Empowered through labor and buttressing their communities: Mayan women and coastal migration, 1875-1965

HAHR - Hispanic American Historical Review

Volumn 86, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 501-534

  Carey Jr , David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 54849439041     PISSN: 00182168     EISSN: 15271900     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00182168-2006-003     Document Type: Review

References (154)

1. Rigoberta Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray (New York: Verso, 1984), 25
2. David McCreery, By the Sweat of Their Brow: A History of Work in Latin America (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2000), 62, 118, 126
3. Eleanor Burke Leacock, "Introduction," in Frederick Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1972): 7-67
4. Eleanor Burke Leacock, "Women's Status in Egalitarian Society: Implications for Social Evolution," Current Anthropology 19, no. 2 (1978): 247-75
5. Eleanor Burke Leacock, "Interpreting the Origins of Gender Inequality: Conceptual and Historical Problems," Dialectical Anthropology 7 (1983): 263-83
6. Donna Guy, "Women, Peonage, and Industrialization: Argentina 1810-1914," in Confronting Change, Challenging Tradition: Women in Latin American History, ed. Gertrude Yeager (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1994), 108-10, 121
7. Laurel Herbenar Bossen, The Redivision of Labor: Women and Economic Choice in Four Guatemalan Communities (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), 6, 84, 130, 137-38, 145
8. Laurel Herbenar Bossen, "Women in Modernizing Societies," American Ethnologist 2, no. 4 (1975): 587-601
9. David McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 1760-1940 (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994), 278
10. Michelle Rosaldo, "The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-Cultural Understanding," Signs 5, no. 3 (1980): 400
11. Irene Silverblatt, "Interpreting Women in States: New Feminist Ethnohistories," in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era, ed. Micaela di Leonardo (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991), 156
12. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994), 203
13. Judith Butler, "Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of 'Postmodernism,'" in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992)
14. Joan W. Scott, "Experience," Butler and Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political, 22-40
15. Cristina Crosby, "Dealing with Difference," Butler and Scott, Feminists Theorize the Political, 130-43
16. Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1999)
17. Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1986), especially Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Feminist Politics: What's Home Got to Do with It?" 191-212
18. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman's Text from the Third World," in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1987)
19. Lara Putnam, The Company They Kept: Migrants and the Politics of Gender in the Caribbean Costa Rica, 1870-1960 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2002), 19
20. Denise Riley, "Am I That Name?": Feminism and the Category of "Women" in History (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota, 1988)
21. Verena Stolcke, "The Social Impact of the Crisis of Development: Adjustment with a Woman's Face," in Eight Essays on The Crisis of Development in Latin America (Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1991), 98
22. Verena Stolcke makes a similar argument for women working in Latin America's expanding informal economy; see Stolcke, "The Social Impact," 100
23. For a useful critique of hegemonic masculinity, see R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, "Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept," Gender and Society 19, no. 6 (Dec. 2005): 1-31
24. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, "Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming," in Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism, ed. Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2001), 8
25. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985), 309
26. E. J. Hobsbawm, "Peasants and Politics," Journal of Peasant Studies 1, no. 1 (1973): 13
27. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852; New York: International, 1963)
28. Emilia Viotti da Costa, "New Publics, New Politics, New Histories: From Economic Reductionism to Cultural Reductionism - in Search of Dialectics," in Reclaiming the Political in Latin American History: Essays from the North, ed. Joseph M. Gilbert (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2001), 20, 29
29. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1980), 98, 102
30. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), 95-96
31. Emilia Viotti da Costa, "Experience versus Structures: New Tendencies in the History of Labor and the Working Class in Latin America - What Do We Gain? What Do We Lose?" International Labor and Working-Class History, 36 (Fall 1989): 15
32. Ruth Finnegan, "A Note on Oral Tradition and Historical Evidence," History and Theory 9 (Oct. 1970): 195-201
33. FIorencia Mallon, "Editor's Introduction," in Rosa Isolde Reuque Paillalef, When a Flower is Reborn: The Life and Times of a Mapuche Feminist (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2002), 17
34. Daniel James, Doña María's Story: Life History, Memory, and Political Identity (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000), 183
35. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, "'You Must Remember This': Autobiography as Social Critique," Journal of American History 85, no. 2 (Sept. 1998): 440
36. Steve Stern, Remembering Pinochet's Chile: On the Eve of London 1998 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2004). The oral histories consulted for this article come from a larger project concerning Mayan women's historical perspectives. Most of the informants included here worked on coffee fincas and therefore have detailed recollections about coastal migration and labor. Since my research focuses on eight towns (and their hamlets) in the central highlands, by definition my informants are permanent highland residents who temporarily worked on the coast. This implicit selection criteria affected the topics this cohort deemed historically relevant. For example, most informants related how their experience on the coast affected their lives in the highlands. Due to the continued political volatility of Guatemala and recurrent human-rights abuses, I have preserved the anonymity of my sources for their safety. For the most part, I have used names that derive from the Mayan calendar. The majority of informants are female and they can be recognized by the "Ix" prefix to their one-word names. In contrast, male names have two words. A name in parentheses after the informant's citation indicates that one of my Kaqchikel female research assistants (Ixk'at, Ixch'onïk, or Ixkawoq) conducted the interview; I performed all other interviews. All oral history interviews were performed in Kaqchikel in the communities where informants lived, and most often in their homes
37. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992)
38. Joanne Rappaport, The Politics of Memory: Native Historical Interpretation in the Colombian Andes (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998), 206
39. Joanne Rappaport, Cumbe Reborn: An Andean Ethnography of History (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), 125, 169-71
40. Charles Joyner, "Oral History as Communicative Event," in Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 1996), 296
41. Allesandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1991), 2
42. James, Doña María's Story, 242
43. Terence Turner, "Ethno-Ethnohistory: Myth and History in Native South American Representations of Contact with Western Society," in Rethinking History and Myth: Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past, ed. Jonathan D. Hill (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1988), 236
44. Dowd Hall, " 'You Must Remember This,'" 440
45. Lowell Gudmunson and Hector Lindo-Fuentes, Central America, 1821-1811: Liberalism before Liberal Reform (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1995)
46. David McCreery, "State Power, Indigenous Communities, and Land in Nineteenth-Century Guatemala, 1820-1920," in The Indian in Latin American History: Resistance, Resilience, and Acculturation, ed. John E. Kicza (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000), 191-212
47. McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 337
48. Chester Lloyd Jones, "Indian Labor in Guatemala," in Hispanic American Essays: A Memorial to James Alexander Robertson, ed. A. Curtis Wilgus (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 311-12
49. Ralph Lee Woodward Jr., "Changes in the Nineteenth-Century Guatemalan State and Its Indian Policies," in Guatemalan Indians and the State: 1540-1988, ed. Carol Smith (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990), 68-70
50. Carol Smith, "Origins of the National Question in Guatemala: A Hypothesis," in Smith, Guatemalan Indians and the State, 83
51. René Reeves, "Liberals, Conservatives, and Indigenous Peoples: The Subaltern Roots of National Politics in Nineteenth-Century Guatemala" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, 1999), 86-175
52. Ralph Lee Woodward Jr., Rafael Carrera and the Emergence of the Republic of Guatemala, 1821-1811 (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1993)
53. J. C. Méndez Montenegro, 444 años de legislación agraria, 1520-1951 (Guatemala City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1958)
54. Julio Castellanos Cambranes, Café y campesinos en Guatemala, 1853-1891 (Guatemala: Ed. Universitaria, 1985), 53-55, 81-119, 144
55. Jim Handy, Gift of the Devil: A History of Guatemala (Boston: South End Press, 1984), 64-67
56. David McCreery, "Coffee and Indigenous Labor in Guatemala, 1871-1980," in The Global Coffee Economy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, 1500-1989, ed. William Gervase Clarence-Smith and Steven Topik (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003): 191-99
57. David C. Johnson, "Internationalization and the Guatemalan Coffee Economy, 1890-1910," SECOLAS Annals 34 (Oct. 2002): 72-73
58. McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 161-93, 301-22
59. David McCreery, "Wage Labor, Free Labor, and Vagrancy Laws: The Transition to Capitalism in Guatemala, 1920-1945," in Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin America, ed. William Roseberry, Lowell Gudmundson, and Mario Samper Kutschbach (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1995): 206-31
60. Greg Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala: A History of Race and Nation (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2000), 111
61. McCreery, "State Power," 202
62. Memorias de la Dirección General de Agricultura 1901 (Guatemala: Tipografía Nacional), 7
63. See also Robert Carmack, Rebels of Highland Guatemala: The Quiche-Mayas of Momostenango (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 225
64. Raymond Stadelman, "Maize Cultivation in Northwestern Guatemala," Contributions to American Anthropology and History 6, no. 33 (1940): 105, 134
65. Charles Wagley, Economics of a Guatemalan Village (Menasha, WI: American Anthropological Association, 1941), 31
66. Felix Webster McBryde, Cultural and Historical Geography of Southwest Guatemala (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1974), 74
67. Richard Adams, Crucifixion by Power: Essays on Guatemalan National Social Structure, 1944-1966 (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1970), 170, 392-93
68. McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 1-3, 148, 294, 308, 326-33, 341-42
69. Oliver LaFarge, "Maya Ethnology: The Sequence of Cultures," in The Maya and Their Neighbors, ed. C. L. Hay (New York: Appleton-Century, 1940)
70. McCreery, "State Power," 192, 207-8
71. Richard Adams, "La población indígena en el estado liberal," in Historia General de Guatemala, vol. 5, ed. Jorge Luján Muñoz (Guatemala: Asociación de Amigos del País / Fundación para la Cultura y Desarrollo, 1995), 176
72. John Early, "Population Increase and Family Planning in Guatemala," Human Organization 34, no. 3 (1975): 276
73. David McCreery, "Debt Servitude in Rural Guatemala, 1876-1936," HAHR 63 (Nov. 1983): 758
74. Valentin Solórzano, Evolución económica de Guatemala (1947; Guatemala City: Editorial Jose de Pineda Ibarra / Ministerio de Educación, 1977), 319-20, 343
75. Johnson, "Internationalization," 73
76. McCreery, "Wage Labor," 217-19
77. AGCA, leg. 28734, exp. 2511; AGCA, Sección de Tierras (ST), paq. 8, exp. 2, p. 73. Ladinos define themselves in opposition to indigenous people; that is, they identify with the national or European, not Mayan, culture. Most ladinos have some Mayan blood but choose not to recognize or represent these cultural, social, or historical aspects of their identity. They are a minority in Guatemala, yet they are also the political and economic power holders. On ladinos, see Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala, 83-85
78. Kay Warren, Symbolism of Subordination: Indian Identity in a Guatemalan Town (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1978)
79. John Hawkins, Inverse Images: The Meaning of Culture, Ethnicity, and Family in Postcolonial Guatemala (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1984)
80. Memoria de las labores del Ejecutivo en el Ramo de Agricultura durante 1923, presentada 1924 (Guatemala: Tipografía Nacional, 1924), 6
81. Handy, Gift of the Devil, 66-68
82. McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 219, 274-76
83. Adams, Crucifixion by Power, 182
84. Lloyd Jones, "Indian Labor," 323
85. Cindy Forster, The Time of Freedom: Campesino Workers in Guatemala's October Revolution (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2001), 39
86. McCreery, "Coffee and Indigenous Labor," 199-200
87. Forster, The Time of Freedom, 138, 153-56
88. Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala. In a similar vein, some scholars have argued that debt peonage was often a consensual system
89. see, for example, Alan Knight, "Mexican Peonage: What Was It and Why Was It?" Journal of Latin American Studies 18 (1986): 41-74
90. Arnold J. Bauer, "Rural Workers in Spanish America: Problems of Peonage and Oppression," HAHR 59 (1979): 34-63
91. Friedrich Katz, "Labor Conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends and Tendencies," HAHR 54, no. 1 (1974): 1-47
92. McCreery, "Coffee and Indigenous Labor," 199
93. Carey, Our Elders Teach Us, 87-91
94. Helen Sanborn, A Winter in Central America and Mexico (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1886), 70, 166-67
95. Watanabe, Maya Saints and Souls, 144
96. J. W. Boddam-Whetham, Across Central America (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1877), 84-85
97. Oliver LaFarge and Douglas Byers, The Year Bearer's People (New Orleans: Tulane Univ., 1931), 59
98. Wagley, Economics of a Guatemalan Village, 30, 53
99. Anne Cary Maudslay and Alfred Percival Maudslay, A Glimpse at Guatemala, and Some Notes on the Ancient Monuments of Central America (London: John Murray, 1899), 100
100. Reeves, "Liberals," 273-76
101. María Luisa Cabrera Pérez-Armin̄án, Tradición y cambio de la mujer K'iche': Kib'antajik pe, Uk'exik pe ri K'iche' Ixoqib' (Guatemala City: IDESAC, 1992), 62-64
102. Bradford Burns, Eadweard Muybridge in Guatemala, 1875: The Photographer as Social Recorder (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), 96-129
103. Forster, The Time of Freedom, 68
104. Memoria de las labores del Ejecutivo en el Ramo de Agricultura durante 1931, presentada 1938 (Guatemala: Tipografía Nacional, 1938), 459-60
105. Lester Schmidt, "The Role of Migratory Labor in the Economic Development of Guatemala" (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Wisconsin, 1967), 369
106. Solórzano, Evolución económica, 347
107. Ixq'in, Comalapa, 6/8/01 (Ixch'onïk)
108. Schmidt, "The Role of Migratory Labor"; Handy, Gift of the Devil, 68
109. McCreery, By the Sweat, 118
110. Tracy Bachrach Ehlers, "Debunking Marianismo: Economic Vulnerability and Survival Strategies among Guatemalan Wives," Ethnology 30, no. 1 (1991), 7. A tapäl is a strap placed across the forehead and attached to a sling to carry a load, in this case coffee, on the back
111. Ixtun, 6/7/03, Comalapa (Ixk'at)
112. McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 218, 281, 294
113. Bachrach Ehlers, "Debunking Marianismo," 7
114. Richard Applebaum, "Seasonal Migration in San Ildefonso Ixtahuacán: Its Causes and Its Consequences," Public and International Affairs 4, no. 1 (1966): 145-46
115. Thomas Melville and Marjorie Melville, Guatemala: The Politics of Land Ownership (New York: Free Press, 1971), 169
116. Bossen, The Redivision of Labor, 134, 145
117. and Applebaum, "Seasonal Migration," 145
118. Ruth Bunzel, Chichichastenango: A Guatemalan Village (Seattle: Univ. of Washington Press, 1952), 143
119. George Cheever Shattuck, A Medical Survey of the Republic of Guatemala (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1938), 104-5
120. Marilyn M. Moors, "Indian Labor and the Guatemalan Crisis: Evidence from History and Anthropology," in Central America: Historical Perspectives on the Contemporary Crisis, ed. Ralph Lee Woodward Jr. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 71
121. Applebaum, "Seasonal Migration," 147
122. Menchú, 7, Rigoberta Menchú, 21-27, 33-42
123. Schmidt, "The Role of Migratory Labor"
124. Adams, Crucifixion by Power, 73, 370, 386-94
125. McCreery, Rural Guatemala, 215, 217, 228
126. Moors, "Indian Labor and the Guatemalan Crisis," 73
127. Wagley, Economics of a Guatemalan Village, 75
128. Sanborn, Winter in Central America, 70, 166-67
129. John P. Young, Central American Currency and Finance (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1925), 39
130. McCreery, "Debt Servitude," 750
131. Sol Tax, Penny Capitalism: A Guatemalan Indian Economy (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1963), 107
132. Applebaum, "Seasonal Migration," 142, 156
133. Menchú, I, Rigoberta Menchú, 23-24, 34-35, 40-42
134. W. F. Jordan, R.R. Gregory, and W. Cameron Townsend, The Cakchiquel Album, ed. Ethel E. Wallis (Costa Mesa, CA: Gift Publications, 1981), 43
135. Applebaum, "Seasonal Migration," 143-44
136. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 309, 322-40
137. Sanborn, A Winter in Central America, 166-67
138. "Declaraciones duen̄os de Osuna-Rochda," 1919, AGCA, Ministerio de Fomento, B leg. 129, exp. 15373
139. Ix'ajaw, Panabajal, Comalapa, 6/29/01; Ixb'aq, Santa Catarina Palopó, 7/13/98; Ixeskit, Patzicía, 9/1/01 (Ixkawoq); Ixajb'al, Patzun, 9/1/01 (Ixkawoq); Ixwuxun, Comalapa, 6/8/03 (Ixk'at)
140. Ixch'anin, 6/8/03, Comalapa (Ixk'at)
141. Applebaum, "Seasonal Migration," 146
142. "Declaración de dueños Hanseatische Plantagen-Gesellschaft," contract of habilitador Manuel Estrada, 6 Mar. 1915, AGCA, Ministerio de Fomento, B leg. 129, exp. 15373
143. Anne Phillips and Barbara Taylor, "Sex and Skill: Notes towards a Feminist Economics," Feminist Review 6 (1980): 79
144. "Técnica sobre la agricultura: Servicio de Fomento de Economía Indígena cuenta con programas de ensayo sobre fertilización," Comalapan 1, no. 1 (Sept. 1966), 7
145. Cindy Forster, "Violent and Violated Women: Justice and Gender in Rural Guatemala, 1936-1956," Journal of Women's History 11, no. 3 (Autumn 1999): 55-77
146. Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), 32
147. Frank Lentricchia, "In Place of an Afterword - Someone Reading," in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas L. McLaughlin (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990), 429
148. Putnam, The Company They Kept, 4
149. Rosenbaum, With Our Heads Bowed, 28-29
150. Wade A. Kit, "Costumbre, Conflict, and Consensus: Kekchí-Finquero Discourse in the Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, 1880-1930" (Ph.D. diss., Tulane Univ., 1998)
151. Moors, "Indian Labor and the Guatemalan Crisis," 68-69
152. Aidan Foster-Carter, "Can We Articulate 'Articulation'?" in The New Economic Anthropology, ed. J. Clammer (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978): 210-49
153. Pierre-Philippe Rey, Las alianzas de clases, trans. Felix Blanco (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1976)
154. Elizabeth Dore, "Debt Peonage in Granada, Nicaragua, 1870-1930: Labor in a Noncapitalist Transition," HAHR 83, no. 3 (2003): 558