To Be a Worker: Identity and Politics in Peru

A contemporary classic in Peru, where it was first published in 1986, this book explores changes in the political identity and economic strategies of the Peruvian working class in the 1970s and 1980s. Jorge Parodi uses a case study of Metal Empresa, a large factory in Lima, to trace the surge and decline of the labor movement in Peru — and in Latin America more generally — through the successes and frustrations of the members of a once-powerful union as they coped with the nation’s deterior...