A Pueblo Divided: Business, Property, and Community in Papantla, Mexico (review)

"This was the world that vanilla had made" (283). The last in line Kourí's meticulously woven story of the experience of the cantón of Papantla, Veracruz, in the nineteenth century encapsulates the book's approach, even as it obscures the complexity and sophistication of Kourí's analysis. This is economic and business history at its best, committed not only to rigorous probing of the explanatory power of external factors like world commodity markets, but also to exposing and exploring the places where those factors lose their power to explain.

Kourí begins the story with two relaxed, almost leisurely background chapters: Chapter 1 traces the scientific and commercial history of vanilla and its relevance to Mexico, and Chapter 2 concerns the geography, demography, and economic organization of the Tecolutla river basin. The relationship between product, land, and society is so carefully established that when Kourí later explains how land tenure could change without major alterations in land use patterns and even access to land, this important distinction is completely clear. Chapter 3 deals with vanilla exploitation in Papantla from 1760 to 1870, with emphasis on the post-1830 period, during which the trade expanded greatly. Vanilla profits initially had the effect of strengthening the traditional core of the region's economic activity, milpa agriculture. But new actors (including a number of Italian immigrants), new monied groups, new frictions within the Indian community concerning taxation and the control of the vanilla trade, new sites of power (as ayuntamientos replaced the Indian governments of the colonial period, and powerful rancherías emerged as the political competitors of the ayuntamientos), all had the potential to be unsettling—perhaps even revolutionary—sources of social and economic change, even if two other factors had not come into play.

But they did. The first was the dramatic expansion of the U.S. market for vanilla after 1870, as improved freezer technology made ice cream available to the masses. The second was the ideological imperative to privatize land in the wake of the liberal triumph in 1867. The intertwined effects of these factors are treated in chapters 4 and 5. Crucially, because of the earlier success of vanilla in Papantla and the labor-intensive nature of vanilla cultivation, the debate about land reform had to involve the holders of the communal properties, who controlled the best vanilla lands. (By contrast, in most of Mexico, Indian peoples did not have the economic power to exert their will on the national project to privatize communal land.) In a particularly subtle discussion, Kourí shows how both potential winners and potential losers in the vanilla economy could see privatization as potentially advantageous; thus, the debate was not so much about whether to privatize, but how. Totonac leaders were not willing to accept any reparto that might further empower merchants and townspeople, and they were able to demand a compromise—brilliantly analyzed—known as condueñazgo, a system of privatized but not individualized ownership in which communal lands were divided into grandes lotes in which the "primitive" owners were given shares.

But even though the vanilla-driven economy had given the Totonac producers a say in how the lands would be privatized, it had also created a class of merchants and townspeople for whom the central ideological message of liberalism, individual property ownership, was increasingly attractive. They could secure a piece of the vanilla action by duplicity, trickery, corruption, malicious rumor mongering, and assassination (all depressingly well-documented), but the best way to consolidate their gains was through an individual property-rights regime. The condueñazgos proved not to be viable in the long term because they were neither private enough to satisfy those committed to parcelization nor fair enough to satisfy those who received shares in distant or less desirable lands, or were denied access to milpa lands, burdened with unexpected taxes, disinherited, or duped out of their shares. As the perhaps too lengthy Chapter 6 details, the difficulty of undermining...