La Falta de Brazos

Land and labor in the coffee economies of

nineteenth-century Latin America
WILLIAM ROSEBERRY
New School for Social Research

A persistent problem for anthropologists and historians attempting to

understand social change in rural Latin America is the placement of
local regions within wider - global and "national" - economic, social,
and political frameworks) One temptation is to subsume the local
within the global, to make the "system" - "capitalist" or "modern" determinative, as in the more extreme versions of dependency and
world-system theories that dominated the literature in the 1960s and
1970s. Another temptation is to avoid the problem altogether, to reject
any discussion of global political and economic pressures as totalizing,
reductive, or teleological. This view, increasingly popular over the past
decade, would have us reject the ''fiction of the whole"2
Although both perspectives, as extremes, can point to respectable
intellectual pedigrees and can attract the sympathetic attention of theoretically inclined scholars, the student examining substantive problems
and aspects of social change in, say, Silo Paulo or Antioquia of the
1920s must remain skeptical. Confronting the global extremists, she or
he will agree that Antioquia was dominated by a coffee economy that
had drawn the region toward the centers of world economy; yet the
very shape of that economy, its most basic social relations and contradictions, were fundamentally different from other coffee economies
that emerged at roughly the same time. Trying to understand why
Antioquia looked different, she or he will begin to explore the settlement of the relatively open frontier, the prior emergence of a gold panning movement, the accumulation of capital by urban merchants
buying up gold, and their investment of accumulated resources in land
and coffee. In short, the "global" begins to recede from view and the
"local" seems predominant. Yet it hardly seems helpful to dismiss the
whole as a "fiction?' Our student of 1920s Antioquia cannot ignore the
Theory and Society 20: 351-382, 1991.
9 1991 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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massive investment of North American finance capital during the
"dance of the millions" directed toward the construction of roads and
railroads and the acquisition of controlling shares in local banks and
exporting firms. And she or he cannot forget that the 1920s were followed by the 1930s, the general depression and the collapse of the
world coffee market. The confident assertions of the postmodern theofist, telling us that we can relegate the world-system to the background, 3 begin to lose some of their seductive appeal in the face of such
events and movements. A more careful reading of global and local
histories is necessary.
One form of sociological understanding that needs to be recovered if
we are to understand the contradictory formation of human subjects at
the conjunction of global and local histories is that sketched by E H.
Cardoso and Enzo Faletto in their call for studies of the "internalization of the external" in Latin America. Surveying the emergence of
capitalism in various Latin American countries, they argue:
The very existence of an economic "periphery" cannot be understood
without reference to the economic drive of advanced capitalist economies,
which were responsible for the formation of a capitalist periphery and for the
integration of traditional noncapitalist economies into the world market. Yet,
the expansion of capitalism in Bolivia and Venezuela, in Mexico or Peru, in
Brazil and Argentina, in spite of having been submitted to the same global
dynamic of international capitalism, did not have the same history or consequences. The differences are rooted not only in the diversity of natural
resources, nor just in the different periods in which these economies have
been incorporated into the international system (although these factors have
played some role). Their explanation must also lie in the different moments
at which sectors of local classes allied or clashed with foreign interests,
organized different forms of state, sustained distinct ideologies, or tried to
implement various policies or defined alternative strategies to cope with
imperialist challenges in diverse moments of history. 4

What we need, according to this view, is a "history of... diversity," a

sense that "the history of capital accumulation is the history of class
struggles, of political movements, of the affirmation of ideologies, and
of the establishment of forms of domination and reactions against
them.''5 A history of diversity is necessarily comparative. One way of
approaching such a comparison is to examine the various regions that
produced a particular export commodity during a particular period coffee, say, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All
such regions would be subject to certain common global pressures;
they would be experiencing the same "world historical fact "'6 Yet an
understanding of the particular forms and dynamics of social and eco-

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nomic relations in the various regions would require careful attention
to local contexts, local fields of power. This essay is directed toward
such a comparative history.

The comparative problem

The nineteenth century (that is, roughly, from 1830-1930) was the coffee century in Latin America. It was a period that witnessed a dramatic
increase in world trade (from 320 metric tons in 1770, mostly from
Asia; to 90,000 metric tons in 1820, with half coming from Brazil; to
450,000 metric tons in 1870 and 1,600,000 metric tons in 19207 ) and
per capita consumption (in the United States, from 3 pounds in 1830
to 10 pounds in 1900 and 16 pounds in 19608). And it was a period in
which coffee production was associated with a profound transformation of landscape and society in several Latin American regions. In
most cases, the expansion of coffee cultivation coincided with territorial expansion, the movement of settlers into frontier zones where
tropical forests were destroyed, "new forests ''9 of coffee and shade
planted, towns established, roads and railroads built, regional identities
forged.
It is not surprising, then, that we find some of the same processes and
themes repeated from coffee-producing region to coffee-producing
region - the incorporation of regions within an expanding world market, the establishment of outwardly focussed development strategies
with the export of a primary product the price of which fluctuates significantly but is beyond the control of local producers and exporters,
the building of roads and railroads (generally with foreign capital) to
carry the coffee from the newly settled interior to port cities, the
ambiguous question of land ownership in frontier zones and the conflicts between rural settlers and urban investors, the related legal revolutions in landed property and labor regulations, and the ubiquitous
concern for the labor problem - the "falta de brazos"
What is perhaps more surprising is the remarkable variation in social,
economic, and political structures and processes among coffeeproducing regions, the radically distinct structures of landed property
and the different resolutions of the labor problem encountered in
Brazil or Costa Rica or Colombia. We need to consider this variation
as an interpretive problem: how is it to be understood? Each of these
regions turned toward coffee at roughly the same time (that is, within a

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few important decades of each other: Brazil, Costa Rica, and Venezuela had important coffee economies by mid-century; Guatemala, El
Salvador, and Colombia turned to coffee several decades later - the
1870s, 1880s and beyond). Each was producing the same primary
product for export to the same European and North American ports
(though one might export primarily to London, another to New York,
another to Hamburg). The structure of trade (that is, the relation
between local exporters and international firms) was roughly the same
(though important differences developed in Brazil as it came to dominate the market). Each of the regions became "dependent" on a single
export commodity, suffering the same reverses and enjoying the same
booms.
Despite the commonalities in their incorporation within the world
market, however, their most basic social relations, including those
associated with labor mobilization and "the specific economic form, in
which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers "'l~
were fundamentally different. Easy assertions about the dominance of
the "latifundia-minifundia complex" are out of place, as are more complex arguments that recognize variation but subsume the variation
within a common emergence of two "large nodes of decision-making
bodies" with the incorporation of regions within the world economy one based on the "plantation" solution and the other based on the
"merchant" solution (in which merchants dominate and capture the
production of small farmers). 11 Such assertions explain away difference
rather than confronting it.
Let us, then, confront these differences in the coffee-growing regions in
Latin America. Let us place Silo Paulo next to the Central Valley of
Costa Rica or Antioquia and ask why such fundamental differences in
landed property and labor mobilization occurred and what effects
these differences might have had for the respective societies in which
they occurred. A variety of easy resolutions are closed to us. None of
the distinctions in timing or markets noted above was decisive. Nor do
we have access to a mechanical opposition between closed and open
frontiers or to different land and labor ratios. If our only contrast was
one between El Salvador and Costa Rica, such oppositions and ratios
might be convincing, but most of the regions were open frontiers, with
different results of settlement that are too important to gloss over with
grids and causal diagrams. A more considered examination of the
societies in which the frontiers were opened and settled, the social, economic, political, and cultural contexts in which coffee became an
important export crop, is necessary.

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This essay represents a preliminary examination of such contexts, the
aim of which is not to explain difference but to begin a comparative discussion. I develop the comparison with a discussion of the manner in
which coffee elites in different regions resolved one of their most pressing problems - the mobilization and reproduction of labor. Although
other aspects of the respective coffee economies (e.g., commercialization and politics) deserve detailed attention, and will be treated elsewhere, the labor problem - "la falta de brazos" - was central to each of
them, inflecting all aspects of social, economic, and cultural life. It
therefore constitutes our necessary starting point.
However much this may seem to resurrect the labelling controversies
associated with the mode of production debates, the crucial difference
in the present exercise needs to be stressed. The purpose of the present
comparison is not to outline distinct modes of production, and I do not
consider here the capitalist or non-capitalist character of the labor
regimes examined. Indeed, one of the problems with earlier labelling
exercises was that they directed our attention toward labels and away
from a consideration of wider economic, social, political, and cultural
fields of power.
It is toward such a consideration that the present study of labor regimes
in Latin American coffee economies, and the larger comparative study
of which it is a part, are directed. We might briefly outline three dimensions of the labor problem that illuminate wider social and political
relations and processes. First, in places such as Brazil, Colombia, and
Guatemala, large landholders attempting to attract laborers were not
acting in isolation. They might be competing with growers from other
regions, with urban entrepreneurs, or, in the case of immigration
schemes, with planters or entrepreneurs in other countries. This is not
to say that landholders were powerless and a free market prevailed: the
monopolization of land in some regions was the most effective means
for securing a labor force. It is to say that planters acted within particular contexts, particular sets of constraints, and that the systems they
devised to attract workers in the first place, or to assure more careful
tending of coffee trees, or to feed the working population, often created
further constraints. Structures of decision making and control could
become quite diffuse as coffee groves and food plots were let out to
tenants.
Second, labor mobilization schemes were never static. It would be
insufficient to set up a comparison in simple spatial terms with large

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estates and the colonato in Brazil, peasants and processors in Costa
Rica, haciendas in Cundinamarca, and peasants in Antioquia - the
large-estate regions being characterized by "oligarchic" domination
and the peasant regions seen as more "democratic" In each of these
regions, labor regimes changed over time. Haciendas in Cundinamarca
began to disintegrate in the 1920s and 1930s, for example, partly due
to economic problems encountered much earlier and partly due to the
increasing organization and militance of their tenants. Careful attention
to the fault lines created by hacendados' resolution of labor-mobilization problems in previous decades is essential for an understanding of
their problems in the 1920s. In the peasant regions, in turn, we need to
be sensitive to changes over time. In Costa Rica, for example, small
farmers faced increasingly difficult pressures from the middle of the
nineteenth century to 1930, as open lands closed off or as relations
with processors became more exploitative or as household heads
found it increasingly difficult to provide an inheritance for all of their
children. 12
Finally, if we think about labor mobilization in terms of contexts, constraints, and fault lines, and if we consider the way particular resolutions of the labor problem change over time, we open up a most interesting area for investigation. One of the interesting developments that
emerges in the literature on coffee in Latin America is the frequency
with which elites experiment with different strategies. The most famous
is probably the Vergueiro experiment in Brazil with immigrant sharecroppers in the mid-nineteenth century, four decades before the end of
slavery (see below)) 3 But we also find other experiments in, for example, Cundinamarca in the 1920s TM or Guatemala in the 1920s and
1930s. Indeed, careful attention to such experiments and debates can
illuminate the most profound economic, political, and cultural dilemmas confronting coffee elites. As we examine the kinds of solutions that
are attempted and the solutions that are not even considered, we are
able to sketch the limits of the possible (which include the limits of the
socially constructed mental and cultural horizons of the elites at a particular time) in various coffee-producing regions. An apparently simple
"economic" question (how was labor organized), then, need not lead to
a labelling exercise. A discourse about labor is seldom "just" about
labor. Examining one such discourse, we may begin to unpack the
sociology of racism in Guatemala or Brazil or Costa Rica; in examining
another, we may begin to understand the particular features of liberalism in, say, early twentieth-century Colombia.

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In what follows, I concentrate on Brazil, Costa Rica, and Colombia,
which represent a range of resolutions to the labor problem in nineteenth-century coffee economies. In this discussion, my aim is to develop a more detailed understanding of the dimensions of difference. I
then suggest an interpretive framework in terms of which we can develop further comparative discussions.

Land and labor in Latin America's new forests

Although the primary focus of this essay concerns land and labor
regimes and does not consider commercialization schemes in any
detail, certain basic features of the coffee trade in nineteenth-century
Latin America deserve brief consideration. For those newly independent countries with exploitable subtropical soils, coffee served as a principal point of linkage to an expanding world economy, the means by
which they could turn toward an "outwardly focussed" model of development. It could be stored for long periods with relatively little spoilage; it had a high value per kilogram, making transport costs relatively
low and making inland territories valuable in a way they could not be
for crops such as sugar; 15 and it enjoyed a growing and lucrative
acceptance in European and U.S. markets. For merchants and trading
firms from countries entering the new Latin American markets, coffee
became a focus of trade.
Throughout the nineteenth century, coffee production and marketing
followed classic free-trade patterns. Control of production was highly
dispersed, both among coffee-producing countries and among producers within countries. Although international trade was controlled
by merchant houses in London, Hamburg, and New York, there was no
significant concentration among the houses until the early twentieth
century. As concentration began to occur, it responded at once to
changing processing and marketing structures in consuming countries
and to crisis periods in producing countries, during which foreign firms
might take more direct and active roles.
Foreign coffee firms would establish credit and commercial relations
with exporters and merchants in particular Latin American countries,
loaning funds to exporters with which the exporters would acquire coffee - often by means of further loans to local producers and merchants.
The general features of such arrangements can be briefly sketched.
First, despite the close connection between European or North Amer-

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ican firms and Brazilian or Costa Rican exporters and producers, local
merchants and exporters were not subsidiaries of European or North
American firms for most of the period under discussion. Even where
the exporters were German or English expatriates, they were expatriates acting as individual entrepreneurs and adventurers, often with a
privileged and preferred relationship with a particular London or
Hamburg house, but the tie that bound them was one of credit and
shared nationality rather than ownership. Second, exporters, acting
with their own funds or with borrowed funds from abroad, were the
principal sources of credit for local producers and merchants. For most
of the period that concerns us, national or international banks were not
involved in the coffee trade. Third, with purchasing and credit arrangements linking particular international firms and exporters, producers
and merchants alike were subject to price fluctuations. Exporters
lacked the means to withhold coffee in periods of low prices. There
were no local exchanges, and states were not involved in coffee trade. It
was only with the onset of the first general overproduction crisis in the
1890s that discussions began finally resulted in Brazil's valorization
scheme of 1906. With this scheme, the first chinks in the free-trade
armor appeared? 6
Furthermore, the market was not homogeneous. In general, European
consumers have preferred the "quality" milds produced in Costa Rica,
Colombia, and Guatemala, and European markets were the principal
outlets for the milds. These export markets were cemented with longterm arrangements with particular foreign houses. Indeed, during the
free-trade period much of the quality coffee was exported not as
Colombian or Costa Rican coffee but, "like French wines, ''17 under the
mark of a particular Costa Rican processor (beneficiador) or Colombian hacienda. The United States, on the other hand, has served as a
market for the harsher, less expensive coffees, especially from Brazil,
but also as a subsidiary market early on for the other countries. As with
all generalizations, this one requires some temporal specification. In
the first place, no producing country exported to a single consuming
country. Second, during the twentieth century the U.S. market became
increasingly important throughout Latin America, especially during
the two World Wars. Nonetheless, the segmentation of the coffee market is an important feature, especially when we consider the quality end
of the scale. Given a marketing environment permeated by a discourse
of quality and a pricing system based on the grading hierarchies, this
provides an important point of control for coffee processors and merchants, especially in relation to small producers. But detailed consider-

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ation of such relations remains beyond the scope of the present essay.
We need to turn now from the structure of commerce and investment
to the transformation of landscapes and societies.
The frontier character of many of the coffee regions has often been
stressed in regional studies? 8 If the frontier has impressed historians
and social scientists, it has also impressed historical actors, both at the
moment of frontier settlement and in memory. The memory of cutting
down the forest (tumbando montes), or the image of a people forged in
settlement and transformation (for example, "the ethos of the hacha" 19
[an ax] in Antioquia) is strong.
Indeed, as we see in detail below, most of the areas converted to coffee
cultivation attracted population migration and settlement. Guatemala
and E1 Salvador serve as counterpoints in this story, in that both were
densely populated. Even in Guatemala, however, the microregions that
were to become the most dynamic production zones - the piedmont of
Amatitlan, Suchitepequez, Solola, Quezaltenango, San Marcos, and the
Alta Verapaz - contained much unused land. Only in E1 Salvador did
the coffee zone correspond with a region of relatively dense colonial
settlement, and only in El Salvador did the expansion of coffee and the
transformation of landed property that accompanied it involve a widespread displacement and expropriation.
Despite the frontier character of much of the coffee expansion, however, most of the "wildernesses" into which coffee farmers moved were
already encumbered by people, overlapping and competing claims to
land, conceptions of space, time, and justice - in short, "history" before the coffee expansion began, and these encumberances shaped
their respective coffee economies even as the regions were transformed
by the move toward coffee. In each of the regions considered in this
essay, then, we begin with a brief discussion of the occupation of space
and the transformation of landed property. With this foundation, we
can then turn to a consideration of the labor problem in various sorts
of production regimes.

Brazil. Let us first consider Brazil, which stands alone in the dimensions of its forest. The extent of territory available and suitable for coffee cultivation, first in the Paraiba Valley of Rio province in the early
and mid-nineteenth century and then into Minas Gerais and the S~o
Paulo west from the mid- to late nineteenth century, dwarfs whole
countries in Central America, not to mention the much more restricted

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zones suitable for coffee. The destructive nature of this expansion, in
which tropical forest would be cut and coffee planted, setting in morion
a 3 0 - 4 0 year boom during which the soil would be depleted, the boom
region set into decline, and then the coffee grove revert to pasture or
waste as new regions to the west were opened up, is well known. 2~ In
one respect, these interior regions were "new," "untouched," "virgin"
The declining sugar complex of the northeast was quite distant. Southern developments during the colonial period had centered around the
administrative center in Rio and gold mining in Minas GerMs in the
eighteenth century, which in turn stimulated cattle and agricultural
complexes in the coastal and more accessible areas. Colonial claims to
interior lands nonetheless emerged. During the colonial period, land
belonged to the Crown unless it had been ceded by a personal grant
(sesmaria), generally one square league (44 sqaure kilometers), in
return for services to the Crown and on condition of cultivation. With
the building of roads between Rio and the mines of Minas, sesmarias
were granted, as the discovery of gold in Mato Grosso led to trail and
road blazing and the establishment of way-stations. The lands encompassed by these grants were underurilized in the absence of commercial
opportunities, however, and they were settled by squatters who would
displace Indians (who were not protected and who were written out
very quickly, both in practice and in histories of settlement) toward the
west. Squatters might engage in subsistence agriculture or service the
way-stations along the proliferating mule tracks, but their lands
(posses), which could be quite extensive and might overlap with underexploited sesmarias, were not recognized in colonial land law. With the
westward expansion of coffee, these conflicting claims became important as grant holders or the entrepreneurs to whom grants had been
sold turned their claims into extensive plantations with vague boundaries. With independence, sesmarias were no longer granted, but both
sesmarias and posses were bought and sold in a conflictful rush to control the land. The land law of 1850 resolved the conflict in favor of
grant holders and those posseiros wealthy enough to purchase their
claim from the state. That is, colonial grants were recognized as titles
but the right of possession was not. Land could only be rifled by means
of registration, survey, and the payment of a tax. In practice, this displaced small squatters toward the west, and the expansion into the
Paraiba Valley or the western plateau of S~o Paulo was characterized
by a series of displacements: squatters displaced Indians toward the
west, only to be displaced by estate owners as roads or railroads
stretched further into the interior. 21 Nonetheless, while the land law
had the effect of displacing squatters, its desired effect of establishing a

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land registry with carefully surveyed properties was not realized.
Indeed, one of the remarkable features of the coffee economy throughout the period we consider is the resistance of large landholders to land
surveys and registries. Such resistance within the particular field of
power in which they operated allowed them to avoid taxes but also allowed them to extend the effective domain of their estates. 22
The spread of the large estate should not be treated as unproblematic,
however. No Latin American frontier of settlement was larger than the
Brazilian interior in this period. A mechanical application of a frontier
thesis might lead us to expect a more "democratic" landholding pattern
to emerge. Yet here, as elsewhere, the importance of the larger field of
power, the political, economic, and cultural context of frontier settlement, needs to be stressed. Again and again, historians point to this
context and the mental and cultural horizon it produced. Commenting
on the failure of smallholding in the vast frontier, Warren Dean notes,
"Unfortunately, the royal administrators could never entertain seriously a reform that would bring about not only the desired increase in
revenues but also what would appear to them to be a social revolution.
The only organization they could conceive for the immense colony had
to be a society precisely as aristocratic as that of the metropolis "'23 Of
the spread of slavery to the frontier, Stein observes, "Free labor as an
alternative hardly existed in the minds of the settlers,' 24
Such conceptions and minds have historical and social armatures.
While as a first approximation it might be useful to distinguish between
the sugar-growing northeast and the expanding coffee provinces of the
south, to see the one as conservative and aristocratic and the other as
more liberal, "less wedded to the past," and holding "more adaptable
economic and social views "'25 their liberalism took on a special, Brazilian character. Viotti da Costa stresses that despite a late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century fascination with Enlightenment thought,
which led to the formation of secret societies and pro-independence
conspiracies, the liberalism that dominated in Brazil by independence
was one that had been purged of its more radical social content:
In Europe, liberalism had originally been a bourgeois ideology,an instrument in the struggle against the absolute power of kings, the privilegesof the
nobility, and the feudal institutions that inhibited economic development.
But in Brazil, liberalism became the ideology of rural oligarchies, which
found in the new ideas arguments they could use against the mother country.
These men were primarly concerned with eliminating colonial institutions
that restricted the landowners and merchants - the two most powerful

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groups in colonial society. When they struggled for freedom and equality,
they were actually fighting to eliminate monopolies and privileges that benefited the mother country and to liberate themselves from commercial restrictions that forced Brazilians to buy and sell products through Portugal. Thus,
during this period, liberalism in Brazil expressed the oligarchies' desire for
independece from the impositions of the Portuguese Crown. The oligarchies,
however, were not willing to abandon their traditional control over land and
labor, nor did they want to change the traditional system of production. This
led them to purge liberalism of its most radical tendencies. 26

For both liberal and conservative planters, the monarchy became a

means for preserving an aristocratic society in the postcolonial era.
Indeed, a pact between northeastern sugar planters and the expanding
Rio elite was crucial in the ascension of Pedro II to the throne in 1840.
With this nineteenth-century monarchy, unique in Latin America, we
might understand something of the political and cultural context that
would attempt to extend into the frontier the system of production and
privilege that had served as the basis for colonial society. We can
understand the political context in which royal land grants were recognized as legitimate but not the rights of possession. We can understand
the attempt to recreate a whole society and way of life, in which both
land titles and aristocratic rank could be granted, in which a personal
empire could rest on the labor of slaves.
But the attempt to expand and reproduce such a society took place in
new contexts. In the first place, planters viewing abundant land and a
dependent labor force adopted production techniques that made for
quick profits and long-term destruction. Initial productivity depended
upon the natural fertility of the forest. Whole sections of forest would
be cut and burned, and coffee trees planted in vertical rows up hillsides, to facilitate access to the trees by slave gangs. At harvest, trees
would be stripped of cherries and leaves. In a classic and oft-repeated
description, this harvesting method (unique in Latin America) is pictured: "Each branch was encircled by thumb and forefinger, the hand
then being pulled down and outward, thus 'stripping the branch in one
swift motion' and filling the screen with leaves, dead twigs, and coffee
b e r r i e s . ''27 Such methods assured the productivity of labor but not of
land; indeed, with the erosion caused by the vertical rows, they assured
that the land would be exausted at the end of the 20-30 year cycle of
the coffee trees themselves.
Second, Brazil's new trade relationship with Britain threatened the

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slave trade, and by mid-century the trade had effectively stopped.
Thus, while the initial expansion into the Paraiba Valley had been facilitated by the easy extension of slavery, the boom of the 1850s and
1860s brought with it an increasingly costly labor force. Slave prices
doubled in the early fifties as an international trade was replaced by an
interregional trade, with Rio planters buying slaves from the declining
northeast. By the 1870s, central legislation began to limit slavery. The
Rio Branco Law of 1871 freed slave children born after passage of the
law, while the Sexagenarian Law of 1885 freed sixty-year-old slaves, e8
Behind the picture of great wealth and aristocratic privilege created by
estate agriculture and slave labor, then, lay a social reality of waste,
decay, and impending crisis. Yet one of the features that impresses the
reader of Stein's study of Vassouras in the Paraiba or Dean's study of
Rio Claro in Sio Paulo is the inability of most planters to respond to
that crisis, to envision anything other than the slavocracy that had been
the basis of their wealth and was decaying around them. Their opposition to abolition, their attempt to put it off for another generation, is
striking. Even so, other planters, especially in Silo Paulo, could foresee
the end of slavery and experimented early on with alternative forms of
labor - alternatives that could not be realized as long as slavery continued. Nicolau Vergueiro's experiment beginning in 1845 on his Silo
Paulo plantation has received considerable attention. 29 Under this system, Vergueiro financed the immigration of German and Swiss workers
who were to settle on his plantation, sharecrop an unspecified number
of coffee trees, and pay off the debt incurred by their passage. Their
compensation was to be half of the coffee yield (from which half was to
be deducted to retire the debt), a house, and a food plot. While the initial success of the experiment led to expanded immigration and sharecropping in the early 1850s, enthusiasm for the project had waned by
the late 1850s, partly due to strikes and desertions of 1856-57, and
partly due to decreased labor productivity. The central problem,
according to Stolcke, was the initial debt. The indenture required the
sharecropper to work off his debt, but the deduction for debt encouraged the sharecropper to concentrate on the food plot rather than the
coffee plot. The planter therefore had to enforce an indenture contract
in a situation in which desertion was possible, and to stimulate productivity in a situation in which control over the labor force was much
more diffuse than with slavery.
Despite the demise of the Vergueiro experiment in the 1850s and the
continued dominance of slave labor until 1888, some planters con-

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tinued to experiment with free-labor regimes.3~ They faced two problems. On the one hand, the initial debt associated with planter financing of immigration created an immediate obstacle. On the other, the
planter needed more control over the coffee production process - and
by extension over the productivity of workers - than sharecropping
allowed. The first problem was to be addressed by the transfer to the
S~o Paulo state of the entire cost of immigration; the second was
addressed with the adoption of a "mixed task and piece-rate system "'31
Together, by the 1880s, these two innovations became the distinctive
features of the colonato. Beginning in 1871, Silo Paulo began to take
over limited subsidization of European immigration for the coffee
farms. In 1886, the Sociedade Promotora da Imigracao, a private
organization under contract to the state, was formed, producing a 60page booklet promoting Silo Paulo, published in Portuguese, German,
and Italian, and opened European offices, promoting and organizing
the immigrant stream. With the fall of the Empire and the establishment of a republic in which the states had significant power and autonomy, the immigration program was taken over by S~o Paulo's Department of Agriculture.32 "From 1889 to the turn of the century," Holloway writes,
nearly three-quarters of a million more foreigners arrived in Silo Paulo, of
which 80 percent were subsidized by the government. From abolition to the
Depression nearly two and one-quarter million immigrants came in, compared to a population base in S~o Paulo in 1886 of one and one-quarter million. Some 58 percent of all immigrants in that period were subsidized by the
state. 33

The vast majority of the immigrants were Italian, although Italy prohibited further subsidized emigration to Brazil in 1902. 34 Furthermore,
the state engaged in a remarkable coordination of planter needs and
labor supply. Immigrants would be transferred from Santos to a hostel
in Silo Paulo, where the state would serve as labor contractor. While at
the hostel, the immigrant family would sign a contract to work on a
particular plantation and would then be given railroad passage from
Sgo Paulo to the interior. 35
The contracts they signed represented a unique form of labor mobilization. First, they received a fixed wage per thousand coffee trees weeded
and maintained during the year, regardless of yield. Second, harvest
labor was compensated on the basis of yield (so much per 50 liters of
cherries). Third, they received a house, and fourth, they received a food
plot. Variations might appear in regions where coffee was being plant-

365
ed, allowing colonos to plant food crops between rows of recently
planted coffee. The system preserved some of the advantages of a
sharecropping regime (some of the risk was reduced with the harvest
compensation tied to yield; costs were reduced with the provision of a
food plot) but eliminated some of sharecropping's disadvantages (the
set wage for tending a number of trees allowed more space for planter
control of the labor process).
Because of state subsidization of immigration and the elimination of
debt as a social and economic relation between planter and colono,
there was extraordinary movement of persons in the S~o Paulo West at
the close of each annual cycle. Colonos on the plantation might leave
and move farther west, especially to zones of expansion, where contracts were perceived by colonos as being more lucrative. As long as
the immigrant stream was maintained, however, the instability in terms
of personnel was of little concern for the planter. A dependable, state
subsidized and controlled mass of cheap and replaceable labor remained available, a6
Once implanted, the colonato system dominated coffee production in
Sao Paulo throughout the period that concerns us here, lasting until the
1960s. The combination of incentives to individual laborers, costreducing features, and a structure of labor discipline, proved a powerful
source of planter power in the early decades of this century. Stolcke
emphasizes, for example, that planters were able to weather increasingly frequent periods of low prices because the provision of food plots
allowed planters to reduce wages and compensate for decreased
prices, a7 Nonetheless, we need to look to the fault lines in any labor
regime. A labor regime that provides flexibility in response to one set
of pressures may create obstacles in others. The planters' dependence
on an ever-flowing immigrant stream was one such obstacle. Another
lay in the attraction of contracts in zones of expansion, providing a
built-in incentive to increase production as planters entered decades
of overproduction. Thus, while the combination of food and coffee
production provided planters with flexibility during low-price periods,
the incentives built into the colonato could exacerbate the overproduction problem, making price troughs more frequent and severe.
Costa Rica also moved toward coffee cultivation early in the nineteenth
century, but the occupation of space and titling of land differed
markedly from the Brazilian example, a8 In the first place, the land suitable for coffee is restricted, concentrated in the Central Valley from

366
Alajuela in the west to Ujarrfis in the southeast. Throughout the colonial period, Costa Rica was a periphery of a periphery. Part of the
Audienca of Guatemala, most of Costa Rican territory lay beyond the
area of dense Mesoamerican indigenous settlement, and the Spaniards
who settled in the frontier colonial outposts found little in the way of
exploitable resources or population. At the end of the colonial period,
40,000 out of a total population of about 50,000 lived in the Central
Valley. The most important colonial commercial crop, cacao, had not
been grown there but on the Atlantic Coast, and the bulk of the Valley's
population lived in towns such as San Jos6, Heredia, and Cartago and
villages, practicing a "village economy.''39
With independence came a search for a viable commercial crop. In
1821 the municipality of San Jos6 distributed coffee plants among
indigents and conceded land to anyone who would plant and fence coffee groves. In 1831 the national assembly declared that anyone who
planted coffee in national lands (terrenos baldios) for five years would
be granted title to the land. n~ This was the first of a series of relatively
open and generous (though not always conflict-free) legal instruments
granting national lands to settlers who would cultivate them. 41 It also
led to the early establishment of a land registry and survey, through
which small holders could protect and defend their holdings.
The expansion of coffee cultivation in the Central Valley can be distinguished among three regions: 42 (1) the nucleus around San Jos6 and
Heredia and surrounding villages, which was the first to move toward
coffee, which had the most fertile lands for coffee cultivation, and
which was the most densely settled center of coffee production and
commercialization; (2) the Alajuela/San Ram6n region to the west,
along and near the road from San Jos6 to Puntarenas, toward which
migrants from San Jos6/Heredia began to move from the 1840s but
especially during the last half of the century, practicing a mixed coffee/
sugar cane/cattle and other crops regime; 43 and (3) the Reventaz6n
and Tundalba Valleys to the east, which did not develop coffee farms
until the completion of the Limon railway, which passed through the
Valleys. Unlike the other regions, Turrialba did not attract peasant
migration and settlement but was characterized by large coffee, sugar
cane, and banana farms. Unlike the development of coffee in other
countries, regional expansion in Costa Rica was not accompanied by
the decline of earlier centers of production. The San Jos6/Heredia
nucleus remained the center of coffee production and commercialization even as new regions were opened up.

367
The expansion of coffee cultivation in Costa Rica's Central Valley
occurred within a social, political, and cultural context that represents a
stark contrast to the Brazilian example. Colonial society had produced
a town and village aristocracy who were not far removed, in social and
economic terms, from the rest of the population. Slavery was virtually
nonexistent (no more than 200 slaves at any point during the colonial
era) and was outlawed in 1 8 2 4 . 44 Nor were other forms of servile labor
widespread. As Gudmundson notes:
Political and religious office went hand in hand with the generation and preservation of wealth, just as in other, more dynamic Spanish colonial societies.
Ownership of land was not the surest or quickest road to enrichment in this
society, however much it may have been both a form of security and a necessary element in securing elite status and acceptance. Unlike other Central
American societies, landownership in central Costa Rica (excluding Guanacaste) did not bring with it a servile labor force, a fact that meant that there
was even less interest in landholding among the elite .... [lln Costa Rica landownership was not the distinguishing feature of the elite; instead it was a
combination of commerce, office holding, and diverse investments in urban
and rural real estate. 45

Many authors have painted a picture of a widespread rural, peasant

population fanning subsistence crops. 46 For these authors, the dispersed peasantry serves as a starting point for their analysis of developments during the coffee era, a minority view arguing that coffee led to
an accumulation of landholdings and a proletarianization of the peasantry and a majority view arguing that the widespread peasantry served
as the social basis for smallholding commercial production with the
expansion of coffee cultivation. 47 On both sides, we encounter silences.
In Seligson's case, for example, the analysis seems to follow from a
theoretical model of the effects of commercial agriculture, along with a
presentist reading of nineteenth-century census categories like
jornalero. In Hall's case, her most vigorous argument against land concentration and proletarianization stresses the contrast with Brazil.
Unlike the huge landholdings in Brazil, that is, large coffee farms in the
Central Valley were relatively small - 60 manzanas on average, with
60,000 trees. By the 1930s, these farms held perhaps 25 percent of the
coffee land in the San Jos&Heredia nucleus. 48 While this does represent a stark contrast with Brazil, once the contrast has been made the
Costa Rican estate needs to be placed in a Costa Rican context. A
60,000 tree farm is not a peasant farm and cannot be worked with
family labor. We need to move beyond the contrast, then, and explore a
specifically Costa Rican field of power.

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This is an area where Gudmundson's model of a colonial village economy and the ruralization of the peasantry with the expansion of coffee
cultivation is especially suggestive. It is a model that helps us better to
understand those nineteenth-century social processes that historians
have delineated: the privatization of baldfos, the move from subsistence
production to commercial crops, a specific migration pattern in which
a particular region would be occupied and then the sons and daughters
of a subsequent generation would be faced with the choice of divided
and reduced holdings, occasional or permanent labor on nearby
estates, or migration to the western frontier of the Central Valley. The
property-holding commercial peasantry represented an obstacle to
land concentration. The expanding estate owner had to purchase small
properties and could not depend on generous land grants or the sale of
extensive bald/os or a structural space created by vague titles and nonexistent registries and surveys.
While this landholding peasantry represents a significant contrast with
other Latin American experiences, it should not be romanticized. With
the passing of generations and the increasing shortage of land, smallholders were to be divided by growing inequalities. 49 Further, the
requirements of processing and marketing their coffee placed them in
direct contact with coffee processors (beneficiadores), who were to
become the coffee elite of Costa Pica. Indeed, as Hall notes, the largeestate holders of the San Jos6/Heredia nucleus were beneficiadores.
An examination of this commercial infrastructure lies beyond the
scope of this essay.5~For now it needs to be noted that the Costa Rican
field of power is inconceivable without it. As in the colonial period,
landholding was not the primary route to power. Both the accumulation of land and access to labor depended on one's position within and
access to accumulated commercial wealth. As Gudmundson concludes:
Coffee fundamentally transformed a colonial r e # m e and village economy
built on direct extraction by a city-based elite from a peasantry that was as
yet privatized to only a small degree. The replacement of this direct extraction by more subtle and productive market-mediated mechanisms created a
qualitatively new, antagonistic relationship between the coffee elite of
processors-exporters and the thoroughly mercantile, landholding peasantry.
The road to agrarian capitalism in Costa Rica followed along these lines,
rather than those of an estate model based on the rapid proletarianization of
a formerly self-sufficient and self-determined peasantry. 5~

369
Yet the elite's immobility in confronting the labor problem needs to be
emphasized. Given the situation of the large estate within a peasant
milieu, estate owners attracted permanent and seasonal laborers with
relatively high wages. The Costa Rican peon, as Cardoso stresses, "was
basically an employee, a wage labourer and not a 'serf.'''52 Yet they
were unable to mount any sustained effort to attract additional laborers
to Costa Rica. On the one hand, this represents their more modest
resources in a world in which other countries - Brazil and Argentina had begun massive subsidized immigration schemes, not to mention
the North American zones of attraction for Italian migrants during the
same period. On another, it represents the limits of their own mental
and cultural horizons. The 1862 colonization law specifically forbade
settlement by blacks and Chinese, and Tomas Guardia rejected Chinese workers in 1875, claiming they were "gamblers, thieves, and
opium smokers? '53 Moreover, even when contracts were signed for the
construction of a railway to the Atlantic Coast, the Costa Rican
government stipulated that the West Indian laborers brought in to work
on the railway were not to enter the Central Valley. 54

Colombia. The expansion of coffee production in Colombia began

much later than in Brazil and Costa Rica. Three branches of the Andes
divide the country into regions that, in the nineteenth century, were isolated from each other and far removed from ports that could be
reached via the river systems of the Magdalena and the Cauca. At the
close of the colonial period, the bulk of the population lived in the
highlands, which had also been the site of indigenous settlement.
Around highland towns and cities, haciendas developed alongside and
often at the expense of indigenous reserves (resguardos). But the
haciendas and resguardos provisioned regional, urban markets. Topography and demography combined to hinder the development of an
export economy and promote the development of relatively isolated
regional economies. Just as a "national" market or export economy was
weakly developed, the central government was quite weak. Local
hacendados held power in particular regions, and though struggles
between liberals and conservatives concerned control of the central
government, they also, and often more importantly, concerned control
of local governments, their public offices and records, and their legislative power.
This is not to say that there were no exports at all, or that the new merchants and free tradists in cities such as Bogotfi did not organize projects and attempt to establish closer ties with world markets. Gold

370
mining in Antioquia was an important export activity and source of
capital, and the mid-nineteenth-century tobacco boom in the Magdalena valley, while short-lived, showed some of the possibilities of the
sub-tropical lowlands and slopes. But it was only with the move toward
coffee production, which began in earnest after 1870, that firm links
with world markets were established. With the move toward coffee, the
regional structuration of Colombian topography, demography, and
economy was important. The development of the coffee economy followed three cycles, each of which was concentrated in a particular
region. Each region, in turn, began its coffee cycle with a different colonial legacy in terms of prevailing social relations and the occupation of
space.
Santander, in the northeast, near the Venezuelan border, was the first
Colombian region to turn toward coffee, after 1850. A region of colonial settlement, hacendados were able to turn to coffee as their tobacco, cotton, or cacao markets collapsed. As the first region to turn to
coffee, Santander was to dominate Colombian production throughout
its first coffee cycle, accounting for some 60 percent of Colombian production at the end of the nineteenth century. 55 An important percentage of its coffee was exported via the developing Venezuelan port at
Maracaibo, as coffee production was expanding in the Venezuelan
Andes at roughly the same time. By the turn of the century, Santanderean production was beginning to level off, and the region accounted for
an decreasing percentage of production in this century (only 8.9 percent by 1943). 56 Although the move to coffee involved changes in
structures of production and landed property, with an accumulation of
large properties aided by regional liberal/conservative wars (during
which victorious forces would destroy local land registries57), it did not
depend on or attract strong population movement.
In Cundinamarca and Tolima, however, the expansion of coffee after
1870 took place along mountain slopes and on lands that had not been
important during the colonial and early post-colonial period. Although
there were important towns that were to become centers of the coffee
trade, the coffee expansion also opened up new lands. The new lands,
however, were encumbered by claims. From the late eighteenth century,
lands in the temperate slopes were claimed in large latifundia. 5s The
expansion toward coffee involved the investment by Bogotfi and
Medellin 59 merchants, a "new class ''6~ looking for investments in
export agriculture and buying and dividing larger latifundia or buying
public lands to establish coffee haciendas. 61 It also involved the move-

371
ment of indigenous and mestizo peasants from the Sabana de Bogotfi
and the highlands of Boyac~i, who settled as renters on the emerging
haciendas. Although the Cundinamarca/Tolima coffee zone of the
western slopes of the eastern Cordillera was an important coffee zone
in that it served as the base for an oligarchic elite that lived in Bogot~i
and accumulated properties in the Cundinamarca/Tolima slopes, it was
never the most important producing region in terms of volume of production. By the time Santander entered into a prolonged decline, the
western, Antioquefio expansion was firmly established, and the Antioquia/Caldas coffee zone dominated Colombian production.
This western zone has been the subject of a powerful myth - the Antioquefio colonization, the establishment of a settler society as colonists
moved into the sub-tropical frontier, carved out farms, and established
towns and small-scale enterprises, with a "democratizing" effect on
Antioquefio and Colombian society. More recent studies have emphasized the less idyllic aspects of this process, the appropriation of large
tracts of land by a few, the exploitation of small producers by urban
merchants, the violent conflicts over land and resources as public lands
were privatized. 62
Unlike the Santanders or Cundinamarca/Tolima the area of western
colonization contained a good deal of unclaimed public lands (baldios)
at the close of the colonial period. The predominant economic activity
was gold mining, which was not characterized by the servile labor relations predominant in other regions. Most of the gold had been mined
by mazamorreros, descendents of slaves and mestizos who had left
other regions and worked independently by mining gold along western
rivers and streams, selling their gold to urban merchants in Medellin.
At the beginning of the Antioquefio colonization, then, the gold economy provided a social base for independent settlement and activity (the
mazamorreros) and a source of capital accumulation allowing urban
merchants to invest in new enterprises. 63
The settlement of baldios in the nineteenth century fell into two broad
periods. During the first, from independence to the 1870s, public lands
were sold as a source of revenue for a weak central government and
without regard to the occupation of land by settlers, setting up the basis
for the same kind of conflict that occurred in Brazil. During this period,
colonization took a "collective" character, in which a whole settlement
would be granted title, including house and farm plots. In this form,
baldfos might be ceded by the state of Antioquia, or colonists would

372
settle uncultivated forest land held in colonial land title (tierras
realengas), or merchants would organize settlement projects and obtain
title, ceding some land to settlers but maintaining the bulk of the land
for cattle haciendas. Thus a mixture of large and small holding resulted,
with large cattle haciendas occupying the lowlands and small farms on
the forested mountainsides. In contrast with Brazil, the passage of laws
61 of 1874 and 48 of 1882 placed limits on the size of holdings that
could be titled from public lands and, more importantly, recognized the
rights of prior settlement and possession. In practice, this did not
represent a transfer of power from large landholders to small, and statistical analyses of public-land sales and grants show a continued predominance of large holdings. But it created a legal terrain on which
settlers could struggle, and through which they could oppose the
appropriation of their f a r m s . 64
The laws of 1874 and 1882 were especially important as the lands held
by settlers increased in value with the expansion of coffee production
in the west from 1890s forward. Before this period, Medellin merchants interested in coffee invested in haciendas in the Cundinamarca/
Tolima region, especially around Sasaima. 65 The first Antioquefio coffee farms were established on large haciendas near MedeUin (Fredonia)
in the 1880s. Further expansion in the 1890s and 1900s occurred in
the areas of small-scale settlement, on the mountain slopes to the
south. By 1913, Antioquia and Caldas had displaced the Santanders as
the most important producing region, creating the basis for a prodigious twentieth-century e x p a n s i o n . 66
Within and among the three Colombian regions that dominated
Colombian coffee production, we find land and labor regimes that
approach the Brazilian and Costa Rican extremes and that cover a
range of intermediate forms and relations. A rough survey of the three
regions can be quickly s k e t c h e d . 67 In Santander in its period of expansion and establishment (1840-1900), a form of sharecropping
(aparceria) predominated in which a tenant would be given a house,
food plot, and coffee plot in return for a third to a half of the coffee
produced and a smaller portion of the food plot's yield. Arango suggests that this system emerged after an early use of wage labor and was
a response to labor scarcity and the need to fix labor on the l a n d . 68
This, in turn, supports Palacios' contention that Santanderean sharecropping was not associated with servile social relations. In this view,
sharecropping represented a short-term economic contract that
implied neither a long-term relationship with the land nor a servile

373
relationship with an absentee o w n e r . 69 If outside labor was necessary
for the harvest, it was employed by the sharecropper.
In Cundinamarca, a form of labor rent (arrendamiento) emerged
during its period of expansion and establishment (1875-1900). The
large haciendas on the western slopes of the eastern cordillera were
owned by Bogotfi merchants who hired resident administrators.
Because the subtropical slopes had been relatively open at the beginning of the coffee cycle, the haciendas depended on the migration of
highland Indians and mestizos from Boyacfi and Cundinamarca who
would settle on hacienda lands and be given a house and access to land
for food and livestock production. In return, they would be expected
to provide a contracted number of days per month on the hacienda's
coffee plot. While this was the most servile of the labor relations to
emerge in Colombia, arrendatarios were in privileged positions in relation to others such as the casual laborers (voluntarios) hired from the
region or from highland Cundinamarca and Boyacfi for the harvest.
Long-term rental arrangements on haciendas gave the arrendatarios
access to a livelihood; their access to land for corn, beans, sugar, and
livestock production created a space for an alternative commercial
economy within the hacienda and with neighboring towns, of which
some arrendatarios were able to take advantage, hiring voluntarios to
do their obligatory work on the hacienda. TM
In Antioquia during the initial expansion (1885-1905), large haciendas
near Medellin and Fredonia used an intermediate system of agregados,
in which the house alloted to the worker was separate from the land to
be worked, minimizing the possibility that the agregado could develop
an alternative agricultural economy within the hacienda. 7~ With the
spread of coffee cultivation to the south, however, small-scale commercial peasant production was widespread, and a structure of production
and commercialization similar to that of Costa Rica's Central Valley
emerged.
Although it is useful to make an initial distinction between a structure
of production dominated by a commercial peasantry in the Antioquefio west and one dominated by haciendas and dependent tenants in
the east, such an opposition needs to be modified by more careful
attention to spatial variation (the existence of small-scale production in
regions dominated by haciendas, and of haciendas in regions dominated by peasants) and to temporal development. Palacios suggests that
the development of coffee production in Colombia can be divided into

374
three broad periods: the hacienda phase (1870-1910), the peasant
phase (1910-1950), and the empresarial phase (small-scale commercial farms, with much greater capital inputs for new strains, fertilizers,
and labor, 1960 to present). 72 On the one hand, the "peasant phase" of
the early twentieth century represents the growing importance of
Antioquia and the southward expansion of settlement and coffee production. Yet it also reflects the fragmentation of hacienda holdings in
the center.
To understand the dynamics of this fragmentation, Palacios' emphasis
on the peasant character of Colombian coffee production on haciendas
is especially helpful. He begins by stressing the frontier character of the
Cundinamarca coffee zone, the implantation of a hacienda regime that
involved the investment of commercial capital from Bogotfi and the
immigration of highland peasants from Boyacfi. But he suggests that it
was "an entire peasant structure" that migrated, meaning that servile
relations from the highlands were successfully implanted in the early
decades but also that household-based production was installed at the
very center of the hacienda regime.73
This was to be increasingly important as arrendatarios established
commercial production in their food plots and pastures, and as hacendados needed to renovate their coffee plots. Hacienda administrators
complained about the difficulty of enforcing labor obligations. That is,
the manner in which hacendados resolved their labor problem created
the structural space for an alternative economy within the hacienda,
which was increasingly important at the close of the initial expansion
phase. By the 1920s, the crisis on central haciendas was acute, as peasant movements began to organize, first against the arrendatarios and
then in combination with the arrendatarios against the hacendados.
One response of hacendados was to divide and sell off their estates to
peasants and outsiders, a long process that continued through and
beyond the depression. With this, the "cellular structure" that characterized the organization of production within haciendas became the
basis for a new structure of landed property, and small-scale property
and production became central in the two most important production
zones of the country.TM As in Costa Rica, this peasantry should not be
romanticized: the exploitative relationship between merchant processors and small producers was crucial. But the importance of the peasantry, both within the hacienda regime and in that regime's collapse,
should not be forgotten. 75

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Fields of power: Toward an interpretive framework

This essay began with a paradox - the common transformation of Latin

America's coffee republics in the late nineteenth century and the radically distinct experience that transformation engendered. After a brief
exploration of one dimension of those distinct experiences, we need
now to ask why these different forms and relations emerged. My
answer, which cannot satisfy those who prefer their explanations to be
more precise and "economical" is that understanding can only be
sought in the comparative discussion itself. "The determinate 'cause' of
such changes" writes Sidney Mintz concerning another problem, "is a
context, or a set of situations, created by broad economic f o r c e s . ''76 In
this case, I have tried to sketch radically different social contexts into
which these broad economic forces were inserted, and I wish now to
suggest that these different contexts "determined" the different directions the coffee economies took.
However much this may look like an argument that the coffee economies were different because they were different, the historical and
anthropological understanding that informs it is more complex and
requires elaboration. I have referred at various points in this essay to
specific Paulista or Costa Rican fields of power. I need now to make my
meaning more explicit. Despite the profilerating use of "power" as a
concept in recent literature, my most direct source for the phrase is
Eric Wolf's Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. 77 Characteristically,
he defines what he means by practice rather than explicit precept. The
phrase appears most prominently in his conclusion that, "Ultimately,
the decisive factor in making a peasant rebellion possible lies in the
relation of the peasantry to the field of power which surrounds it.''78
While he goes on to use a definition of power offered by Richard
Adams, his understanding of the field of power is less susceptible to
codification. It clearly refers to the class structure of which the peasants
are a part - the landlords, merchants, state officials, capitalist planters,
and others who press claims upon or otherwise threaten peasant livelihoods. But his understanding of the class structure is one that is less
dependent on a ready set of sociological categories than on detailed
anthropological and historical investigation. Earlier, Wolf observed that
the anthropologist is greatly aware of the importance of groups which mediate between the peasant and larger society of which he forms a part. The
landlord, the merchant, the political boss, the priest stand at the junctures in
social, economic, and political relations that connect the village to wider-

376
ranging elites in markets or political networks. In his study of peasant villages
he has learned to recognize their crucial role in peasant life, and he is persuaded that they must play a significant role in peasant involvement in political upheaval. To describe such groups, and to locate them in the social field
in which they must maneuver, it is useful to speak of them as "classes"
Classes are for me quite real clusters of people whose development or decline is predicated on particular historical circumstances, and who act together or against each other in pursuit of particular interests prompted by
these circumstances. In this perspective, we may ask - in quite concrete
terms - how members of such classes make contact with the peasantry. In
our accounts, therefore, we must transcend the usual anthropological
account of peasants, and seek information also about the larger society and
its constituent class groupings, for the peasant acts in an arena which also
contains allies as well as enemies. This arena is characteristically a field of
political battle. TM
T h e r e is m u c h in this statement that bears the marks of the period, over
twenty years ago, in which it was written; there is also m u c h in it that is
extraordinarily refreshing in the context of theoretical preoccupations
that have dominated the literature in the subsequent twenty years.
W h a t Wolf was marking out was less a confining set of concepts and
hypotheses and m o r e a historical and anthropological attitude, which
he then t o o k to his six case studies of peasant rebellion. It is in these
case studies that we find, in practice, Wolf's concept of a field of power.
In his study of the Mexican Revolution, for example, he begins with the
formation of indigenous peasant communities during the colonial
period, their relations to haciendas, cities, and the colonial state; the
W a r of I n d e p e n d e n c e and the social and political transformations of
the nineteenth century (the liberal reforms and the expansion of
haciendas, especially u n d e r the Diaz regime); the development of
mining and industry in the north. It was only in this context that he analyzed the various locally focussed Mexican Revolutions and s o m e of
the initial consequences for regional peasantries of the new Mexico
that emerged. In each of the case studies, an attempt is m a d e to understand the f o r m a t i o n of a particular peasantry in terms of its internal
relations, forms of landholding and community, its relations with
hacendados, merchants, the Church, representatives of the state, etc.,
and to examine how this complex of relations changes with, say, the
passage of new land laws in Mexico, the end of one colonialism or the
introduction of another, the imposition of a head tax or the developm e n t of rice plantations in Vietnam. Although he does not use the language, each of the case studies can be seen as an attempt to capture the
conjunction of local and global histories, or to explore the internalization of the external.

377
Although it might have seemed to some reviewers that Wolf's case
studies are "too complex and vague" and that he writes the "least theoretically" of the authors who examined peasant rebellions in the 1960s
and 70s, 8~ it should be apparent that his approach to fields of power is
actually well informed by theory. Likewise, the examination of coffee
economies in this essay comes out of a certain theoretical understanding, one that organizes our account of the different social and cultural
contexts in which coffee economies developed in a certain way. To each
of the regions considered, I take a set of questions that fit comfortably
within a historical materialist framework: the occupation of space and
the transformation of landed property, the mobilization and reproduction of labor, and (in a discussion to be presented elsewhere) the organization and capitalization of markets, and the political and ideological
processes associated with state formation and the emergence of
hegemonic blocs.
In addressing these questions, I have tried to avoid the temptation of
filling structural boxes, by locating within each theme real problems that
confronted historical actors - obtaining title to land, or resisting a land
survey, recruiting a labor force by experimenting with various forms of
compensation, pressing the state to pay for the transport of one's laborers, or agitating for market control in a depression and finding that the
control scheme results in greater foreign domination. It is through
attention to these problems, their varying local solutions, and the problems created by those solutions that we can sketch the structure of class
relations in Silo Paulo or Antioquia in a way that pays attention to the
action of human subjects and to the contradictory forms and results of
such actions.

Notes
1. This article presents a portion of the summary and argument contained in my introduction for a forthcoming volume on "Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin America," edited by William Roseberry and Lowell Gudmundson. While the present
essay concentrates on questions of land and labor, the longer introduction explores
these questions in a wider range of countries and also treats questions of coffee
processing, commercialization and trade, as well as class formation and politics, all
of which are necessary for the comparative interpretation suggested here. The
introduction, in turn, depends upon and was inspired by the essays by Michael
Jimenez, Lowell Gudmundson, Mario Samper, Hector P6rez, Marco Palacios, Fernando Pic6, David McCreery, Verena Stolcke, and Mauricio Font gathered in the
volume. The conference that led to the volume was generously funded by the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the Social Science Research Council, with
funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

378
2. G. Marcus, "Imagining the Whole," Critique of Anthropology, 9 (3, 1989), 7.
3. G. Marcus, "Contemporary Problems of Ethnography in the Modern World System," in J. Clifford and G. Marcus, editors, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics
of Ethnography (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986), 165-193.
4. F.H. Cardoso and E. Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America
(Berkeley, University of California Press, 1979), xvii.
5. Ibid., xvii, xviii.
6. K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology (New York, International, 1970
l18461), 55-58.
7. J. de Graaf, The Economics of Coffee (Wageningen, Netherlands, Centre for Agricultural Publishing and Documentation, 1986), 26.
8. U.S. Department of Commerce, Business and Defense Services Administration,
Coffee Consumption in the United States, 1920-1965 (Washington, D.C., 1961), 5.
9. M. Palacios, E1 Card en Colombia, 1850-1970, 2nd ed. (Mexico City, El Colegio de
M6xico, 1983), 178.
10. K. Marx, Capital, vol. 3. (New York, International, 1967 [1984]), 791.
11. I. Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of
the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840 (San Diego, Academic Press, 1989),
152-153.
12. See L. Gudmundson, "Peasant, Farmer, Proletarian: Class Formation in a Smallholder Coffee Economy, 1850-1950," Hispanic American Historical Review, 69
(2, 1989), 221-258; M. Samper, "Enfrentamiento y Conciliaci6n: Comentarios a
Prop6sito de las Relaciones entre Productores y Beneficiadores de Caf6," Revista
de Historia, Ntimero Especial (1985), 207-212.
13. S. Stein, Vassouras, A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850--1900: The Role of Planter and
Slave in a Plantation Society, 2nd ed. (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1985);
W. Dean, Rio Claro:A Brazilian Plantation System, 1820-1920 (Stanford, Stanford
University Press, 1976); T. HoUoway, Immigrants on the Land: Coffee and Society
in S~o Paulo, 1886-1934 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980);
V. Stolcke, Coffee Planters, Workers, and Wives: Class Conflict and Gender Relations on $5o Paulo Plantations, 1850-1980 (New York: St. Martin's, 1988).
14. A. Machado uses articles written by hacendados outlining the benefits of new
forms of tenancy that they had recently adopted. Machado uses the articles as evidence of particular forms of sharecropping, but they are also interesting as elite discourses, as planters simultaneously trying to present themselves to each other in a
particular way and trying (publicly) to resolve increasingly intractable problems as
their tenants left the farms and worked on public works projects. (A. Machado, El
Cafd: De la Aparceria al Capitalismo, [Bogotfi, Punta de Lanza, 1977] 179-199.)
15. See L. Bergad, Coffee and the Growth of Agrarian Capitalism in Nineteenth Century
Puerto Rico (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1982), 38.
16. With the depression of the 1930s and the closure of the European market in World
War II, the United States and 14 producing countries signed the International Coffee Agreement of 1940, setting export quotas for the various countries. The agreement was the first of a series of international control schemes that stabilized the
market and facilitated a dramatic post-war price increase. It also corresponded
with (indeed required) the formation of national coffee-marketing boards, marking
the effective end of the free-trade model of coffee marketing. Some of these boards
had been formed earlier, during the depression, or, in Brazil, to administer the
valorization schemes.
17. M. Arango, Caf~ e lndustria, 1850-1930 (Bogot~i, Carlos Valencia Editores, 1977),

379

18.

19.
20.
21.

22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.

30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.

39.
40.
41.

184. The analogy, while suggestive, is inexact. Coffee is subject to a grading system,
at first developed by traders in consuming countries and in recent decades developed by marketing boards in producing countries as well. It has never been associated with the sort of politically and commercially charged designation of lands
that produce grapes that can be processed into wines with certain appellations, and
within appellations, designation of grapes and the lands that produce them into
grand, premier, and lesser crus, nor can it be. That a discourse of quality can give to
a coffee processor a control analogous to that exercised by, say, a wine negociant is,
nonetheless, an interesting possibility.
Stein, Vassouras, 3; Dean, Rio Claro, 1-23; C. Hall, El Caf~ y el Desarrollo
Hist6rico-Geogrdfico de Costa Rica (San Jos~, Editorial Costa Rica, 1976); Palacios, El Caf~ en Colombia, passim; D. A. Rangel, Capital y Desarrollo: La Venezuela Agraria (Caracas: Universidad Central, 1969); W. Roseberry, Coffee and
Capitalism in the Venezuelan Andes (Austin, University of Texas Press, 1983),
passim.
Palacios, El Caf~ en Colombia, 294.
The classic account for Rio is Stein, Vassouras.
An excellent general treatment of land policy is in E. Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian
Empire: Myths and Histories (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985), 78-93.
For treatments of the conflicts between squatters and grantholders in Rio and S~to
Paulo, see Stein, Vassouras, 10-17; Dean, Rio Claro, 11-20; HoUoway, Immigrants
on the Land, 112-114.
See Holloway, Immigrants on the Land, 113, 120-121.
Dean, Rio Claro, 13.
Stein, Vassouras, 55.
B. Bums, A History of Brazil, 2nd ed, (New York, Columbia University Press,
1980), 189.
Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire, 7.
Stein, Vassouras, 35.
Stein, Vassouras, 65-67.
Dean, Rio Claro, 89-123; Holloway, Immigrants on the Land, 70-72; Stolcke,
Coffee Planters, Workers, and Wives, 1-9; Viotti da Costa, Brazilian Empire, 94124.
Stolcke, Coffee Planters, Workers, and Wives, 9-16.
Ibid., 17.
Holloway, Immigrants on the Land, 35-40.
Ibid., 41.
Other important nationalities of immigrants were Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese. See ibid., 42-43.
Ibid., 50-61.
This summary has depended on descriptions in Stolcke, Coffee Planters, Workers,
and Wives;Holloway, Immigrants on the Land, and Dean, Rio Claro.
Stolcke, Coffee Planters, Workers, and Wives, 28-34.
The best analysis of the occupation of space in Costa Rica is Hall, El Ca# y el
Desarrollo Hist6rico-Geogr6fico. See as well idem, Costa Rica: A Geographical
Interpretation in Historical Perspective (Boulder, Westview Press, 1985).
L. Gudmundson, Costa Rica before Coffee: Society and Economy on the Eve of the
Export Boom (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1986).
Hall, El Caf~y el Desarrollo Hist6rico-Geogrtifico, 35-37.
J.A. Salas Viquez, "La Bdsqueda de Soluciones al Problema de la Escasez de

380

42.
43.

44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.

51.
52.

53.
54.

55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.

63.

Tierra en la Frontera Agr/cola: Aproximaci6n al Estudio del Reformismo Agrario

en Costa Rica, 1880-1940." Revista de Historia, Nfimero Especial (1985), 97160.
Hall, El Card y el Desarrollo Hist6rico-Geogrdfico, 72-101.
See as well M. Samper Kutschbach, "La Especializaci6n Mercantil Campesina en el
Noroeste del Valle Central: 1850-1900. Elementos Microanaliticos para un
Modelo." Revista de Historia Ntimero Especial (1985), 49-98.
M. Seligson, Peasants in Costa Rica (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press,
1980), 8.
Gudmundson, Costa Rica before Coffee, 57.
M. Seligson, Peasants in Costa Rica; E. Fonseca, Costa Rica Colonial (San JosE,
EDUCA, 1983); C. Hall, El Cafd y el Desarrollo HistErico-Geogrdfico.
For the first view, see Seligson, Peasants in Costa Rica; for the second, see Hall, El
Caf~ y el Desarrollo HistErico-Geogrdfico.
Hall, El Caf~ y el Desarrollo Hist6rico-GeogrEfico, 85-87.
L. Gudmundson, "Peasant, farmer, proletarian."
See the Introduction, cited in note 1, as well as Hall, El Caf~ y el Desarrollo Hist6rico-Geogr(~fico, 47-49; G. Peters Solorzano, "La formaci6n territorial de las
grandes fincas de car6 en la Meseta Central: Estudio de la firma Tournon (18771955)/' Revista de Historia (9-10, 1980), 81-167; V. H. Acufia Ortega, "Clases
sociales y conflicto social en la econom/a cafetalera costarricense: productores contra beneficiadores: 1932-1936." Revista de Historia (Nfimero especial, 1985),
181-212.
Gudmundson, Costa Rica Before Coffee, 152.
C. F. S. Cardoso, "The formation of the coffee estate in nineteenth-century Costa
Rica," in Land and Labor in Latin America, ed. K. Duncan and I. Rutledge, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977), 194.
Hall, El CafOy el Desarrollo Hist6rico-Geogrtifico, 57.
Ibid. All the more interesting, then, the famous mural depicting Costa Rican economy and society in San JosE's National Theater. The romanticized picture of coffee
and banana workers shows them all to be white - an obvious misrepresentation of
the banana zone, an accurate representation of an elite's self-image.
Palacios, El Card en Colombia, 73.
Machado, El Caf~, 117; Palacios, El Caf~ en Colombia, 70-73.
Arango, Caf~ e Indastria, 47.
Palacios, El CafOen Colombia, 169.
On Medellin merchants in the early Cundinamarca coffee economy, see Arango,
Card e Industria.
Palacios, El Caf~ en Colombia, 78-79.
Ibid., 131-169.
The classic study of Antioquefio colonization is J. J. Parsons, The Antique~o Colonization in Western Colombia, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, University of California Press,
1968). Recent reconsiderations include M. Palacios, El Caf~ en Colombia, 293340; M. Arango, Caf~ e Industria, 68-87. C. LeGrand's Frontier Expansion and
Peasant Protest in Colombia, 1850-1936 (Albuquerque, University Of New Mexico
Press, 1986) is not limited to Antioquia but offers an innovative study of the appropriation of and conflict over public lands (baldios) in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Colombia.
Machado, El Caf~, 17-32; C. Bergquist, Labor in Latin America (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1986), 287-290.

381
64. This entire discussion depends on LeGrand, Frontier Expansion, 10-18. See as
well Arango, Caf~ e lndustria, 68-87.
65. Arango, Caf~ e Industria.
66. Machado, El Ca#, 117.
67. Sources for this comparison include Palacios, El Caf~ en Colombia, 187-234;
Arango, Caf~ e Industria, 130-151; Machado, El Cafd, 33-85; Bergquist, Labor in
Latin America, 313-330.
68. Arango, Caf~ e Industria, 149-151.
69. Palacios, El Caf~ en Colombia, 191.
70. Palacios, El Caf~ en Colombia, 206.
71. Palacios, El Caf~ en Colombia, 193.
72. Palacios, El Caf~ en Colombia, 342.
73. Ibid., 171-175.
74. Palacios, El Caf~ en Colombia, 372-401. See also M. Jimenez, "Traveling Far in
Grandfather's Car: The Life Cycle of Central Colombian Coffee Estates. The case
of Viotfi, Cundinamarca (1900-1930)," Hispanic American Historical Review 69
(no. 2, 1989), 216.
75. Here again, the limited nature of the present comparison needs to be emphasized.
A full understanding of the respective fields of power sketched in this essay requires consideration of the relations between small producers and merchants. But
the bases for merchant control, and the special characterisitics of coffee that make
such control possible, are sketched elsewhere. See the Introduction, cited in note 1,
as well as the Costa Rican sources cited in note 50. For Colombia, see Palacios, El
Caf~ en Colombia; Arango, and Card e lndustria. For other countries, see Roseberry, Coffee and Capitalism; Bergad, Coffee and the Growth of Agrarian Capitalism.
76. S. Mintz, Sweetness and Power." The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York,
Viking, 1985), 181.
77. E. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row,
1969).
78. Ibid., 290.
79. Ibid., xii.
80. T. Skocpol, "What Makes Peasants Revolutionary?" in R. Weller and S. Guggenheim, Power and Protest in the Countryside (Durham, 1982), 166, 178.