Reinterpreting Labor Militancy: The Collapse of the Cacao Economy and the General Strike of 1922 in Guayaquil, Ecuador

Resumen

I NCREASING interest in Latin American labor history in recent years has brought growth to this still largely underdeveloped field. For some time, only a few U.S. scholars covered the subject, most notably Robert J. Alexander.' But as unions established a larger role in the political process, many institutional studies began to appear in English, especially in -the 196os, covering single nations and Latin America as a whole.2 In 1977, Hobart Spalding, riding a tide of rising U.S. academic interest in dependency theory, offered a forceful new synthesis, arguing that Latin America's ties to the world economy played the critical role in shaping labor's development. Spalding's work sparked a lively debate and generated increased interest.3 Over the last few years, several studies have appeared which combine a concern for broader national political and economic trends with attention to ordinary people in everyday life. Scholars such as Peter DeShazo and June Hahner have provided in-depth observations of workers' lives, labor, and