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Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State
The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean
By Aviva Chomsky, Aldo Lauria-Santiago Duke University Press
Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-9697-0
CHAPTER 1
ALDO LAURIA-SANTIAGO
"That a Poor Man Be Industrious"
Coffee, Community, and Agrarian Capitalism in the Transformation of El Salvador's Ladino Peasantry, 1850-1900
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This chapter examines a series of transitions in the history of one of western El Salvador's larger municipalities, retracing the complex and contradictory ways in which a ladino peasant community was both agent and subject in the development of agrarian capitalism during the latter half of the nineteenth century. By studying patterns of land use, expressions of peasant politics and identity, and commercial production in the context of local history, this essay sheds light upon a crucial period in the formation of El Salvador's peasant farmers and places it in the context of large-scale changes in the country's economy and society. In particular, this essay examines the experience of a ladino peasant community with land tenure, coffee production, and regional politics. The ladino Community of Chalchuapa and its experience with the pressures and opportunities afforded by the expanding coffee economy provide a window into the history of El Salvador's ladino peasantry and thus into a little-known and even suppressed aspect of the country's history.
The history of El Salvador during the period examined in this essay has been typically framed by two overlapping themes. The first emphasizes the development of coffee production as an activity controlled by a few oligarchic elites. Following this trend, the history of coffee production has been assumed to be a history of large, elite-owned plantations that quickly came to dominate the land and labor of western El Salvador. The second theme, closely linked to the first, is that Salvadoran elites are usually presented as fully in control of the process of privatization of land that took place during the late nineteenth century, manipulating or controlling the state to its exclusive benefit. Although both of these themes contain contributions to the historiography of the period, they also suppress and ignore a history of peasant participation in agrarian production, landholding, and politics.
The lack of research into local history has allowed these assumptions to linger, and their popularity has been reinforced by their deep political roots. Both Left and Right in El Salvador have seized upon aspects of the country's history in order to draw lessons and weapons for their contemporary cultural and political battles. The image of a country ruled by despotic clans of land-grabbing coffee oligarchs who monopolized land and wealth alternates with the benign image of dynamic, progressive, and farsighted coffee entrepreneurs who provided a base for the nation's prosperity. In many ways these images are two sides of the same coin: the deeply ahistorical character of Salvadoran elite mythology. But they also contain the same silence: they ignore El Salvador's peasantry and its own autonomous participation in the emergence of agrarian capitalism and export production.
These assumptions have been reproduced in historical accounts, which rarely examine peasant participation in the export and commercial economy, emphasizing instead an absolute contradiction between small producers and export production. Thus coffee has been presented as a crop grown in large estates that were owned by a small group of landowners. As a result, historians have paid scant attention to the history of landholding peasant communities. This chapter attempts to reverse this tendency and place peasants and farmers closer to the center of Salvadoran historiography.
Between the 1750s and the 1890s the agrarian landscape of Chalchuapa experienced three important transformations. Chalchuapa began as a lightly populated, Indian-dominated cattle raising, pig raising, and trading town. But by the end of the colonial period it had become more populated and ladino dominated, producing a greater variety of commercial crops. During the second transition (1850s to 1860s) Chalchuapa developed its coffee economy, leading to increased pressure on Chalchuapa's combination of community-based landholding with individually controlled commercial farming. By the 1880s Chalchuapa experienced a third transition when the country's community-owned and municipal lands were privatized and titled by individual landowners. In each of these transitions the peasants of Chalchuapa, both collectively and individually, faced conditions to which they had to respond creatively while they struggled for their subsistence and market position under conditions that were mostly outside of their control. They struggled to defend their access to land but also to sustain a larger principle: their right to help define and respond to the socioeconomic transformations they confronted.
From Indian to Ladino: Chalchuapa's Colonial Origins
The municipality of Chalchuapa is located to the northwest of San Salvador and adjacent to the western city of Santa Ana. During the late colonial period Chalchuapa became an important site for settlement and productive activities due to its strategic location between Salvadoran cities and Guatemala. Chalchuapa had been a cattle-raising center throughout the colonial period. A church official who traveled to the region during the 1760s noted that Chalchuapa had twenty farms or haciendas, twelve trapiches (sugar mills), and many small, disperse farms and sugar mills, "which the Indians place [d] in any corner of the mountains," all controlled by Indian, ladino, and Spanish peasants and farmers.
Although Chalchuapa did not become a significant producer of colonial El Salvador's principal export, indigo, it did benefit indirectly from the expansion in the production of this powdered dye, and it developed important linkages with the expanding indigo economy. The expansion of indigo production raised the demand for cattle and foodstufFs throughout the provinces of San Salvador and Sonsonate. Cattle provided food for hacienda laborers, and leather was used for packaging the indigo. Relations such as this one provided a base for the strengthening of peasant communities—both Indian and ladino in the western and south-central regions of what later became El Salvador.
It was also during the eighteenth century that Chalchuapa's ladino and Indian communities began to enlarge their holdings by purchasing lands from the Spanish Crown. Like most municipalities, the town of Chalchuapa had the right to a royal grant of thirty-seven caballerías (1,665 hectares) of ejidos (municipal lands) for its residents. Indian and ladino communities also had the right to obtain a title for additional lands by paying for a survey and compensating the Crown. As a result, during the 1700s the Indian and ladino communities of Chalchuapa laid claim to a significant extension of land—not because they could use it productively, but because such acquisitions strengthened their position when dealing with other communities and local hacendados. In the context of the late colonial and early republican polities, controlling land meant more than owning an economic resource—it also implied political sovereignty.
By the early nineteenth century Chalchuapa was among the towns with the fastest population growth in sparsely populated El Salvador. In 1740 Chalchuapa had only about 600 people, but twenty-six years later the town had expanded to 2,200, and by 1807 to 3,000 inhabitants. By the mid nineteenth century Chalchuapa was among the most populated towns in western El Salvador, with about 4,600 people in the 1860s. Although estimates of Chalchuapa's population varied after the mid-century, sources reported a population of between 5,000 and 9,000 between the 1860s and 1870s. However, unlike other towns , in the region where ladino and Indian populations expanded at similar rates, Chalchuapa's demographic growth since the late eighteenth century was mostly among the ladinos, which reflected both the ladinoization of the local Indian population as well as the immigration of ladinos from other regions, including Guatemala. In 1740 Chalchuapa was over 50 percent Indian, but by 1770 the Indian population had declined to about 25 percent.
Sometime during the early nineteenth century the Indian community of Chalchuapa restricted the settlement of ladinos in their town and the amount of land it would rent to these immigrants. The Indian-controlled town also did not permit the establishment of ladino households in the town center. This attitude was consistent both with colonial law and with practices of ethnic segregation, and it enhanced Indian defense of their landholdings and local municipal power. In the decades that followed, however, this restriction broke down and the ladino population increased considerably to the point where the Indian Community became a small minority. By 1864 only 6 percent of Chalchuapa's births were classified as Indian, a number significantly lower than in other nearby towns that had also begun as predominantly Indian settlements.
We have few sources on the Indian Community of Chalchuapa, and it is not clear why it declined. It is possible that its decline was fueled by the relative benefits Indian peasants could gain from physical mobility during the years of the early nineteenth century. Avoiding military conscription was a motivation for abandoning Indian identity, as recruitment of soldiers and town militias relied heavily on the Indian communities. The loss of lands by sale or encroachment might have been a cause as well as an effect of the Community's decline. Eventually, the diminished Indian Community sold part of its lands to the town's ladino Community. By 1867 ladino expansion and confidence were such that the ladino Community members described themselves as "almost the totality and the most useful part of all this settlement." The mood reflected by this statement was based on their extensive acquisition of lands and their successful expansion of commercial agriculture.
Common Lands and Ethnic Communities around 1860
By the mid nineteenth century the municipality of Chalchuapa contained four different types of landholding: privately held haciendas, municipal ejidos, Indian-controlled communal lands, and ladino-controlled communal and sodality lands. Private haciendas were never very prominent in Chalchuapa, precisely because of the success of peasant and community landholding since the eighteenth century. The municipal ejidos were composed of the thirty-seven caballerias of land allotted to the town by the Spanish Crown. After independence, republican governments continued to legitimate and support this form of land tenure by regulating different aspects of ejido use.
In Chalchuapa, the Indian Community controlled the ejidos as their own until the Indians were displaced from municipal power by ladinos sometime during the mid-century. By the 1860s municipal ejidos were clearly distinguished from Community-owned lands in Chalchuapa and throughout the country as well. The Indian Community also owned lands outright, but the steady decline of the members of the indigenous Community during the nineteenth century eventually led it to sell its lands to the Ladino Community and to farmers from the nearby city of Santa Ana.
Chalchuapa's most important landholder by far was the ladino Community. This Community made its extensive land purchases during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In 1755 the común deladinos purchased the fields known as San Juan, Chiquito, and Guayavos. Later, between 1809 and 1829, it added lands in the Canton Ayutepeque, and the Haciendas Santa Rosa and San José; the sitios (ranches) Guachipilín, Sacamíl, La Joya, and Jocotillo; and plots known as Arado, Rosario, and Dolores. In addition to purchasing lands from the Spanish Crown, the local Indian Community, and other individual landowners, the ladino Chalchuapenos successfully defended the boundaries of their communal lands in a century-long conflict with the nearby municipalities of Atiquizaya and Juayua. Republican laws established between the 1830s and 1860s confirmed, defined, and clarified the legal status of landholding peasant communities. By the 1860s these communities were subject to municipal supervision and had to elect officers and maintain record books. They were, in fact, together with municipal landholding, the backbone of peasant agriculture throughout the country.
By the 1870s Chalchuapa's ladino Community controlled at least eighty caballerías (3,600 hectares) of land and ranked among the largest landholding communities of El Salvador. On the basis of these lands the Community turned Chalchuapa into an attractive and successful site of peasant and farmer agriculture. Unlike Indian communities, which required members to have a long-term connection to local kin groups, ladino communities were usually more flexible in their incorporation of new members. However, they usually recognized the predominance of a core of long-term resident families as well. The ladino Community of Chalchuapa charged rent to recent settlers and outside tenants, whereas older families had the right to use plots of land without payment.
The Expansion of Commercial Agriculture and the Defense of Communal Lands, 1860-1880s
In 1860 ladino officials from the department of Santa Ana complained that Chalchuapa had the most valuable communal lands in the region, "but unfortunately its residents do not take advantage of them and the municipality does not know how to increase its funds with the advantage offered by the many caballerías of lands which are envied for their fertility." This observation merits attention because it marks a hiatus between Chalchuapa's earlier cattle-oriented economy and the emergence of commercial crops, especially coffee, that began around this year. It reveals clearly the circumstances the ladino Community of Chalchuapa faced during the 1860s when it began to produce coffee and confront internal and external pressures upon its ownership of extensive lands. Between 1860 and 1880 Chalchuapa experienced the development of its commercial and export agriculture at the same time as it negotiated challenges to its communal landholding practices by forces outside the community. By both negotiating the demands placed upon the community by farmers and investors from nearby Santa Ana—one of the nation's centers of coffee production and capitalist agriculture— and successfully developing its own form of peasant commercial entrepreneurship, Chalchuapa provides an exceptional case study of peasant and community agency in the context of rural, export-oriented capitalist development.
After 1860 Chalchuapa's ladino Community began to be pressured to provide immigrant farmers and entrepreneurs who resided in nearby towns with access to its extensive and uncultivated holdings. As part of these efforts, a group of farmers from Santa Ana city—a leading center of coffee production and the region's principal commercial center-attempted to show in court that part of the community's lands were actually owned by the state and thus subject to public use. They claimed in the Juzgado General de Hacienda that these lands held an old unpaid capellanía (chaplaincy) obligation, which was due to the state after the takeover of such payments by the government during the 1830s. As a result of the suit the government warned that if the lands were found to have been mortgaged, it would reserve the right to sell them back to the community in order to pay the principal and accumulated interest on the original debt of 400 pesos. This claim represented an attempt by the emerging coffee-growing elite of Santa Ana city at manipulating the legal system for their benefit. But their claim was not successful. For the ladino Community of Chalchuapa the possibility that they would have to repurchase their lands (even at moderada composición, "moderate payment") or that they might be sold in public auction constituted a major threat. The Community mobilized its legal representatives and local municipal authorities in defense of their lands. As part of this defense community leaders organized a response that combined legal and extralegal pressures.
The Chalchuapeñlo defense of their community lands could not be a straightforward legal maneuver. In order to appease the farmers who wanted to gain outright ownership of the Community's lands, the Community began to rent some of their unoccupied lands to outsiders. At the same time, the municipal officials of Chalchuapa also began to publicly express devotion and acclaim for the regime of President Dueñas. But their accolades were so exaggerated that they did not entirely convince government officials of their allegiance to the current regime. As a result the governor of Santa Ana warned the minister of government that Chalchuapa's display of Duenas's picture and coat of arms was dishonest and resulted only from their attempt to gain government support in their legal proceedings. In fact, most Chalchuapenos had supported the previous government before it was overthrown. But the Chalchuapeños had had good reasons to oppose Dueñas's rule. The governor of Santa Ana—an official named by the Dueñas regime—had tried to impose a candidate in one of Chalchuapa's local elections by bringing eighty men from Santa Ana to intimidate the local people, no doubt a result of Santaneco interest in gaining control of Chalchuapa's unused lands. Despite their distrust of Dueñas, the ladinos of Chalchuapa knew clearly that they had to play the game of political allegiances in their attempt to defend their lands from legal and extralegal challenges.
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Excerpted from Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State by Aviva Chomsky, Aldo Lauria-Santiago. Copyright © 1998 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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