Call for papers for the dossier: Urban informality and the social history of workers in Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries, volume 18 (2026).
Dossier Title: Urban Informality and the Social History of Workers in Latin America in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Organization: Brodywn Fischer (University of Chicago), Samuel Oliveira (CEFET-RJ/Unirio), Mariana Costa (UFRJ)
Deadline for submissions: February 28, 2026.
Abstract (Call for Papers):
The dossier Urban Informality and the Social History of Workers in Latin America in the 19th and 20th Centuries welcomes contributions that address workers' agency in the formation of informal spaces, considering their practices, experiences, and worldviews in the metropolitanization of Latin America. The expansion and academic institutionalization of Labor History have renewed the historiography of urban informality through analyses that intersect political struggles for housing and the construction of workers' identities in Brazil and Latin America.
The concept of "urban informality" emerged in the 1970s to describe various urbanization processes in the Global South. This notion overlooked the experiences that shaped this phenomenon, adopting normative and analytical perspectives of social marginality that ignore the analyses of workers' social history. This perspective, still present in Social Sciences, Urbanism, and common sense, treats urban informality through anachronisms that fail to consider the trajectory of social practices, informal territory governance, and inequalities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries in the long urbanization process (Fischer, 2008; Fontes, Cavalcanti, 2012; Oliveira, 2011, 2020; Velascos, 2015; Gonçalves, Brum, Amoroso, 2021; Duarte, 2018; Cortés, 2018; Costa, 2022; Pestana, 2022; Gonçalves, Benemergui, Cravino, 2022; Snitcofsky, 2022; Vorms, Fischer, 2025).
This dossier invites contributions addressing the history of urban informality in Latin America. The formation of mocambos, favelas, peripheries, "invasions," villas miseria, poblaciones, cantegrilles, and other urban forms associated with informal workers' housing and the social experiences that shaped sociabilities and/or conflicts are welcome. The chronological scope is broad. We are interested in workers' actions during the wave of urban reforms in the second half of the 19th century and early 20th century, as well as in the metropolitanization process after World War II, during Latin American dictatorships, and the democratization periods.
The dossier welcomes contributions investigating class, ethnic-racial, regional, local, and gender identities that mediated the formation of urban spaces and the political meanings linked to the struggle for the right to the city in Latin America.
