Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State: The Laboring Peoples of Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean

Identity and Struggle at the Margins of the Nation-State brings together new research on the social history of Central America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Aviva Chomsky and Aldo A. Lauria Santiago have gathered both well-known and emerging scholars to demonstrate how the actions and ideas of rural workers, peasants, migrants, and women formed an integral part of the growth of the export economies of the era and to examine the underacknowledged impact such groups had on the shaping of national histories. Responding to the fact that the more common, elite-centered “national” histories distort or erase the importance of gender, race, ethnicity, popular consciousness, and identity, contributors to this volume correct this imbalance by moving these previously overlooked issues to the center of historical research and analysis. In so doing, they describe how these marginalized working peoples of the Hispanic Caribbean Basin managed to remain centered 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 effects of foreign corporations in Costa Rica, coffee production in El Salvador, banana workers in Honduras, sexuality and working-class feminism in Puerto Rico, the Cuban sugar industry, agrarian reform in the Dominican Republic, and finally, potential directions for future research and historiography on Central America and the Caribbean. This collection will have a wide audience among Caribbeanists and Central Americanists, as well as students of gender studies, and labor, social, Latin American, and agrarian history. Contributors. Patricia Alvarenga, Barry Carr, Julie A. Charlip, Aviva Chomsky, Dario Euraque, Eileen Findlay, Cindy Forster, Jeffrey L. Gould, Lowell Gudmundson, Aldo A. Lauria Santiago, Francisco Scarano, Richard Turits

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Identity and Struggle in the History of the Hispanic Caribbean and Central America / Aldo Lauria-Santiago and Aviva Chomsky 1 Central America "That a Poor Man Be Industrious": Coffee, Community, and Agrarian Capitalism in the Transformation of El Salvador's Ladino Peasantry, 1850–1900 / Aldo Lauria-Santiago 25 "Vana Ilusión": The Highlands Indians and the Myth of Nicaragua Mestiza, 1880–1925 / Jeffrey L. Gould 52 At Their Own Risk / Coffee Farmers and Debt in Nicaragua, 1870–1930 / Julia A. Charlip 94 Auxiliary Forces in the Shaping of the Repressive System: El Salvador, 1880–1930 / Patricia Alvarenga 122 The Banana Enclave, Nationalism, and mestizaje in Honduras, 1910s–1930s / Darío A. Euraque 151 Laborers and Smallholders in Costa Rica's Mining Communities, 1900–1940 / Aviva Chomsky 169 Reforging National Revolution: Campesino Labor Struggles in Guatemala, 1944–1954 / Cindy Forster 196 The Hispanic Caribbean Free Love and Domesticity: Sexuality and the Shaping of Working-Class Feminism in Puerto Rico, 1900–1917 / Eileen J. Findlay 229 "Omnipotent and Omnipresent"? Labor Shortages, Worker Mobility, and Employer Control in the Cuban Sugar Industry, 1910–1934 / Barry Carr 260 The Foundations of Despotism: Agrarian Reform, Rural Transformation, and Peasant-State Compromise in Trujillo's Dominican Republic, 1930–1944 / Richard L. Turits 292 Conclusion: Imagining the Future of the Subaltern Past—Fragments of Race, Class, and Gender in Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean, 1850–1950 / Lowell Gudmundson and Francisco A. Scarano 335 Selected Bibliography 365 Index 385 Contributors 403