The sugar entrepreneurs and the social question. Tucumán, 1904-1930.

Abstract

This research tries to fill a gap that Tucuman historiography that has not yet been addressed: the social policy of radicalism in the province during the 1920s, which presented particular characteristics as it was closely linked to the vicissitudes of the sugar industry - the main source of financing of the provincial State- and the replicas of the industrialists before the development of such public policies. Part of a broad objective that refers to the visions of some aspects of the social question that entrepreneurs had, such as work in sugar mills, healthcare, housing, education -translated in many cases into the creation and maintenance of school premises -for workers and their families, as well as provision for old age, disability and death of workers due to work accidents. This approach is framed within the guidelines of Social History also attending to the political, in the aspiration to contribute to discovering the determining factors of politics on the social and at the same time unraveling the influences of politics on the social. This research attempts to approach the understanding of the political and social actions and strategies that sugar entrepreneurs articulated, as objects and subjects of politics, in relation to their participation in the development of the sugar industry. Sugar entrepreneurs constituted the most dynamic sector of the Tucumán elite. Sustaining their economic power required intense political action before the national powers to obtain customs legislation that was favorable to the industry, in the same way that they needed to exercise the greatest possible control over the provincial State, while political participation was an inseparable activity of its businesses and regulator of social sectors.