Call for Papers - Dossier "The Second World War and the Latin American Working Class", volume 17 (2025).

In 2025, the eightieth anniversary of the surrender of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, traditionally consecrated as the final milestones of the Second World War, will be celebrated. In the countries where the conflict claimed hundreds of thousands or even millions of lives, the impact of the total war experience on the worlds of labor has long been consolidated as a relevant topic of historiographical debate, something that until recently was not the case in Latin America.

Recent research, however, has shown that the diplomatic and military disputes between the great powers, culminating in the consolidation of the global hegemony of the United States over an international system made up of formally sovereign nation-states, generated multiple impacts on workers in the region.

Some of the thematic areas that have deserved the attention of historians are: experiences of work on the production fronts of strategic materials and in infrastructure works linked to hemispheric defense; class and race identities and inequalities among soldiers recruited into the Armed Forces during the war; the imposition of military discipline and extraordinary production quotas in various productive activities as a result of the war effort; popular mobilizations against shortages, rationing and the black market in essential products; the intersection between class conflicts and ethnic-racial rivalries in work environments; the relationship between the international context of the period and transformations in labor legislation and efforts to establish norms and standards in relation to work; changes in the inclusion of women and different ethnic-racial groups in the occupational structure; transformations in the processes of organization, mobilization and political participation related to anti-fascism, anti-imperialism, the discussion about neutrality in the face of war and mass nationalism.

Without limiting itself to these examples, the dossier aims to bring together a set of papers that offer a comprehensive and diverse view of these new strands of historiographical production that rescue the role of the Latin American working class at a crucial juncture in the history of the 20th century.

The deadline for submitting articles is March 15, 2025.