Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power and Working-Class Communities

Abstract

Company Towns in the Americas: Landscape, Power and Working-Class Communities By Oliver J. Dinius andAngeL· Ver gar a, Editors Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011. xi + 241 pp. Map, notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8203-3329-8, $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8203-3682-4.Oliver Dinius and Angela Vergara have offered an edited volume on "company towns" that presents a quite different and very comparative format, content, and series of analyses about a truly important and interesting topic. This comparative approach uses original essays on company towns in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, and Argentina that examine several differing industries in mining, agriculture, and manufacturing over varied time frames from the middle of the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, and that had an almost bemusing array of different results, successes, and failures as both business ventures and as social communities. While the existing literature about company towns is extensive and complex, the contents of this volume travel a long way towards a more detailed and comparative understanding of this phenomenon.Three macro-regions were selected for examination herein: Latin America, the United States, and Canada. Each essay studies selected company towns from vigorously different points of view. Andrew Herod sets the stage for these comparative studies with an extensive and thorough general presentation on concepts, interpretations, and understandings of many of the basic components and motives for company towns. While the economic characters of such communities might be the more obvious foci for study, Herod also forcefully presents a large set of social, political, and even psychological motives for the creation and maintenance of company towns. He calls such communities as much "social engineering through spatial engineering" as simply practical means of attracting and holding work forces in company towns that often were located in isolated localities.Aurora Gomez-Galvarriato examines how company towns (based on textile manufacturing) evolved into union towns during the tumultuous times of the Mexican Revolution. Fernando Teixeira da Silva, studying the Brazilian port city of Santos, presents the idea that Santos was essentially an economic creation of its port functions and the dominating businesses and labor force clashes of that main type of business. He also confirms a point of Herod; that company towns do not have to be located in isolation to function as company towns. Elizabeth Esch chronicles the conception, establishment, development, and ultimate failure of Henry Ford's "Fordlandia" communities in the semi-tropics of Brazil. Ford's settlement/plantations failed not only because of mistakes in growing the wrong type of rubber, but also persisted in misguided, and stubborn attempts at overwhelming social engineering. Ford managed to produce very little rubber for his cars, and losttens of millions of dollars in these schemes.Oliver Dinius' study of Volta Redonda, Brazil's "steel company town," also records how attempts at social engineering (this time more religiously based in Catholicism and Brazilian nationalism) became confused and entwined in the dreams of Vargas, the Brazilian "leader of the 1930s-50s to modernize Brazil rapidly. Eugenio Garces Felice and Angela Vergara studied "El Salvador," a later mining operation in the Chilean Andes. The owners of this town and mining operation used the most modern means of housing, human services, and facilities, but by the 1970s, the Chilean government nationalized both the mining activities and the town itself. The other Latin American company town of Firmai, Argentina (by Silvia Simonassi) was a manufacturing-type of company town, making agricultural machinery.There were two other essays. One, by Christopher Post, studied the making and activities of a U.S. Federal company town: Sunflower Village, Kansas. …