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Completion of a book on the history of unemployment in Chile from the Great Depression through the 1980s.

In this project, I examine how social, racial, and gender categories shaped public efforts to regulate the labor market and selectively protect workers facing unemployment in Chile throughout the twentieth century. I argue that traditional efforts to distinguish between vagrants and the “real” unemployed, social fears toward the non-working poor, legal definitions of formal work and people’s own expectations about work influenced the experience, protections, and rights of unemployed and non-formally employed men and women in modern Chile. More generally, I contribute to the humanities by looking at unemployment beyond exclusively class and economic analyses and outside traditional industrial countries. Using the tools of social history and based on a wide range of archival and periodical sources, I narrate the story of the unemployed and the efforts of the State to define and control the labor market in Chile from the 1930s-Great Depression to the Debt/Oil crisis of the early 1980s.