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Hispanic American Historical Review 84.1 (2004) 168-169



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Panama's Poor: Victims, Agents, and Historymakers. By Gloria Rudolf. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. Photographs. Maps. Tables. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xiii, 298 pp. Cloth, $49.95.

This excellent study, one of a handful of book-length works on the campesino populations of the Panamanian interior, fills a major gap in the ethnographic and historical literature on the region. Based on long-term fieldwork carried out from 1972 to the mid-1990s, it traces the fortunes and misfortunes of the inhabitants of Loma Bonita, a small highland community in Coclé Province.

Rudolf examines the impact of capitalist agriculture and the market economy on Loma Bonita through five stages or transformations: from subsistence cultivators with abundant land (up to the 1920s) to peasants impoverished by commercial agriculture (1920s-1960s) to peasant laborers (1970s) to "postpeasants" in global capitalism (1980s) to further marginalized postpeasants following the 1989 U.S. invasion.

As early as the 1970s, "the majority of community members perched on a narrow economic ledge . . . constantly in danger of slipping off" (p. 96), and they were increasingly differentiated into the comparatively well off and the truly desperate. Insisting on both the importance of peasant agency and the dangers of romanticizing it, Rudolf examines the strategies and devices by which people struggled to survive: shortened fallow periods, farming far from home in Atlantic-side forests, exchanges of land, labor, and food, longer work hours, seasonal work on lowland plantations, and especially migrant labor in the city.

A point of special interest is the discussion of the populist programs of the Torrijos government and the Catholic Church, exemplified in a telling vignette about a weeklong workshop run by clueless visiting students in which the thinnest facade of local consultation rationalized the authoritarian imposition of a credit cooperative (pp. 136-38). Despite the failure of these programs, the high costs of participation, and the skewing of leadership toward males and richer peasant families, Rudolf holds out hope that the church programs, at least, "planted seeds of social activism" (p. 192) that may yield fruit over the longer term.

As bleak as its subject matter may be, Panama's Poor is a pleasure to read. The author's political commitment, devotion to the community, and insightful remarks on her field experience strengthen its analysis. Moving back and forth adroitly [End Page 168] between macro and micro perspectives, Rudolf demonstrates that even if the experiences of these few hundred people cannot stand for all of Panama's poor, they are nonetheless broadly representative. In this respect, although Rudolf makes good use of earlier work (especially Steven Gudeman's now classic studies of peasant life in Veraguas), she would have strengthened her conclusions by comparison with Stanley Heckadon Moreno's Cuando se acaban los montes (Editorial Universitaria; Instituto de Investigaciones Tropicales Smithsonian, 1983), which deals with some of the same transformations in Los Santos Province.

In a fitting tribute to Rudolf's committed research, a Spanish-language edition of the monograph was presented to the public in the town of Coclé in July 2000 at an event attended by Panamanian social scientists and many of the inhabitants of Loma Bonita.



James Howe
Massachussetts Institute of Technology

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