Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua (review)

The academic literature about changes to Latin American rural society caused by the spread of coffee cultivation during the late nineteenth century is extensive. But Dore's work on the municipality of Diriomo in the Granada district of Nicaragua makes it clear that much remains to be learned about this period.

Informed by interesting theoretical and conceptual perspectives, and using a variety of sources, Dore traces the history of Diriomo in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, concentrating on the period after 1870. Her most important sources are municipal archives, through which she has sifted painstakingly. Dore augments them with oral history, using conversations with residents both to deepen the account contained in the archives and to suggest alternative understandings of the events described. She explores the changes in Diriomo through an analysis of arguments about the commons, private property, and agrarian capitalism—drawing from the work of Polanyi and Burns; gender, patriarchy, and debt bondage—using arguments derived from Stern and Knight; and ethnicity—gleaning insights from Adams and Gould.¹

By the latter part of the nineteenth century, indigenous elites in the community acted with regional elites and national governments to title land and to extinguish common property rights in the municipality. Dore puts this process in the context of "private property revolutions" elsewhere and discusses the extent to which the titling of private property and the spread of coffee cultivation led to agrarian capitalism. In Dore's analysis, this issue is tied up with questions of labor. The continuation of a form of debt peonage leads Dore to argue that Diriomo was not in transition to a "free labour" regime; nor did the spread of coffee cultivation lead to the dominance of capitalist relations of production in the municipality.

Debt peonage was linked to the continuing importance of patronage and patriarchy. Local elites used continuing relations of patriarchy to cement their elite positions and to tie labor to their estates. This "patriarchy from above" connected to a "patriarchy from below" that reinforced the role of the male head of the peasant household and helped bind peasants to the coffee regime. Nonetheless, one of Dore's central arguments is that private property enabled women to title land in their own names, freeing them from legal dependence on a head of household for access to land. Unfortunately, most of the evidence that Dore is able to bring to bear on this issue consists of census records; the argument remains suggestive but unconvincing.

Dore is more persuasive in discussing ethnicity. She argues that the effective termination of communal lands in the second half of the century removed the most important difference between indigenous and nonindigenous residents. Thus, Diriomenos no longer described themselves as indigenous. Dore also ties her arguments about Diriomo's history to an understanding of the mistakes made in the Sandinista agrarian reform of the 1990s.

Those trying to understand agrarian change and rural society in Latin America, and elsewhere, can find much that is informative and useful in this marvelous book.