Overview

This text presents an examination of the social history of Central America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean during the late-19th and early-20th centuries. The book demonstrates how the actions of rural workers, peasants, migrants and women formed an integral part of the growth of the export economies of the era and examines the impact such groups had on the shaping of national histories. The text explores how marginalized working peoples of the Hispanic Caribbean basin managed to remain centred on not only class-based issues, but on a sense of community, a desire for dignity and a struggle for access to resources. Individual essays include discussions of plantation justice in Guatemala, highland Indians in Nicaragua, the efforts of foreign corporations in Costa Rica, coffee production in El Salvador and sexuality and working-class feminism in Puerto Rico.

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9780822322023

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Reviews

This is an important volume in Latin American labour history, which makes a welcome disciplinary contribution with its emphasis on ethnicity within labour dynamics and class formation. --British Bulletin of Publications on Latin America, April 2000 ... a worthy mix of solid scholarship and first-rate editing... the decisive difference this book makes is in its attention to ethnicity, gender and race in relation to labour power, and the stripping away of the inclusive social categories often used by politicians and intellectuals. Though the 'State' figures importantly in nearly all of the essays, in analysis it often dissolves into contending factions like 'Indians', 'Negroes', or 'peasants', which must first be deconstructed in order to be understood at all. How racism, gender bias, chauvinism and ethnic hatred successfully transcend class differences at certain critical historical junctures is what much of the book is about. At the outset we are told that this is a volume of social history, and, indeed the essays are rarely concerned with the wholly contemporary. They add to our understanding of how labels may conceal or oversimplify history. They build fruitfully on the anthropological and historical insights of a different era, as much as they indict simplifiers and obstructions of the past. -- TLS, 27 August, 1999 This volume does an exceptional job of bringing together in a single volume very substantial new research on working people and their history in the Hispanic Caribbean basin. Ralph Lee Wood Jr, Tulane University This collection gives us a much more nuanced view of labour in these regions than previously available. Using archives and oral history, the writers successfully break through the screen of elite-centred history into the world of the masses. David McCrery, Georgia State University

Author Information

Aviva Chomsky is Professor of History at Salem State College and author of West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870–1940. Aldo A. Lauria Santiago is Assistant Professor of History at the College of the Holy Cross.

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