La Falta de Brazos Tierra y Trabajo en Las Economias Cafetaleras Del Siglo Xix en America Latina

La Falta de Brazos: Land and Labor in the Coffee Economies of Nineteenth-Century Latin America Author(s): William Roseberry Reviewed
work(s): Source: Theory and Society, Vol. 20, No. 3, Special Issue on Slavery in the New World (Jun., 1991), pp. 351-381 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/657557 . Accessed: 23/12/2012 11:08
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La Falta de Brazos Land and labor in the coffee economies of Latin America nineteenth-century
WILLIAM ROSEBERRY
New School for Social Research
A persistent problem for anthropologists and historians attempting to understand social change in rural Latin America is the placement of local regions within wider - global and "national" - economic, social, and political frameworks.' One temptation is to subsume the local within the global, to make the "system" - "capitalist" or "modem" determinative, as in the more extreme versions of dependency and world-system theories that dominated the literature in the 1960s and 1970s. Another temptation is to avoid the problem altogether, to reject any discussion of global political and economic pressures as totalizing, reductive, or teleological. This view, increasingly popular over the past decade, would have us reject the "fiction of the whole."' Although both perspectives, as extremes, can point to respectable intellectual pedigrees and can attract the sympathetic attention of theoretically inclined scholars, the student examining substantive problems and aspects of social change in, say, Sao Paulo or Antioquia of the 1920s must remain skeptical. Confronting the global extremists, she or he will agree that Antioquia was dominated by a coffee economy that had drawn the region toward the centers of world economy; yet the very shape of that economy, its most basic social relations and contradictions, were fundamentally different from other coffee economies that emerged at roughly the same time. Trying to understand why Antioquia looked different, she or he will begin to explore the settlement of the relatively open frontier, the prior emergence of a gold panning movement, the accumulation of capital by urban merchants buying up gold, and their investment of accumulated resources in land and coffee. In short, the "global" begins to recede from view and the "local" seems predominant. Yet it hardly seems helpful to dismiss the whole as a "fiction."Our student of 1920s Antioquia cannot ignore the
Theory and Society 20: 351-382, 1991. ? 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
352 massive investment of North American finance capital during the "danceof the millions,"directedtowardthe constructionof roads and railroadsand the acquisitionof controllingshares in local banks and exportingfirms.And she or he cannot forget that the 1920s were followed by the 1930s, the general depression and the collapse of the world coffee market.The confidentassertionsof the postmoderntheorist, telling us that we can relegate the world-system to the backbegin to lose some of theirseductiveappealin the face of such ground,3 events and movements. A more careful reading of global and local historiesis necessary. that needs to be recoveredif One form of sociological understanding formationof humansubjectsat we are to understandthe contradictory the conjunctionof global and local histories is that sketched by F. H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto in their call for studies of the "internalization of the external"in Latin America. Surveyingthe emergence of capitalismin variousLatinAmericancountries,they argue:
The very existence of an economic "periphery"cannot be understood without referenceto the economic drive of advanced capitalisteconomies, whichwere responsiblefor the formationof a capitalistperipheryand for the of economies into the worldmarket. Yet, integration traditional noncapitalist the expansionof capitalismin Bolivia and Venezuela,in Mexico or Peru,in Brazil and Argentina,in spite of havingbeen submittedto the same global dynamicof international capitalism,did not have the same historyor consequences. The differences are rooted not only in the diversity of natural resources,nor just in the differentperiods in which these economies have been incorporatedinto the international system (althoughthese factorshave played some role). Their explanationmust also lie in the differentmoments at which sectors of local classes allied or clashed with foreign interests, organizeddifferentforms of state, sustained distinct ideologies, or tried to implement various policies or defined alternativestrategies to cope with imperialist challengesin diversemomentsof history.4
a What we need, accordingto this view, is a "historyof ... diversity," sense that "the history of capital accumulationis the history of class
struggles, of political movements, of the affirmation of ideologies, and
of the establishment of forms of domination and reactions against A them."5 history of diversityis necessarily comparative.One way of approachingsuch a comparisonis to examine the various regions that produced a particularexport commodity during a particularperiod coffee, say,duringthe late nineteenthand early twentiethcenturies.All such regions would be subject to certain common global pressures; they would be experiencingthe same "worldhistoricalfact."6Yet an of forms and dynamicsof social and ecounderstanding the particular
353 nomic relationsin the various regions would requirecarefulattention to local contexts, local fields of power. This essay is directed toward such a comparative history. The comparativeproblem from 1830-1930) was the cofThe nineteenthcentury(thatis, roughly, fee centuryin LatinAmerica.It was a period that witnesseda dramatic increase in world trade (from 320 metric tons in 1770, mostly from Asia; to 90,000 metric tons in 1820, with half coming from Brazil;to 450,000 metrictons in 1870 and 1,600,000 metrictons in 19207) and per capita consumption(in the United States, from 3 pounds in 1830 to 10 pounds in 1900 and 16 pounds in 19608). And it was a period in which coffee productionwas associated with a profound transformation of landscape and society in several Latin American regions. In most cases, the expansion of coffee cultivationcoincided with territorial expansion, the movement of settlers into frontier zones where tropical forests were destroyed, "new forests"9of coffee and shade planted,towns established,roads and railroadsbuilt,regionalidentities forged. It is not surprising,then, that we find some of the same processes and themes repeated from coffee-producing region to coffee-producing region - the incorporationof regionswithin an expandingworld market, the establishmentof outwardlyfocussed development strategies with the export of a primaryproduct the price of which fluctuatessignificantlybut is beyond the control of local producersand exporters, the building of roads and railroads(generallywith foreign capital)to carry the coffee from the newly settled interior to port cities, the ambiguousquestion of land ownershipin frontierzones and the conflicts between ruralsettlersand urbaninvestors,the relatedlegal revolutions in landed property and labor regulations,and the ubiquitous concernfor the laborproblem- the "faltade brazos." What is perhaps more surprisingis the remarkable variationin social, economic, and political structures and processes among coffeeproducingregions, the radicallydistinct structuresof landed property and the different resolutions of the labor problem encountered in Brazil or Costa Rica or Colombia.We need to consider this variation as an interpretiveproblem:how is it to be understood?Each of these regionsturnedtowardcoffee at roughlythe same time (thatis, withina
354 few important decades of each other: Brazil, Costa Rica, and Venezuela had importantcoffee economies by mid-century;Guatemala,El Salvador,and Colombia turned to coffee several decades later - the 1870s, 1880s and beyond). Each was producing the same primary product for export to the same European and North American ports (though one might export primarilyto London, another to New York, another to Hamburg).The structure of trade (that is, the relation between local exportersand international firms)was roughlythe same (though importantdifferencesdeveloped in Brazil as it came to dominate the market).Each of the regionsbecame "dependent" a single on the same reverses and enjoyingthe same export commodity,suffering booms. Despite the commonalities in their incorporation within the world market, however, their most basic social relations, including those associatedwith labor mobilizationand "thespecific economic form,in which unpaid surplus-labouris pumped out of direct producers,"10 were fundamentally different.Easy assertionsabout the dominanceof the "latifundia-minifundia complex"are out of place, as are more comthat recognize variation but subsume the variation plex arguments within a common emergence of two "largenodes of decision-making bodies"with the incorporationof regionswithin the world economy one based on the "plantation" solution and the other based on the "merchant" solution (in which merchantsdominate and capture the productionof small farmers)."Such assertionsexplainawaydifference ratherthanconfrontingit. Let us, then, confrontthese differencesin the coffee-growingregionsin Latin America. Let us place Sao Paulo next to the CentralValley of Costa Rica or Antioquia and ask why such fundamentaldifferencesin landed property and labor mobilization occurred and what effects these differencesmight have had for the respective societies in which they occurred.A varietyof easy resolutions are closed to us. None of the distinctionsin timingor marketsnoted above was decisive.Nor do we have access to a mechanicalopposition between closed and open frontiersor to differentland and labor ratios. If our only contrastwas one between El Salvadorand Costa Rica, such oppositions and ratios mightbe convincing,but most of the regions were open frontiers,with differentresultsof settlementthat are too importantto gloss over with grids and causal diagrams.A more considered examination of the societies in whichthe frontierswereopened and settled, the social, economic, political, and cultural contexts in which coffee became an importantexportcrop, is necessary.
355 This essay represents a preliminary examination of such contexts, the
aim of whichis not to explaindifferencebut to begin a comparative discussion. I develop the comparisonwith a discussion of the mannerin whichcoffee elites in differentregionsresolvedone of theirmost pressing problems - the mobilizationand reproductionof labor.Although other aspects of the respectivecoffee economies (e.g., commercialization and politics) deserve detailed attention,and will be treated elsewhere,the labor problem- "lafalta de brazos"- was centralto each of them, inflecting all aspects of social, economic, and cultural life. It thereforeconstitutesour necessarystartingpoint. However much this may seem to resurrectthe labellingcontroversies associatedwith the mode of productiondebates, the crucialdifference in the presentexerciseneeds to be stressed.The purposeof the present comparisonis not to outline distinctmodes of production,and I do not consider here the capitalist or non-capitalistcharacter of the labor regimes examined.Indeed, one of the problems with earlierlabelling exercises was that they directed our attentiontowardlabels and away from a considerationof wider economic, social, political,and cultural fields of power. It is towardsuch a considerationthatthe presentstudyof laborregimes in LatinAmericancoffee economies, and the largercomparative study of which it is a part,are directed.We mightbrieflyoutline threedimensions of the labor problem that illuminatewider social and political relationsand processes. First, in places such as Brazil,Colombia,and Guatemala,large landholdersattemptingto attractlaborerswere not acting in isolation. They mightbe competing with growersfrom other regions, with urban entrepreneurs,or, in the case of immigration in schemes, with plantersor entrepreneurs other countries.This is not to say that landholderswere powerlessand a free marketprevailed: the monopolizationof land in some regions was the most effectivemeans for securinga labor force. It is to say that plantersacted withinparticular contexts, particularsets of constraints,and that the systems they devised to attractworkersin the first place, or to assure more careful tendingof coffee trees,or to feed the workingpopulation,often created further constraints.Structuresof decision making and control could become quite diffuse as coffee groves and food plots were let out to tenants. Second, labor mobilization schemes were never static. It would be insufficientto set up a comparisonin simple spatial terms with large
356 estates and the colonato in Brazil, peasants and processors in Costa Rica, haciendas in Cundinamarca,and peasants in Antioquia - the domination large-estate regions being characterized by "oligarchic" and the peasant regions seen as more "democratic." each of these In regions,labor regimeschangedover time. Haciendasin Cundinamarca began to disintegratein the 1920s and 1930s, for example,partlydue to economic problemsencounteredmuch earlierand partlydue to the and increasingorganization militanceof theirtenants.Carefulattention to the fault lines created by hacendados'resolutionof labor-mobilization problemsin previousdecades is essentialfor an understanding of their problemsin the 1920s. In the peasantregions,in turn,we need to be sensitive to changes over time. In Costa Rica, for example, small farmers faced increasinglydifficult pressuresfrom the middle of the nineteenth century to 1930, as open lands closed off or as relations with processors became more exploitative or as household heads found it increasinglydifficultto provide an inheritancefor all of their
children.12
Finally,if we thinkabout labor mobilizationin terms of contexts, constraints,and fault lines, and if we consider the way particularresolutions of the labor problemchange over time, we open up a most interesting area for investigation.One of the interestingdevelopmentsthat emerges in the literatureon coffee in Latin America is the frequency with whichelites experimentwith differentstrategies. The most famous is probablythe Vergueiroexperimentin Brazil with immigrantsharecentury,four decades before the end of croppersin the mid-nineteenth But slavery(see below).13 we also find other experimentsin, for example, Cundinamarcain the 1920s'4 or Guatemalain the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, carefulattention to such experimentsand debates can illuminatethe most profound economic, political,and culturaldilemcoffee elites. As we examinethe kindsof solutionsthat mas confronting are attemptedand the solutions that are not even considered, we are able to sketch the limits of the possible (whichincludethe limits of the socially constructedmental and culturalhorizonsof the elites at a particulartime) in variouscoffee-producingregions.An apparently simple "economic" question(how was labor organized),then, need not lead to a labelling exercise. A discourse about labor is seldom "just"about labor. Examining one such discourse, we may begin to unpack the sociology of racismin Guatemalaor Brazilor Costa Rica;in examining featuresof liberalanother,we may begin to understandthe particular ism in, say,earlytwentieth-century Colombia.
357 In what follows, I concentrate on Brazil, Costa Rica, and Colombia, which representa range of resolutionsto the labor problem in ninecoffee economies.In this discussion,my aim is to develteenth-century a more detailed understandingof the dimensions of difference.I op framework termsof whichwe can develin then suggestan interpretive op furthercomparativediscussions. Land and labor in Latin America'snew forests Although the primary focus of this essay concerns land and labor regimes and does not consider commercializationschemes in any detail, certain basic features of the coffee trade in nineteenth-century LatinAmerica deserve brief consideration. those newly independFor ent countrieswith exploitablesubtropicalsoils, coffee servedas a principal point of linkage to an expandingworld economy, the means by which they could turn towardan "outwardly focussed"model of develIt could be stored for long periods with relativelylittle spoilopment. age; it had a high value per kilogram,makingtransportcosts relatively low and makinginland territoriesvaluablein a way they could not be for crops such as sugar;15and it enjoyed a growing and lucrative acceptancein European and U.S. markets.For merchantsand trading firmsfrom countriesenteringthe new LatinAmericanmarkets,coffee becamea focus of trade. Throughoutthe nineteenth century,coffee productionand marketing followed classic free-tradepatterns.Control of productionwas highly dispersed, both among coffee-producingcountries and among producers within countries. Although internationaltrade was controlled by merchanthouses in London,Hamburg,and New York,therewas no significantconcentration among the houses until the early twentieth century.As concentration began to occur, it responded at once to changingprocessing and marketingstructuresin consumingcountries and to crisis periods in producingcountries,duringwhichforeignfirms mighttake more directand activeroles. Foreign coffee firms would establishcredit and commercialrelations with exportersand merchantsin particularLatin American countries, loaningfunds to exporterswithwhichthe exporterswould acquirecoffee - often by means of furtherloans to local producersand merchants. The general features of such arrangementscan be briefly sketched. First,despite the close connectionbetween Europeanor North Amer-
358
ican firms and Brazilianor Costa Rican exportersand producers,local merchantsand exporterswere not subsidiariesof European or North American firms for most of the period under discussion.Even where the exporterswere German or English expatriates,they were expatrioften with a ates acting as individualentrepreneursand adventurers, privileged and preferred relationship with a particularLondon or Hamburghouse, but the tie that bound them was one of credit and shared nationality rather than ownership. Second, exporters, acting with their own funds or with borrowed funds from abroad, were the For principalsources of creditfor local producersand merchants. most bankswere not of the period that concerns us, nationalor international and involvedin the coffee trade.Third,with purchasing credit arrangements linking particularinternationalfirms and exporters,producers and merchants alike were subject to price fluctuations. Exporters lacked the means to withhold coffee in periods of low prices. There were no local exchanges,and states were not involvedin coffee trade.It crisis in the was only with the onset of the first generaloverproduction 1890s that discussions began finally resulted in Brazil'svalorization scheme of 1906. With this scheme, the first chinks in the free-trade armorappeared.'6 the Furthermore, marketwas not homogeneous.In general,European milds producedin Costa Rica, consumershave preferredthe "quality" Colombia, and Guatemala,and European marketswere the principal outlets for the milds. These export marketswere cemented with longwith particularforeign houses. Indeed, during the term arrangements free-trade period much of the quality coffee was exported not as Colombianor Costa Rican coffee but, "likeFrenchwines,"7 under the or mark of a particularCosta Rican processor (beneficiador) Colombian hacienda.The United States, on the other hand, has served as a marketfor the harsher,less expensive coffees, especially from Brazil, but also as a subsidiarymarketearlyon for the othercountries.As with all generalizations,this one requires some temporalspecification. In the first place, no producingcountry exported to a single consuming country.Second, duringthe twentiethcenturythe U.S. marketbecame increasinglyimportant throughout Latin America, especially during the two WorldWars.Nonetheless, the segmentationof the coffee market is an importantfeature,especiallywhen we considerthe qualityend of the scale. Given a marketingenvironmentpermeatedby a discourse of qualityand a pricing system based on the gradinghierarchies,this providesan importantpoint of control for coffee processors and merchants,especiallyin relationto small producers.But detailedconsider-
359
ation of such relationsremainsbeyond the scope of the present essay. We need to turn now from the structureof commerce and investment to the transformation landscapesand societies. of The frontier characterof many of the coffee regions has often been stressed in regional studies.18 If the frontierhas impressed historians and social scientists,it has also impressedhistoricalactors, both at the momentof frontiersettlementand in memory.The memoryof cutting down the forest (tumbandomontes),or the image of a people forgedin settlementand transformation example,"theethos of the hacha"9 (for [anax]in Antioquia)is strong. Indeed,as we see in detail below,most of the areasconvertedto coffee cultivationattractedpopulation migrationand settlement.Guatemala and El Salvadorserve as counterpointsin this story,in that both were however,the microregionsthat densely populated.Even in Guatemala, were to become the most dynamicproductionzones - the piedmontof San Amatitlan,Suchitepequez, Solola, Quezaltenango, Marcos,and the Alta Verapaz- contained much unused land. Only in El Salvadordid the coffee zone correspond with a region of relativelydense colonial settlement,and only in El Salvadordid the expansionof coffee and the transformation landed propertythat accompaniedit involvea wideof spreaddisplacementand expropriation. Despite the frontier characterof much of the coffee expansion,howinto ever,most of the "wildernesses" whichcoffee farmersmoved were alreadyencumberedby people, overlappingand competing claims to land, conceptions of space, time, and justice - in short, "history" before the coffee expansion began, and these encumberancesshaped theirrespectivecoffee economies even as the regionswere transformed by the move toward coffee. In each of the regions considered in this essay,then, we begin with a brief discussionof the occupationof space and the transformationof landed property.With this foundation,we can then turn to a considerationof the labor problem in varioussorts of productionregimes. Brazil.Let us first consider Brazil, which stands alone in the dimensions of its forest.The extent of territoryavailableand suitablefor coffee cultivation,first in the ParaibaValley of Rio province in the early and mid-nineteenthcentury and then into Minas Gerais and the Sao Paulo west from the mid- to late nineteenth century, dwarfs whole countriesin CentralAmerica,not to mentionthe much more restricted
360 zones suitable for coffee. The destructivenature of this expansion, in which tropicalforest would be cut and coffee planted,settingin motion a 30-40 yearboom duringwhichthe soil would be depleted, the boom region set into decline, and then the coffee grove revertto pastureor waste as new regions to the west were opened up, is well known.20 In one respect, these interior regions were "new," "untouched," "virgin." The decliningsugarcomplex of the northeastwas quite distant.Southern developmentsduringthe colonial period had centered aroundthe center in Rio and gold mining in Minas Gerais in the administrative eighteenth century, which in turn stimulated cattle and agricultural complexes in the coastal and more accessible areas.Colonial claims to interior lands nonetheless emerged. During the colonial period, land belonged to the Crown unless it had been ceded by a personal grant (sesmaria), generally one square league (44 sqaure kilometers), in returnfor services to the Crown and on condition of cultivation.With the buildingof roads between Rio and the mines of Minas, sesmarias were granted,as the discoveryof gold in Mato Grosso led to trail and road blazingand the establishmentof way-stations. The lands encomthese grantswere underutilized the absenceof commercial in passed by opportunities,however,and they were settled by squatterswho would displace Indians (who were not protected and who were written out very quickly,both in practiceand in historiesof settlement)towardthe west. Squattersmight engage in subsistence agricultureor service the way-stations along the proliferating mule tracks, but their lands (posses),which could be quite extensiveand mightoverlapwith underexploited sesmarias,were not recognizedin colonial land law.With the westwardexpansionof coffee, these conflictingclaims became important as grant holders or the entrepreneursto whom grants had been sold turned their claims into extensive plantationswith vague boundaries. With independence,sesmariaswere no longer granted,but both sesmariasand posses were bought and sold in a conflictfulrush to control the land. The land law of 1850 resolved the conflict in favor of grant holders and those posseiros wealthy enough to purchase their claim from the state. That is, colonial grants were recognized as titles but the rightof possession was not. Land could only be titled by means of registration, survey,and the paymentof a tax. In practice, this displaced small squatters toward the west, and the expansion into the ParaibaValley or the western plateau of Sao Paulo was characterized by a series of displacements:squattersdisplaced Indians toward the west, only to be displaced by estate owners as roads or railroads stretched further into the interior.2'Nonetheless, while the land law had the effect of displacingsquatters,its desired effect of establishinga
361 land registry with carefully surveyed properties was not realized. featuresof the coffee economy throughIndeed, one of the remarkable out the period we consideris the resistanceof largelandholdersto land surveys and registries.Such resistance within the particularfield of power in which they operated allowed them to avoid taxes but also allowed them to extend the effectivedomainof theirestates.22 The spread of the large estate should not be treatedas unproblematic, however.No LatinAmericanfrontierof settlementwas largerthan the Brazilianinteriorin this period.A mechanicalapplicationof a frontier thesis mightlead us to expect a more "democratic" landholdingpattern to emerge.Yet here, as elsewhere,the importanceof the largerfield of power, the political, economic, and culturalcontext of frontiersettlement, needs to be stressed. Again and again, historianspoint to this context and the mentaland culturalhorizon it produced.Commenting on the failureof smallholdingin the vast frontier,WarrenDean notes, the could never entertainserious"Unfortunately, royaladministrators ly a reform that would bring about not only the desired increase in revenuesbut also what would appearto them to be a social revolution. The only organizationthey could conceive for the immensecolony had to be a society preciselyas aristocraticas that of the metropolis."23 Of the spread of slaveryto the frontier,Stein observes, "Freelabor as-an alternative hardlyexisted in the mindsof the settlers."24 Such conceptions and minds have historical and social armatures. While as a firstapproximation mightbe useful to distinguish it between the sugar-growing northeastand the expandingcoffee provincesof the south, to see the one as conservativeand aristocraticand the other as more liberal, "less wedded to the past,"and holding "moreadaptable economic and social views,"25 theirliberalismtook on a special,Brazilian character.Viotti da Costa stresses that despite a late eighteenthfascinationwith Enlightenmentthought, and early nineteenth-century which led to the formation of secret societies and pro-independence conspiracies,the liberalismthat dominatedin Brazilby independence was one thathad been purgedof its more radicalsocial content:
In Europe, liberalism had originally been a bourgeois ideology, an instrument in the struggle against the absolute power of kings, the privileges of the nobility, and the feudal institutions that inhibited economic development. But in Brazil, liberalism became the ideology of rural oligarchies, which found in the new ideas arguments they could use against the mother country. These men were primarly concerned with eliminating colonial institutions that restricted the landowners and merchants - the two most powerful
362
groups in colonial society. When they struggledfor freedom and equality, they were actuallyfightingto eliminatemonopoliesand privilegesthat benefited the mothercountryand to liberatethemselvesfromcommercialrestrictions that forced Braziliansto buy and sell productsthroughPortugal.Thus, duringthis period, liberalismin Brazil expressedthe oligarchies'desire for Crown.The oligarchies, independecefromthe impositionsof the Portuguese control over land and however,were not willingto abandontheir traditional labor,nor did they want to changethe traditional systemof production.This led themto purgeliberalismof its most radicaltendencies.26
For both liberal and conservative planters, the monarchy became a means for preserving an aristocratic society in the postcolonial era. Indeed, a pact between northeastern sugar planters and the expanding Rio elite was crucial in the ascension of Pedro II to the throne in 1840. With this nineteenth-century monarchy, unique in Latin America, we might understand something of the political and cultural context that would attempt to extend into the frontier the system of production and privilege that had served as the basis for colonial society. We can understand the political context in which royal land grants were recognized as legitimate but not the rights of possession. We can understand the attempt to recreate a whole society and way of life, in which both land titles and aristocratic rank could be granted, in which a personal empire could rest on the labor of slaves. But the attempt to expand and reproduce such a society took place in new contexts. In the first place, planters viewing abundant land and a dependent labor force adopted production techniques that made for quick profits and long-term destruction. Initial productivity depended upon the natural fertility of the forest. Whole sections of forest would be cut and burned, and coffee trees planted in vertical rows up hillsides, to facilitate access to the trees by slave gangs. At harvest, trees would be stripped of cherries and leaves. In a classic and oft-repeated description, this harvesting method (unique in Latin America) is pictured: "Each branch was encircled by thumb and forefinger, the hand then being pulled down and outward, thus 'stripping the branch in one swift motion' and filling the screen with leaves, dead twigs, and coffee berries."27Such methods assured the productivity of labor but not of land; indeed, with the erosion caused by the vertical rows, they assured that the land would be exausted at the end of the 20-30 year cycle of the coffee trees themselves. Second, Brazil's new trade relationship with Britain threatened the
363 slave trade, and by mid-century the trade had effectively stopped. Thus, while the initialexpansioninto the ParaibaValleyhad been facilitated by the easy extension of slavery,the boom of the 1850s and 1860s brought with it an increasinglycostly labor force. Slave prices doubled in the early fifties as an international trade was replacedby an trade, with Rio plantersbuying slaves from the declining interregional northeast.By the 1870s, centrallegislationbegan to limit slavery. The Rio Branco Law of 1871 freed slave childrenborn afterpassageof the Law of 1885 freed sixty-year-old slaves.28 law,while the Sexagenarian Behind the pictureof greatwealthand aristocraticprivilegecreatedby estate agricultureand slave labor, then, lay a social reality of waste, decay,and impendingcrisis.Yet one of the featuresthat impressesthe readerof Stein'sstudy of Vassourasin the Paraibaor Dean's study of Rio Claro in Sao Paulo is the inabilityof most plantersto respondto that crisis,to envision anythingother than the slavocracythathad been the basis of their wealth and was decayingaroundthem.Their opposition to abolition, their attemptto put it off for another generation,is Even so, other planters,especiallyin Sao Paulo, could foresee striking. the end of slaveryand experimentedearly on with alternative formsof labor - alternativesthat could not be realized as long as slaverycontinued.Nicolau Vergueiro's experimentbeginningin 1845 on his Sao Paulo plantationhas receivedconsiderableattention.'9Under this sysof tem, Vergueirofinancedthe immigration Germanand Swissworkers who were to settle on his plantation,sharecropan unspecifiednumber of coffee trees, and pay off the debt incurredby their passage.Their compensationwas to be half of the coffee yield (fromwhichhalfwas to be deducted to retirethe debt), a house, and a food plot. While the initial success of the experimentled to expanded immigration shareand croppingin the early 1850s, enthusiasmfor the projecthad wanedby the late 1850s, partly due to strikes and desertions of 1856-57, and partly due to decreased labor productivity.The central problem, accordingto Stolcke, was the initial debt. The indenturerequiredthe sharecropperto work off his debt, but the deduction for debt encouraged the sharecropperto concentrateon the food plot ratherthanthe coffee plot. The planterthereforehad to enforce an indenturecontract in a situationin which desertionwas possible, and to stimulateproductivity in a situation in which control over the labor force was much more diffusethanwith slavery. Despite the demise of the Vergueiroexperimentin the 1850s and the continued dominance of slave labor until 1888, some planterscon-
364 tinued to experimentwith free-laborregimes.30 They faced two problems. On the one hand, the initialdebt associated with planterfinancing of immigrationcreated an immediate obstacle. On the other, the planterneeded more control over the coffee productionprocess - and by extension over the productivityof workers - than sharecropping allowed. The first problem was to be addressedby the transferto the Sao Paulo state of the entire cost of immigration;the second was addressedwith the adoption of a "mixedtask and piece-ratesystem."31 Together,by the 1880s, these two innovationsbecame the distinctive
features of the colonato. Beginning in 1871, Sao Paulo began to take
over limited subsidization of European immigrationfor the coffee farms. In 1886, the Sociedade Promotora da Imigracao, a private organizationunder contract to the state, was formed, producinga 60page booklet promotingSao Paulo, publishedin Portuguese,German, and Italian,and opened European offices, promotingand organizing the immigrantstream.With the fall of the Empire and the establishment of a republicin which the states had significantpower and autonomy, the immigrationprogramwas taken over by Sao Paulo'sDepartHollo"From1889 to the turn of the century," ment of Agriculture.32 waywrites,
of nearly three-quarters a million more foreignersarrivedin Sao Paulo, of Fromabolitionto the which 80 percentwere subsidizedby the government. Depression nearly two and one-quartermillion immigrantscame in, commilparedto a populationbase in Sao Paulo in 1886 of one and one-quarter in lion. Some 58 percentof all immigrants thatperiodwere subsidizedby the state.33
were Italian,althoughItalyprohibThe vast majorityof the immigrants further subsidized emigrationto Brazil in 1902.34Furthermore, ited the state engaged in a remarkablecoordinationof planter needs and from Santos to a hostel would be transferred labor supply.Immigrants While at in Sao Paulo, where the state would serve as labor contractor. the hostel, the immigrantfamily would sign a contract to work on a particularplantationand would then be given railroadpassage from Sao Paulo to the interior.35 The contractsthey signed representeda uniqueformof labormobilization. First,they receiveda fixed wage per thousandcoffee trees weeded and maintainedduring the year, regardlessof yield. Second, harvest labor was compensatedon the basis of yield (so much per 50 liters of cherries).Third,they receiveda house, and fourth,they receiveda food plot. Variationsmight appearin regionswhere coffee was being plant-
365 ed, allowing colonos to plant food crops between rows of recently planted coffee. The system preserved some of the advantagesof a sharecroppingregime (some of the risk was reduced with the harvest compensationtied to yield; costs were reduced with the provisionof a food plot) but eliminated some of sharecropping's disadvantages(the set wage for tending a numberof trees allowed more space for planter controlof the labor process). Because of state subsidizationof immigrationand the eliminationof debt as a social and economic relation between planter and colono, movementof persons in the Sao Paulo Westat therewas extraordinary the close of each annual cycle. Colonos on the plantationmight leave and move farther west, especially to zones of expansion, where contracts were perceived by colonos as being more lucrative.As long as the immigrantstreamwas maintained, however,the instabilityin terms of personnel was of little concern for the planter.A dependable,state subsidized and controlled mass of cheap and replaceable labor remainedavailable.36 Once implanted,the colonato system dominatedcoffee productionin Sao Paulo throughoutthe period thatconcernsus here, lastinguntilthe 1960s. The combination of incentives to individual laborers, costof reducingfeatures,and a structure labordiscipline,proveda powerful source of planter power in the early decades of this century.Stolcke emphasizes,for example, that planterswere able to weatherincreasinglyfrequentperiods of low pricesbecause the provisionof food plots allowed planters to reduce wages and compensate for decreased Nonetheless, we need to look to the fault lines in any labor prices.37 A labor regime that provides flexibilityin response to one set regime. of pressuresmay create obstacles in others.The planters'dependence on an ever-flowingimmigrantstreamwas one such obstacle.Another lay in the attraction of contracts in zones of expansion, providinga built-in incentive to increase productionas planters entered decades of overproduction.Thus, while the combination of food and coffee productionprovided planterswith flexibilityduringlow-priceperiods, the incentivesbuilt into the colonato could exacerbatethe overproduction problem,makingprice troughsmorefrequentand severe. CostaRica also moved towardcoffee cultivationearlyin the nineteenth century, but the occupation of space and titling of land differed In markedlyfrom the Brazilianexample.38 the firstplace, the land suitable for coffee is restricted,concentratedin the Central Valley from
366 Alajuela in the west to Ujarrasin the southeast.Throughoutthe colonial period, Costa Rica was a periphery of a periphery.Part of the Audienca of Guatemala,most of Costa Rican territorylay beyond the area of dense Mesoamericanindigenoussettlement,and the Spaniards who settled in the frontiercolonial outposts found little in the way of exploitableresourcesor population.At the end of the colonial period, 40,000 out of a total populationof about 50,000 lived in the Central Valley.The most importantcolonial commercialcrop, cacao, had not been growntherebut on the AtlanticCoast, and the bulkof the Valley's populationlived in towns such as San Jose, Heredia,and Cartagoand economy."39 villages,practicinga "village With independence came a search for a viable commercialcrop. In 1821 the municipalityof San Jose distributed coffee plants among indigentsand conceded land to anyonewho would plantand fence coffee groves. In 1831 the national assembly declared that anyone who planted coffee in nationallands (terrenosbaldios)for five years would This was the first of a series of relatively be grantedtitle to the land.40 not alwaysconflict-free)legal instruments open and generous (though grantingnational lands to settlers who would cultivatethem.4'It also led to the early establishmentof a land registryand survey,through whichsmallholderscould protectand defend theirholdings. The expansionof coffee cultivationin the CentralValleycan be distin(1) guished among three regions:42 the nucleus around San Jose and Heredia and surrounding villages, which was the first to move toward which had the most fertile lands for coffee cultivation, and coffee, which was the most densely settled center of coffee production and commercialization; the Alajuela/San Ram6n region to the west, (2) and near the road from San Jose to Puntarenas,toward which along migrantsfrom San Jose/Heredia began to move from the 1840s but especiallyduringthe last half of the century,practicinga mixed coffee/ and (3) the Reventaz6n sugar cane/cattle and other crops regime;43 and TurrialbaValleys to the east, which did not develop coffee farms until the completion of the Limon railway,which passed throughthe Valleys. Unlike the other' regions, Turrialbadid not attract peasant migrationand settlementbut was characterizedby large coffee, sugar cane, and banana farms. Unlike the development of coffee in other countries, regionalexpansion in Costa Rica was not accompaniedby the decline of earlier centers of production. The San Jos6/Heredia nucleus remainedthe center of coffee productionand commercialization even as new regionswere opened up.
367 The expansion of coffee cultivation in Costa Rica's Central Valley occurredwithina social, political,and culturalcontextthatrepresentsa starkcontrastto the Brazilianexample.Colonial society had produced a town and village aristocracywho were not far removed,in social and economic terms, from the rest of the population.Slaverywas virtually nonexistent(no more than 200 slaves at any point duringthe colonial era) and was outlawedin 1824.44Nor were other forms of servilelabor widespread.As Gudmundsonnotes:
Politicaland religiousoffice went hand in hand with the generationand preservationof wealth,just as in other,more dynamicSpanishcolonialsocieties. in Ownershipof land was not the surestor quickestroad to enrichment this howevermuchit mayhavebeen both a form of securityand a necessociety, sary element in securingelite status and acceptance.Unlike other Central in GuanaAmericansocieties, landownership centralCosta Rica (excluding caste) did not bringwith it a servile labor force, a fact that meantthat there was even less interestin landholding amongthe elite.... [IlnCostaRica landfeature of the elite; instead it was a ownership was not the distinguishing in combinationof commerce,office holding,and diverseinvestments urban and ruralrealestate.45
Many authors have painted a picture of a widespread rural,peasant population farming subsistence crops.46For these authors, the dispersed peasantryservesas a startingpoint for theiranalysisof developments duringthe coffee era, a minorityview arguingthat coffee led to an accumulationof landholdingsand a proletarianization the peasof served antryand a majorityview arguingthatthe widespreadpeasantry as the social basis for smallholdingcommercialproductionwith the On expansionof coffee cultivation.47 both sides, we encountersilences.
In Seligson's case, for example, the analysis seems to follow from a
theoreticalmodel of the effects of commercialagriculture, alongwith a presentist reading of nineteenth-century census categories like jornalero.In Hall'scase, her most vigorousargumentagainstland concentration and proletarianizationstresses the contrast with Brazil. Unlike the huge landholdingsin Brazil,that is, largecoffee farmsin the Central Valley were relativelysmall - 60 manzanason average,with 60,000 trees. By the 1930s, these farmsheld perhaps25 percentof the coffee land in the San Jose/Heredia nucleus.48 While this does represent a stark contrastwith Brazil,once the contrasthas been made the Costa Rican estate needs to be placed in a Costa Rican context. A 60,000 tree farm is not a peasant farm and cannot be worked with familylabor.We need to move beyond the contrast,then, and explorea specificallyCosta Ricanfield of power.
368 model of a colonial villageeconThis is an area where Gudmundson's of and the ruralization the peasantrywith the expansionof coffee omy cultivationis especiallysuggestive.It is a model that helps us better to understandthose nineteenth-centurysocial processes that historians of have delineated:the privatization baldios, the move from subsistence to commercialcrops, a specific migrationpatternin which production a particularregionwould be occupied and then the sons and daughters of a subsequentgenerationwould be faced with the choice of divided and reduced holdings, occasional or permanent labor on nearby estates, or migrationto the westernfrontierof the CentralValley.The property-holdingcommercial peasantry represented an obstacle to land concentration.The expandingestate owner had to purchasesmall propertiesand could not depend on generousland grantsor the sale of extensivebaldios or a structural space created by vague titles and nonand surveys. existentregistries While this landholdingpeasantryrepresentsa significantcontrastwith With other LatinAmericanexperiences,it should not be romanticized. and the increasingshortage of land, smallthe passing of generations Further, the holders were to be divided by growing inequalities.49 of requirements processingand marketingtheir coffee placed them in direct contact with coffee processors (beneficiadores),who were to become the coffee elite of Costa Rica. Indeed, as Hall notes, the largeestate holders of the SanJose/Heredianucleuswere beneficiadores. An examination of this commercial infrastructurelies beyond the For scope of this essay.50 now it needs to be noted that the Costa Rican is inconceivablewithout it. As in the colonial period, field of power landholdingwas not the primaryroute to power. Both the accumulation of land and access to labordepended on one's position withinand access to accumulated commercial wealth. As Gudmundson concludes:
Coffee fundamentally transformed a colonial regime and village economy built on direct extraction by a city-based elite from a peasantry that was as yet privatized to only a small degree. The replacement of this direct extraction by more subtle and productive market-mediated mechanisms created a qualitatively new, antagonistic relationship between the coffee elite of processors-exporters and the thoroughly mercantile, landholding peasantry. The road to agrarian capitalism in Costa Rica followed along these lines, rather than those of an estate model based on the rapid proletarianization of a formerly self-sufficient and self-determined peasantry.5'
369 Yet the elite's immobilityin confrontingthe labor problemneeds to be emphasized. Given the situation of the large estate within a peasant milieu, estate owners attractedpermanentand seasonal laborerswith relativelyhigh wages.The Costa Rican peon, as Cardoso stresses,"was Yet basically an employee, a wage labourer and not a 'serf.'"52 they were unableto mount any sustainedeffortto attractadditionallaborers to Costa Rica. On the one hand, this represents their more modest resourcesin a world in which other countries- Braziland Argentinahad begun massive subsidized immigrationschemes, not to mention the North Americanzones of attractionfor Italianmigrantsduringthe same period. On another,it representsthe limits of their own mental and culturalhorizons. The 1862 colonization law specificallyforbade settlement by blacks and Chinese, and Tomas GuardiarejectedChinese workers in 1875, claiming they were "gamblers,thieves, and Moreover,even when contractswere signedfor the opium smokers."53 construction of a railway to the Atlantic Coast, the Costa Rican governmentstipulatedthat the WestIndianlaborersbroughtin to work on the railwaywere not to enter the CentralValley.54 Colombia. The expansion of coffee production in Colombia began muchlater than in Braziland Costa Rica.Three branchesof the Andes divide the countryinto regionsthat,in the nineteenthcentury,wereisolated from each other and far removed from ports that could be reachedvia the riversystems of the Magdalenaand the Cauca.At the close of the colonial period, the bulk of the population lived in the highlands, which had also been the site of indigenous settlement. Around highlandtowns and cities, haciendasdeveloped alongsideand often at the expense of indigenous reserves (resguardos).But the haciendasand resguardosprovisionedregional,urbanmarkets.Topography and demographycombined to hinder the developmentof an export economy and promote the development of relativelyisolated marketor exporteconomywas regionaleconomies. Justas a "national" weakly developed, the central government was quite weak. Local hacendados held power in particularregions, and though struggles between liberals and conservativesconcerned control of the central concernedcontrol government,they also, and often more importantly, of local governments,their publicoffices and records,and theirlegislative power. This is not to say that there were no exports at all, or that the new merchants and free tradistsin cities such as Bogota did not organizeprojects and attempt to establish closer ties with world markets.Gold
370 mining in Antioquia was an importantexport activity and source of tobacco boom in the Magdacapital, and the mid-nineteenth-century lena valley, while short-lived,showed some of the possibilities of the sub-tropicallowlandsand slopes. But it was only with the move toward coffee production,which began in earnest after 1870, that firm links with world marketswere established.With the move towardcoffee, the regional structurationof Colombian topography, demography,and economy was important.The developmentof the coffee economy followed three cycles, each of which was concentrated in a particular region.Each region,in turn,beganits coffee cycle with a differentcolonial legacy in terms of prevailingsocial relations and the occupationof space. Santander,in the northeast,near the Venezuelanborder,was the first Colombian region to turn towardcoffee, after 1850. A regionof colonial settlement,hacendadoswere able to turn to coffee as their tobacco, cotton, or cacao marketscollapsed. As the first region to turn to coffee, Santanderwas to dominate Colombian productionthroughout its firstcoffee cycle, accountingfor some 60 percentof ColombianproAn duction at the end of the nineteenthcentury.55 importantpercentof its coffee was exported via the developing Venezuelanport at age Maracaibo, as coffee production was expanding in the Venezuelan Andes at roughlythe same time.By the turn of the century,Santanderean productionwas beginningto level off, and the regionaccountedfor an decreasingpercentageof productionin this century (only 8.9 percent by 1943).56 Although the move to coffee involved changes in
of structuresof productionand landed property,with an accumulation large properties aided by regional liberal/conservativewars (during it whichvictoriousforces would destroylocal land registries57), did not on or attractstrongpopulationmovement. depend and Tolima,however,the expansion of coffee after In Cundinamarca 1870 took place along mountainslopes and on lands thathad not been importantduringthe colonial and early post-colonial period.Although there were importanttowns that were to become centers of the coffee trade, the coffee expansionalso opened up new lands. The new lands, however,were encumberedby claims.From the late eighteenthcentury, lands in the temperateslopes were claimed in large latifundia.58 The toward coffee involved the investment by Bogota and expansion Medellin59merchants, a "new class"60 looking for investments in and buyingand dividing largerlatifundiaor buying export agriculture lands to establishcoffee haciendas.6'It also involvedthe movepublic
371 ment of indigenous and mestizo peasants from the Sabanade Bogota and the highlandsof Boyaca, who settled as renterson the emerging haciendas. Although the Cundinamarca/Tolima coffee zone of the westernslopes of the eastern Cordillerawas an importantcoffee zone in that it served as the base for an oligarchicelite that lived in Bogota and accumulated propertiesin the Cundinamarca/Tolima slopes, it was never the most importantproducingregionin terms of volume of production. By the time Santanderentered into a prolonged decline, the western,Antioqueiio expansionwas firmlyestablished,and the Antioquia/Caldascoffee zone dominatedColombianproduction. This westernzone has been the subjectof a powerfulmyth- the Antioqueiio colonization, the establishmentof a settler society as colonists moved into the sub-tropicalfrontier,carvedout farms,and established towns and small-scale enterprises,with a "democratizing" effect on Antioqueiio and Colombiansociety.More recent studies have emphasized the less idyllic aspects of this process, the appropriation large of tracts of land by a few, the exploitationof small producersby urban the merchants, violent conflictsover land and resourcesas publiclands were privatized.62 Unlike the Santandersor Cundinamarca/Tolima area of western the colonizationcontaineda good deal of unclaimedpubliclands (baldios) at the close of the colonial period.The predominant economic activity was gold mining,which was not characterized the servilelabor relaby tions predominantin other regions.Most of the gold had been mined descendents of slaves and mestizos who had left by mazamorreros, other regionsand workedindependentlyby mininggold along western riversand streams,selling their gold to urban merchantsin Medellin. At the beginningof the Antioqueiio colonization,then, the gold economy provideda social base for independentsettlementand activity(the and a source of capital accumulationallowing urban mazamorreros) merchants investin new enterprises.63 to The settlementof baldios in the nineteenthcenturyfell into two broad periods.Duringthe first,from independenceto the 1870s, publiclands were sold as a source of revenue for a weak centralgovernmentand withoutregardto the occupationof land by settlers,settingup the basis for the same kind of conflictthatoccurredin Brazil.Duringthis period, colonizationtook a "collective" in character, which a whole settlement would be granted title, includinghouse and farm plots. In this form, baldios might be ceded by the state of Antioquia,or colonists would
372
settle uncultivated forest land held in colonial land title (tierras realengas), or merchants would organize settlement projects and obtain
title, ceding some land to settlers but maintainingthe bulk of the land for cattle haciendas.Thus a mixtureof largeand smallholdingresulted, with large cattle haciendasoccupyingthe lowlandsand small farms on In the forested mountainsides. contrastwith Brazil,the passageof laws 61 of 1874 and 48 of 1882 placed limits on the size of holdings that could be titledfrom publiclands and, more importantly, recognizedthe of prior settlement and possession. In practice, this did not rights representa transferof power from large landholdersto small, and statistical analyses of public-landsales and grantsshow a continued predominance of large holdings. But it created a legal terrainon which settlers could struggle, and through which they could oppose the of appropriation theirfarms.64 The laws of 1874 and 1882 were especiallyimportantas the lands held by settlers increasedin value with the expansion of coffee production in the west from 1890s forward.Before this period, Medellin merchantsinterestedin coffee investedin haciendasin the Cundinamarca/ The Tolima region,especially aroundSasaima.65 first Antioqueio coffee farmswere establishedon largehaciendasnear Medellin(Fredonia) in the 1880s. Furtherexpansion in the 1890s and 1900s occurred in the areas of small-scale settlement, on the mountain slopes to the south. By 1913, Antioquiaand Caldas had displacedthe Santandersas the most importantproducing region, creating the basis for a prodiexpansion.66 gious twentieth-century Within and among the three Colombian regions that dominated Colombian coffee production, we find land and labor regimes that approach the Brazilian and Costa Rican extremes and that cover a rangeof intermediateforms and relations.A roughsurveyof the three In regionscan be quicklysketched.67 Santanderin its period of expansion and establishment (1840-1900), a form of sharecropping
(aparceria) predominated in which a tenant would be given a house,
food plot, and coffee plot in returnfor a third to a half of the coffee produced and a smaller portion of the food plot's yield. Arango suggests that this system emergedafter an early use of wage labor and was a response to labor scarcity and the need to fix labor on the land.68 shareThis, in turn, supports Palacios'contention that Santanderean was not associated with servile social relations.In this view, cropping sharecropping represented a short-term economic contract that implied neither a long-term relationshipwith the land nor a servile
373 If relationshipwith an absentee owner.69 outside labor was necessary for the harvest,it was employedby the sharecropper. In Cundinamarca,a form of labor rent (arrendamiento)emerged during its period of expansion and establishment(1875-1900). The large haciendas on the western slopes of the eastern cordillerawere owned by Bogota merchants who hired resident administrators. Because the subtropicalslopes had been relativelyopen at the beginning of the coffee cycle, the haciendas depended on the migrationof who highland Indians and mestizos from Boyaca and Cundinamarca would settle on haciendalands and be given a house and access to land for food and livestock production.In return,they would be expected to provide a contractednumberof days per month on the hacienda's coffee plot. While this was the most servile of the labor relations to were in privilegedpositions in relaemergein Colombia,arrendatarios tion to others such as the casual laborers(voluntarios) hired from the or from highland Cundinamarca and Boyaca for the harvest. region Long-term rental arrangementson haciendas gave the arrendatarios access to a livelihood;their access to land for corn, beans, sugar,and livestock production created a space for an alternativecommercial economy within the hacienda and with neighboringtowns, of which some arrendatarios were able to take advantage,hiringvoluntariosto do theirobligatorywork on the hacienda.70 In Antioquiaduringthe initialexpansion(1885-1905), largehaciendas near Medellinand Fredoniaused an intermediatesystemof agregados, in which the house alloted to the workerwas separatefrom the land to be worked,minimizingthe possibilitythat the agregadocould develop an alternativeagriculturaleconomy within the hacienda.71 With the spreadof coffee cultivationto the south, however,small-scalecommercial peasantproductionwas widespread,and a structure production of and commercializationsimilar to that of Costa Rica's CentralValley emerged. Although it is useful to make an initialdistinctionbetween a structure of production dominated by a commercial peasantryin the Antioqueiio west and one dominatedby haciendasand dependenttenantsin the east, such an opposition needs to be modified by more careful attentionto spatialvariation(the existenceof small-scaleproductionin regions dominated by haciendas, and of haciendas in regions dominated by peasants)and to temporaldevelopment.Palaciossuggeststhat the developmentof coffee productionin Colombiacan be divided into
374 three broad periods: the hacienda phase (1870-1910), the peasant phase (1910-1950), and the empresarialphase (small-scalecommercial farms,with much greatercapitalinputs for new strains,fertilizers, and labor, 1960 to present).72 the one hand, the "peasant On phase"of the early twentieth century represents the growing importance of Antioquia and the southwardexpansion of settlementand coffee production. Yet it also reflects the fragmentationof haciendaholdings in the center. To understandthe dynamicsof this fragmentation, Palacios'emphasis on the peasantcharacterof Colombiancoffee productionon haciendas is especiallyhelpful.He begins by stressingthe frontiercharacterof the coffee zone, the implantationof a haciendaregimethat Cundinamarca involved the investmentof commercial capital from Bogota and the immigrationof highlandpeasantsfrom Boyaca. But he suggeststhat it was "an entire peasant structure" that migrated,meaningthat servile relations from the highlandswere successfully implantedin the early decades but also that household-basedproductionwas installedat the verycenter of the haciendaregime.73 This was to be increasingly important as arrendatariosestablished commercialproductionin their food plots and pastures,and as hacendados needed to renovate their coffee plots. Hacienda administrators complainedabout the difficultyof enforcinglabor obligations.That is, the mannerin which hacendadosresolved their laborproblemcreated the structuralspace for an alternativeeconomy within the hacienda, which was increasinglyimportantat the close of the initial expansion phase. By the 1920s, the crisis on centralhaciendaswas acute, as peasant movements began to organize, first against the arrendatarios and then in combination with the arrendatariosagainst the hacendados. One response of hacendadoswas to divide and sell off their estates to peasants and outsiders, a long process that continued through and that characbeyond the depression.With this, the "cellularstructure" terized the organizationof production within haciendas became the basis for a new structureof landed property,and small-scaleproperty and productionbecame central in the two most importantproduction zones of the country.74 in Costa Rica, this peasantryshould not be As romanticized:the exploitativerelationshipbetween merchantprocessors and small producerswas crucial.But the importanceof the peasantry,both within the hacienda regime and in that regime'scollapse, shouldnot be forgotten.75
375 Fields of power: Toward an interpretive framework This essay began with a paradox - the common transformation of Latin America's coffee republics in the late nineteenth century and the radically distinct experience that transformation engendered. After a brief exploration of one dimension of those distinct experiences, we need now to ask why these different forms and relations emerged. My answer, which cannot satisfy those who prefer their explanations to be more precise and "economical," is that understanding can only be sought in the comparative discussion itself. "The determinate 'cause' of such changes," writes Sidney Mintz concerning another problem, "is a context, or a set of situations, created by broad economic forces."76In this case, I have tried to sketch radically different social contexts into which these broad economic forces were inserted, and I wish now to suggest that these different contexts "determined" the different directions the coffee economies took. However much this may look like an argument that the coffee economies were different because they were different, the historical and anthropological understanding that informs it is more complex and requires elaboration. I have referred at various points in this essay to specific Paulista or Costa Rican fields of power. I need now to make my meaning more explicit. Despite the profilerating use of "power" as a concept in recent literature, my most direct source for the phrase is Eric Wolf's Peasant Warsof the Twentieth Century.77 Characteristically, he defines what he means by practice rather than explicit precept. The phrase appears most prominently in his conclusion that, "Ultimately, the decisive factor in making a peasant rebellion possible lies in the relation of the peasantry to the field of power which surrounds it."78 While he goes on to use a definition of power offered by Richard Adams, his understanding of the field of power is less susceptible to codification. It clearly refers to the class structure of which the peasants are a part - the landlords, merchants, state officials, capitalist planters, and others who press claims upon or otherwise threaten peasant livelihoods. But his understanding of the class structure is one that is less dependent on a ready set of sociological categories than on detailed anthropological and historical investigation. Earlier, Wolf observed that
the anthropologist is greatly aware of the importance of groups which mediate between the peasant and larger society of which he forms a part. The landlord, the merchant, the political boss, the priest stand at the junctures in social, economic, and political relations that connect the village to wider-
376
rangingelites in marketsor politicalnetworks.In his studyof peasantvillages
he has learned to recognize their crucial role in peasant life, and he is persuaded that they must play a significant role in peasant involvement in political upheaval. To describe such groups, and to locate them in the social field in which they must maneuver, it is useful to speak of them as "classes." Classes are for me quite real clusters of people whose development or decline is predicated on particular historical circumstances, and who act together or against each other in pursuit of particular interests prompted by these circumstances. In this perspective, we may ask - in quite concrete terms - how members of such classes make contact with the peasantry. In our accounts, therefore, we must transcend the usual anthropological account of peasants, and seek information also about the larger society and its constituent class groupings, for the peasant acts in an arena which also contains allies as well as enemies. This arena is characteristically a field of political battle.'7
There is much in this statement that bears the marks of the period, over twenty years ago, in which it was written; there is also much in it that is extraordinarily refreshing in the context of theoretical preoccupations that have dominated the literature in the subsequent twenty years. What Wolf was marking out was less a confining set of concepts and hypotheses and more a historical and anthropological attitude, which he then took to his six case studies of peasant rebellion. It is in these case studies that we find, in practice, Wolf's concept of a field of power. In his study of the Mexican Revolution, for example, he begins with the formation of indigenous peasant communities during the colonial period, their relations to haciendas, cities, and the colonial state; the War of Independence and the social and political transformations of the nineteenth century (the liberal reforms and the expansion of haciendas, especially under the Diaz regime); the development of mining and industry in the north. It was only in this context that he analyzed the various locally focussed Mexican Revolutions and some of the initial consequences for regional peasantries of the new Mexico that emerged. In each of the case studies, an attempt is made to understand the formation of a particular peasantry in terms of its internal relations, forms of landholding and community, its relations with hacendados, merchants, the Church, representatives of the state, etc., and to examine how this complex of relations changes with, say, the passage of new land laws in Mexico, the end of one colonialism or the introduction of another, the imposition of a head tax or the development of rice plantations in Vietnam. Although he does not use the language, each of the case studies can be seen as an attempt to capture the conjunction of local and global histories, or to explore the internalization of the external.
377 Although it might have seemed to some reviewers that Wolf's case studies are "too complex and vague"and that he writesthe "leasttheoof retically" the authorswho examinedpeasant rebellionsin the 1960s and 70s,80it should be apparentthat his approachto fields of poweris actuallywell informedby theory.Likewise, the examinationof coffee economies in this essay comes out of a certaintheoreticalunderstanding, one that organizesour account of the differentsocial and cultural contextsin whichcoffee economies developed in a certainway.To each of the regions considered,I take a set of questionsthat fit comfortably the within a historicalmaterialistframework: occupation of space and the transformation landed property,the mobilizationand reproducof tion of labor,and (in a discussionto be presentedelsewhere)the organization and capitalizationof markets,and the political and ideological processes associated with state formation and the emergence of hegemonicblocs. In addressingthese questions, I have tried to avoid the temptationof boxes,by locatingwithineach themerealproblemsthat fillingstructural confrontedhistoricalactors- obtainingtitle to land, or resistinga land a with variousforms of survey,recruiting labor force by experimenting the state to pay for the transportof one's laborcompensation,pressing ers, or agitatingfor marketcontrol in a depressionand findingthat the control scheme results in greater foreign domination. It is through attentionto these problems,theirvaryinglocal solutions,and the problems createdby those solutionsthatwe can sketchthe structureof class relationsin Sao Paulo or Antioquiain a way that pays attentionto the action of humansubjectsand to the contradictory forms and resultsof such actions.
Notes
1. This article presents a portion of the summary and argument contained in my introduction for a forthcoming volume on "Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin America," edited by William Roseberry and Lowell Gudmundson. While the present essay concentrates on questions of land and labor, the longer introduction explores these questions in a wider range of countries and also treats questions of coffee processing, commercialization and trade, as well as class formation and politics, all of which are necessary for the comparative interpretation suggested here. The introduction, in turn, depends upon and was inspired by the essays by Michael Jimenez, Lowell Gudmundson, Mario Samper, Hector Perez, Marco Palacios, Fernando Pic6, David McCreery, Verena Stolcke, and Mauricio Font gathered in the volume. The conference that led to the volume was generously funded by the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the Social Science Research Council, with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
378
2. G. Marcus,"Imagining Whole,"Critique Anthropology, (3, 1989), 7. the 9 of 3. G. Marcus,"Contemporary Problemsof Ethnographyin.the Modem World SysCulture: Poeticsand Politics The tem,"in J. Cliffordand G. Marcus,editors, Writing Press, 1986), 165-193. of Ethnography (Berkeley,Universityof California 4. F. H. Cardoso and E. Faletto, Dependencyand Developmentin Latin America Press, 1979), xvii. (Berkeley,Universityof California 5. Ibid.,xvii, xviii. 6. K. Marx and F. Engels, The GermanIdeology (New York, International,1970 [1846]), 55-58. 7. J. de Graaf, TheEconomicsof Coffee(Wageningen, Netherlands,Centrefor AgriculturalPublishing Documentation,1986), 26. and 8. U.S. Departmentof Commerce, Business and Defense Services Administration, in D.C., 1961), 5. CoffeeConsumption the UnitedStates,1920-1965 (Washington, 9. M. Palacios,El Cafeen Colombia,1850-1970, 2nd ed. (Mexico City,El Colegio de Mexico, 1983), 178. 10. K. Marx,Capital,vol. 3. (New York,International, 1967 [1984]), 791. 11. I. Wallerstein,TheModernWorld-System TheSecondEra of GreatExpansionof III: the CapitalistWorld-Economy, 1730s-1840 (San Diego, Academic Press, 1989), 152-153. 12. See L. Gudmundson,"Peasant,Farmer,Proletarian: Class Formationin a Smallholder Coffee Economy, 1850-1950," HispanicAmericanHistoricalReview,69 (2, 1989), 221-258; M. Samper,"Enfrentamiento Conciliaci6n:Comentariosa y Prop6sito de las Relaciones entre Productoresy Beneficiadoresde Cafe,"Revista de Historia,NumeroEspecial(1985), 207-212. A 13. S. Stein, Vassouras, BrazilianCoffeeCounty,1850-1900:TheRole of Planterand Slavein a Plantation Society,2nd ed. (Princeton,PrincetonUniversityPress, 1985); W. Dean, Rio Claro:A BrazilianPlantation System,1820-1920 (Stanford,Stanford on UniversityPress, 1976); T. Holloway, Immigrants the Land:Coffeeand Society in Sdo Paulo, 1886-1934 (Chapel Hill: Universityof North CarolinaPress, 1980); V. Stolcke, CoffeePlanters,Workers, and Wives:Class Conflictand GenderRelations on Sdo Paulo Plantations, 1850-1980 (New York: St. Martin's, 1988). 14. A. Machado uses articles written by hacendados outlining the benefits of new
forms of tenancythat they had recentlyadopted.Machadouses the articlesas eviformsof sharecropping, they are also interesting elite disdence of particular as but courses, as planterssimultaneously tryingto present themselvesto each other in a intractable way and trying(publicly)to resolve increasingly problemsas particular their tenantsleft the farmsand worked on public works projects.(A. Machado,El al Cafe:De la Aparceria Capitalismo, [Bogota,Puntade Lanza,19771 179-199.) in 15. See L. Bergad,Coffeeand the Growthof AgrarianCapitalism Nineteenth Century PuertoRico (Princeton,PrincetonUniversityPress, 1982), 38.
16. With the depression of the 1930s and the closure of the European market in World
CofWarII, the United Statesand 14 producingcountriessigned the International fee Agreementof 1940, settingexport quotas for the variouscountries.The agreement was the first of a series of internationalcontrol schemes that stabilizedthe market and facilitateda dramaticpost-war price increase. It also corresponded with (indeed required)the formationof nationalcoffee-marketing boards,marking Some of these boards the effectiveend of the free-trademodel of coffee marketing. had been formed earlier, during the depression, or, in Brazil, to administerthe valorization schemes.
17. M. Arango, Cafe e Industria, 1850-1930 (Bogota, Carlos Valencia Editores, 1977),
379 184. The analogy,while suggestive,is inexact.Coffee is subjectto a gradingsystem, at first developed by tradersin consumingcountriesand in recent decades develboards in producingcountriesas well. It has never been assooped by marketing ciated with the sort of politicallyand commerciallychargeddesignationof lands thatproducegrapesthat can be processedinto wines with certainappellations,and within appellations,designationof grapes and the lands that produce them into grand,premier,and lesser crus,nor can it be. That a discourseof qualitycan give to a coffee processora controlanalogousto thatexercisedby, say, a wine negociantis, nonetheless,an interesting possibility.
18. Stein, Vassouras, 3; Dean, Rio Claro, 1-23; C. Hall, El Cafe y el Desarrollo Hist6rico-Geogrdfico de Costa Rica (San Jose, Editorial Costa Rica, 1976); Palacios, El Cafe en Colombia, passim; D. A. Rangel, Capital y Desarrollo: La Vene-
zuela Agraria (Caracas:Universidad Central, 1969); W. Roseberry, Coffee and

Capitalism in the Venezuelan Andes (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1983), passim. 19. Palacios, El Cafe en Colombia, 294.
20. The classicaccountfor Rio is Stein, Vassouras. 21. An excellentgeneraltreatmentof land policy is in E. Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire:Mythsand Histories(Chicago,Universityof ChicagoPress, 1985), 78-93. For treatmentsof the conflicts between squattersand grantholders Rio and Sao in Paulo,see Stein, Vassouras, 10-17; Dean, Rio Claro,11-20; Holloway,Immigrants
on the Land, 112-1 14. 22. See Holloway, Immigrants on the Land, 113, 120-121. 23. Dean, Rio Claro, 13. 24. Stein, Vassouras, 55.
25. B. Bums, A Historyof Brazil, 2nd ed, (New York, Columbia University Press,
26. 27. 28. 29. 1980), 189. Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire, 7. Stein, Vassouras, 35. Stein, Vassouras, 65-67. Dean, Rio Claro, 89-123; Holloway, Immigrants on the Land, 70-72; Stolcke, Coffee Planters, Workers, and Wives, 1-9; Viotti da Costa, Brazilian Empire, 94124. Stolcke, Coffee Planters, Workers, and Wives, 9-16. Ibid., 17. Holloway, Immigrants on the Land, 35-40. Ibid., 41. Other important nationalities of immigrants were Spanish, Portuguese, and Japan-
30. 31. 32. 33. 34.
ese. See ibid.,42-43.

35. Ibid., 50-61.
36. This summaryhas depended on descriptionsin Stolcke, CoffeePlanters,Workers,

and Wives;Holloway, Immigrants on the Land, and Dean, Rio Claro. 37. Stolcke, Coffee Planters, Workers,and Wives, 28-34. 38. The best analysis of the occupation of space in Costa Rica is Hall, El Cafe y el Desarrollo Hist6rico-Geogrdfico. See as well idem, Costa Rica: A Geographical Interpretation in Historical Perspective (Boulder, Westview Press, 1985). 39. L. Gudmundson, Costa Rica before Coffee: Society and Economy on the Eve of the Export Boom (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1986). 40. Hall, El Cafe y el Desarrollo Hist6rico-Geogrdfico, 35-37. 41. J. A. Salas Viquez, "La Btsqueda de Soluciones al Problema de la Escasez de
380
Tierraen la FronteraAgricola:Aproximaci6nal Estudio del ReformismoAgrario en Costa Rica, 1880-1940." Revistade Historia,Nimero Especial (1985), 97160. 72-101. 42. Hall, El Cafey el DesarrolloHist6rico-Geogrdfico, "La 43. See as well M. SamperKutschbach, Especializaci6nMercantilCampesinaen el Noroeste del Valle Central: 1850-1900. Elementos Microanaliticos para un Modelo."Revistade HistoriaNdmeroEspecial(1985), 49-98. 44. M. Seligson, Peasants in Costa Rica (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1980), 8. 45. Gudmundson,CostaRica beforeCoffee,57. 46. M. Seligson, Peasantsin Costa Rica; E. Fonseca, Costa Rica Colonial (San Jose, EDUCA, 1983); C. Hall, El Cafey el DesarrolloHist6rico-Geogrdfico. 47. For the first view, see Seligson,Peasantsin CostaRica;for the second, see Hall, El Hist6rico-Geogrdfico. Cafey el Desarrollo 85-87. 48. Hall, El Cafey el DesarrolloHist6rico-Geogrdfico, 49. L. Gudmundson, "Peasant, farmer,proletarian." 50. See the Introduction,cited in note 1, as well as Hall, El Cafey el DesarrolloHis47-49; G. Peters Solorzano, "La formaci6n territorialde las t6rico-Geogrdfico, grandesfincas de cafe en la Meseta Central:Estudio de la firmaTouron (18771955)," Revistade Historia(9-10, 1980), 81-167; V. H. Acufia Ortega, "Clases sociales y conflictosocial en la economiacafetaleracostarricense: productorescontra beneficiadores:1932-1936." Revista de Historia (Ntmero especial, 1985), 181-212. 51. Gudmundson,CostaRica BeforeCoffee,152. Costa 52. C. F. S. Cardoso, 'The formationof the coffee estate in nineteenth-century Rica,"in Land and Labor in LatinAmerica,ed. K. Duncan and I. Rutledge,(Cambridge,Cambridge UniversityPress, 1977), 194. 57. 53. Hall, El Cafey el DesarrolloHist6rico-Geogrdfico, 54. Ibid.All the more interesting,then, the famousmuraldepictingCosta Rican econpictureof coffee omy and society in SanJose's NationalTheater.The romanticized of and bananaworkersshows them all to be white - an obvious misrepresentation of the bananazone, an accuraterepresentation an elite'sself-image. 55. Palacios,El Cafeen Colombia,73. 56. Machado,El Cafe,117; Palacios,El Cafeen Colombia,70-73. 47. 57. Arango, Cafee Industria, 58. Palacios,El Cafeen Colombia,169. coffee economy, see Arango, 59. On Medellin merchantsin the early Cundinamarca Cafee Industria. 60. Palacios,El Cafeen Colombia,78-79. 61. Ibid.,131-169.
62. The classic study of Antioqueno colonization is J. J. Parsons, The Antiquenio Colo-
nization in Western Colombia, 2nd ed. (Berkeley,Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1968). Recent reconsiderationsinclude M. Palacios, El Cafe en Colombia,293340; M. Arango, Cafe e Industria,68-87. C. LeGrand'sFrontierExpansionand PeasantProtestin Colombia,1850-1936(Albuquerque, UniversityOf New Mexico Press, 1986) is not limitedto Antioquiabut offers an innovativestudyof the appropriationof and conflict over public lands (baldios)in nineteenth-and early twenColombia. tieth-century 63. Machado,El Cafe, 17-32; C. Bergquist,Labor in Latin America(Stanford,Stanford UniversityPress, 1986), 287-290.
381
64. This entire discussion depends on LeGrand, FrontierExpansion, 10-18. See as
well Arango, Cafe e Industria, 68-87. 65. Arango, Cafe e Industria.
66. Machado,El Cafe, 117. 67. Sources for this comparison include Palacios, El Cafe en Colombia, 187-234;
Arango, Cafe e Industria, 130-151; Machado, El Cafe, 33-85; Bergquist, Labor in Latin America, 313-330. Arango, Cafe e Industria, 149-151. Palacios, El Cafe en Colombia, 191. Palacios, El Cafe en Colombia, 206. Palacios, El Cafe en Colombia, 193. Palacios, El Cafe en Colombia, 342.
68. 69. 70. 71. 72.
73. Ibid., 171-175. 74. Palacios, El Cafe en Colombia,372-401. See also M. Jimenez,'TravelingFar in Grandfather's Car:The Life Cycle of CentralColombianCoffee Estates.The case
of Viota, Cundinamarca (1900-1930)," Hispanic American Historical Review 69
(no. 2,1989), 216. 75. Here again,the limited natureof the presentcomparisonneeds to be emphasized. A full understanding the respective fields of power sketched in this essay reof quires considerationof the relationsbetween small producersand merchants.But of the bases for merchantcontrol, and the special characterisitics coffee that make such controlpossible,are sketchedelsewhere.See the Introduction, cited in note 1, as well as the Costa Rican sources cited in note 50. For Colombia,see Palacios,El
Cafe en Colombia; Arango, and Cafe e Industria. For other countries, see Roseberry, Coffee and Capitalism; Bergad, Coffee and the Growth of Agrarian Capitalism. 76. S. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York,
Viking, 1985), 181.

77. E. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row,
1969). 78. Ibid.,290. 79. Ibid.,xii. 80. T. Skocpol, "WhatMakes PeasantsRevolutionary?" R. Weller and S. Guggenin
heim, Power and Protest in the Countryside (Durham, 1982), 166, 178.

La Falta de Brazos Tierra y Trabajo en Las Economias Cafetaleras Del Siglo Xix en America Latina

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La Falta de Brazos Tierra y Trabajo en Las Economias Cafetaleras Del Siglo Xix en America Latina

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La Falta de Brazos: Land and Labor in the Coffee Economies of Nineteenth-Century Latin America Author(s): William Roseberry Reviewed

355 This essay represents a preliminary examination of such contexts, the

zuela Agraria (Caracas:Universidad Central, 1969); W. Roseberry, Coffee and

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

ese. See ibid.,42-43.

36. This summaryhas depended on descriptionsin Stolcke, CoffeePlanters,Workers,

68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

Viking, 1985), 181.

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