A Tale of Two Cities: The Tenants? Strikes of 1907-1908 in Buenos Aires and New York. Exploring the Global Historical Roots of Tenants? Organization

LUCAS POY

Estocolmo

Conferencia; Tenants Organizing: Precarization and Resistance; 2019

112 years ago, in the last months of 1907, a spirit of struggle and activism spread among the impoverished working-class tenants of several multicultural neighborhoods in New York and Buenos Aires. Although most of the participants were unaware of the events taking place more than 8,500 km away, both strikes had many things in common. Thousands of tenants, many of them migrants, with a strong prominence of women, acted together in order to put an end to the voracious and predatory rule of landlords. They all had to face attacks from the media and the state?they all had to build on their experiences of resistance in order to develop the necessary organizational resources to accomplish their goals. Both labor and social historiography paid some attention to tenants? strikes throughout history, but comparative studies are still very scarce. Case studies are extremely important to help us understand the peculiarities of past struggles, but broader and more comprehensive assessments are also critical to evaluate the general trends that shaped working-class resistance in different times and places. Moreover, as shown by recent developments in Global Labor History, it is important to include the so-called Global South into the picture to avoid a kind of labor history that all too often was exclusively focused on events in Europe and the United States.Drawing upon a variety of secondary and primary sources, this paper develops a study of the tenants? strikes that took place in 1907-1908, with a difference of some months, in Buenos Aires and New York. It focuses on the peculiarities of urban development and working-class formation in both cities in those early years of the 20th century, in the motley population that filled its tenement houses and conventillos, in the role played by socialist and anarchist organizers, in the reaction of the state and the ruling class towards the tenants? struggles. It will pay special attention to the prominent role played, in both cases, by migrant workers and women. Its goal is to highlight similarities and differences of these two cases of tenants? strikes in the North and the South, in order to enrich our understanding of the global historical roots of the ongoing struggle against landlords and capitalist market forces.