Public Land Settlement, Privatization, and Peasant Protest in Duaca, Venezuela, 1870-1936

Abstract

in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was largely a frontier crop. Throughout the region, spread to land that had remained sparsely populated and economically marginal until the onset of export-led expansion in the nineteenth century.' In Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela, the development of economies depended on migration to frontier regions and the settling of new territory. Nevertheless, as scholars have often noted, the patterns of land tenure that took hold on Latin America's frontiers varied widely, from large plantations with dependent workers in Brazil to independent peasant farms in Costa Rica, and mixtures of both in most other coffee-producing nations. Accounting for the variety of land-and-labor regimes that emerged on these frontiers involves a number of variables, but the role of the state in allocating public lands to private individuals is a central concern. For a good deal of the land transformed into coffee-producing centers was public land. Controlled (however nominally) by the state, it was transferred to private ownership during the hundred years between independence and the Great Depression, the period William Roseberry has referred to as Latin America's coffee century. 2 This essay will examine the transformation of a public land frontier in a single locale within one of Latin America's least-studied coffee-producing nations. During the first three decades following independence, as Vene