Broccoli and Desire: Global Connections and Maya Struggles in Postwar Guatemala (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Broccoli and Desire: Global Connections and Maya Struggles in Postwar Guatemala Linda Quiquivix Broccoli and Desire: Global Connections and Maya Struggles in Postwar Guatemala. Edward F. Fischer and Peter Benson . Stanford University Press, 2006. 212 pp., maps, notes, appendices and index. $19.95 cloth (ISBN 0-8047-5484-5). The trend to industrialize agriculture has placed economists in a struggle to understand the small farm. Why do these farmers, whose labor value far often exceeds the value of their returns, stick to practices that are economically irrational and not altogether beneficial? Fischer and Benson ask that instead of examining these economic decisions as rational (or not), we explore them through the lens of desire; the compelling pull of achieving "something better". It is through these attempts of filling gaps in our understanding of human complexities where the authors succeed in showing the difference ethnography can make. Broccoli and Desire examines those Tecpán's Kaqchikel Maya farmers in post-war Guatemala who have converted parts of their subsistence cropland into export broccoli production bound for the United States. The authors characterize "desire" as a future-oriented process diverting energy away from the violent past and disappointments of the present, and use of the term "post-war" implies a period ripe with promises of brand new opportunities. Thus, the book is halved into desire and its social context. In the first section, "How the Maya Want", the authors juxtapose Maya farmers' desires of getting ahead financially and providing for their families, with American consumers' desires of eating healthy and staying fit. The authors acknowledge that while desire is the force guiding both groups' decision-making, the risks weigh far more heavily on the farmer whose success rests on American consumers' desire for cheap but perfect-looking food. The Maya's production of broccoli, a nontraditional crop, is at first a surprising choice. However, the allure of entering the trade is great since subsistence beans and corn crops have rarely been profitable. Additionally, broccoli allows farmers to participate in a greater world economic system while retaining control over the means of production. This greater sense of autonomy is valued more than working in the maquiladoras sprouting up along the Highlands, migrating to coffee plantations, or remaining unemployed. And while broccoli is a risky endeavor, a little extra cash is indeed realized. But, the rewards are never big enough for the poor farmer to stop desiring "something better". Still, farmers feel that "at least" they and their families are not stealing, doing drugs, or joining a local gang – the region's new discourse of violence. It is here where the authors make excellent illustrations of how hegemonic processes are sustained by limit points which route certain desires toward what is practical and obtainable. Such limit points maintain the status quo by giving farmers a sense of appeasement, detracting them from fighting the system, and attracting them to work within it instead. The second half of the book, "Violence, Victimization, and Resistance" articulates desires via the postwar social experience. The section provides a brief but clear history of Guatemala's violent past and its transition into the new phase wrought with promises to deliver "something better." Opportunities to form farmer co-operatives and to partake in political protests now exist – opportunities that "would have been suicidal in the not-so-distant past" (p. 100). While such opportunities are few and create only very small ripples of change, this new sense of empowerment not found a generation ago contextualizes the region's particular limit points. The authors warn that we not interpret [End Page 197] these positionings as purely structural, reducing the Maya to agency-less victims robbed of any power. To do that would not only add "symbolic insult to violent injury" (p. 156), but would steer us deeper into the "us" versus "them" binary. Broccoli and Desire also stops short of steering us into that other fictitious binary: that globalization is either "good" or "bad." We learn that the Tecpánecos' are neither anti-capitalist nor anti-free trade. Instead of making a judgment call on how things should be, the authors focus throughout on asking why things are. Readers of...