Labor Strikes and Reciprocity on Chuquisaca Haciendas

Abstract

IN past few years historians have begun to question image of docile and compliant hacienda peon over whom landowner had near absolute control. As study of Latin American hacienda has advanced, it has become clear that there often was an active give-and-take, in which landowner did not always have upper hand. This was especially evident during lateV nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a boom in exports and consolidation of national economies profoundly changed Latin American rural society. Throughout region, landowners attempted to rationalize production and redefine relations with their workers. Laborers on estates often resisted these attempts at agricultural modernization by insisting on traditional rights that were threatened by landowners' reforms.' These patterns of resistance to market forces and rationalizing of production have been observed elsewhere in world. Useftil to an analysis of this resistance is Herbert Gutman's work on first-generation industrial workers in nineteenth-century United States. Gutman showed how workers, often migrants from rural areas in United States and Europe, brought conceptions of work and time different from those required of a disciplined industrial work force. These conceptions, which Gutman called the working class subculture, provided basis for often successful resistance to ideas and values that indus-