“They Call Us Thieves and Steal Our Wage”: Toward a Reinterpretation of the Salvadoran Rural Mobilization, 1929–1931

Abstract

The basic facts of the January 1932 uprising in El Salvador are well known and largely undisputed. Thousands of workers and peasants in central and western El Salvador rose up on the night of January 22 and occupied various towns in the departments of Sonsonate and Ahuachapán.1 The Salvadoran Communist Party (PCS) had planned the insurrection two weeks earlier, but its key supporters in the army and many of its leaders were already either dead or in jail when the revolt began. The response of regional elites and the central government was swift and brutal. The army reoccupied all of the towns within a few days, and throughout the next month government forces and civilian militias killed thousands of peasants and workers, especially in the heavily indigenous areas of the west.2During the past 70 years, four themes have dominated interpretations of the movement and the massacre. The first focuses on the structural causes of the revolt. In 1927, following six years of dramatic expansion, coffee prices and export volumes began to decline. This slump accelerated over the next few years, a devastating blow to an economy dependent on coffee exports. The western part of the country, which was hardest hit, became the principal site of the rebellion.3 The second focuses on the major political crisis that began when President Romero Bosque (1927–31) broke with official continuismo and permitted relatively free and democratic local and presidential elections. As a result of this political opening, reformist candidate Arturo Araujo was elected and held office from March until December 1931, presiding over the deepening economic crisis and increasing social and political unrest in the countryside. Elites and their military allies moved to depose him, principally due to his inability to stem the growing leftist-dominated movement in the countryside but also because of the administrative chaos that plagued his government.4 The third line of analysis focuses on the role of the PCS.5 Within the Left, many have questioned the PCS’s political line, and more recently, scholars have questioned the degree of PCS influence over the movement.6 The fourth theme, concerning the ethnic content of the revolt, relates to the third in that some scholars stress the remoteness of the PCS from the concerns and culture of the indigenous supporters who participated in the movement.7 The western region boasted the greatest concentration of indigenous population and communities, and long-standing conflicts over land and local political control contributed to their mobilization.8 This history of ethnic tension also shaped the undeniably racist dimension of the repression.9 Scholars have argued that the indigenous leadership of cofradías played a critical role, but did so with all the tensions, ambiguity, and social distance implied by such an alliance with the movement’s urban, ladino leadership.The exploration of these themes has helped to elucidate the causes of the insurrection and its repression. Notwithstanding the great value of the existing literature, however, we feel it has privileged certain lines of inquiry and, with notable exceptions, failed to exhaust research possibilities. In particular, the literature has failed to offer adequate insight into the experiences, motivations, and origins of campesinos’ resistance and mobilization.William Roseberry’s understanding of hegemony is useful in trying to grasp the ideological and cultural relations between elite and subaltern groups. He argues, “What hegemony constructs then, is not a shared ideology but a common material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and acting upon social orders characterized by domination.”10 This article will attempt to explain why the Salvadoran elite, and its religious and political allies, had such an extraordinarily difficult time establishing such a discursive frame-work. We probe, in the words of Sidney Mintz, the moment when “populations come to the recognition that their felt oppression is not merely a matter of poor times, but of evil times—when, in short, they question the legitimacy of an existing allocation of power, rather than the terms of that allocation.”11Combining oral and archival research allows us to approximate the areas of consciousness and ethnic relations during the period of mobilization, themes that have usually been studied from a remote vantage point. We link our argument about weak elite hegemony—that is, a poorly developed framework of meaningful communication with subaltern groups—to four important considerations that contributed to the success of rural mobilization. First, we argue that the structural transformations of the 1920s created two relatively new social groups: colonos (resident laborers) and semiproletarianized villagers, both of which played key roles in the mobilization. These new “precipitates of capitalism” had historical roots in the zone, but the capitalistic nature of rural enterprises did not generate the sort of paternalistic ties between landowners and laborers that existed elsewhere in Latin America.12Second, emerging political and social ideologies favored the particular alliances and rifts that characterized the mobilization. The agrarian elite, and the small oligarchy of merchants and financiers that backed it, was on the defensive throughout the latter part of the 1920s. This was due, in part, to the emergence of a middle-class politics of reform. Middle-class reformism was coupled with a discourse of mestizaje, a nationalist ideology of race mixture to be nurtured through cultural processes of de-Indianization. Whereas the discourse of mestizaje formed a cornerstone of nationalism in Mexico and Nicaragua, in El Salvador the same discourse and practices had contradictory effects that, in different ways, fomented the autonomous mobilization of indigenous people. Although ethnic relations did play an important role in the mobilization, they did so in complex and contradictory ways. Any attempt to view the mobilization and revolt as ethnic conflict tout court misses far more than it captures. Although ethnicity as an analytical tool is essential to understanding the movement, ethnic ideologies were not the sole, or even principal, motivation of most actors. Third, we argue that rural traditions of patriarchy and everyday violence also contributed to the mobilization. In other times and places, patriarchy has formed a vital component of elite or nationalist hegemony. In western El Salvador, however, we find that indigenous patriarchy confronted the problem of growing ladino landowner contact with, and at times coercion against, indigenous women. Moreover, violence was a hard fact of campesino life that predisposed rural residents toward violent responses to threats or affronts. Finally, we should not exaggerate the distance between the worlds of the Communist militants and indigenous peasants. Indigenous and ladino rural poor decisively influenced the strategy, tactics, and organizational forms of the radical movement that rocked the foundations of Salvadoran society before being crushed in a nightmare of bloodshed.13Most contemporary descriptions of El Salvador’s countryside around 1920 emphasize the symbiotic coexistence of smallholding peasants with larger commercial farms. While noting that El Salvador was not a land of latifundias, travelers mentioned the commercial connections between smallholders and larger landowners, who were united by the “energy and driving force that are nationally characteristic.”14 One commented, “Most of the work . . . is done by its independent farmers in their time off,”15 and “the much more equitable division of property results in there being few people without their own land,” producing the “many individual properties” of El Salvador’s “coffee country.”16 These smallholders and their families provided “[t]he bulk of the labor of the picking season,” and they would “finish their own picking first, and then go, with their wives and children, to work on one of the big fincas near at hand. . . . There they join the volunteers who have come out from the town, and also, another class like themselves, small farmers who raise other crops than coffee.”17 Another noted the “plot after plot of coffee ground as large as village squares, each owned and worked by some peasant proprietor” and argued that the peasants and workers “had never suffered from the rapacity of large land-holders.”18 And another author, crystallizing this perspective, explained, “The country is one big farm, with all its people at work, and no land wasted. Practically every man owns a little piece of property, or else has a good home upon one of the many large plantations. Even the poorest have something to lose in case of a revolution, and hence all are peacefully inclined.”19Observers also viewed Indians as a near-privileged caste of smallholders. A reformist governor of Sonsonate wrote, “[T]he economy of the Izalcos contains a surprise for him who looks into its organization a bit . . . large properties, the criollo latifundio, is almost unknown [in this region],” which is instead characterized by “an infinity of small snippets,” each small farm having “pasturage, fruit, grains, wood” and marketing products in Sonsonate City. Similarly, in Nahuizalco, “every home is like a little factory and each wife an excellent manufacturer,” producing “sleeping mats, stools, and jugs, etc.”20These descriptions may not have been entirely inaccurate for the early 1920s; however, they would look absurd by the end of the 1920s for most rural Salvadorans. They failed to grasp, however, the historical transformations that were already underway in the countryside, particularly in the west, where the dramatic growth of the coffee industry increased friction between large commercial producers and the rural poor. They also failed to envision the layered nature of the agrarian landscape of the region. Colonialera haciendas that had stepped up production during the early twentieth century made up one layer. Even after some subdivision, these formidable and diversified properties often combined coffee, sugar, and grain production with cattle herding and logging. A significant smallholder and peasant sector, which had its origins in the process of privatization of community and municipal lands in the late nineteenth century, formed the second layer. Finally, the third layer encompassed rich peasants and entrepreneur-settlers who carved mediumsized commercial farms from municipal lands or previously uncultivated state-owned land. By the early 1900s, these three layers so blanketed the western countryside that no agrarian frontier remained.21Coffee was the engine that transformed western El Salvador during the 1910s and 1920s. After a period of slow expansion between the 1880s and 1910s, coffee acreage increased 60 percent between 1916 and 1933, while production, prices, and export volume increased at still faster rates. The long-standing and vigorous capitalist sector in the department of Santa Ana nearly tripled its production of coffee, while La Libertad, a department that entered into coffee production in the early twentieth century, doubled its production. Most coffee farms were not huge latifundia; in 1920, of the 3,400 commercial coffee farms, the 350 largest possessed between 75 and 300 manzanas (125–500 acres) and accounted for 45 percent of national production.22 The greatest expansion in production came from midsized commercial producers with 10–50 manzanas of coffee, who produced about one-third of the country’s crop. These midlevel producers consolidated smaller farms and increased productivity, resulting in an increased concentration of land ownership.Population growth also contributed to land concentration and landlessness. Between the 1880s and 1930 the country’s population nearly doubled, contributing significantly—in the absence of any significant urbanization or industrialization—to a growing layer of landless peasants during the 1920s.23 Furthermore, inheritance partitioning of privatized communal plots increased the number of smallholders dependent on wage labor, and many gradually fell into the ranks of tenants and rural wage laborers. Indeed, by 1930 about half of the adult male population of rural western El Salvador did not own sufficient land and had to work as semiproletarians or colonos.24 Rapidly increasing land values, caused by higher coffee prices and skyrocketing profits, fueled this process of land concentration. The U.S. Foreign Agricultural Service estimated that land values ranged from one hundred dollars per manzana in remote districts to five hundred dollars in better locations. Prices were higher still for plots adjacent to large plantations, with some paying up to $2,500 for small tracts.25In the west, intense land use, high land values, and the lack of an agricultural frontier encouraged many larger landowners and investors to pressure smallholders into selling or mortgaging their small plots. Mario Zapata, one of the student leaders executed after the 1932 revolt, recounted a dialogue with a smallholder sometime during 1930 that illustrates this process. A wealthy landowner was pressuring the smallholder to sell his land and remain on it as a colono. Zapata convinced the smallholder that it was not in his best interest to sell. But when his wife became ill, the peasant had to mortgage his property to the entrepreneur at 5 percent interest per month. A few months later, he was unable to repay the loan, and the property was foreclosed. “[T]he man who had been born free and who remained so until a few months ago, was reduced to the status of colono: he no longer could own pigs or oxen, nor keep his cart or his chickens, because the new owner planted coffee trees right up to the patio of his homestead.”26 Zapata’s story was repeated throughout the region, as the ranks of colonos swelled.A 1938 coffee census underscores the significance of colonos as a social group (allowing for some changes between 1932 and 1938): about 18 percent of the entire rural population of western El Salvador lived on commercial coffee farms as either resident workers or administrators—a total of about 55,000 people living on about 3,000 farms, with the largest estates having a few hundred colonos each.27 “Colonato” generally involved the incorporation of peasants into a farm or estate in exchange for access to land and/or wages. But while in eastern El Salvador the institution usually involved the payment of a fixed rent in kind, in the west landlords used it to secure low-wage or free labor, rather than rent income or crops.28 In 1929 a U.S. Agricultural Service officer reportedWhen falling coffee prices in 1927 compelled owners to cut back on cash expenditures, colonos took on much of the work formerly carried out by wage laborers, but without any of the customary benefits in terms of steady wages.30 Landowners also reacted to the market crisis by increasing fees: by 1931 many farmers, including the wealthiest, were charging their workers and colonos for access to water.31 A 1930 labor union internal document repeated a report from the local press: “[W]hoever has spent even one day in one of these so-called great haciendas will have noticed how the ‘patrons’ treat their colonos: for a manzana of land that they rent to cultivate maize, they have to pay 15 or 20 [colones] or else two fanegas of corn, which leaves the poor colono obligated to work for the hacienda for six or eight weeks earning a miserable wage (one, two, or three reales daily; that is, 12, 25, 35, or 36 cents a day). The wretched colono only works for the patron. . . . There are patrones that, for whatever motive, even deny the worker, in part or in whole, his miserable wage.”32Harsh contractual and labor conditions and the lack of paternalistic relations reinforced the colonos’ sense that the elite’s ownership of land was illegitimate, or in Mintz’s phrase, that “evil times” reigned on the plantation. This sentiment was even more intense on midsized farms that had emerged from once indigenous-controlled lands. The message of land reform, first raised by supporters of Arturo Araujo during his 1930 presidential campaign, strongly appealed to colonos. Unlike their counterparts in most Latin American countries, colonos—especially after the Araujo government failed to implement any meaningful land reform—became actively involved in the revolutionary movement and were perhaps its most important protagonists, as suggested in the testimony of the daughter of colonos: “Both my parents were very active in the union, always going to meetings at night. They really believed that we were all going to get land and they would break up (hacienda) San Isidro.”33Semiproletarianized indigenous smallholders, dependent on wage labor to supplement their inadequate landholdings, formed the other key social group that emerged in western El Salvador during the1920s. Smallholders thus joined the ranks of seasonal laborers, who usually outnumbered permanent workers on the coffee plantations by at least three to one. During the boom years of the 1920s, the increased availability of wage labor and small increases in wages partially compensated for the increased landlessness. However, starting in 1928 the demand for wage labor declined, and wages would plummet dramatically during 1931 as landowners became intent on keeping cash costs down.34 In August 1931, the U.S. consul noted the effect of this steep decline in wages: “One large agriculturist is said to have reduced wages from the rate of 6 or 7 colones a week prevailing a year ago to 1.25. . . . It is evident that the purchasing power of the laboring classes, especially in the rural districts, has been distinctly curtailed. The ragged appearance of the workers is notable.”35The world of these semiproletarians took shape in cantones such as Cuyagualo and Cuntan on the outskirts of densely populated Izalco and in the rural cantones of Nahuizalco. Ladino encroachment on privatized communal lands pushed most indigenous families toward seasonal employment. Many villagers worked during the planting, pruning, and harvest seasons on the larger haciendas in eastern Izalco, typically leaving home for two weeks and returning every other Sunday. By 1930, those Sunday trips home were occupied with local union and leftist meetings.36The weak ideological and cultural presence of the elite favored the mobilization of colonos and semiproletarians. Hacendados and finqueros in western El Salvador had a strong sense of identity, power, and wealth, but they remained socially distant from their laborers. The 1920s saw the breakdown of the few paternalistic and clientelistic ties that connected the rural poor to the region’s wealthiest landowners. The massive scale of modern plantations, with tens of thousands of workers mobilized each year to pick coffee and cut sugarcane, did not lend itself to personal contact between landowners and workers.37 Furthermore, the wealthiest owners lived in the departmental capitals and rarely on their properties.Even before the crisis, observers alluded to this potentially dangerous distance between owners and workers. One report stated: “[T]he conditions to which its labor is subjected to (in order to keep down that one phase of production cost) are none too conducive to the nocturnal rest of a conscientious plantation owner.”38 Their low level of hegemony was apparent to the agrarian elite well before the advent of serious rural labor organizing. Consider the statement of one of El Salvador’s best known and most “modern” coffee growers, John Hill, who commented sometime during mid-1927 on the growing revolutionary current among workers: “Bolshevism? Oh yes. . . . It’s drifting in. The work people hold meetings on Sundays and get very excited. . . . Yes, there’ll be trouble one of these days. . . . They say: ‘We dig the holes for the trees! We clean off the weeds! We prune the trees! We pick the coffee! Who earns the coffee then? . . . We do!’ . . . Why, they’ve even picked out parcels that please them most, because they like the climate or think that the trees are in better condition and will produce more. Yes, there’ll be trouble one of these days.”39Planter arrogance and opulence ensured that their miserable wages did not appear to rural laborers to be the work of market forces. Although the high profit margins were not public knowledge, they must have appeared obscene to the workers. On one plantation, annual coffee sales were estimated at nearly half a million dollars, while the wage bill amounted to a mere ten thousand.40 Substandard housing, schooling, and food abounded, and landowners increased rents while charging for water and firewood and raising prices in their stores.41 This dramatic increase in exploitation broke the already weak ties of paternalism that had connected wealthy landowners to their labor force.Reactionary opposition to land reform by the country’s wealthiest land-owners also fueled the organization of a leftist opposition. The U.S. military attaché reported, “Their arguments usually come down to this; ‘If we sell our land to these mozos we will have nobody to pick our coffee for us. The best thing for everybody is to keep things as they are. As a matter of fact we paid our mozos very high wages three years ago. What happened? Did they improve their living conditions? No. They simply stayed drunk two days a week longer than they do now. These mozos are not unhappy and as long as they do not know any better, why go out of our way to change matters.’”42The elite and middling producers’ intransigence on labor and land issues further undermined their ability to establish elementary forms of hegemony. There were, of course, rural sectors in western Salvador who were deferential to the elite and their claims. In particular, in towns and villages in which Indians were involved in the labor and Left movements, ladino smallholders and workers were much less likely to join. Similarly, in some towns, some small-holders (especially ladinos) survived without falling into the laboring ranks, in part due to their paternalistic ties to more prosperous farmers. Notwithstanding, our research has also led to a paradoxical finding: despite the significant variations in municipal histories of land and labor and their differentiated and heterogeneous class relations, an important convergence of campesino experiences took place during the late 1920s, lending the popular movement an element of strength despite the continued economic power of the agrarian elite.The memory and myth of land availability during the nineteenth century and the state-sanctioned practice of guaranteeing communities sufficient land for their needs persisted among the rural poor and contributed to their view of large-scale private landownership as illegitimate.43 These memories merged with a regional tradition of collective struggle in defense of communal rights, shaping a widespread ideological acceptance of radical agrarian reform and armed struggle. Western El Salvador’s workers and peasants were deeply rooted in the region and were not likely to “vacate” it (as might happen in other plantations zones in times of crisis), but instead stood their ground and voiced their grievances to the state and elites.44Reformist political currents helped to create a more democratic political climate, which curtailed the elite’s ability to resist those demands locally. A move toward local political autonomy pushed municipal politics outside of official networks and channels. By 1927, elites’ ability to use local politics and patronage networks as a system of social control had weakened greatly, contributing to the political opening of this period.45 By 1929, the agrarian elite could rely only on the national state and its repressive institutions to control labor organizing, as evidenced in a letter from one thousand “leading citizens” to President Romero Bosque criticizing his “lack of energy” in quelling strikes and labor organizing.46Growing reformist and anti-imperialist sentiment curtailed the state’s ability to respond to urban and rural working-class mobilizations during the late 1920s. Indeed, during that decade, a significant critique of El Salvador’s political and economic structures emerged from the country’s growing urban middle class.47 These political and ideological trends, combined with growing worker and campesino unrest, forced the elites on the defensive. The reformist critiques of urban artisans, students, and intellectuals were nationalist, unionist (Central Americanist), anti-imperialist, and anticapitalist in tone. Artisans and skilled workers formed a significant part of the urban population of El Salvador and since at least the 1880s had played a critical role in both local and national politics, often articulating demands for social and political reforms.48 Skilled workers and students also played an important role in linking nationalism and anti-imperialism to struggles over wages, rents, electric rates, foreign loans, and railroad fees.49U.S. political, military, and economic intervention in the region contributed significantly to the emergence of these reformist discourses. Even before Sandino’s armed struggle against U.S. forces in Nicaragua, El Salvador had distinguished itself for opposing U.S. intervention in the isthmus.50 The Sandinista resistance galvanized support in El Salvador: peasant and artisan committees raised funds for Sandino and protested U.S. actions; some even joined his forces (most notably Farabundo Martí).51 Anti-imperialist fervor spread beyond the capital; as Reynaldo Galindo Pohl wrote in his memoirs, “In all of Sonsonate, it would have been difficult to find a single person who did not express anti-imperialist ideas.”52 Thousands of Salvadorans from diverse sectors attended anti-imperialist rallies. The connections between anti-imperialism and the emerging Left were clear: in 1929, state repression against an anti-imperialist demonstration in Santa Tecla contributed directly to the formation of a Salvadoran branch of the Socorro Rojo Internacional, a leftist organization that aided victims of political repression.During the 1920s, visible and persistent public critiques of the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth further challenged elite dominance. National newspapers like Patria and the Diario Latino routinely editorialized about the need for reforms in favor of peasants, rural workers, and indigenous people. Similarly, provincial newspapers like the Heraldo de Sonsonate also protested against the economic system. One article, for example, decried how the “exploitative companies form a menacing plague that strangles justice and increases the percentage of the impoverished.” Exposés of rural labor condemned large landowners: “Life on the estates . . . is heavy, due to the monotony of the daily work and the pitiful rations, which have been reduced to two large tortillas and beans mixed with chicken droppings, cooked without salt or onions; they sleep under the coffee trees.”53 Journalists also attacked the concentration of land in the hands of large-scale producers and supported measures in favor of the dwindling number of small-scale coffee producers.54 These critiques of agrarian capitalism coincided with attacks on the foreign-owned railroad monopoly (the International Railways of Central America) and foreign loans.55The “Minimum Vital” (which sought ways to “guarantee the basic necessities of life” for the lower classes) and student movements also formed part of the reformist current. Alberto Masferrer’s Minimum Vital program promoted a harmonious balance between capital and labor and moderate land reform.56 Reformist university students also organized the “Movimiento Renovación” and the National Association of Students (AGEUS), extending their efforts beyond the campus gates to include protests against foreign loans, high rents, trolley fees, electric rates, foreign monopolies, and militarism.57 Out of this reformist climate emerged the Federación Regional de Trabajadores Salvadoreños (FRTS), which became a key part of this current. The economic crisis in the late 1920s pushed artisans into the ranks of wage laborers, creating a new fertile field upon which to sow the seeds of labor organizing. In one demonstration alone, the FRTS mobilized ten thousand people in San Salvador, with speakers from the middle-class Liga Antiimperialista alternating with urban workers. The speakers made broad ideological connections between U.S. intervention in Nicaragua and Mexican president Plutarco Elias Calles’s confrontation with U.S. interests.58 A 1926 FRTS manifesto listed its goals: Puerto Rican and Filipino independence, internationalization of the Panama Canal, and nationalization of the railroads and other public services.59These trends of the 1920s, propelled by the economic crisis, coalesced into massive support for the presidential campaign of reformist Arturo Araujo. The involvement of thousands of peasants who voted en masse for Araujo in the 1931 elections (despite PCS opposition) led to the creation of a relatively autonomous movement among artisan, worker, and peasant supporters. Perhaps the best image of the strength of Araujo’s base was the massive parade of peasants who followed him into the city of Sonsonate as part of the presidential campaign of 1931: “Don Arturo, who was at the head of the parade, mounted a purebred mare, imported from England, and marched at a tight pace, with his hat in his hand, and saluted the crowd that had gathered on the sidewalks, doorways, and balconies. . . . Some three thousand men on horseback followed don Arturo, four abreast, with their hats pulled down tight and their mounts reined in. . . . Behind this impressive parade of riders and horses