Who are the Peasants?

Disappearing Peasantries: Rural Labour in Africa, Asia and Latin America. By Deborah Bryceson, Cristóbal Kay, and Jos Mooij. (London: intermediate Technology Publications, 2000. Pp. 331. $29.95 paper.)

the Spaces of Neoliberalism: Land, Place and Family in Latin America. Edited by Jacquelyn Chase. (Hartford, CT: Kumarian, 2002. Pp. 250. $65.00 cloth, $25.95 paper.)

¿Una Nueva Ruralidad En América Latina? Compiled by Noerma Giarracca. (Buenos Aires: Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, 2000.)

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. Pp. 326. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

Farewell To the Peasantry? Political Class Formation in Rural Mexico. By Gerardo Otero. (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1999. Pp. 185. $60.00 cloth.)

La Nueva Ruralidad En América Latina. Edited by Edelmira Pérez, Maria Adelaida Farah. (Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, 2001.)

Mission Possible: the Story of the Latin American Agribusiness Development Corporation (LAAD). By Robert L. Ross. (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000. Pp. 160. $32.95 cloth.)

Rural Development in Central America. Edited by Ruerd Ruben and Johan Bastiaensen. (London: Macmillan Press, Ltd., 2000. Pp. 252. $65.00 cloth.)

Farmers of the Golden Bean: Costa Rican Households and the Global Coffee Economy. By Deborah Sick. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999. Pp. 169. $35.00 cloth, $20.00 paper.)

in the Shadows of State and Capital: the United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900-1995. By Steve Striffler. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Pp. 242. $64.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

Current Land Policy in Latin America. Edited by Annalies Zoomers and Gemma van der Haar. (Amsterdam: KIT Royal Tropical institute, 2000. Pp. 333. $ 25.00 paper.)

This collection of books offers a variegated view of the extraordinary wealth of literature that continues to pour out of academe focusing on the peasant and peasantry in present-day Latin America. In this sense it gives meaning to the 1970s debate between campesinistas and descampesinistas in Mexico: in spite of erudite affirmations of their disappearance, peasants are still a significant segment of the population, and today they are playing an important role in shaping the future of their societies and the processes of integration into the globalized economy.

Several different types of books are included in this collection. There are three doctoral dissertations transformed into books by Aldo Lauria-Santiago, Deborah Sick, and Steve Striffler; there are six edited collections of conference proceedings by Deborah Bryceson, Cristóbal Kay, and Jos Mooij; Jacquelyn Chase; Ruerd Ruben and Johan Bastiaensen; Annalies Zoomers and Gemma van der Haar; Noerma Giarracca; and Edelmira Pérez and Maria Adelaida Farah; and finally, there are two monographs that offer uniquely personal interpretations of rural development in the region by Gerardo Otero and Robert Ross. Taken as a whole they attest to the vitality of social movements in rural Latin America. They also criticize the mistaken view of many policymakers that simply because the value of rural production is a falling proportion of national income, the sizable segments of the population that were chosen to remain there should be condemned to oblivion.

The two monographs offer starkly contrasting, but optimistic, views of rural development in the region. Ross's celebratory recounting of his twenty-six years of tenure as president of the Latin American Agribusiness Development Corporation (LAAD) is an unusual addition to the literature. LAAD "operates as a private, for-profit company; the developmental mission of the company remains paramount when selecting projects and clients" (5). He offers innumerable studies of investment projects that stimulated the commercial production of agricultural produce in the region. He recounts the frustrating negotiations with uncomprehending central bankers and the difficulties of developing marketing and other infrastructural networks that are so important for assuring the success of any business, and is pleased with what he identifies as the two most significant changes that profoundly...