Debt Peonage Research Articles

Debt, the Precarious Grammar of Life, and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest

Debt, the Precarious Grammar of Life, and Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest Jodi Kim (bio) Life an’ debt freedom not yet —Mutabaruka, “Life and Debt” What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence. —David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years In the first epigraph above, Jamaican artist Mutabaruka’s pithy lyric captures freedom’s antinomies by questioning freedom’s content and temporality. To live a life excruciatingly tethered to debt is to live a conjunctional “life an’ debt.”1 In Mutabaruka’s formulation, life and debt are one and the same; debt owns your life, and in doing so, it owns your freedom. By taking residence as the content of formal freedom, debt works in this instance to vacate or evict the substantive meaning of freedom and to forestall the event and temporality of freedom as a “not yet.” In this sense, we can speak of debt as a “shifting grammar of life” (Rajan 2006, 14) that perpetually recedes before our horizon into a future tense, a vanishing point through which a “not yet” freedom is perhaps glimpsed but always foreclosed. Haunting this vanishing point is the term that Mutabaruka self-consciously substitutes debt for: death. A life of debt forecloses an intimacy with freedom, which is to say that it forces an intimacy with forms of social and physical death. Debt, in other words, can be a death sentence, and while some might be able to have their sentences commuted and still live a social death, others experience a literal physical death flashing blindingly [End Page 215] forward, a fatal present tense. If, as David Graeber suggests, a debt is “just the perversion of a promise,” a promise “corrupted by both math and violence,” then who can have their debt/death sentences commuted, who can have their debts forgiven altogether, and who must fully repay their debts with interest (Graeber 2011, 391)? Within this economy, who must keep their promises? Mutabaruka, and his Jamaican nation, must do so; they must pay their promissory notes. The reason lies in the “math and violence” to which they have been subjected, a history of colonialism and racial chattel slavery succeeded by more recent forms of neocolonial domination and an international uneven division and proliferation not only of gendered racial labor but also of debt. This continued corruption of the promise by math and violence perpetually keeps Mutabaruka’s longing for freedom, the promise of freedom, in the future tense. His future tense grammar, as at once a specific temporality of freedom as well as a broader system of signification, calls to mind other similar grammars, such as that of Hortense Spillers. Tracing the total objectification of the captive body as flesh within the U.S. context of chattel slavery, she calls, and theorizes the symbolic order instantiated by the African slave trade as, an “American grammar.” One of the distinctive features of this grammar is that it “remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show movement, as the human subject is ‘murdered’ over and over again” (Spillers 2003, 208). This, as Saidiya Hartman writes, is the afterlife of slavery, an afterlife not only symbolic but also crushingly material (Hartman 2008). That is, formal emancipation for the enslaved in the United States represented not a radical rupture but rather a “nonevent.” The whip of chattel slavery was replaced with the “burdened individuality of freedom,” constituted by the tethers of liberalism: a guilty conscience, notions of responsibility modeled on contractual obligation, calculated reciprocity, and most importantly, indebtedness, since “debt played a central role in the creation of the servile, blameworthy, and guilty individual and in the reproduction and transformation of involuntary servitude” (Hartman 1997, 9). The longue durée of the “nonevent” of emancipation from a range of distinct yet related forms of unfreedom throughout the globe—whether racial chattel slavery, colonial subjugation, racial genocide, debt peonage, contract labor, apartheid, or incarceration—has produced and continues to produce increased levels of privation and debt, as well as greater vulnerability to...

Slavery by Another Name by Sam, Pollard, Sheila Curran Bernard, Laurence Fishburne, Jason L. Pollard, Andrew Young, Michael Bacon, and Douglas A. Blackmon

Reviewed by: Slavery by Another Name by Sam, Pollard, Sheila Curran Bernard, Laurence Fishburne, Jason L. Pollard, Andrew Young, Michael Bacon, and Douglas A. Blackmon Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel (bio) Slavery by Another Name, by Pollard, Sam, Sheila Curran Bernard, Laurence Fishburne, Jason L. Pollard, Andrew Young, Michael Bacon, and Douglas A. Blackmon a film review Boston, MA: PBS Distribution, 2012 In 1942, slavery officially ended in the United States, asserts douglas blackmon, whose documentary Slavery by Another Name powerfully demonstrates the disconnect between the official abolition of slavery on paper and the enduring practice on the ground. Based on Blackmon’s book of the same title, this PBS documentary brings to light the long-silenced story of convict leasing and debt peonage in Southern states from the Civil War to World War II, and reveals these structures for what they were: new state-sanctioned forms of slavery. Blackmon does an excellent job of restoring the voices of Southern blacks who experienced this brutal reality, through letters, court records, and archival images, as well as through dramatizations by actors and the personal testimonies of their descendants. The result is a deeply informative presentation of the social and economic forces that kept Southern blacks in bondage. The [End Page 86] contemporary viewer who is currently unaware of this chapter in U.S. history will find him/herself echoing the refrain of the descendants interviewed in the documentary: “We didn’t know, but now we do.” Throughout Slavery by Another Name, the past and the present converge as scenes switch from grainy black and white photographs to reenactments of events in color. Accounts of Southern blacks living through this period mingle with narration provided by Laurence Fishburne, analyses by historians, and emotional testimonies of descendants. This powerful strategy gives voice to the silenced victims of convict leasing and debt peonage and allows these African Americans to tell their own stories of forced labor and the horrors they witnessed and suffered under this system. It also allows us to fill in the gap concerning hundreds of thousands of Southern blacks who disappeared without a trace in coal mines, in lumber camps, and on cotton plantations well after the de jure abolition of slavery. Blackmon’s work demonstrates that as the gains of Reconstruction were eroded by Jim Crow laws, Southern farmers, steel corporations, lumber companies, and coal mines found a new source of cheap, exploitable labor. With the complicity of law enforcement officials who also ultimately turned a profit, as well as state agencies, a disproportionate number of black men were arrested on vague and trumped-up charges and were leased to work in mines and industries for fees. Essentially, free Southern blacks could be picked up at any time for so much as walking along the railroad tracks (a felony at the time), vagrancy (the most common), spitting on the sidewalk, talking loudly, or simply the accusation of wrongdoing—“crimes” that were sufficient to rob thousands of their freedom—and made to disappear within these industries, never to be heard from again. Others fell victim to the system of debt peonage and were kept enslaved on farms in an eternal cycle of debt due to extraordinarily high interest rates. In a period when personal and economic freedom should have been guaranteed by the Thirteenth Amendment, Southern blacks found themselves reinscribed in a system of indentured servitude facing the whip, disease, and other familiar forms of torture and brutality. Slavery by Another Name recreates this atmosphere of fear and uncertainty primarily through the stories of three men: Ezekiel Archie, Green Cottenham, and John Davis. Their different stories represent the eighty-year evolution of convict leasing and debt peonage, an increasingly profitable arrangement for wealthy whites and a dangerous, exploitative system for blacks. Archie and Cottenham ultimately did not make it out of the mines, having been captured at a time when convict leasing was at its peak and law enforcement officials either supported it or turned a blind eye. Davis, on the other hand, regained his freedom due to the crackdown on debt peonage in 1903 with the transition to Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. But this crackdown did not end the practice, and...

The Making of a Market: Credit, Henequen, and Notaries in Yucatán, 1850-1900Los Hacendados de Yucatán, 1785-1847

The Making of a Market: Credit, Henequen, and Notaries in Yucatán, 1850-1900Los Hacendados de Yucatán, 1785-1847

The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, 1840–1930

TO MANY HISTORIANS, SCIENTISTS, AND agricultural experts, the term “Green Revolution” refers to the controversial array of programs and policies that introduced high-yield seeds, intensive irrigation techniques, herbicides, pesticides, mechanization, and petrochemical fertilizers to parts of the developing world during the 1960s and 1970s. Among the most profound consequences of this recent agricultural transformation was a vast increase in the amount of nitrogen available to farmers in Asia and Latin America. Through the application of imported synthetic fertilizers, these cultivators achieved increased yields of staple crops such as corn, rice, and wheat. Numerous scholars have portrayed this twentieth-century intervention in world food production as the first human alteration of the global nitrogen cycle during the modern era.1 Such a depiction is misleading. It obscures an earlier Green Revolution, beginning in the nineteenth century, during which companies and labor contractors transported millions of metric tons of nitrogen fertilizer and more than 100,000 workers across the globe, producing significant shifts in environments and labor conditions throughout the world. A comprehensive understanding of this First Green Revolution fuses two emerging research areas—global environmental history and transnational labor history. An investigation of the relationship between new forms of servitude that emerged in the Age of Abolition and the concurrent development of a worldwide fertilizer trade reveals that the changing nature of work is inextricably intertwined with the work of changing nature.

The Road to Debt Deflation, Debt Peonage, and Neofeudalism

What is called “capitalism” is best understood as a series of stages. Industrial capitalism has given way to finance capitalism, which has passed through pension fund capitalism since the 1950s and a US-centered monetary imperialism since 1971, when the fiat dollar (created mainly to finance US global military spending) became the world’s monetary base. Fiat dollar credit made possible the bubble economy after 1980, and its substage of casino capitalism. These economically radioactive decay stages resolved into debt deflation after 2008, and are now settling into a leaden debt peonage and the austerity of neo-serfdom.The end product of today’s Western capitalism is a neo-rentier economy — precisely what industrial capitalism and classical economists set out to replace during the Progressive Era from the late 19th to early 20th century. A financial class has usurped the role that landlords used to play — a class living off special privilege. Most economic rent is now paid out as interest. This rake-off interrupts the circular flow between production and consumption, causing economic shrinkage — a dynamic that is the opposite of industrial capitalism’s original impulse. The “miracle of compound interest,” reinforced now by fiat credit creation, is cannibalizing industrial capital as well as the returns to labor.The political thrust of industrial capitalism was toward democratic parliamentary reform to break the stranglehold of landlords on national tax systems. But today’s finance capital is inherently oligarchic. It seeks to capture the government — first and foremost the treasury, central bank, and courts — to enrich (indeed, to bail out) and untax the banking and financial sector and its major clients: real estate and monopolies. This is why financial “technocrats” (proxies and factotums for high finance) were imposed in Greece, and why Germany opposed a public referendum on the European Central Bank’s austerity program.

Demonic trade: debt, materiality, and agency in Amazonia

This article examines Amazonian Urarina engagements with the system of debt peonage in light of the conceptual and ontological premises of the traditional subsistence economy. It argues that to view debt as a mechanism for harnessing indigenous labour is inadequate for comprehending the wilfulness with which Urarina indebt themselves to outsiders today, which should instead be considered in terms of local theories of agency and an aversion to immediate, market‐style exchange. This relational and hierarchically distributed view of agency is further implicated in ideas surrounding industrial goods, which are ascribed to the Devil as their putative maker and owner, and who is seen as the source of their power over people in this life and the next. If this brand of commodity ‘fetishism’ expresses moral ambivalence towards capitalism, it also mediates otherwise contradictory forms of production and exchange, repudiating the possibility of total rupture between persons and things.RésuméL’auteur examine ici l’engagement des Unarina d’Amazonie dans un système de servage pour dettes, à la lumière des prémisses conceptuelles et ontologiques de l’économie de subsistance traditionnelle. Il avance que la vision de l’endettement comme d’un mécanisme visant à capturer la main‐d’œuvre indigène ne convient pas pour comprendre la bonne volonté avec laquelle les Unarina s’endettent aujourd’hui vis‐à‐vis de parfaits inconnus. Au lieu de cela, l’approche doit s’appuyer sur les théories locales de l’agent et sur l’aversion des Unarina envers les transactions non différées, de type marchand. Cette notion d’agency relationnelle, distribuée de façon hiérarchique, se retrouve dans les idées liées aux marchandises industrielles, dont le fabricant et le propriétaire supposé serait le Diable, considéré comme la source de leur pouvoir sur les gens dans cette vie et la vie future. Quoique ce mode de « fétichisme » des marchandises exprime une ambivalence morale à l’égard du capitalisme, il médie par ailleurs des formes de production et d’échange qui seraient sinon contradictoires, réfutant la possibilité d’une rupture totale entre les gens et les choses.

From Marx to Goldman Sachs: The Fictions of Fictitious Capital, and the Financialization of Industry

Classical economists developed the labour theory of value to isolate economic rent, which they defined as the excess of market price and income over the socially necessary cost of production (value ultimately reducible to the cost of labour). A free market was one free of such ‘unearned’ income – a market in which prices reflected actual necessary costs of production or, in the case of public services and basic infrastructure, would be subsidized in order to make economies more competitive. Most reformers accordingly urged – and expected – land, monopolies and banking privileges to be nationalized, or at least to have their free-lunch income taxed away. In keeping with his materialist view of history, Marx expected banking to be subordinated to the needs of industrial capitalism. Equity investment – followed by public ownership of the means of production under socialism – seemed likely to replace the interest-extracting ‘usury capital’ inherited from antiquity and feudal times: debts mounting up at compound interest in excess of the means to pay, culminating in crises marked by bank runs and property foreclosures. But as matters have turned out, the rentier interests mounted a counter-Enlightenment to undermine the reforms that promised to liberate society from special privilege. Instead of promoting capital investment in an alliance with industry and government, financial planners have sponsored a travesty of free markets. Realizing that income not taxed is free to be capitalized, bought and sold on credit, and paid out as interest, bankers have formed an alliance between finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) to free land rent and monopoly rent (as well as debt-leveraged ‘capital’ gains) from taxation. The result is that today's economy is burdened with property and financial claims that Marx and other critics deemed ‘fictitious’ – a proliferation of financial overhead in the form of interest and dividends, fees and commissions, exorbitant management salaries, bonuses and stock options, and ‘capital’ gains (mainly debt-leveraged land-price gains). And to cap matters, new financial modes of exploiting labour have been innovated, headed by pension-fund capitalism and privatization of Social Security. As economic planning has passed from government to the financial sector, the alternative to public price regulation and progressive taxation is debt peonage.

The Importance of Place in Post-Everything American Studies

The Importance of Place in Post-Everything American Studies Matthew Pratt Guterl (bio) New World Poetics: Nature and the Adamic Imagination of Whitman, Neruda, and Walcott. By George B. Handley. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. 448 pages. $39.95 (cloth). Blackface Cuba, 1840–1895. By Jill Lane. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 288 pages. $59.59 (cloth). Waves of Decolonization: Discourses of Race and Hemispheric Citizenship in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States. By David Luis-Brown. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. 352 pages. $89.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary. By Ramón Saldívar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 536 pages. $89.95 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba After Slavery. By Rebecca J. Scott. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 392 pages. $29.95 (cloth). $18.95 (paper). Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperalisms, 1898–1976. By Harilaos Stecopoulos. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. 203 pages. $69.95 (cloth). $22.95 (paper). In the first decades of the twentieth century, white supremacy was rarely a provincial affair. Although the Virginian Earnest Sevier Cox (1880–1966) could trace his family to William the Conqueror, his intellectual roots were at the University of Chicago, where he studied “the Negro problem” with Frederick Starr, E. A. Ross, and other scholars of race in America. Armed with this formidable lineage, he set out in 1910 to explore the world, aiming to “[find] out how other peoples control their negroes.”1 He spent a year working in the Kimberley diamond mines in South Africa, studying apartheid at [End Page 931] its founding moment, and earning venture capital for visits to his “racial kin” around the world. Modeling himself after Henry Morton Stanley, he traveled the “Cape to Cairo” route, offering a comparative assessment of the European colonies, showing a preference for those administered by Germany. He surveyed the global color line in all its fullness, including the settler societies of Australia and New Zealand, the new American colony in the Philippines, the major port cities of the Far East, and much of South America. At every stop, he presented himself as an expert on the race problem and a student of “Negro” psychology. On the road or on rail, at sea or in port, he wrote countless newspaper articles, granted numerous interviews, and shared remarks over dinner or lunch to anyone who agreed to pay for a meal and was willing to flatter his image as a renowned explorer. Often, he would present his famous slide show: a panorama of the world’s darkest peoples, often naked or in tribal dress. After completing his travels in 1914, he explained that his years of social scientific study and vagabondage had confirmed what he knew already to be true: that “the Negro” needed stricter, potent, even deadly, controls if “he” was to serve as captive labor; that blacks would have to be “returned” to Africa at some point soon or they would “outbreed” whites; and that whites needed to better manage their own racial capital. The fate of the world and of “civilization,” Cox insisted, was at stake.2 Cox was a southern preacher, a businessman, a cyclorama enthusiast, a blue blood and aristocrat. With connections to Chicago and Vanderbilt—and a heavy file of press clippings from his sojourns—he was no minor figure in white supremacist circles. After a chance meeting in Washington, he became an occasional collaborator with James K. Vardaman, the man who turned Mississippi’s Parchman prison plantation into something “worse than slavery,” establishing debt peonage and forced labor for the state as a southern rite.3 Later, he supported the Garvey movement, which he understood as a literal “black to Africa movement,” and advertised White America, his first book, in Garvey’s publications. When Garvey was imprisoned, Cox successfully petitioned the president to have him released. But he wasn’t an especially significant man. Nor were his global connections extraordinary, then or now. Cox wasn’t a diplomat or a statesman. He never held an elected office. He wasn’t an academic or entrepreneur. He was...

Mexican Immigration to the United States

Until the late-nineteenth century, the majority of Mexican peasants (or campesinos) were locked in debt peonage and isolated in rural areas that lacked the railroads or other transportation systems that facilitate mass migration. But the presidency of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910), a period popularly known as el Porfiriato, changed the history of Mexican immobility. Díaz pursued a program of modernizing Mexico in the image of nations such as Argentina and the United States. During this campaign for “Order and Progress,” Diaz dramatically expanded Mexico's railroad system, promoted land privatization, and encouraged a switch from peonage to wage labor. As an estimated five million Mexican campesinos lost access to communal land holdings during el Porfiriato, their search for work began a century of mass labor migration between Mexico and the United States (1). This essay provides a compact history of Mexican immigration to the United States. There are many ways to tell this history, but the basic framework of what follows is a story of uneven capitalist economic development and U.S. foreign policy in the making of international labor migration.

Houselot Refuse Disposal and Geochemistry at a Late 19th Century Hacienda Village in Yucatán, Mexico

In the 19th century, an increasing percentage of the rural, Maya-descent population in Yucatán, Mexico, became tied to hacienda estates through legally sanctioned debt peonage. Recent investigations at Hacienda Tabi, a pre-revolutionary sugar plantation in the peninsula's Puuc region, shed light on non-architectural domestic spaces occupied by debt peons. Spatial distributions of ceramic debris and soil phosphorus concentrations in four houselots approximate models of waste management in contemporary domestic settings. The size sorting of inorganic refuse, in particular, is a consistent indicator of patio zones. The data suggest that houselot structure under conditions of forced labor was not appreciably different from what has been documented for independent subsistence farmers in Mesoamerica. Nevertheless, discard patterns at Tabi suggest that some lots were more intensively maintained than others, and this variation may be related to population density or workforce stratification. The site's good state of preservation, resulting in part from a relatively short period of occupation and a rapid abandonment event, facilitates the study of cultural formation processes in domestic contexts of the northern Maya Lowlands.

Enganche and Exports in Chiapas, Mexico: a Comparison of Plantation Labour in the Districts of Soconusco and Palenque, 1876–1911

AbstractThis article examines the internal structure and dynamics of the coffee economy in two districts of the southern Mexican state of Chiapas during the presidency of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911). In both Palenque, in the northern highlands, and Soconusco, on the Pacific coast, production was oriented to international markets, direct foreign investment was a key aspect of coffee plantation development, and workers were recruited by the payment of wage advances (enganche), which they were then expected to pay off by labouring on coffee plantations. Yet, despite these similarities, the social relations that characterised coffee production in the two districts differed considerably. This article analyses those differences by comparing and contrasting the demographic factors, processes of land privatisation and the relationship between foreign investors, the national regime and local elites that influenced the nature and purpose of debt peonage in each district.

"To Love the Wind and the Rain": African Americans and Environmental History (review)

Reviewed by: “To Love the Wind and the Rain”: African Americans and Environmental History Barbara L. Allen (bio) “To Love the Wind and the Rain”: African Americans and Environmental History. Edited by Dianne D. Glave and Mark Stoll . Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. Pp. 288. $55/ $24.95. The emergence of environmental history as a distinct field during the last few decades—essentially as a post–Earth Day discipline—has produced a rich array of research. This scholarship has often been politically charged, even passionate. While the field has expanded to encompass regions beyond the United States and to examine environmental issues of Native Americans and women, comparatively little has been written about African Americans. So it is that "To Love the Wind and the Rain" is a welcome addition to the literature. Arranged chronologically, most of the fourteen chapters are concerned with the twentieth century, although a handful cover topics in the nineteenth century and the antebellum South. Mart Stewart and Scott Giltner both address African Americans and their relationship to the environment under slavery. Stewart focuses on the agricultural contributions of slaves, showing how, in an explicitly repressive institution, people found positive expressions of freedom in the landscape. Hunting and fishing, both in ser-vice to white elites and as subsistence living, are explored in the Giltner chapter. The defiance of authority and the ingenuity of slave customs are interwoven in the rich environmental tapestry that both authors present. Progressive reform and agricultural extension services within the realm of African-American women's gardening are problematized by coeditor Dianne Glave. She argues that productivity rather than proper femininity defined their labor, both in the home and the garden. In "Turpentine Negro," Cassandra Johnson and Josh McDaniel expose the harsh realities of life in the forest, living in camps under the repressive system of debt peonage. The view of living in nature as "the hard life" and moving to the city as "a step up" is a theme repeated in a number of contributions. [End Page 200] Another common theme concerns the difficulties experienced by African Americans seeking to enjoy the amenities of urban parklands and suburbia's green landscape. Colin Fisher's chapter begins with the incident that started the Chicago race riot of 1919—a boy drowning after being hit by a rock when his raft floated into a "whites only" part of Lake Michigan. Fisher ties this incident to a fear of nature by some urban African Americans: while they viewed outdoor leisure and green spaces as an antidote to the ills of urban living, their access was stifled by racist attitudes. This narrative is repeated in Christopher Sellers's intimate oral history of one immigrant family's path from the Virgin Islands, to New York City, to an effort to capture the dream of suburban homeownership on Long Island. His oral history documents a family traveling to Levittown after the 1948 Supreme Court decision banning racially restrictive covenants, only to be told that the development was for whites only. Both Stoll and Glave address the important role of the church in African-American environmental history. The church funded some of the first environmental-justice research in the late twentieth century, and still plays an advocacy role in environmental-justice activism contra that of many white churches, which not only tend to ignore the topic, but in the case of some evangelical sects even oppose the Green movement on the basis of its alliance with liberal politics. In the final chapter of the book, Carl Anthony characterizes African-American environmentalism as a concern for an ecology of life. He explains that "the hidden narrative of race . . . has to do with the fragmentation and disruption of personal and community life, and therefore the quest for wholeness" (p. 205). While this is a very different version of environmental history than narratives about the destruction of forests, the loss of species, the uprooting of indigenous cultures, and the settlement of the West, it is a history that is uniquely American and that also provides an opening for "other," more community-encompassing environmental histories to be written. Barbara L. Allen Dr. Allen is director of the graduate program in...

Empowered through Labor and Buttressing Their Communities: Mayan Women and Coastal Migration, 1875-1965

Empowered through Labor and Buttressing Their Communities: Mayan Women and Coastal Migration, 1875-1965

‘Una Esclavitud Simulada’: Debt peonage in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, 1876–19111

This article examines debt peonage in the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico during the regime of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911). It argues that debt peonage in Chiapas was a coercive institution, which served to cheapen the price of labour in the growing agricultural export sector. Thus, rather than a ‘feudal relic’ incompatible with the logic of capitalist efficiency, the expansion and intensification of debt peonage during this time was consistent with the political economy of capitalist modernization in Mexico prior to the revolution of 1910–20.

NAN E. WOODRUFF. American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2003. Pp. 282. $39.95

This book tells a story of nearly constant conflict between African American workers and wealthy employers in the Mississippi River Delta areas of Arkansas and Mississippi from about 1900 through World War II. Investigating an impressive range of sources, Nan E. Woodruff details the ways those employers tried to keep workers numerous and to minimize wages and resistance and the various ways workers fought back. The differences were slight between timber work and agricultural work and between work on establishments owned by the heirs of southern plantations and those owned by northern investors. All employers wanted to keep compensation low, and almost all were willing to use violence and to manipulate the legal and political systems. Nor were there great differences, with a few exceptions, between the policies the various employers wanted and the policies granted by the state and federal governments; barons of land and lumber advertised themselves as progressive entrepreneurs, and governments went along, sometimes ignoring oppression, sometimes supporting it. Woodruff details the various ways employers tried to keep their workers dependent and cheap by using debt peonage, relying on company stores, and evicting or firing workers who tried to organize.

Tapping Masculinity: Labor Recruitment to the Brazilian Amazon during World War II

Tapping Masculinity: Labor Recruitment to the Brazilian Amazon during World War II

Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua

2. Indians under Colonialism and Postcolonialism 33 3. Patriarchal Power in the Pueblos 53 4. The Private Property Revolution 69 5. Gendered Contradictions of Liberalism: Ethnicity, Property, and Households 97 6. Debt Peonage in Diriomo: Forced Labor Revisited 110 7. Patriarchy and Peonage 149 Conclusion 164 Epilogue: History Matters-The Sandinistas' Myth of Modernity 172 Notes 181 Glossary 213 Bibliography 217 Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Who Controls the Past Controls the Future 1 1. Theories of Capitalism, Class, Gender, and Ethnicity 17 Index 239

Culture and Economy: The Case of the Milk Market in the Northern Andes of Ecuador

In a Quichua area of Ecuador milk marketing has traditionally been in the hands of nonindigenous people. In recent years the market has come into the hands of indigenous people, who use their kin relations to take it from mestizo intermediaries. The changes in the economy are paralleled by sociocuitural changes in the villages, and in notions of what constitute the economy, fair transactions, and market relationships. There is no sharp division between market and traditional exchanges; rather, market exchanges are understood in terms of traditional reciprocity. (Ecuador, market exchange, reciprocity, structural adjustments) ********** For almost three decades, there has been anthropological interest in market systems considered as empirical entities (e.g., Plattner 1985) or as conceptual categories (e.g., Dilley 1992; Carrier 1997, 2002; Carrier and Miller 1998). The topic is critically important for Latin America, where the 1990s have witnessed the domination of neoliberal philosophy and its emphasis on a free market as the basis for the development of national economies. An extreme example of this philosophy is Ecuador's currency, which has been officially substituted by the US dollar. This article shows with an ethnography of the milk market in a Quichua area of the Northern Andes of Ecuador, that changes in the economy are paralleled with changes in the culture of the villages. The commercialization of milk in this area has traditionally been in the hands of nonindigenous mestizo people, but with economic conditions changing in recent years this market has come into the hands of indigenous people, who used their kin relations to take it over from mestizo intermediaries. Rather than having a rupture with the past, there is a continuation of local ways of conceiving the economy in terms of fair transactions and proper relationships. Unlike of the literature on the Andes and other regions of the world, there is no sharp division between market and traditional exchanges; rather, market exchanges are understood in the language of traditional reciprocity. This article contributes to the debate in anthropology and development scholarship on concepts and functions of markets, and to the growing awareness among scholars from different disciplines that much Western thinking about the economy is problematic and heavily ideological and so merits careful scrutiny (Carrier 2002:126). SETTING The ethnographic area lies in the parish of Olmedo, in the inter-Andean valley delimited by the Cayambe volcano to the east and by the slopes of the Mojanda mountain to the west, at an altitude between 2800 and 3400 miles above sea level. The climate is Andean, with temperatures ranging between 5[degrees] and 22[degrees] C throughout the year, dropping sharply at higher altitudes and at night. Most of the area falls below 3100 miles above sea level. This ecological zone has heavy showers in the rainy season, prolonged droughts in the dry season, chill dry winds, and frosts that threaten crops. At lower elevations, potatoes are primarily raised, along with maize and broad beans, while in the higher areas wheat, and especially barley, are grown. The area above 3200 miles above sea level (the Paramo) has traditionally been used for cattle grazing. From colonial times until 1908, the area was a vast hacienda owned in turn by several Catholic religious orders, and based on a system of debt peonage in which indigenous peasants received the use of small plots of land and small sums of cash that they had to repay in labor (Guerrero 1991; Ferraro 2000a, 2000b). In 1908 the Government of Ecuador expropriated all church properties; the area was divided into five smaller haciendas managed by a Government Agency that rented land and, as before, was based on peonage labor (Crespi 1968; Guerrero 1991; Ferraro 2000a, 2004a). The Agrarian Reform aimed to redistribute the land more equitably to the indigenous people but did not fully succeed. …

Material Expressions of Social Inequality on a Porfirian Sugar Hacienda in Yucatán, Mexico

Power relations intrinsic to the institution of debt peonage clearly influenced material conditions on the haciendas of Yucatan prior to the Mexican Revolution. Recent investigations at a late-19th- and early-20th-century sugar hacienda explore the material basis for its relations of production. The evidence indicates that hacienda owners divided the indebted workforce and then provided a select group of laborers with privileged access to material resources. Vernacular architecture, settlement layout, and the distribution of imported ceramics all signify social inequality within the labor force. Material disparities on the estate suggest a negotiation of power through the exchange of rewards for the loyalties of a managerial class. Moreover, the inequalities may have accentuated a social order perceived by Yucatecan elites, while inhibiting indebted class solidarity.

Pueblos, comunidades y municipios frente a los proyectos modernizadores en América Latina, siglo XIX

The product of a 1999 conference on nation-states in Latin America, Pueblos, comunidades e municipios present five papers on Mexico and six others touching on Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Nicaragua. All are solidly rooted in primary sources and local archives, and most focus on struggles between specific communities and nineteenth-century liberal states over the form, content, and costs of change. The editors identify several points of origin for these conflicts, including the shift from a heterogenous colonial monarchy to a homogenous republican state, the definitions of which groups were, or might be, part of the new nations, and the unequal and sometimes paradoxical economic and social effects of liberal policies.Looking at Tlaxcala before and after independence, Raymond Buve finds complex and shifting alliances among elements of several communities and agents of the state in competition for local power. This was also a characteristic, according to Antonio Ohmstede, of the efforts of Hidalgo and the Huastecas of Veracruz to deflect liberal schemes, such as land privatization, individualization, and restriction of non-Indians from access to community resources. Similarly, Brian Hamnett argues that the indigenous communities of Oaxaca resisted liberal efforts to legally homogenize the population, seen as a threat to their ethnic identity. In a theme that marks several essays, Romana Falcón uses the records of Maximilian’s Junta Protectora da las Clases Menesterosas to show that rural pueblos and indigenous communities occasionally adopted liberal ideas and institutions and were able to manipulate these to their own ends—opting, for example, for condueñazo to replace traditional communal land ownership. In the Sierra de Puebla, Guy Thompson discovers that organic intellectuals created a history of nineteenth-century conflicts that holds local memories in a tension with national and nationalist elements.Those chapters that examine areas outside Mexico continue many of the same themes. For mid-nineteenth-century Ecuador, for example, Andrés Guerrero suggests that whites and mestizos, and not just Indians, resisted legal homogenization, preferring to preserve the status of “citizen” for themselves and that of “subject” for the indigenous population. He (as do several other authors) points to the role of village scribes and tinterillos in cultural translations between the communities and the state. Among the indigenous groups of the Pampas and northern Patagonia, Martha Bechis finds various reactions to an Argentine state policy that seldom strayed from confrontation and one-way assimilation in the name of “civilization.” In mid-1850s Bogota, according to Hans-Joachim Konig, artisans (aided by elements in the army) opposed a free-trade model of social equality, protectionist economic policies, and limits on individualism. By contrast, Marianne Wiesebron finds that in nineteenth-century Pernambuco, struggles over modernization took a back seat to local electoral politics. And in an ambitious effort, Cynthia Radding compares postindependence efforts by Indians in northern Mexico and the eastern lowlands of Bolivia to reconstruct the community-state alliance that had underpinned a colonial moral economy and was now threatened by liberal innovation. Finally, in an interesting (if somewhat out-of-place) piece, Elizabeth Dore discovers among the peasant populations of Granada, Nicaragua, a late-nineteenth-century “debt peonage” based less on state coercion than on personalist and clientalistic relations.Pueblos, comunidades e municipios would have benefited had the participants studied each others’ contributions and incorporated more cross-references and comparisons. To their credit, the editors make a heroic and useful effort in their conclusion to draw together threads from these diverse pieces. They identify five main propositions emerging from the texts: (1) the reforms that liberals sought often contradicted existing ideas and practice, provoking violent reaction and resistance; (2) most of the communities examined struggled to preserve their existing ethnic and social character in the face of liberal assimilationist projects; (3) in the course of these struggles, marginal groups commonly incorporated elements of the liberal modernization project itself, such as political organization or military tactics (one writer calls this “aculturación antagónica”); (4) these same groups, however, were typically unable to agree among themselves upon a globalizing vision, and they remained too weak to impose any vision on the state; and (5) all of the contributors agree upon the importance of the nineteenth century in forming the modern Latin American state.