Tinker Salas Miguel Tinker Salas

Enduring Legacy (eBook, PDF)

Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

Oil has played a major role in Venezuela's economy since the first gusher was discovered along Lake Maracaibo in 1922. As Miguel Tinker Salas demonstrates, oil has also transformed the country's social, cultural, and political landscapes. In The Enduring Legacy, Tinker Salas traces the history of the oil industry's rise in Venezuela from the beginning of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to the experiences and perceptions of industry employees, both foreign and Venezuelan. He reveals how class ambitions and corporate interests combined to reshape many Venezuelans' ideas of citizenship. Middle-class Venezuelans embraced the oil industry from the start, anticipating that it would transform the country by introducing modern technology, sparking economic development, and breaking the landed elites' stranglehold. Eventually Venezuelan employees of the industry found that their benefits, including relatively high salaries, fueled loyalty to the oil companies. That loyalty sometimes trumped allegiance to the nation-state.North American and British petroleum companies, seeking to maintain their stakes in Venezuela, promoted the idea that their interests were synonymous with national development. They set up oil camps-residential communities to house their workers-that brought Venezuelan employees together with workers from the United States and Britain, and eventually with Chinese, West Indian, and Mexican migrants as well. Through the camps, the companies offered not just housing but also schooling, leisure activities, and acculturation into a structured, corporate way of life. Tinker Salas contends that these practices shaped the heart and soul of generations of Venezuelans whom the industry provided with access to a middle-class lifestyle. His interest in how oil suffused the consciousness of Venezuela is personal: Tinker Salas was born and raised in one of its oil camps.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Seitenzahl: 344
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. Mai 2009
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780822392231
• Artikelnr.: 54912704

Autorenporträt

Miguel Tinker Salas is Arango Professor in Latin American History and Professor of History and Chicano/a Studies at Pomona College. He is the author of In the Shadow of the Eagles: Sonora and the Transformation of the Border during the Porfiriato and co-editor of Venezuela: Hugo Chávez and the Decline of an “Exceptional Democracy.”

Inhaltsangabe

Preface vii
Introduction: Oil, Culture, and Society 1
1. A Tropical Mediterranean: Lake Maracaibo at the Turn of the Century 15
2. The Search for Black Gold 39
3. La Ruta Petrolera: Learning to Live with Oil 73
4. Oil, Race, Labor, and Nationalism 107
5. Our Tropical Outpost: Gender and the Senior Staff Camps 143
6. The Oil Industry and Civil Society 171
7. Oil and Politics: An Enduring Relation 205
Conclusion: An Enduring Legacy 237
Notes 251
Bibliography 299
Index 317