Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean (Comparative and International Working-Class History) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0822322021 ISBN 13: 9780822322023

Verlag: Duke University Press, 1998

Inhaltsangabe

Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State brings together new research on the social history of Central America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aviva Chomsky and Aldo A. Lauria Santiago have gathered both well-known and emerging scholars to demonstrate how the actions and ideas of rural workers, peasants, migrants, and women formed an integral part of the growth of the export economies of the era and to examine the underacknowledged impact such groups had on the shaping of national histories.
Responding to the fact that the more common, elite-centered "national" histories distort or erase the importance of gender, race, ethnicity, popular consciousness, and identity, contributors to this volume correct this imbalance by moving these previously overlooked issues to the center of historical research and analysis. In so doing, they describe how these marginalized working peoples of the Hispanic Caribbean Basin managed to remain centered on not only class-based issues but on a sense of community, a desire for dignity, and a struggle for access to resources. Individual essays include discussions of plantation justice in Guatemala, highland Indians in Nicaragua, the effects of foreign corporations in Costa Rica, coffee production in El Salvador, banana workers in Honduras, sexuality and working-class feminism in Puerto Rico, the Cuban sugar industry, agrarian reform in the Dominican Republic, and finally, potential directions for future research and historiography on Central America and the Caribbean.
This collection will have a wide audience among Caribbeanists and Central Americanists, as well as students of gender studies, and labor, social, Latin American, and agrarian history.

Contributors. Patricia Alvarenga, Barry Carr, Julie A. Charlip, Aviva Chomsky, Dario Euraque, Eileen Findlay, Cindy Forster, Jeffrey L. Gould, Lowell Gudmundson, Aldo A. Lauria Santiago, Francisco Scarano, Richard Turits

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Aviva Chomsky is Professor of History at Salem State College and author of West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870-1940.

Aldo A. Lauria Santiago is Assistant Professor of History at the College of the Holy Cross.

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"This volume does an exceptional job of bringing together in a single volume very substantial new research on working people and their history in the Hispanic Caribbean Basin."--Ralph Lee Woodward Jr., Tulane University

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Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State

The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean

By Aviva Chomsky, Aldo Lauria-Santiago

Duke University Press

Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-2202-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
Identity and Struggle in the History of the Hispanic Caribbean and Central America, 1850-1950, 
Central America, 
"That a Poor Man Be Industrious", 
"¡Vana Ilusion!", 
At Their Own Risk, 
Auxiliary Forces in the Shaping of the Repressive System, 
The Banana Enclave, Nationalism, and Mestizaje in Honduras, 1910s-1930s, 
Laborers and Smallholders in Costa Rica's Mining Communities, 1900-1940, 
Reforging National Revolution, 
The Hispanic Caribbean, 
Free Love and Domesticity, 
"Omnipotent and Omnipresent"?, 
The Foundations of Despotism, 
Conclusion, 
Selected Bibliography, 
Index, 
Contributors, 

CHAPTER 1

ALDO LAURIA-SANTIAGO

"That a Poor Man Be Industrious"

Coffee, Community, and Agrarian Capitalism in the Transformation of El Salvador's Ladino Peasantry, 1850-1900

* * *

This chapter examines a series of transitions in the history of one of western El Salvador's larger municipalities, retracing the complex and contradictory ways in which a ladino peasant community was both agent and subject in the development of agrarian capitalism during the latter half of the nineteenth century. By studying patterns of land use, expressions of peasant politics and identity, and commercial production in the context of local history, this essay sheds light upon a crucial period in the formation of El Salvador's peasant farmers and places it in the context of large-scale changes in the country's economy and society. In particular, this essay examines the experience of a ladino peasant community with land tenure, coffee production, and regional politics. The ladino Community of Chalchuapa and its experience with the pressures and opportunities afforded by the expanding coffee economy provide a window into the history of El Salvador's ladino peasantry and thus into a little-known and even suppressed aspect of the country's history.

The history of El Salvador during the period examined in this essay has been typically framed by two overlapping themes. The first emphasizes the development of coffee production as an activity controlled by a few oligarchic elites. Following this trend, the history of coffee production has been assumed to be a history of large, elite-owned plantations that quickly came to dominate the land and labor of western El Salvador. The second theme, closely linked to the first, is that Salvadoran elites are usually presented as fully in control of the process of privatization of land that took place during the late nineteenth century, manipulating or controlling the state to its exclusive benefit. Although both of these themes contain contributions to the historiography of the period, they also suppress and ignore a history of peasant participation in agrarian production, landholding, and politics.

The lack of research into local history has allowed these assumptions to linger, and their popularity has been reinforced by their deep political roots. Both Left and Right in El Salvador have seized upon aspects of the country's history in order to draw lessons and weapons for their contemporary cultural and political battles. The image of a country ruled by despotic clans of land-grabbing coffee oligarchs who monopolized land and wealth alternates with the benign image of dynamic, progressive, and farsighted coffee entrepreneurs who provided a base for the nation's prosperity. In many ways these images are two sides of the same coin: the deeply ahistorical character of Salvadoran elite mythology. But they also contain the same silence: they ignore El Salvador's peasantry and its own autonomous participation in the emergence of agrarian capitalism and export production.

These assumptions have been reproduced in historical accounts, which rarely examine peasant participation in the export and commercial economy, emphasizing instead an absolute contradiction between small producers and export production. Thus coffee has been presented as a crop grown in large estates that were owned by a small group of landowners. As a result, historians have paid scant attention to the history of landholding peasant communities. This chapter attempts to reverse this tendency and place peasants and farmers closer to the center of Salvadoran historiography.

Between the 1750s and the 1890s the agrarian landscape of Chalchuapa experienced three important transformations. Chalchuapa began as a lightly populated, Indian-dominated cattle raising, pig raising, and trading town. But by the end of the colonial period it had become more populated and ladino dominated, producing a greater variety of commercial crops. During the second transition (1850s to 1860s) Chalchuapa developed its coffee economy, leading to increased pressure on Chalchuapa's combination of community-based landholding with individually controlled commercial farming. By the 1880s Chalchuapa experienced a third transition when the country's community-owned and municipal lands were privatized and titled by individual landowners. In each of these transitions the peasants of Chalchuapa, both collectively and individually, faced conditions to which they had to respond creatively while they struggled for their subsistence and market position under conditions that were mostly outside of their control. They struggled to defend their access to land but also to sustain a larger principle: their right to help define and respond to the socioeconomic transformations they confronted.

From Indian to Ladino: Chalchuapa's Colonial Origins

The municipality of Chalchuapa is located to the northwest of San Salvador and adjacent to the western city of Santa Ana. During the late colonial period Chalchuapa became an important site for settlement and productive activities due to its strategic location between Salvadoran cities and Guatemala. Chalchuapa had been a cattle-raising center throughout the colonial period. A church official who traveled to the region during the 1760s noted that Chalchuapa had twenty farms or haciendas, twelve trapiches (sugar mills), and many small, disperse farms and sugar mills, "which the Indians place [d] in any corner of the mountains," all controlled by Indian, ladino, and Spanish peasants and farmers.

Although Chalchuapa did not become a significant producer of colonial El Salvador's principal export, indigo, it did benefit indirectly from the expansion in the production of this powdered dye, and it developed important linkages with the expanding indigo economy. The expansion of indigo production raised the demand for cattle and foodstufFs throughout the provinces of San Salvador and Sonsonate. Cattle provided food for hacienda laborers, and leather was used for packaging the indigo. Relations such as this one provided a base for the strengthening of peasant communities—both Indian and ladino in the western and south-central regions of what later became El Salvador.

It was also during the eighteenth century that Chalchuapa's ladino and Indian communities began to enlarge their holdings by purchasing lands from the Spanish Crown. Like most municipalities, the town of Chalchuapa had the right to a royal grant of thirty-seven caballerías (1,665 hectares) of...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1998
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822322021
• ISBN 13: 9780822322023
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Herausgeber: Chomsky Aviva, Lauria-Santiago Aldo A
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar