Les femmes paysannes et la crise agraire en Amérique latine

Abstract

The great agrarian transformation in favor of capitalist agriculture that has occurred over the past few decades in the dependent countries of Latin America has modified the traditional production of foodstuffs, the mode of work, and the social reproduction of peasant women belonging to the social groups with the lowest levels of income. Policies of centralized industrialization which have excluded agricultural manpower have affected Latin American women, accounting for their greater tendency to migrate to cities. Migrant peasant women participate in 3 principal characteristics of the dependent development of Latin America: the rural exodus, the burgeoning of the tertiary sector, and marginality. The consequences of unequal capitalist agrarian development in the formation of a female rural proletariat have not been well studies, resulting in a tendency to disregard the heterogeneity of situations in which peasant women find themselves and to confuse 3 aspects of their condition as members of rural families, as workers, and as women. As family members, peasant women find family income declining, leading to increases in their unpaid labor time and declining standards of nutrition and health. The agrarian economies of Latin America and the Caribbean show a certain homogeneity in the sexual division of labor. Their historical development after their insertion as colonial regions in the world economy produced 3 well-defined forms of agricultural economy: haciendas, plantations, and peasant communities, each with its own forms of family and kinship relationships which reflected adjustments between sexual division of labor and production or manpower needs. Concerning the participation of women, there are curerntly 3 specific types of agricultural production characteristic of Latin America and the Caribbean: peasant family units usually belonging to communities in which women primarily perform the tasks of "reproduction", rural family units which rely on the external labor market for a large part of their consumption, and family units or independent women who rely entirely on the labor market for survival. Recent studies have shown that the subordination of women antedates capitalism, even in situations such as indigenous communities where women have more favorable positions than in fully capitalist societies. In all cases, women are responsible for the unpaid work, but their participation in production activities depends on the patterns of manpower recruitment and the social position of the household. Women replace men when shortages of male workers occur, but men never replace women when shortages of female workers occur. Census figures demonstrate that there is no linear and homogeneous process of proletarianization of displaced peasant women. The most usual forms are working as agricultural laborers, seasonsl or temporaty migration for agricultural work, irregular or temporary salaried work, or petty commerce.