oa Drawing through the boys’ book

This graphic essay employs illustration to explore interwar women’s access to radical organising in, and near, industrializing colonial ports. It centres the Union General de Trabajadores [General Workers’ Union], a short-lived, clandestine union active on Curaçao in 1929. In spite of the masculine terms through which scholarship and media have framed the union’s history, it professed to pursue working class solidarity regardless of “race, nationality or sex,” and actively recruited women. Integrating academic writing and visual storytelling and incorporating labour history, archival research, and visualizations of mobility, this graphic essay approximates the fragmentary traces of UGT-women’s activities. It argues that Curaçao’s expanding interwar maritime economy affected women’s access to radical organizing in a double-edged way: due to gendered labour divisions, many women lost direct access to portside radicalism. Simultaneously, male radicals could leverage their mobility to smuggle resources onto the island. Their ‘solidarity-as-patronage’ provided women with unprecedented access to radical organization – but also reinforced hierarchies and dependence. Furthermore, the essay explores how drawing offers a method of thinking to help connect fragmentary sources, and an exercise to explore to what extent, and through which lenses, historians can grasp and perceive the historical contexts they are researching.