The Cargo of the Montserrat: Gilbertese Labor in Guatemalan Coffee, 1890-1908

Abstract

Upon the plantations themselves the laborers are not so badly treated, for there they are the property of their owners, and men treat their own property well, especially when it is of considerable value. But they are brought from a thoroughly healthy climate, where disease is almost unknown, to a feverstricken region. Within twelve months their numbers will probably be reduced to one-third, and at the expiration of the three years a woefully diminished number will return to their lovely homes in the Western Pacific.In recent years much attention has focused on the labor migration of Pacific Islanders, and particularly Melanesians, during the second half of the nineteenth century for work on the export plantations of Fiji, Samoa, New Guinea, and Queensland. A smaller number, but a quantity nevertheless significant for the populations from which they came, went to labor in Latin America. In 1862-63, for example, vessels from Peru kidnapped perhaps 3,600 persons from the smaller islands of the eastern Pacific and ventured as far west as the Gilbert Islands, where they ensnared three hundred or more unsuspecting individuals. A larger migration from the Gilberts occurred almost thirty years later, when in 1890-92 some twelve hundred individuals signed up to work on the coffee plantations (fincas) of the Pacific piedmont (boca costa) of southern Mexico and Guatemala; this constituted almost fifteen percent of the Gilbertese who migrated for offisland labor after the middle of the century. Less than 800 of the 1890s cohort actually arrived, and perhaps a quarter to a third of these died in the first year, so that their impact on an industry which annually mobilized tens of thousands of local Indians was limited. Nevertheless, for the Guatemalan coffee elites the experience confirmed what they had long suspected, that there would be no solution to their labor problems outside of the republic itself. For the Gilbertese this was by far the largest instance of labor recruitment of the decade, a period of economic hardship and political changes in the archipelago.