The Cacao Boom: From Peon to Peon to Peon, 1920–1940

Sometime around 1920, Javier Alvaro and his brother Paco arrived in the Guayas basin in Ecuador's coastal plain. Barely fifteen, they had grown up in the southern part of the Ecuadorian Andes. Seventy-five years later, Javier recounted his initial decision to leave home:

Javier and Paco were part of a wave of highland-coast migration associated with the cacao boom at the turn of the century. By the early 1900s, or less than two decades after Ecuadorians began to cultivate cacao in a serious way, the country was the world's largest producer. Routinely representing more than half of Ecuador's total exports, cacao shaped the entire political-economic landscape. Coastal jungle was cleared and planted, and Ecuadorians began moving down from the highlands in search of better wages and access to land. Increased revenue transformed the state, coastal elites gained control of the central government, and power relations changed at local, regional, and national levels.⁶

Economic growth was centered in rural regions of the coast and Javier and Paco quickly attached themselves to a hacienda. They were given a section of land to clear and plant with cacao trees. The plan was to raise the trees for about five years, turning them over to the hacienda owner once they became productive; the owner would then work the trees with wage labor. In return, Javier and Paco were to be paid a small amount for each healthy tree and given access to land in order to grow subsistence crops. Once the trees matured they would then start the whole process over on another piece of land within the hacienda's boundaries. This arrangement was quite typical and allowed hacienda owners to develop cacao plantations with little capital or risk. The relationship was usually between a hacendado and a peasant family; in order to be successful the arrangement required the labor of husband, wife, and children. In our case, the landowner agreed to contract with two single men.

Although they did not know it at the time, Javier and Paco had arrived at the end of the cacao boom. Competition from West Africa and Brazil made Ecuador an increasingly minor player, and the First World War devastated the world trade in chocolate. More importantly, an agricultural disease, the “Witch's Broom,” destroyed cacao trees throughout Ecuador's coast during the early 1920s. As a major export, cacao was effectively done by 1925 (though it would return in the postwar period as a significant crop for small producers). For their part, Javier and Paco never saw their trees to maturity and lost the entire investment.

With the collapse of cacao exports, the Ecuadorian state went into a crisis that would last until the banana boom of the 1950s. Coastal hacendados saw the source of their fortunes evaporate and in many cases abandoned their landholdings altogether. Paco saw the writing on the wall and left for Guayaquil just prior to cacao's total collapse. Javier, however, had fallen in love with his future wife, Maria, and tried to stick it out. Cacao was no longer viable, but land was available to anyone who wanted to work hard. As Maria recalls:

Not even twenty years old, Maria and Javier joined Paco in Guayaquil just when the collapse of the cacao-based economy was being felt throughout the region. The impact in Guayaquil was immediate. During the early 1900s, Guayaquil had developed an export and service-related economy, with cacao representing about three-quarters of the city's exports. With a population of just over 25,000 in 1877, the city grew at a faster rate than most other Latin American cities during a period of region-wide urbanization, reaching 120,000 by 1925.⁸

And this was during the boom. Maria and Javier's timing could hardly have been worse. Having arrived almost two years earlier, Paco was able to land a job as a dockworker, loading the very cacao that Javier produced further up the Guayas River. It was a job that he would have for the rest of his working life, periodically finding employment in construction when he was temporarily laid off from the docks. Paco was relatively lucky, however, and came as close to achieving economic stability as any member of Guayaquil's working class during this period.

Javier was not so fortunate. Despite help from his brother, he could not get steady work on the docks. With cacao's collapse, fewer goods passed through Ecuador's primary port. Already in crisis when the Great Depression hit, Guayaquil became an extremely difficult place to live during the 1930s.

Maria remembers this period in similar terms:

By the 1930s, Javier, Maria, and Paco were part of a growing urban working poor whose origins could be found in rural areas of Latin America. Neither the timing nor the forces driving urbanization were exactly the same in all parts of Latin America, but a variety of factors including the collapse of agricultural exports during the Great Depression, land pressures, rural violence, industrial growth, and expanding state bureaucracies worked to bring people into urban areas. In the case of the Alvaro family, their situation was precarious. They had not been drawn to Guayaquil so much as they had been forced out of the countryside. Once in Guayaquil, there were few jobs of any kind and they settled into an expanding mass of working poor.

To his credit, Paco managed to insert himself into the most visible, dynamic, and organized sector of the urban proletariat in Ecuador at the time: dockworkers. He even played a bit part in the November 1922 General Strike when workers brought the city to a standstill for three days—and then were massacred by police.¹⁰

Even as an “urban” worker, Javier continued to find periodic employment in rural areas not far from Guayaquil. He had no romantic longing for the countryside; the bitter taste of cacao was still fresh. But in the struggle to survive, Javier ventured just about anywhere in search of work. This journey eventually led him and Maria out of Ecuador's largest city and back into the countryside; this time to a remote frontier zone south of Guayaquil. By the late 1940s, when much of Latin America was taking an urban-industrial turn, Javier and Maria would be on the forefront of Ecuador's next boom and belong to a rural working-class that more closely resembled an industrial proletariat than any other labor force in Ecuador.

The Banana Boom: Industrial Worker, Rural Proletariat, or Landless Peasantry?

United Fruit bought Hacienda Tenguel, or what would become the centerpiece of its Ecuadorian operations, in 1934. The company's plantations in Central America were threatened by increasingly militant workers, independent governments, and uncontrollable diseases. By contrast, Ecuador seemed ideal. The coastal region was largely abandoned and elites were anxious for an export alternative to cacao. Since banana production had never been introduced on a large scale, agricultural diseases were virtually absent; workers, in turn, were desperate for work and had almost no experience with unions or multinational corporations.¹¹

For about twenty years, from the early 1940s until the early 1960s, Javier, Maria, their kids, and United Fruit would be bound together in a paternalistic embrace that, although always unequal and often insidious, was remarkably satisfying for all parties. As Javier remembers, times were tough in the beginning, but eventually he and Maria found the life they had been looking for.

At a moment when Ecuador was rapidly becoming the world's number one producer of bananas, Javier became a member of Ecuador's largest rural proletariat, working for the largest banana company in the world on the largest banana hacienda in the country. By the early 1950s, Hacienda Tenguel was exporting 80,000 stems of banana a week and employing close to 3000 workers. He may have lived in the country, but Javier was the archetypical male worker. Hacienda Tenguel did not produce steel or car parts, but it resembled a factory-in-the-field and was certainly a company town. Families lived in company housing, bought their food from company stores, and held social events in company buildings. Men were paid a living wage—three to four times the going rate for rural labor at the time—while women were expected to maintain the home at standards defined by United Fruit. Maria remembers: “The were no jobs for women. But women didn't need to work. The men were paid well. But we [the women] had plenty to do! We got food from the company store, helped with schools, organized social events, and maintained the house. The company had standards. The house had to be maintained or you could lose your job and house.”

United Fruit's system of labor control extended well beyond the immediate process of production and into the social and familial lives of Tenguel's working class. The company did not simply provide workers with food, housing, and jobs. It partially controlled or regulated church activities, social events, and sports. By the early 1940s, United Fruit had even organized workers into social clubs, creating separate clubs and facilities for administrators, rail workers, dockworkers, carpenters, and different groups of field workers. Club members not only worked, socialized, and exercised together, but formed families. As Maria explains: “Everything we did outside of work we did with the clubs. The clubs had soccer teams, elected queens, had parties, helped out members with financial problems. They improved the communities and worked with schools. My son, Juan, as well as my daughter, Ana, both met their spouses at club dances. The clubs were really beautiful.”¹²

Compared to Guayaquil during the depression, life was good in Tenguel. In fact, from the mid-1940s through the 1950s, Paco—still in Guayaquil—would be envious of the stability and quality of life that Javier and Maria had achieved in Tenguel. As Javier recounted: “Paco did well during this period too. Banana exports increased and the port in Guayaquil was always busy. But sometimes Paco would be without work. We would send money, and a number of times he sent his kids to live with us when he could not support them. We always had food in Tenguel.” Although Javier and Maria's return to “rural life” flew in the face of the broader processes of Latin American urbanization that characterized the period, it appeared to be a particularly auspicious decision throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Nor were they the only ones. Attracted by opportunities for agricultural employment and access to land, large numbers of peasants migrated from the highlands to the coast during the banana boom. Most of Javier's coworkers came either from the province of Guayas or the southern highlands. They were following the flow of capital that transformed much of the coast into a sea of green trees during the 1950s.

This general process was reminiscent of the cacao boom, but on a much larger scale. Areas that had never been brought into cultivation were developed; greatly expanded export revenues allowed the state to open up roads in the coast; and Ecuador was quickly exporting more bananas than any other country in the world. Moreover, because foreign banana companies were increasingly leery of direct production, it was Ecuadorians who developed the industry. Despite the occasional multinational enclave, most production remained in the hands of medium-sized domestic producers. As a consequence, the economic spinoff from bananas was much greater than that experienced during the cacao boom. The banana dollar filtered into all sectors of the economy, including both the state and industry. The problem was that like all booms this one did not last forever, and not nearly long enough for industry to takeoff and open up new lines of employment for the likes of Paco and Guayaquil's urban poor.

Javier and Maria were on the forefront of the banana industry, including its decline and eventual restructuring—processes that were intimately related to popular organizing and the spread of an agricultural disease. United Fruit's decision in the late 1940s to form a pro-company labor union signaled the fact that times were changing. The move was a preemptive effort to undermine attempts by workers or outside groups to form independent, antimanagement labor unions. Much had changed since the company purchased the property in the mid-1930s. The workforce now numbered over 2000 and the political climate had been transformed. Velasco Ibarra, Ecuador's famous populist demagogue, was elected President for the first time in 1934, an event that both signaled and stimulated a dramatic growth in popular organizing during the 1930s and 1940s. Urban and rural organizing were distinct, but fed off one another in a multiplicity of ways. Before 1929 there were four labor unions in Ecuador. During the next decade, while Javier and Maria were trying to piece together a living in Depression-era Guayaquil, the number climbed to nearly seventy. Strikes in Guayaquil, Quito and other urban centers became a feature of Ecuadorian life, a process that only intensified after the “May Revolution” of 1944 and Velasco's return to power. The major national unions, including the Communist Party's own trade union (CTE), along with women's, students', and even peasant organizations, all formed during this period.¹³

The explosion of urban-based popular organizations was match by political activity in rural areas. In 1929, there were thirty-four legally constituted popular organizations. During the next decade, nearly 800 popular organizations formed, most of which were created by peasants and agricultural laborers.¹⁴

It was the growth of popular organizing that led United Fruit officials to move beyond the social clubs and form a labor union. Why wait for workers to develop an independent union when the company could simply establish its own? At first, company sponsorship went unquestioned. United Fruit controlled everything else. In addition, United Fruit officials promoted two groups of leaders who competed for control of the union. Both groups were procompany, but the ficticious competition gave the union a certain legitimacy, as did the leaders' boisterous (but token) demands followed by the company's reluctant acquiescence. As Javier's son, Juan, put it:

The irony was that United Fruit created a union structure that would, once a new set of leaders took over, eventually orchestrate the invasion of Hacienda Tenguel and push the multinational out of Ecuador. Although the Panama Disease had been present for some time, it was not until the mid to late 1950s that it began to devastate Tenguel's banana plantations. Once it cut into United Fruit's profits, the company could no longer afford the paternalism that was so central to its success. United Fruit cut back services, laid-off workers, and started evicting families from their (company-owned) homes. Families that had lived in Tenguel for over twenty years were cruelly reminded that the houses they lived in, the schools they went to, and the streets they walked on belonged to United Fruit. As ex-employees, they were asked to leave the zone.

Once the benefits and privileges that sustained hacienda life were withdrawn, everything became political, including not only the union, but the social clubs, schools, company store, medical care, and fiestas. The simplest of activities, such as getting food at the company store, became contentious as the entire community was threatened by the decline of the hacienda. Consequently, Javier, along with the vast majority of the workers, became actively involved in an increasingly militant union. For the Alvaros, the union was a family affair. Javier's two sons, as well as his eldest grandson, all belonged to the union. And Paco, who was in Guayaquil, helped connect the union in Tenguel with urban labor leaders in the Guayaquil-based FPTG. For her part, Maria helped form one of the first women's political organizations in the rural coast.

Together, in March of 1962, they invaded Hacienda Tenguel; an event that immediately put them on the front pages of national newspapers and at the center of debates regarding agrarian reform and the spread of communism. Looking to protect the life they had built in the 1940s and 1950s, Javier and Maria found themselves—just a couple years after the Cuban Revolution—at the center of a popular organization that earned them and their coworkers quite a reputation. Unfortunately, despite the emergence of an embryonic labor movement in Guayaquil, the plantation workers at Tenguel were largely on their own. Labor leaders from Guayaquil provided moral support and advice, but Tenguel remained geographically isolated into the 1960s. As a result, a year after the workers invaded the hacienda and pushed United Fruit out, the military first took over the country and (a week later) reclaimed control of Hacienda Tenguel (now labeled a “Communist outpost”).¹⁵

Going Urban?

It had been a long journey. Javier left the southern highlands around 1920 because his family lacked land; worked as a hacienda peon in the Guayas basin at the end of the cacao boom; was part of an urban working poor in Guayaquil during the Depression; and then found himself in the 1940s and 1950s on the forefront of the global banana industry, US imperialism, and the most important workers' strike of the period. Javier was sixty before he owned his first piece of land:

In the mid-1990s, when I interviewed him, Javier was about ninety-years-old, “retired,” and cared for by his children and grandchildren. Yet, for close to twenty-five years, or from about the mid-1960s until the 1980s, Javier worked his eight hectares (on three separate plots). Pushed out of banana production, he (re)turned to the crop that brought him to the coast in the first place. Cacao, with its relatively low labor requirements, was ideal for an aging man and provided a pretty good return. Yet, although Javier identified himself as a campesino, and was immensely proud of the fact that he still owned land, there was never a time when his land provided enough income to support the family. In fact, he spent much of the 1970s working on a hacienda that contracted with Dole Fruit—on land he once worked for United Fruit, later invaded, and then owned as a member of Cooperative San Rafael. Maria grew corn, raised chickens, maintained the house and even ran a small business selling basic goods from her house. The reproduction of the Alvaro family has always been a collective affair.

Moreover, it seemed as though the Alvaro family was, by the turn of the twenty-first century, in danger of becoming urbanized. Paco, who had relied on Javier and Maria in the 1940s and 1950s, returned the favor during the 1960s and 1970s. With the exception of Javier and Maria's oldest son, Juan, who had worked for United Fruit, belonged to a cooperative, and remained in Tenguel throughout his life, the children and grandchildren had made their way to urban centers and now supported Javier and Maria in their old age. Guayaquil was the destination of choice, and most children stayed with Paco (or his children) for extended periods of time as they negotiated the transition. Some of the children and grandchildren preferred Machala, a regional urban center that was itself a product of the banana boom (and known as the banana capital of the world). Some had done well; others struggled. Regardless of their relative success, however, everyone agreed on one thing: There was no future in Tenguel.¹⁶

Conclusion

When Javier and Paco left the southern highlands around 1920 they did so with the expressed purpose of acquiring land and achieving the status of landed peasantry. Theirs' was hardly a novel goal. Agricultural laborers, landless peasants and others have set out with similar goals at various times and in various places. In Latin America, this collective and contentious struggle for land reached its peak during the 1960s and 1970s and was intimately related to broader processes of agricultural modernization, industrialization, and urbanization. Part of the reason why this region-wide struggle emerged with such force in the 1960s was that earlier attempts by a rural working class to become a viable peasantry or move to urban areas were either thwarted or made extremely difficult. Landlords and the state cut off access to land, and burgeoning cities offered a precarious existence for the vast majority of new arrivals.

If African Americans in the US South or peasants in Southern Italy could go “North” when they ran out of options in the “South,” the Alvaros' choices were more limited. The collapse of cacao during the early 1920s (temporarily) ended their attempt to become a bona fide peasantry and forced them into Guayaquil, a city that experienced tremendous growth from the late 1800s but which was nevertheless an extremely difficult destination for rural migrants (particularly during the 1920s and 1930s). It might not have been easy being working class in Chicago, Detroit, Turin, or Milan during the 1930s and 1940s, but the possibility of being a “worker” in any traditional or ideal sense of the term was simply not an option for Guayaquil's working poor during this period. Paco was relatively lucky, and permanently settled into urban life. Yet, even he periodically relied on the (rural) help of Javier and Maria during the 1940s and 1950s. Javier and Maria, for their part, struggled for well over a decade in Guayaquil before the flow of capital carried them back to the countryside. Indeed, the opening of agricultural frontiers to development, either in coastal lowlands or Amazonia, provided a limited option for rural folks and helped slow the flow of migrants to urban areas. Yet, such a strategy—pursued by a number of states in Latin America—was not a substitution for the creation of urban-industrial jobs.

In this sense, the Alvaros' periodic flirtations with working-class stability, if not entirely “typical,” are significant in terms of what they suggest about class formation in many parts of the Third World. In the case of Ecuador and other (very) late industrializing regions of Latin America, class formation, labor markets, and industrialization have often been intimately tied to the ups and downs of a single agricultural or mineral export. The very emergence of dockworkers in Guayaquil—and Paco's ability to land a job in the early 1920s—was directly related to the increased production of cacao in rural areas of the coast. At the same time, aside from some minor growth at the port and in the tertiary sector, the economic spinoff from the cacao boom was minimal. And yet, oddly, despite cacao's failure to generate any significant industrial employment, its abrupt end was nonetheless disastrous. The collapse of cacao ended Paco's brief experiment with stable employment and forced Javier and Maria out of the countryside and into a city whose economy was further weakened by the collapse of the very export that drove them to the coast in the first place. The end of the cacao boom, then, not only insured that the development of industry and an industrial proletariat would have to wait, but that Guayaquil would be in no position to handle the urbanization represented by Javier and Maria, an urbanization that emerged out of desperation in the countryside.

The banana boom was a different beast. It was not only much larger in terms of the export revenues generated and the land brought into production, but was more “democratic” in the sense that the majority of production remained in the hands of Ecuadorians of relatively modest means (especially when compared with banana production in Central America). The boom benefited both middle-class landowners and expanded agricultural employment, which led to expansion in the internal market. This demand, in turn, served to accelerate industrialization both by encouraging growth in existing industries (textiles, cement, beer, food processing) and by providing encouragement to the dominant class to diversify their investments.¹⁷

In the end, however, the banana boom failed to produce what we might call a mass proletariat in either rural or urban areas. Urban areas experienced economic and demographic growth, but this did not include the creation of a class of industrial workers. The expanding economy provided working people with more opportunities, but the sources of employment looked remarkably familiar. More often than not families still pieced together a livelihood from a wide range of unstable activities (i.e. construction, laundry, restaurants, the odd job in rural areas, etc.). Industrial development had only just got off the ground when the boom faltered. In rural areas, the development of a mass proletariat (beyond the occasional multinational enclave) was limited due to the small size of most properties and the relative accessibility of banana production. Plantations rarely had more than twenty or thirty employees, and workers tended to see themselves as aspiring farmers. Moreover, in those few cases where reasonably sized groups of urban or rural workers were concentrated, the military response to popular organizing was often quick and brutal. Tenguel was only one example among many.

Ultimately, what makes Javier and Paco so interesting in terms of class formation is that they came as close as anyone in Ecuador to becoming the classic, modern workers so familiar to labor studies. They were, quite simply, on the forefront of the formation of urban and rural proletariats in Ecuador during the twentieth century. And yet, because of the truncated nature of economic development, the basis for these proletariats was undermined before they could be formed. As a result, not only was the ideal of the male breadwinner not sustainable over the long term, but neither was geographic stability. It was not simply that the transition to urban life came later in Latin America, or even that it was incomplete. Rather, if the Alvaros are at all representative, our story suggests that in many parts of the world the reproduction of working-class families, of class itself, may be permanently, and simultaneously, both rural and urban.

Quite obviously, the extent to which working-class families live in both country and city varies across time and place. Ecuador is not Colombia, Chile, or Brazil, countries where (to simplify) revenue from agricultural or mineral exports was sufficient to generate industrial development. And Colombia, Chile, and Brazil are certainly not the United States, England, or France. However, the value of looking at an admittedly “extreme” case like Ecuador is not to conclude that in some (“less developed”) countries industry failed to emerge and generate a “cohesive” industrial proletariat; or, conversely, that in other (“developed”) countries industry did emerge, and along with it the ideal-type of industrial proletariat (i.e. one that is forever urban, male-dominated, employed by the same company from cradle to grave, and lives, breathes, and dies union politics). Rather, what I think what we might learn from the Alvaros is this: The ideal-type of class formation which implicitly informs much of labor studies is not the rule, but a remarkably rare exception.

This is certainly so in Latin America and other parts of the Third World. But it is also the case in the United States and Europe, and not simply because workers in these places failed to sever ties to rural areas once they saw the bright lights of a Chicago, New York, or London. Class formation is messy because the flow of capital itself is so uneven. Workers must pursue a variety of economic and political strategies, either simultaneously or over the course of a lifetime, in order to survive. Stable employment is not a luxury that most working class families enjoy, and their lives are often defined by the almost continual search for new sources of income. The geography of this never-ending quest may, as in the case of the Alvaros, lead one to stake a claim in both city and country; or it may mean moving from Mississippi to Detroit and back again over the course of a single lifetime; or it may simply force family members to employ a range of strategies within a relatively restricted geographic locale. The point here is that there is rarely (if ever) a smooth trajectory by which, or moment at which, classes neatly cohere and are “made.” This is true in Ecuador as it is in the United States. Working-class life is almost universally precarious, fragile, and incoherent; so too is class formation.