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The fifteenth meeting of the Latin American Labor History Conference (LALHC), held April 17–18, 1998, at Duke University, began with a session on the early twentieth-century labor history of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. In “Class, Ethnicity, and Gender: The Negotiation of Workers' Identities in Porto Alegre's 1906 ‘Strike of Twenty-One Days,'” Joan Bak (University of Richmond) used the surprisingly detailed contemporary press coverage to carefully reconstruct the discourses of class, ethnicity, and gender that marked one of the earliest generalized work stoppages in the capital city of Porto Alegre. The origin of the 1906 strike, she argued, grew out of three intersecting transitions: from an artisanal to an industrial mode of production; from largely hermetic ethnic communities to more heterogeneous ones with multiple ethnic groups cross-cut by an emerging class identity; and from an overwhelmingly male paid working force to one increasingly female. She demonstrated how the workers' experience as a class during the strike came to override other divisions at this critical juncture. To understand this process of class formation, she argued, one must study how appeals to ethnicity and gender interacted with this emerging class identity, and how each element served as a locus of contention and negotiation between workers and management.

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