In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31.2 (2000) 312-313



[Access article in PDF]

Review

Peasants on Plantations:
Subaltern Strategies of Labor and Resistance in the Pisco Valley, Peru


Peasants on Plantations: Subaltern Strategies of Labor and Resistance in the Pisco Valley, Peru. By Vincent C. Peloso (Durham, Duke University Press, 1999) 252 pp. $49.95 cloth $17.95 paper

Peloso demonstrates the value of examining one hacienda complex in depth by melding the approaches of social history with Gramscian notions of competing hegemonies. 1 The result is a seamless and well-written study, rich in rural labor history and the way that it intersected with the raw materials export complex. It is a significant contribution to the literature, because it shows how complex labor relations were on plantations, a type of rural estate that has been assumed to have a relatively undifferentiated labor force.

The main focus is on the constant struggles between the landlords, their managers (the Aspíllagas, the owners, were absentee landlords), and [End Page 312] the workers who labored in the fields. Peloso analyzes on a highly detailed level the shift from labor scarcity after the War of the Pacific (1879-1884), when the Chilean Army occupied the region, to c. 1940. At least three crucial moments in the history of Palto Hacienda can be discerned. The first was the switch from indentured Chinese labor to a mixture of sharecropping and renting in the aftermath of the War of the Pacific, bringing about the death knell of indentured Chinese servitude. The second came in the 1920s, when the owners successfully transformed the tenants into sharecroppers (yanaconas). This process had begun in 1907, after bad floods and a financial panic caused the managers to begin to reduce tenant laborers. By the 1930s, in response to the effects of the Great Depression, Hacienda Palto had returned to a much more precarious form of yanacona labor. Mechanization and attempts at rationalizing plantation labor, a process also notable in the rest of Latin America during the 1920s, meant that landlords could assert much greater labor control than before. In fact, another strand in the story is the conflict between labor stability and the plantation's control over its own lands; tenants provided stability but left control over the fields to the workers. By the end, the plantation owners had opted for control over their land rather than labor stability.

This is not an unfamiliar story, but in this case, the rich details (at times somewhat confusing, given the back and forth of real life) of the struggles between laborers and landlords show how long it took for the latter to gain control over their workers. Even when the planters seemed to have the upper hand, Peloso shows how the workers were able to leverage their position so that they could squeeze out some, though at times ephemeral, advantage. The author correctly highlights the question of credit in this struggle, though he shows that the hacienda store and the use of debt were issues much more complex than other scholars have described. Peloso also adds to the debate on the nature of the peasantry. He shows that the plantation workers were peasants rather than a rural proletariat; they acted in most ways like traditional peasants, trying first to provide for their subsistence and only afterward some surplus.

This book fits well with the already abundant and generally excellent studies of the Peruvian coast, such as those of Klarén, Gonzáles, and Piel. 2 It adds considerably to a number of debates, not only because it deals with the largely neglected southern Peruvian coast, but also because it advances our understanding of the nature of plantation labor, debt peonage, the interaction between the Latin American export economy and rural labor, and how to define a peasantry.

Erick D. Langer
Georgetown University

Notes

1. See Antonio Gramsci (trans. Raymond Rosenthal), Letters from Prison (New York, 1993), 2v.

2. Peter F. Klarén, Modernization, Dislocation, and Aprismo: Origins of the Peruvian Aprista Party, 1870-1932 (Austin, 1973); Michael J...

pdf

Share