The Light of Your Body

The Chicana/o Movement of the 1960s and 1970s has fascinated historians, scholars, and activists for generations. The labor dimensions of this multifaceted movement have been traditionally examined by turning to the organizing drives and vision of the United Farm Workers (UFW). In this presentation, historian Eduardo Contreras will zero in on how the "labor question" regained some of its force during the movement era and in an urban setting. Generally encompassing the pursuit of a living wage and the promotion of initiatives for socioeconomic well-being, the labor question proved dominant before World War II, lost much of its vitality at midcentury, and resurfaced with great strength at the end of the 20th century. In San Francisco, many activists and organizations revived the labor question, reframed it for their historical moment, and situated it energetically within el movimiento, which unfolded as a Chicano/Latino movement owing to the city's heterogenous population. Some groups focused their efforts on accessing work and promoting job creation. Others built alliances with existing labor unions and championed unionization for unorganized laborers. As activists and reformers of an earlier era had long known, addressing and finding solutions to the challenges faced by working people required struggle as well as immersion on various fronts.

Eduardo Contreras is associate professor of history at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research specializations include U.S. Latina/o/x histories, labor, race, and migration. He is the author of Latinos and the Liberal City: Politics and Protest in San Francisco (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). He is now at work on "Central American Labor and U.S. Empire: From the Gold Rush to the Early 1930s," an investigation of working people's responses to U.S. corporate enterprises in Central America since the mid-nineteenth century. He currently serves on the editorial board of International Labor and Working-Class History, one of the preeminent journals in the field.

The first project, Latinos and the Liberal City, won the 2020 David Montgomery Prize Award for the best book on American labor and working-class history, presented by the Organization of American Historians and the Labor and Working-Class History Association. It has garnered critical attention across a variety of fields. The American Historical Review recognized that “By focusing on trade unionism, feminism, gay rights, and other subjects, [Contreras] has gone far in explaining the liberality of San Francisco as something that Latino/as helped construct. And by bringing all these things together, he has produced a unique and important work.” A reviewer in the Journal of American History underscored the following: “By placing Latinos at the center of the city's political history, Contreras allows us to see how generations of Latinos understood and attempted to shape the economic, social, and political systems around them.” In another revealing observation – perhaps more of the writer than of the book – Arizona History pointed out that “Without a doubt, Contreras demonstrates that San Francisco Latinos were politically active and helped shape this bastion of liberalism throughout the twentieth century.”

Broadly, scholars conclude with phrases such as “essential reading for scholars of urban history, political history, and Latinx studies"; “an analytically sophisticated and archivally rich story of San Francisco and its Latino populations and traces in novel ways their engagement with the ideals and failures of twentieth-century democratic liberalism”; “a standard bearer”; and “a welcome addition to Latino/a history, western history, the history of labor activism, urban history, and other fields.”