “improper” methods of being girl or male. Disputing the concept the shift within the generators’ group over numerous many years from in most cases girls to nearly solely males was once established exclusively on fiscal components, the writer exhibits how gender and sophistication, as social practices, converged to form commercial improvement itself.
Innovative in its artistic employment of sophisticated and complicated fabric, Dulcinea within the Factory addresses long-standing debates inside of hard work background approximately proletarianization and paintings tradition. This book’s specialize in Colombia will make it invaluable to Latin Americanists, however it also will entice a large readership past Latin American and exertions experiences, together with historians and sociologists, in addition to scholars of women’s stories, social events, and anthropology.
