CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Nota: la ponencia se presentó en francés, pero la edición en curso se realiza en idioma inglés. Por eso se adjunta el texto en inglés, así como el abstract en este mismo idioma.What was the reach of the sections of the International Workingman?s Association in Latin America? Social historians from the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, like Marcelo Segall and Carlos Rama, were optimists with respect to the discovery of documentary sources that proved a continental reach. The developments of recent historiography tell us that the experience of the First International had a localized effect on three capital cities, cities that were particularly receptive to the migration of European exiles: México City, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires. It was, on the other hand, a belated reception: the news about the First International only began to spread en masse by the Latin American press with the explosion of the Paris Commune. And the sections created in Montevideo and Buenos Aires appear connected to the exile of Communards. Why was this reception so belated and localized? Globally, this is because the process of urbanization, the crisis of the artisanal class, and the formation of the modern worker?s movement were just beginning at the twilight of the First International. In any case, if the establishment of the sections of the International was weak in the Argentine capital, it nevertheless influenced its intellectual history thanks to the arrival of Raymond Wilmart from the General Council, who answered to Marx. For its part, the sections in Mexico City like those of Montevideo reveal a greater insertion into the burgeoning worker?s movement as well as a more tangible continuity: both experiences appear as preliminary moments of the formation of Mexican and Uruguayan anarchism, respectively.

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