Tenant Mobilization and the 1907 Rent Strike in Buenos Aires

1993 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Baer

In September of 1907, the residents of a large conventillo, or tenement house, in Buenos Aires protested a 47 percent rent increase by striking against their landlord and refusing to pay. The strikers called on the residents of other rental buildings to join with them and organized a central committee. The strike spread quickly. By October 1 tenants from more than 750 buildings had joined in the strike. That number increased to nearly 2,000 buildings before the end of 1907. Neighborhood and building committees arose throughout the city as nearly one tenth of the total population of Buenos Aires, and tenants in several other major cities as well, joined the strike in one of the largest and most unusual forms of working-class collective action in early twentieth-century Argentina.

Author(s):  
Connal Parr

St John Ervine and Thomas Carnduff were born in working-class Protestant parts of Belfast in the 1880s, though Ervine would escape to an eventually prosperous existence in England. Orangeism, the politics of early twentieth-century Ireland, the militancy of the age—and the involvement of these writers in it—along with Ervine’s journey from ardent Fabian to reactionary Unionist, via his pivotal experiences managing the Abbey Theatre and losing a leg in the First World War, are all discussed. Carnduff’s own tumultuous life is reflected through his complicated Orange affiliation, gut class-consciousness, poetry, unpublished work, contempt for the local (and gentrified) Ulster artistic scene, and veneration of socially conscious United Irishman James Hope. It concludes with an assessment of their respective legacies and continuing import.


Author(s):  
Lila Caimari

Keeping order in the city is the oldest of police duties. In the 1820s, the Policía de Buenos Aires adopted the image of a watchful eye as their emblem, placing the symbol on their medallions, badges, and letterhead. This institution “never slept.” Watching the city by day, watching it by night, the police attempted to give the appearance of being the ubiquitous eyes of authority. This chapter focuses on the crisis and subsequent resurrection of this ideal during the first decades of the twentieth century. It traces this history into the 1930s, when the police began using the new technologies—radios and patrol cars—that fundamentally altered methods of perceiving and collecting information on urban life.


Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin

This chapter examines the development of some of Liverpool’s most significant moral welfare organisations between the late-Victorian period and the end of the First World War. It unpacks the early historical trajectories of the House of Help, the Liverpool Vigilance Association, the Liverpool Catholic Women’s League and the Liverpool Women Police Patrols, and it argues that these organisations continued to view women’s relationship to the city through the lens of Victorian gender ideals. Moreover, the chapter examines how the pioneering and well-intended efforts of these organisations to craft a ‘respectable’ form of public womanhood during the first two decades of the twentieth century were still steeped in presumptions about the immorality of the working class, and working-class women in particular.


2017 ◽  
Vol 86 (4) ◽  
pp. 632-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Rees

Australian women travelers in early twentieth-century New York often recoiled from the frenetic pace of the city, which surpassed anything encountered in either Britain or Australia. This article employs their travel accounts to lend support to the growing recognition that modernity took different forms throughout the world and to contribute to the project of mapping those differences. I argue that “hustle” was a defining feature of the New York modern, comparatively little evident in Australia, and I propose that the southern continent had developed a model of modern life that privileged pleasure-seeking above productivity. At a deeper level, this line of thinking suggests that modernization should not be conflated with the relentless acceleration of daily life; it thus complicates the ingrained assumption that speed and modernity go hand-in-hand.


2016 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 74-88
Author(s):  
Ralph Mills

Small mass-produced objects, such as ceramic figurines, that may have been displayed on mantelpieces, are found in working-class nineteenth and early twentieth century archaeological contexts. Above the hearth, at the heart of the home, objects located on the mantelpiece could be said to be central in reflecting a number of aspects of the lives of those who placed them there. These could include identity, resistance, memory and superstition.


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