Comunes y haciendas: Procesos de comunalizacion en la Sierra de Piura (siglos XVIII al XX), and: El Norte en la historia regional, siglos XVIII-XIX (review)

Comunes y haciendas: Procesos de comunalización en la Sierra de Piura (siglos XVIII al XX). By ALEJANDRO DIEZ HURTADO. Piura and Cuzco: Centro de Investigación y Promoción del Campesinado, and Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos "Bartolomé de las Casas," 1998. Maps. Tables. Figures. 262 pp.

El Norte en la historia regional, siglos XVIII-XIX. Edited by SCARLETT O'PHELAN GODOY and YVES SAINT-GEOURS. Lima and Piura: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos and Centro de Investigación y Promoción del Campesinado, 1998. Maps. Tables, Figures. 390 pp.

These two books impressively demonstrate the growth in research on and understanding of the history of northern Peru and southern Ecuador during the past two decades. Until recently, the region had appeared in the broader tapestry of the viceregal and national history primarily as the site of coastal sugar plantations and slave populations, and the postemancipation economic and political structures arising from that complex. Now we are beginning to get publications based on serious archival research on diverse areas in the north, from the eastern slopes of the Andes through various highland settings--from Ancachs to Cajamarca and Piura, and Loja and Cuenca in Ecuador--to the variegated coastal valleys and despoblados, and on topics ranging from resistance and identity formation in highland and coastal indigenous communities to fishermen and the aristocratic life styles of the region's urban elites. What is emerging is an image of an internally complex northern Andean and coastal region with major differences from the central and southern Peruvian regions on which so many of our notions about the historical trajectory of Peru have depended to date.

Alejandro Diez Hurtado's excellent monograph about landholding regimes and communal institutions in the rural spaces of the Sierra de Piura (bordering on Ecuador) is a case in point. The book, a revised version of the author's doctoral thesis written under the guidance of Nathan Wachtel at the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, traces the weakening of decentralized and badly consolidated haciendas, and the formation of new indigenous communities from the late eighteeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Local populations from the coast, the highlands and the adjacent piedmont regions were subjected to a complex and bloody double-colonizing experience, first by the Incas and then by the Spaniards, in which they were repeatedly moved and assigned to various authorities with shifting jurisdictional boundaries. By the late colonial period, most peasants in the region did not speak an indigenous language any more. Land tenure was particularly complex, with haciendas, estancias and sitios owned by individuals or groups of Spaniards, mestizos, and Indians, and many of the largest estates divided among tenants. Labor conditions on the estates were also more fluid and diverse than we are accustomed to finding in the southern Andes, with labor tenants, regular tenants, mitayos, a few slaves, and seasonal wage laborers all working side by side, and something like a stable resident labor force (yanaconas and colonos) developing on most estates only in the course of the eighteenth century.

Based on impressive research in national, regional, and local archives, Diez Hurtado finds that, in contrast to Peru's coastal areas and southern Sierra, large estates in the Sierra de Piura did not undergo major expansion into peasant communities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, perhaps because bad transport conditions made the region's livestock products, sugar, and grains uncompetitive outside a narrowly defined region. Rather, the land tenure pattern was marked during the nineteenth century by border conflicts between haciendas and communities as well as among communities, and by the definition of rights of family lineages to lands within communites. Compared to the southern Andes, these appeared to be less...