Identity and struggle at the margins of the nation-state : the laboring peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean

401 Pages·1998·11.449 MB·English

by  Aviva Chomsky, Aldo Lauria-Santiago

Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank the American Historical Association,
the Conference on Latin American History, the New England His­
torical Association, and the Latin American Studies Association for
providing the opportunity and context for meeting and discussing, both
formally and informally, the works that appear here. Our appreciation
goes also to the Hispanic American Historical Review for permission to
reprint Jeffrey Gould’s essay in this volume. A version of it also appears
in his Duke University Press book To Die in This Way (1998). We would
also like to thank Bates College, College of the Holy Cross (Mass.),
Salem State College (Mass.), and the New School for Social Research
for funding to attend conferences and for technical support for every
aspect of this project.
For ingenious creativity and endless patience in tracking down ref­
erences, we wish to express thanks to Bates reference librarian Laura
Juraska. And for those last few references that could not be found in
any way except by somebody physically present in Harvard’s Widener
Library, we thank Mara Thomas. Our appreciation goes also to Pat
Chalifoux for secretarial assistance at Holy Cross and to Sylvia Hawks
at Bates.
We also would like to give special thanks to the authors and to the
editors at Duke for helping us follow through and complete this project.
We dedicate this book to the peoples of Central America and the
Caribbean, whose struggles are only beginning to bear fruit.
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ALDO LAURIA-SANTIAGO AND AVIVA CHOMSKY
Introduction
Identity and Struggle in the History
of the Hispanic Caribbean and Central
,
America 1850-1950
This volume brings together new research on the social history of Cen­
tral America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean in the crucial period
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—a period that
saw the consolidation of export economies and national states, both of
which, in most cases, have left enduring legacies for our times. Tradi­
tional histories of this period have been written from the top down, and,
from the international perspective, from the outside in. The contribu­
tions to this volume take the opposite approach. Drawing on recent
trends in social and cultural history, the authors see the popular classes
as important actors in their national histories and seek to uncover as­
pects of these histories that have heretofore remained submerged and
silent.
The contributors to this volume define “laboring peoples” very
broadly and integrate their histories into national and international
contexts. Laboring peoples in Central America and the Caribbean were
usually more rural than urban, and few fit the pattern of a classic pro­
letariat. Out of this ethnically and socially diverse population of former
slaves, peasants with varying relations to the land, and seasonal and per­
manent migrants, elites attempted to recruit or coerce a workforce for
agro-export industries.
The volume’s chapters examine multiple forms of worker and peasant
culture, identity, consciousness, and resistance. Workers’ and peasants’
individual and collective struggles were centered on questions relating
to community, ethnicity, land, and dignity as well as on work-related
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2 ALDO LAURIA -SANTIAGO AND AVIVA CHOMSKY
or class-based issues. Thus these essays seek to incorporate analysis
of ethnicity and gender, of ideological and cultural formation, and of
popular strategies of everyday resistance and accommodation. They use
discourse and cultural analysis to seek a culturally sophisticated and
nonreductionist class analysis. The initial assumption that underlies the
contributions presented in this volume is that there are no a priori
scripts in the formation of the popular sectors and the course of their
struggles. Instead, the authors have painstakingly attempted to uncover
the multiplicity of forces that have shaped working people’s lives.
The perspectives taken here also lead inevitably to new interpreta­
tions of elite political projects. Elite-centered histories have tended to
flatten complex and multilayered nonelite experiences. Elite ideologies
and histories in all of these countries have served to promote distorted
visions and versions of the nation that erase the experiences of popu­
lar sectors and justify their subordination. Contestation from below has
been a constant concomitant to the construction of elite dominance;
the character of the elites, and of the histories they have written, is very
much a product of their attempts to assert their position against those
who have challenged it.
Beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, national elites strug­
gled to channel and contain social and political movements in order to
promote the kind of order and progress they and foreign investors de­
pended upon and also to construct memories, histories, and images of
nations that were functional to their political and economic projects and
their dreams of national power and stability. At the same time, foreign
political and economic control and their own internal weaknesses and
contradictions led them to seek, at least rhetorically, national unity and
independence and to make strategic concessions to popular classes in
an attempt to form nationalist or populist alliances. This kind of open­
ing both influenced the ways popular struggles came to be defined and
created situations in which popular forces could effectively make their
voices heard in the national political arena.
The republics of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean islands
share many historical characteristics. All of these countries formed part
of the Spanish colonial system for three centuries or more. Although
the countries spun out of the Spanish colonial orbit at different times
and in different contexts, Spanish colonialism established important
elements of coherence that helped lay the foundations for the chal­
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INTRODUCTION 3
lenges of nation-state construction after independence. Furthermore,
Central America and the Spanish Caribbean have shared, since the late
nineteenth century, the strong political, social, and economic influence
of the United States and the development of agro-export economies.
Either through the direct creation of classic enclave economies (min­
ing, sugar, timber, bananas, and so on); the development of export
infrastructures; or the less visible participation in the production and
marketing of other products, such as coffee, cattle, or food, foreign—
especially U.S., German, and English—entrepreneurs helped connect
the region firmly to the North Atlantic economy.
These factors profoundly influenced all the nations discussed in this
book. However, the dilemmas of nation-state formation and the experi­
ences of different regions show that neither the narrative of national
political history nor the complex formation of diverse social sectors
were driven single-handedly by the logic of the plantation and export-
agriculture complexes. Incorporating the history of working peoples
into the narratives of states and nation formation can illuminate the
ways in which local actors and experiences differed, as well as the struc­
tural similarities among the cases.
The study of Central America since around 1980 has been influenced
by key questions originating in the political and social conflicts of recent
years. Among these are the tension political leaders face between pre­
serving their own status, attracting and accommodating foreign capital,
maintaining legitimacy in the eyes of their own populations, and con­
taining challenges from below. Why were the revolutionary movements
of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua so strong? Why were some
victorious and others not? Why were the states they faced so authori­
tarian and exclusive? Why did Costa Rica and Honduras constitute
forms of exceptionalism within the larger Central American experi­
ence? From the Caribbean similar questions continue to be posed about
the parallels and divergences among the islands once settled by Spain
and which have followed disparate forms of development in the twen­
tieth century.
These questions have received much attention, and they still inform
the research of most historians and other scholars who work on the re­
gion. But they have often led to an impasse: they too frequently have
been posed in terms of national, homogeneous, state-oriented histo­
ries that tend to obscure multiple, contradictory sources of tension and
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4 ALDO LAURIA -SANTIAGO AND AVIVA CHOMSKY
conflict—including those that had limited expression at the national
or state levels. Under the influence of “new” or expansive versions of
social history, the authors in this volume attempt to uncover the mul­
tiple actors in much of the history of Central America and the Carib­
bean, confronting the larger and often impersonal narratives of states
and nations and the study of elite political projects. In doing so, they
attempt to transcend the dichotomies that have too often separated the
newer social and cultural historical approaches from political and eco­
nomic histories and to show the ways each can illuminate the other.
The study of popular sectors in Central America has only a brief his­
tory. Although a few early accounts of the history of Central America
attributed an independent role to popular sectors, most histories of
the isthmus kept discussions of popular sectors subordinate to the ex­
amination of the large-scale transitions in the formation of the re­
gion’s nation-states.1 Beginning in the 1960s, under the impact of re­
formist, popular, and revolutionary movements and of the various calls
for agrarian reform, there emerged a new but relatively small genera­
tion of studies emphasizing the history of urban and enclave workers,
union history, and the role of workers in conjunctural crises, especially
national political transitions. These studies tended to be urban rather
than rural, and they focused especially on the challenges and obstacles
facing the organization of a working-class alternative to crisis-ridden
oligarchic regimes.2 The first histories of rural Central America also
appeared in the 1960s, and these were largely agricultural histories and
general descriptions of social structure.3 After the revolutionary up­
surges that began in the late 1970s many writers began to examine
the origins of social-revolutionary movements. As peasants and indige­
nous peoples participated in the upheavals of the period, scholars began
to examine more deeply the rural origins of political protest, as well
as giving more consideration to questions of ethnicity and racial dif­
ference. Studies that explored the comparative origins of dictatorship,
democracy, and revolution in the various Central American republics
tended to favor macroquestions of class structure and political process
but also opened an arena for discussions of class and ethnic formation
that eventually contributed to closer accounts of local history. As a re­
sult important studies published during the mid-1980s began the careful
investigation of processes of agrarian class formation and ethnic rela­
tions, with the experiences of working peoples as a central focus.4 As a
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INTRODUCTION 5
result of these trends, the social history of Central America became one
of the principal strands in the historical literature, but in-depth studies
of local cases have remained scarce.5
In many respects, Costa Rican historiography has led the way in the
social history of popular sectors, developing the richest literature of
empirical case studies.6 Costa Rica also has the most developed labor
historiography.7 It has also led the way in the study of rural social struc­
tures and the formation of rural economies, the peasantry, and small
farmers.8 More recently, historians of Costa Rica have extended their
study to popular resistance, popular culture, and the history of indige­
nous and Afro Caribbean populations.9
The literature on other Central American countries has lagged be­
hind, partially because of the effects of war and repression, but mostly
due to the long-term effects of having weak civil societies ruled by
authoritarian states. Nicaragua’s historiography has recently expanded
as well, with a new generation of scholars that have gone beyond the
search for the origins of popular support for the Sandinista revolution.10
In this respect the work of Jeffrey Gould has been pathbreaking and
opened the door for a transition toward the microlevel study of national
class- and ethnic-based processes.
The study of laboring people in Guatemala has benefited from the
many ethnographic studies carried out by anthropologists since the early
twentieth century.11 More recent studies by historians extend and draw
on this tradition of community-based studies, adding historical depth
and the use of archival materials,12 most often in the study of ethnic
relations and the formation and history of Guatemala’s Maya.13 Guate­
malan works also benefit from a more solid grounding in the colonial
period beginning with such classics as Severo Martinez’s La patria del
criollo and continuing with the studies by Carmack and Lovell.14
Without a doubt, Honduras and El Salvador are the countries with
the least-developed national historiographies. Studies of the popular
sectors and their relation to the larger themes of national history are
especially scarce. For Honduras a few studies have focused on the his­
tory of enclave workers, especially the 1954 banana workers’ strike.15
El Salvador has had a few more studies of labor history and agrarian
structures.16 Still, only recently has the country’s peasantry received sig­
nificant and carefully documented attention, and the histories of urban
workers and other working people remain unexamined.17
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6 ALDO LAURIA-SANTIAGO AND AVIVA CHOMSKY
Of the three Hispanic Caribbean countries, Puerto Rico has the most
developed social history of popular sectors. Classic studies examined
slavery and the impact of Spanish colonial policies upon the laboring
classes.18 During the late 1970s and early 1980s a new historiography
strongly influenced by Marxist debates about the development of capi­
talism and its impact on class formation began to examine the origins of
Puerto Rico’s social classes.19 During this period earlier studies, espe­
cially the comprehensive ethnohistorical study of the 1950s, The People of
Puerto Rico, were rediscovered and their insights into regional class dy­
namics extended and linked to Puerto Rico’s complex questions about
nationhood.20 An issue that framed many examinations of the history
of Puerto Rico’s social classes was the successes and failures of Puerto
Rico’s nationalist and socialist movements.21 From the mid-1980s on,
however, historians began to include the examination of women’s his­
tory, while no longer subordinating the study of popular sectors to the
large questions of political status and colonialism.22 An extensive litera­
ture on the island’s plantations and haciendas, the labor movement, and
the formation of the peasantry has enhanced the study of the popular
sectors and also contributed to the creation of a more critical, histori­
cally informed sense of national identity.23
The most salient studies in Cuban history written in the 1970s and
1980s focused on the transition from slave labor to free labor in Cuba’s
plantation economy and were led by the research of Manuel Moreno
Fraginals into Cuba’s plantation sector and Rebecca Scott’s work on
the abolition of slavery and its impact24 Since then, studies have ad­
dressed issues of racial and ethnic formation and identity, immigration,
and social banditry, as well as the women’s and labor movements 25 Jorge
Ibarra has begun a process of revision and reconsideration of the classic
themes of Cuban historiography, including the island’s social structure.26
If the historiography of Cuba’s popular sectors is relatively unde­
veloped, that of the Dominican Republic is virtually unexplored. Few
in-depth studies were published prior to the 1970s, and works since
then have tended to focus on large-scale issues of capitalism, crop his­
tory, and national development. Dominican historiography, like that of
El Salvador and other republics in the region, has been limited by the
cultural and educational impact of authoritarian regimes. The country’s
poverty has also contributed to the scarcity of historical studies. Most
literature is recent and strongly influenced by political debates and ques­
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INTRODUCTION 7
tions grounded in Marxist theory.27 As with Nicaragua, popular sectors
have received some attention when scholars examine the impact of and
resistance to U.S. occupation 28 In recent years regional agrarian history,
including peasant politics, has come under study.29 The contribution
of local history to emigration patterns has gained interest, especially
among sociologists and anthropologists.30 Since the late 1980s the for­
mation of the Dominican Republic’s national racial identity has also
been explored.31
The contributions in this volume carry on the project of uncovering
the histories of popular sectors. They also try to take the endeavor a
step further by incorporating the study of cultures and identities and by
using this added dimension to show how history written from above is
inevitably a distorted history: the failure to pay attention to the lives,
beliefs, and actions of peasants and workers has led to assumptions
about national and international developments that are at best partial
and at worst erroneous. The stories the authors in this volume tell not
only add to but also transform and revise previous conceptions of the
region’s national histories.
Cindy Forster’s chapter argues that despite numerous accounts of
Guatemala’s 1944 to 1954 revolution, the history of the revolution from
below has been virtually suppressed, although, as she argues, “ ‘the revo­
lution from above’ only set down roots when jealously defended, or
‘tended,’ by the poor.” Standard accounts of the revolution have tended
to focus on relations between urban revolutionary leaders, the agrarian
elite, the United Fruit Company (ufc), and the United States, but
Forster shows that the revolution also opened a space for campesinos
and plantation workers to become critical actors on the national and
even international stage and that their actions were a key factor in the
direction the revolution took and in the eventual U.S. decision to over­
throw it.
She shows that consciousness and ethnic identity played a major role
in shaping the ways ordinary people understood and acted in the revolu­
tion. She does so by contrasting the experience of the revolution and the
grassroots movements for social justice that developed in conjunction
with it in two very different regions of Guatemala: the Pacific highlands
coffee zone of San Marcos, with its Indian migrant labor force, and
the Pacific coast banana zone, dominated by the ufc and populated by
migrant Spanish-speaking ladino workers. Despite distinct social com-
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8 ALDO LAURIA-SANTIAGO AND AVIVA CHOMSKY
plexes in the two regions, campesinos shared a conception of social jus­
tice that Forster summarizes as a higher standard of living and dignity
for the rural poor and which sharply diverged from the goals enunciated
and pursued by revolutionary leaders.
Dario Euraque and Barry Carr also examine particular groups of
enclave workers and their importance in national histories. Euraque
focuses on the Honduran north coast banana enclave, which was the
country’s key economic sector during the early twentieth century but
which has been viewed as peripheral to the country’s social and politi­
cal history. As in the Nicaraguan case examined by Jeffrey Gould, the
concept of an ethnically homogeneous race emerged in Honduran elite
thought, and in official documents, in the early twentieth century. In
Honduras, this myth was created in direct contradiction with the exis­
tence of black populations on the Atlantic coast, rather than in the
context of the social struggles in the highlands that took place in Nica­
ragua. As in Nicaragua, though, the myth was part of an attempt to
erase the realities undergone by the workers and peasants marginalized
by, or who produced for, the export sector. Euraque looks at the struc­
turing of Honduran censuses (which after 1910 eliminated black and
mulato as possible categories for Hondurans), anti-immigrant legisla­
tion, and intellectuals’ discussions of the race issue to show how the
myth took form.
Barry Carr’s chapter challenges the standard view of the social world
of the sugar plantations in early twentieth-century Cuba. Like Forster,
Carr documents actions by nonelites that show the degree to which
they were able to maneuver and pursue their own goals despite the con­
centration of economic and political power against them. By looking at
labor mobility and labor shortages, which pitted employers against each
other in the struggle to secure labor, he challenges the assumption that
the sugar centrales (central factories”—modern mills that can process
sugar grown by numerous small colonos, or tenants) and the world they
created could be managed as fiefdoms. The importance of paternalism
and the concession of subsistence plots are evidence that the supposed
hegemony of the sugar plantation was actually more of a complex nego­
tiation between the companies and their workers.
In her essay Eileen Findlay retraces the history of counterhegemonic
working-class and feminist polemics and struggles that relate to the
question of sexual practices and mores in early twentieth-century Puerto
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INTRODUCTION 9
Rico. By closely reconstructing the debates, discussions, and conflicts as
they were reflected in the feminist, women's, socialist, and labor presses,
Findlay reconstitutes an essential aspect of the autonomous world of
alternative ideologies and practices that peppered the history of early
twentieth-century working-class Puerto Rican women and men. Tra­
ditional and revisionist labor historiography have shared an emphasis
on the political activities and positions of the labor movement and
the working-class Left or on narrow party-based conceptions of class
struggle. More recently, a new generation of feminist historians have
begun to trace the specific perspectives and struggles of women within
and across social classes.32 Findlay's research aptly applies this fresh ap­
proach to the social history of gender relations and sexuality within the
context of Puerto Rico during the 1910s and 1920s.
Also discussing the suppression of marginalized identities and his­
tory, Jeffrey Gould's chapter shows how the hegemony of what he calls
“the myth of Nicaragua mestiza"—the belief that indigenous commu­
nities in Nicaragua had ceased to exist—developed from the struggle
between indigenous communities and mestizo elites in the late nine­
teenth and early twentieth centuries. At the same time, he suggests
that the commonsense notion that Nicaragua is an ethnically homoge­
neous society, which has also dominated Nicaraguan historiography, is
in fact a product of the ultimate mestizo victory over Nicaragua's Indi­
ans. Yet this outcome was not a foregone conclusion, and the period he
examines was one of intense struggle that both shaped and was shaped
by the sense of identity of indigenous communities. The forms that re­
sistance and identities took varied and had far-reaching implications.
In some cases ethnic identities atomized, whereas in others they were
transformed into a class perspective that formed part of a new culture of
resistance. Gould also traces support for the Sandinistas by looking at
the history of various peasant communities and how they have under­
stood and remembered their experiences over many decades.
Coffee production in Central America has typically been portrayed
as an activity dominated by oligarchies. New research, however, has
begun to emphasize the participation of other social sectors in the pro­
duction and marketing of this fundamental crop. Julie Charlip's essay
examines important aspects of the little-studied history of small pro­
ducers of coffee in southwestern Nicaragua. She finds that independent
producers of varying amounts of coffee engaged in a complex set of
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