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chapter 2 Cajamarcan Society under the Magnifying Glass regional society, economy, and politics in the nineteenth century G The department of Cajamarca comprises the provinces of Cajamarca, Celend ín, Cajabamba, San Marcos, Contumazá, San Pablo, and Santa Cruz, as well as the provinces of San Marcos, Cutervo, and Chota, more remote from the provincial capital. Located between the coastal departments of La Libertad, Lambayeque, and Piúra, on the one side, and the tropical department of Amazonas , on the other, the department of Cajamarca spans a range of ecological zones. These include arid highlands and fertile valleys, as well as districts such as Magdalena and the province of Contumazá with a lush, semitropical climate.1 While cattle—and, eventually, labor—were the department’s main exports in the nineteenth century, the various provinces in the department of Cajamarca produced a range of other products: wheat, barley, vegetables, fruit, maize, pulses, sugar, aguardiente, and chancaca (molasses). Haciendas usually covered several ecological zones and were thus able to produce potatoes , barley, wheat, oca, beans, maize, and quinoa, as well as cattle. While pastoral activities dominated the highlands in the province of Contumazá, the hot coastal climate near the banks of the two main rivers, the Jequetepeque and the Chicama, allowed for the production of rice, sugarcane, cassava , bananas, and mangoes. In addition, the harvest from fruit trees was an important source of cash income in the valleys of Cascas and Contumazá.2 Similarly ecologically diverse was the province of Hualgayoc, which produced aguardiente, molasses, and maize in the valleys, tubers and cattle in the highlands, and silver from the provincial capital’s silver mines. Historically , the silver mines in Hualgayoc, a mining town at an altitude of 3,508 meters, and the smaller mines in Celendín and Cajabamba, were important centers of economic activity. Although mining declined throughout the 21 disobedience, slander, seduction, and assault nineteenth century, Hualgayoc continued to constitute a local market for foodstuffs, artisanal products, and timber and charcoal. Even in 1873, a year in which silver production hit an all-time low, the town required thousands of sheep and hundreds of head of cattle, thousands of arrobas of salted beef, cheese, butter, rice, citrus fruit, barley, maize, tubers, pulses, and vegetables, not to mention timber, charcoal, coal, firewood, and beasts of burden.3 Although contemporary observers tended to view Cajamarca as an economic backwater isolated from the coastal agro-industrial complex, the department boasted a diversity of agricultural and pastoral products, as well as a tradition of healthy interprovincial trade. Traditionally, Cajamarca has been viewed as a region in which precapitalist, even feudal, relations dominated economic activity and social relations until the 1930s. As a result of the paucity of historical research on the region until recent years, a number of stereotypes that more properly reflect reality in the southern highlands—absentee landlordism, gamonalismo (local ‘‘bossism’’), and servile relations between hacendado and peasants—have been wrongly imputed to Cajamarca.4 In the late nineteenth century haciendas covered two-thirds of the province of Cajamarca. However, the apparent dominance of the hacienda is deceptive : only 29 percent of the rural population resided on haciendas. Divided among six hundred rural communities dispersed among the haciendas, 71 percent of the peasantry lived outside hacienda boundaries in rural hamlets and on independently farmed peasant smallholdings.5 Nor did haciendas necessarily monopolize the most fertile land; in Hualgayoc, for instance, most hacienda land was dedicated to the pasturing of livestock, with little land under direct cultivation due to the shortage of water.6 By the early twentieth century only 2–3 percent of the department of Cajamarca’s population lived in traditional indigenous communities. Even where these existed, all cultivated land was privately held and worked as early as the 1880s. The traditional peasant community was, in other words, virtually nonexistent.7 Hand in hand with the disappearance of the Indian community went a pronounced process of cultural and ethnic mestizaje, with the result that by 1876 the mestizos’ share of the population almost equaled that of the indigenous population.8 According to the nationwide census of 1876, only 41.5 percent of the population was Indian, 30.9 percent was mestizo, and 26.8 percent was categorized as white.9 While ethnic categories must not be treated as absolute, the figures do give an indication of how the rural society was perceived by census takers and provide an approximation of Cajamarca’s cultural and ethnic composition.10 Both the...

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