An Agrarian Republic: Commercial Agriculture and the Politics of Peasant Communities in El Salvador, 1823-1914 (review)

An Agrarian Republic: Commercial Agriculture and the Politics of Peasant Communities in El Salvador, 1823-1914. By ALDO A. LAURIA-SANTIAGO. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. Maps. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. viii, 326 pp. Cloth, $45. Paper, $19.95.

When El Salvador's civil conflict abated in the late 1980s and early 1990s, scholars gained access to the nation's archives for the first time. Aldo Lauria was the initial investigator to take advantage of the opportunity. For that reason alone this book is a landmark. Lauria's work is the beginning of what promises to be a long and healthy reevaluation of El Salvador's past.

Until the appearance of new research like Lauria's, the history of postcolonial El Salvador had consolidated into a master narrative. The story went something as follows. Liberals enacted a sweeping land privatization in the late nineteenth century that handed communal lands to an emerging coffee elite and turned community members into proletarians. The subsequent distribution, or maldistribution, of wealth mobilized urban and rural labor and eventually resulted in the 1932 rebellion in the western coffee zones. The military suppressed the rebellion and thereafter joined with the coffee oligarchy to create an authoritarian barrier to popular mobilization. After five decades of military/oligarchy rule, opponents eventually radicalized into a guerrilla army and incited the civil war of 1980-1992. Although this version of the narrative varies with the politics of the teller, the basic outline has remained the same.

Lauria directed his attention to the narrative's foundational elements, liberalism and nineteenth-century land policies. One of Lauria's main arguments is that privatization happened differently than the master narrative suggests. The decrees were designed to produce yeoman farmers and although some land went to land speculators and emerging coffee barons, much of it was titled by community members, Indian and ladino alike. Conflicts over land were more likely to occur between two communities competing over disputed territory rather than between communities and a land-grabbing elite. In short, privatization was a messy and complex process shaped by local variables. Lauria does not deny rural proletarianization, but he says it occurred later--in the 1910s and 1920s--and for reasons more diverse than land privatization. Lauria also acknowledges the emergence of a coffee elite, but around processing, marketing, and financing rather than land monopoly.

Lauria places land privatization in a broader context of nation-state formation. He argues that the peasantry was an arbiter of political and economic power. He shows their involvement in rebellions and national-level political factionalism. In addition, Lauria makes a number of smaller historiographical contributions, including, but not limited to the decline of the hacienda sector after independence, the labor shortages in the late nineteenth century and the importance of small-scale markets before the export boom.

Much of the argumentative weight of the book is dedicated to debunking the master narrative. This is one of the book's strengths, reflecting the originality and importance of Lauria's research. It can be a deficiency, however, when local variation is made secondary to national-level class issues. While Lauria illustrates intercommunity conflicts and peasant differentiation along "ethnic, class, and regional lines" (p. 102), arguably he undermines their importance by arguing that such divisions did not "threaten the survival of any one layer" (p. 102). I interpret this to mean that divisions within the peasantry did not hinder pan-peasant unity, be it at the local, regional, or national level. If so, such unity is unsubstantiated. This issue becomes apparent in the chapter on rural rebellions where the rebels are seldom differentiated and non-peasant leaders are restricted in agency.

Another small problem in the book is the lack of an aggregate picture of land tenure in the form of maps or tables illustrating the amount and rate of...