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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
In this essay the communication practices of labor migrants and their evolution from nineteenth-century print media to late twentieth-century electronic media provide the frame for a discussion of the limitations of national approaches to collection and interpretation. Multiple languages and knowledge of cultures of origin are required, cooperative library and research projects are necessary. On the basis of the Labor Newspaper Preservation Project it is argued that analysis of the bibliographic data by themselves, without going into the contents of the newspapers, revises current assumptions about processes of migration, acculturation, and internationalist class positions. The classic North American immigrant labor press came to an end in the 1970s. New patterns, feminization of migration and mobility to domestic and caregiving work, and new patterns of communication led to an ascendancy of electronic publications. Electronic publications and global rather than hemispheric migration will require different collecting strategies. These, like their printed predecessors, provide a perspective on migrants that differs from ethnicity and state-side approaches. Human rights rather than class struggles and migrant remittances rather the denationalization are the themes, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) rather than labor organizations are the publishers.
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In the internationalizing research scene, the Wisconsin Historical Society, through its collections dating from the time of the labor relations studies of Richard T. Ely, Selig Perlman, John R. Commons, and others became an important resource. At the time of these scholars' groundbreaking work, disciplines were far more integrated than in the compartmentalized and fragmented academia of the present. Most of the reformers of the period were as much part of an Atlantic space of social reform and intellectual exchange as workers were of the labor markets of the Atlantic economies (see Rodgers, 1998). But under twentieth-century nation-state paradigms and powers of definition such transeuropean and transatlantic traditions had been relegated to the margins or, even, oblivion.
Rescuing working-class publications from this assigned place was a task assumed by James P. Danky, the newspaper and periodical librarian of the Wisconsin Historical Society. He inherited the responsibility for the largest collection of labor newspapers and periodicals in the United States. From the German press of Milwaukee's socialists to the Italian American anarchists of Vermont, the society's collections were a well-known source for scholars. In the political climate he needed energetic perseverance not only to prevent neglect of the collections in this field but, even more, to develop and expand them. (1) He included new titles that reflected the changing demographics of the state and nation like, to give only one example, "UNITE!" published by the Blouse, Skirt, Sportswear, Children's Wear and Allied Workers Union, Local 23-25. Even the union's name suggests that the times of male-dominated work was past--but the women's strike of 1909 had already set an early sign that neither AFL-leadership, nor pre-1960s scholars had fully understood.
The pathbreaking work of the Wisconsin scholars, and thus the holdings of the Wisconsin Historical Society, had been organized around concepts of labor relations and economics. Negotiating wages and organizing economic units were studied in the English language, and few scholars could read the many languages the laborers spoke and in which they published. To overcome limitations of language, culture, and state-centered archival collection as well as the nation-state focus of historical research, the authors of this essay developed the internationally cooperative Labor Migration Project (LMP).
A first step of the LMP was to establish in 1978 the Labor Newspaper Preservation Project (LNPP) for the non-English language labor press in North America from the 1840s to the 1970s. With Jim Danky, the authors discussed the use of North American databases; Danky became a cooperating scholar. The bibliographic information by itself, placed in chronological sequence and studied quantitatively, changed the interpretations of the impact and development of ethnocultural working-class groups in North America. Building on the newspaper preservation project's broadly cooperative structure, Danky worked to provide a similar source basis for Afro-Americans. The African American Newspapers and Periodicals: A National Bibliography (Maureen E. Hady, associate editor; Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1998) was the result. Danky is internationalizing the perspective in his current project "Newspapers and Periodicals of the African Diaspora."
He thus helped to overcome a seemingly useful division of tasks among historians that involved a segmentation of working people's experiences. In the U.S. context they were placed in compartments of the discipline separate from "labor history": history of slavery and of African Americans, history of coolie labor and Asian Americans, and history of Chicanos or Mexican Americans. Following seemingly natural discourses that had racist origins but made sense in terms of source materials and approaches, most historians of the time divided the working classes according to the race-conscious categories or country of origin. As a result, their approaches were implicitly or even explicitly bounded by national language, institutions, and territorial borders. Nineteenth and early twentieth-century migrating men and women were thus entrenched in nation-state frames; they were seen as leaving the nation-state or entering another.
With today's globally mobile work force, however, we can see different frames of reference. Though the nation-state is still responsible for many of the migration policies that so prominently implicate the migrants' lives--making them legal or turning them into "illegal criminals"--do we best capture their life experiences by a national perspective? Or do we see, through their Web-based forms of communication, a globally connected diaspora emerging which retains aspects of national identity but functions in a regional, transcultural, and worldwide frame?
In this essay the authors consider the approach taken by the Labor Migration Project, in particular the Labor Newspaper Preservation Project (LNPP) to achieve bibliographic control over the non-English-language labor press in English- and French-language North America. The authors also look at more recent Web-based labor publications to consider changes due to electronically mediated communication and new patterns of migration. The authors believe the archival and research work that Danky...
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