Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean (review)

Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean. Edited by AVIVA CHOMSKY and ALDO LAURIA-SANTIAGO. Comparative and International Working-Class History. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. vii, 404 pp. Cloth, $64.95. Paper, $21.95.

As all eyes turned on Central America in the early 1980s, it became clear that much of the history of these countries, essential to making sense of the contemporary crisis, had yet to be written. During the 1980s, concerned graduate students in North American universities began to focus on the small, heretofore "unimportant" nations of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean, bringing to bear broader analytical questions about how popular groups shaped state formation and the expansion of the coffee, banana and sugar economies. This book presents a sampling of exciting new research authored by this younger generation based on hard slogging through local and national archives and on oral history. The results are often surprising: the articles poke holes in facile generalizations about the impact of agro-export economies, the forms and implications of foreign influence, and the nature of authoritarian regimes, among other subjects.

Through innovative, deeply researched case studies, the authors explore the social dimensions of agricultural export growth and state initiatives and nation-building discourses as experienced "from below"; they illuminate the actions and reactions of rural workers and peasants to the changes affecting their lives between 1850 and 1950. The book is concerned with the intersections of the political, the socioeconomic, and the cultural, and with ethnicity, class, gender, region, and the foreign presence. It gives a tantalizing taste of a number of outstanding monographs recently published or about to be published.

A fine analytical introduction by the coeditors lays out the issues and summarizes the existing writings on each country, providing a very useful guide to the literature on Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. A particularly stimulating feature of the articles that follow is that at least two address each subject but from different standpoints. Thus, Jeffrey Gould and Darío Euraque both concentrate on nation and ethnicity, Gould examining the fate of the native people of western Nicaragua, while Euraque focuses on how Honduran intellectuals reacted against black West Indian laborers in the banana enclave by elaborating the idea of mestizo nationhood.

Aviva Chomsky, Barry Carr, and Cindy Forster study forms of worker protest, respectively, in a highland United Fruit Company gold mining enclave in Costa Rica, on early-twentieth-century Cuban sugar plantations, and on banana and coffee fincas during the Guatemalan spring (1944-54). By emphasizing plantation worker agitation prior to and during agrarian reform, Forster sheds light on the internal dynamic of the Guatemalan reform process and United Fruit's concerns that led the company to advocate the overthrow of the Arbenz government.

Patricia Alvarenga and Richard Turits explore the rural foundations of authoritarian regimes. Alvarenga analyzes how, in the late nineteenth century, the Salvadoran state incorporated peasants into the repressive system by forming civilian auxiliary forces (auxiliares civiles) to keep order in rural localities; thus she unearths a fascinating antecedent to the Colombian paramilitaries of la violencia during the 1950s and to the Guatemalan civil patrols of the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast, Turits finds that Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo generated support in the 1930s not through repressive means but rather by distributing land to peasants. Turits's is a pathbreaking study of Trujillo as rural populist that completely revises our understanding of the appeal of his dictatorship and the social bases of his power.

Turits' study, together with those of Aldo Lauria-Santiago and Julie Charlip which focus on Salvadoran and Nicaraguan peasant responses to the commercial...