History Ph.D. Student Receives Fulbright to Support Research on Chilean Labor and the Cold War

Andrea Gutmann Fuentes will travel to Chile in 2026-27 to conduct archival research and oral history interviews exploring how workers and labor movements shaped global Cold War politics.

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Andrea Gutmann Fuentes, a Ph.D. student in the Department of History, has been awarded a prestigious Fulbright U.S. Student Program grant to Chile for the 2026-27 academic year.

During her fellowship, Gutmann Fuentes will conduct archival research and oral history interviews for her project, “Chilean Labor and the Global Cold War, 1945-1990.” She has secured an affiliation with prominent Chilean historian Mario Garcés at the Universidad de Santiago de Chile.

Her research focuses on how Chilean workers and labor unions built international connections during the Cold War and how those relationships influenced political struggles within Chile from the end of World War II through the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1990.

The project explores connections between Chilean labor organizations and their U.S., Soviet, Latin American and European counterparts through labor conferences, exchange programs, political organizing, print media and correspondence between union leaders.

“My work moves beyond a focus on relations between states to show how the Global Cold War was waged at the level of civil society,” Gutmann Fuentes said. “I focus on the transnational dimension of struggles between communist and anti-communist workers in Chile to show that the Chilean labor movement itself was a site of Cold War conflict.”

During the Fulbright fellowship, she will work in Chilean government and private archives and conduct oral history interviews with Chilean workers and unionists who lived during the period of study.

The project builds on earlier research she conducted in Chile during Summer 2025, when she visited archives and libraries in Santiago and interviewed former political leader Oscar Garretón about labor organizing during the early 1970s under Chile’s leftist Unidad Popular coalition government.

Gutmann Fuentes also has a personal connection to Chile through her family. Her mother immigrated to the United States from southern Chile, and Gutmann Fuentes grew up speaking Spanish and learning about Chilean history and culture from an early age.

Gutmann Fuentes previously earned a master’s degree through UMD’s History and Library and Information Science (HiLS) dual-degree program.