Recent historical studies of Latin-American coffee-growing peasants have unearthed an array of seemingly endless differences. They have overturned earlier generalizations that rather uniformly associated emerging liberal “coffee republics” with elite dominance, peasant landlessness, authoritarian rule, and incipient capitalism. By emphasizing local peasant agency and historical specificity, the new scholarship has inevitably complicated the task of generalizing about the impact of coffee production on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Latin America. The words of Fernand Braudel (Capitalism and Material Life [New York, 1973]) hover over the entire enterprise: “There is a danger that the history of coffee may lead us astray. The anecdotal, the picturesque and the unreliable play an enormous part in it.”
Elizabeth Dore's intriguing new study of Diriomo, Nicaragua, “a metahistory of a small place,” successfully avoids the perils of Braudel's warning. Located near Granada, Nicaragua's third largest city, Diriomo offered Dore a wealth of source material for a reliable study. Its municipal archive was never sent to the Archivo General de la República and thus escaped incineration in the aftermath of the 1931 Managua earthquake. Residents of Diriomo also brought Dore their personal records and provided her with oral historical testimony.
Dore begins with the “central premise” that “class, gender, and ethnicity can be separated theoretically but not experientially.” Myths of Modernity carefully weaves the three together in its analysis of the complexities of Diriomo's transformation under liberalism and coffee cultivation between the mid-nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Collective land ownership and a common political community constituted the defining characteristics of Indian identity in Diriomo. Before coffee, stratification by wealth proved rather modest, whether among the ranks of the Indians or among the fifty or so ladino males that rented land from the indigenous commons and dominated Diriomo's municipal council.
Gender stratification, however, remained stark among both the indigenous and ladino populations. Indian common land rights excluded women. Among ladinos, patriarchal practice denied most women the exercise of their legal civic and property rights. Ladino male political cliques used their power in the municipal council to establish a patriarchal “moral ethos” with a strict code of conduct for elite ladinas and a more flexible one for indigenous women, thus affording ladino males some measure of impunity in their behavior toward the latter.
“In the late nineteenth century,” Dore affirms, “land privatization transformed landscape and society in Latin America more than any other event since the conquest.” Common property tenure covered most land in Nicaragua in 1870, but a half century later private property reigned. Yet, however revolutionary in its implications and however much the result of “relentless state intervention to divest Indians of the common property rights they had enjoyed since the conquest,” this drastic change took place unevenly across Nicaragua under often contradictory laws. While Indians revolted in some places such as Matagalpa in 1881, in Diriomo Dore found “no evidence that the leaders of the comunidad indígena opposed privatization.” The change in land tenure systems ended collective landholding, the principal basis of indigenous identity in Diriomo. The indigenous community withered away as a political entity, and by 1930 residents of Diriomo had become members of a mestizo peasant society.
Elite landowners from Granada aggressively expanded their estates and dominated the region's coffee cultivation, but, nevertheless, most Diriomeños managed to secure a place for themselves within the new liberal private property regime. Dore finds that at the turn of the century only four percent of Diriomo households lacked land or owned plots too small for subsistence. Another thirty-seven percent and an additional thirty-nine percent owned enough land to establish themselves as poor and middle peasants respectively. Rich peasants and commercial planters made up the remaining fifth of Diriomo households.
Privatization brought distinctly different gender consequences for the upper and lower levels of society. For the first time, indigenous females gained access to land, and before long fourteen percent of landholdings belonged to women, most from the ranks of the poorer peasantry. Dore sees a fundamental change in the material basis of gender relations among most inhabitants of Diriomo. Single women by the end of the nineteenth century governed nearly two-thirds of the female-headed households in Diriomo. Almost two-thirds of female merchants and artisans were either single or widowed, while less than a third of their male counterparts remained unmarried. Since married women forfeited control of their property, the absence of marriage for single or widowed women meant freedom to manage their own property and economic life without patriarchal male interference.
While liberalism in Dore's view thus effected a progressively gendered economic change at the popular level, its impact among relatively well-to-do families proved regressive. After the liberal reform of traditional inheritance and property laws, women from the families of commercial planters and rich peasants seldom owned land, although widows from oligarchic backgrounds might on occasion head large coffee estates as a family tactic to avoid any division of concentrated property holdings.
Patriarchy also governed the management of coffee's labor requirements in the Granada region. Successive Nicaraguan governments passed a detailed maze of oppressive legislation intended to force peasants to work for large coffee growers on the latter's terms. Passbooks, forced labor, and debt peonage all had a role in assuring an adequate labor supply in the Diriomo area. Peasant indebtedness gave planters control over their labor. The poor resisted this coercion through flight, acts of sabotage and violence, and at times through the court system. Dore argues on the basis of her oral interviews that “patriarchy from above” (patriarchal relations of reciprocity between planter and peon) mediated some of the harshness of the system. At the same time, “patriarchy from below” (senior male control within peasant households) enabled peasant men to guarantee coffee growers the labor of their wives and children as a means of paying off debt. In Diriomo, women and children made up about two-thirds of the coffee labor force, leaving many males free to cultivate the family's subsistence land.
Dore is right that gender analysis has been “virtually absent” from the extensive historical literature on Latin American debt peonage. Her examination of Diriomo establishes gender as a crucial factor in matters of land and labor in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. One wishes that she would have extended her study forward with an equally thorough analysis of how things looked in 1930.
Regrettably, Dore makes only briefly refers to other peasant historical studies, yet her own “metahistory” cries out for a systematic comparison with the extensive scholarship on Latin-American coffee-growing peasant communities. Instead, Dore spends too much time affirming and reaffirming that debt peonage impeded the emergence of capitalist labor relations in Nicaragua until well into the twentieth century. Her focus on this issue derives from her experience directing a research project for the Ministry of Internal Commerce in the early 1980s, a time in which the dominant Sandinista view of Minister of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform Jaime Wheelock Román argued that coffee and other agricultural exports had rendered most rural Nicaraguans landless proletarians rather than peasants hungering for individual land ownership. In her successful refutation of Wheelock's classic Imperialismo y dictadura, Dore unfortunately oversimplifies the views of Arnold Bauer and Alan Knight to an extent that misleads. Besides, she flails a dead horse. Historical scholarship over the last generation has highlighted the diverse mixtures of land and labor practices among Latin American coffee-growing peasantries, not the uniform emergence of capitalist society. These flaws aside, Dore has produced an admirable pioneering study well worth reading.
