From "The Steel City" to "local development". A socio-anthropological approach to industry-city relations in San Nicolas de los Arroyos.

Abstract

This paper proposes a medium term approach to relationships between the city of San Nicolás de los Arroyos and the steel mill installed there by the 50’s, managed and directed for thirty years by the national government, and privatized in 1992. Specifically, we are interested in investigating how a set of practices and interventions relating to the processes of production and reproduction of the labor force concretize the formation of industrial workers as part of the working class within consecutive hegemonic processes. Second, we are interest in tracing analytical coordinates for a socio-anthropological approach to the relationship between industry and community site. In this paper, we try to recover the historical specificities of the relationship SOMISA - San Nicolas de los Arroyos and to establish lines of analysis of the contemporary situation with a common coupling point: the relational and practical  frameworks that shed light on the workers’ actions on the main issues identified for each time: housing and living conditions since the 60s and employment issues for the 90s.