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The International Instituut Voor Sociale Geschiedenis, or International Institute of Social History, located in Amsterdam, is well known as one of the world's leading centers for research on the history of labor movements and leftist political parties. It is also a major depository of archival material. However, scholars have largely neglected the Institute's extraordinary collection of Latin American materials. The purpose of this article is to describe the two largest bodies of Latin American holdings, those pertaining to Argentina and Brazil. For reasons of space, we have kept annotations to a minimum and have included only materials published before 1940, since they constitute by far the most significant portion of the Institute's Latin American collection.

Although the volume of research on latin america has increased markedly in the past decade or so, major topics remain neglected. One of these encompasses the urban working class (wage labor) and worker organizations. This situation, however, is changing. Scholars today are opening new lines of investigation and are applying fresh criteria to existing data in order to formulate working hypotheses and test older theories about organized labor and the working class in Latin America. This article presents a brief, highly selective analysis of new and traditional materials available for Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. It treats the urban sectors and labor in modernized enclaves in rural areas almost exclusively; related topics such as peasant unions and rural labor in general fall outside its scope. It outlines areas and problems that future investigators might probe and also presents some hypotheses. Perhaps most important, it attempts to orient future investigators in the field.