Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
women. It was like a village, an entire city block. You could look
across it and see a mass of people in white [factory smocks] working;
it was beautiful, a real spectacle” (James, 2000, 45).
The new influx of Creole workers added to the cultural and racial
antagonisms within urban society. As the sons and daughters of grin-
gos moved into the middle class, their factory jobs were taken over by
darker-skinned migrants. These newly arrived workers crowded into
the unhealthy shantytowns known as
villas miserias
(miserable little
towns). On the streets, they were disparagingly called
cabecitasnegras
(black-headed ones), for their Indian and African features. The middle
class in particular found new reason to worry about the problems of
crime and social control in a rapidly changing urban society. They
believed the migrants to be undisciplined and given over to deceitful
and tricky behavior known as
vivezacriolla
(native's deceit).
Tensions also rose in the workplace between foreign and middle-
class supervisors and the multicultural workers. The railways were
employing nearly 2,000 British citizens at the outbreak of World War
II, and the company's policy of placing British subjects in the high-
est positions necessarily affected the majority of the workers. Of the
other railway employees, 49,516 were Argentine, 19,515 were Italian,
and 12,062 were Spanish. The tension between British and non-British
employees was not the only ongoing ethnic conflict. Animosity also
existed between Argentine citizens and immigrants and between the
unskilled migrants and the skilled workers.
The directors tried to increase worker productivity in order to com-
pensate for the railways' technological stagnation and increasing decay.
To do so, they needed the Conservative's support to annul the work
rules sanctioned by the previous Radical governments. One of the mili-
tary government's first measures in 1930 was to repeal the eight-hour
workday that had been legislated just before the coup. A subsequent
decree by President Justo allowed the companies to cut wages and
violate seniority rules. Bereft of political protection, workers looked to
their unions as the principal means of advancing their interests.
By the early 1940s, 20 percent of Argentine workers held union cards,
a high level of unionism compared to most Latin American countries.
The railroad workers still had the nation's most powerful union, as they
made up more than one-third of the union members affiliated with the
Confederación General del Trabajo (General Labor Confederation) or
CGT. Communist labor activists had been aggressively organizing the
less-skilled workers in labor-intensive industries like meatpacking and
construction. They also carried their union drive to the rural sector,
