Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
interior settled in the industrial enclaves of Argentina's cities, supple-
menting southern and eastern European immigrants as a source of
cheap, unskilled labor. The newcomers worked in textile and metallur-
gic factories. Others labored in the booming construction trades or in
the immense meatpacking plants that supplied Europe with Argentine
beef.
Although the economy had expanded, the workers lived in crowded
neighborhoods strained by housing shortages and shrinking real wages.
Most industrial laborers suffered arbitrary treatment by employers
while the government stood by, unwilling to enforce existing labor
codes. Meanwhile, electoral fraud and corruption among civilian politi-
cians denied the working class an effective voice in the political arena.
The depression had terminated the era of massive immigration in
Argentina, though some Europeans and Asians found niches in the
urban and rural landscape thereafter. The new workers of the 1930s
and 1940s were native-born migrants. The first wave of rural migrants
consisted of sons and daughters of European immigrants, gringos, who
chose to move to the city, particularly Buenos Aires, after a generation
of working as tenants on the land. This trend had begun early and
continued into the 1930s. Increasingly, however, mixed-race criollos
of the interior arrived looking for job opportunities in provincial cities
and in the national capital. Di Tella's manufacturing plant experienced
a wholesale turnover of its 4,000 laborers from skilled Italians to semi-
skilled and unskilled Argentines.
Women, too, began to find jobs in the industrial sector. Many pre-
ferred work in the factories for the higher wages and greater dignity
rather than the demeaning, poorly paid, and lengthy labor in someone
else's household. For many young women, a factory job served as a
brief year or two of earning money in order to make the transition
from living with parents to marriage. Women found work in the textile
plants, where their skills in sewing had prepared them to handle the
fine motor skills of threading the weaving machines and inspecting the
finished cloth. There were drawbacks, of course. Male supervisors
might abuse their authority from time to time, and the pay for women
never equaled that of the male workers assigned the heavier duties on
the shop floor. Even the less savory tasks associated with the
frigorífi-
cos
(slaughtering plants) attracted female job seekers to the industrial
suburbs of Berisso and Avellaneda south of Buenos Aires. “I started
work in the picada [cutting] section of the Swift factory in 1944,” said
one migrant woman, “. . . You had to do one hundred kilos of clean
meat an hour. It was an enormous section with about twelve hundred
