Introduction
Much of the agricultural history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin America has been dominated by studies of export products and economies.Footnote 1 Adeptly exploring how export commodity chains’ backward linkages affected workers’ culture and daily existence, scholars have studied labour and transitions to capitalism. Given that the experience of agricultural export production varied by country, commodity and time, the prevalence of this scholarship compared to the study of domestic-use agriculture (DUA), which comprises subsistence agriculture and foodstuff production for the domestic market, can obscure as much as it enlightens. Domestic markets supplied by small-scale farmers were just as important as the export sector for national development.Footnote 2
Using Guatemala as a case study for Latin America, I argue that over the course of the national period, state authorities’ sporadic concern for domestic agriculture provided indigenous small-scale farmers with opportunities to advance their agendas, which ranged from resisting forced labour to maintaining their traditional agricultural practices. The expansion of export agriculture – particularly coffee – in Guatemala over the second half of the nineteenth century negatively impacted DUA. When state authorities began actively promoting DUA in the early twentieth century, however, foodstuff production of staples such as maíz (Zea mays; subsp. mays; ‘corn’ in US English; ‘maize’ in British English) and beans for the domestic market increased markedly. By the 1930s, DUA had become more productive than export agriculture. Generally overlooked in historiography, state authorities who supported DUA, and small-scale farmers who produced it, demonstrated how subaltern officials and indigenous cultivators shaped agricultural policies and production.
Authorities’ concern for domestic agricultural production is evident in the archives in the Ministry of Agriculture's missives reminding local officials that DUA was vital to the nation and thus should be encouraged and protected; in the records of the ministers, presidents and governors who exempted indigenous and other agriculturists from military and labour conscription so they could work on their subsistence crops; in magistrates’ rulings that privileged indigenous agricultural knowledge and practices; in government requests for DUA products to be displayed at national exhibitions; and in agricultural and landowning censuses; and memorandums of local authorities who facilitated DUA and lauded small-scale farmers.Footnote 3 Similarly, other documents highlight officials who recognised that both domestic and export agriculture were key to the nation's development.Footnote 4 Public intellectuals and journalists also acknowledged indigenous farmers’ vital contributions to the domestic economy. That such memos, absolutions, requests and concessions found throughout the archival records were specific to both subsistence agriculture and foodstuff production for the domestic market speaks to some officials’ recognition of the crucial contributions of small-scale farmers.
In all its manifestations from the 1840s to the 1950s, the state periodically accommodated indigenous farmers who provisioned the nation. By organising the article chronologically, I examine the critical role indigenous farmers and DUA played in the nation's nineteenth-century development and official recognition thereof. Less apparent to national authorities, indigenous coffee entrepreneurs embodied the intersections – both competitive and collaborative – of agro-exports and DUA. Even as forced labour mechanisms persisted in the early twentieth century, authorities’ concessions to small-scale farmers reveal official priorities during periods of intensive DUA labour. By the 1930s, DUA and small-scale farmers enjoyed a revival that endured dictatorial and democratic rule.
Located close to the capital, Kaqchikel Mayas (henceforth Kaqchikels) in the departments of Sacatepéquez and Chimaltenango were integral to feeding Guatemala City – particularly prior to the 1930s, when the inadequate and costly transportation system precluded the ability to profitably move large amounts of grain.Footnote 5 With responsibilities that ranged from feeding military forces to displaying their products and demonstrating their trades at national fairs, poor indigenous farmers served and shaped their nation. At times, they leveraged their agricultural knowledge and foodstuff production for the domestic market to avert compulsory labour and other mandates.
Guatemala was not unique in its attention to domestic agriculture. Although dramatically distinct from other movements and governments in Latin America, the Mexican Revolution offers a point of comparison, with its emphasis on the importance of small- and medium-scale farming from its inception in 1910. At the same time as President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) promoted agricultural exports, his administration buoyed DUA. Guatemala never promoted peasant agriculture to the extent Mexico did during the 1920s and 1930s, but some Guatemalan leaders saw the wisdom in supporting DUA.Footnote 6
In addition to their influence on state policy, small-scale farmers also figured prominently in the fate of DUA.Footnote 7 Since maize depleted soil nutrients, its cultivation was dependent on farmers practising careful fertilisation and crop rotation.Footnote 8 If small-scale indigenous farmers, who authorities generally associated with subsistence agriculture and agro-export labour, also produced coffee, the distinction between domestic-use and agro-export agriculture may have been blurred for some officials. In many ways, domestic-use and agro-export agriculture were intertwined. Authorities who promoted labour freedom and removed obstacles to production for small-scale farmers apparently did not consider these concessions a detriment to the agro-export economy. Depending on the motives, ideas and practices of small-scale farmers and government officials, domestic-use and agro-export agriculture could be symbiotic.
Maize, Labour and Indigenous Farmers
Well before the Spanish invasions, maize was the grain around which Meso-American empires and city states were built. The centrality of maize in Mayas’ religion and world view speaks to its importance in their agricultural cycle and daily lives.Footnote 9 When locusts and frosts devastated cornfields in ancient Kaqchikel communities, starvation ensued. One Kaqchikel messenger explained to his Quiché rivals: ‘In truth, there is great famine, the people have no more strength due to the famine.’Footnote 10
During the colonial and early national periods, maize remained one of Guatemala's primary staples.Footnote 11 To encourage domestic agricultural production, early conservative regimes facilitated conditions whereby indigenous communities and small-scale farmers could continue to pursue milpa agriculture (small-scale maize, bean and squash cultivation). As Rafael Carrera's conservative government (1844–8, 1851–65) began encouraging coffee cultivation, it also investigated the possibility of growing maize for export on the coast where it had been sown for domestic consumption for centuries.Footnote 12
To thwart coerced labour, agricultural production was a powerful card to play. In addition to compulsory agricultural labour dating back to the colonial period, military conscription, road work and other forced labour mechanisms snared indigenous men. Because the nineteenth-century state was too weak to capture non-compliant labourers, indigenous labourers regularly avoided conscription.Footnote 13 Flight and deception were not their only strategies, however. When military recruiters arrived in San Antonio Aguascalientes (henceforth Aguascalientes) in Sacatepéquez on 24 July 1849, to conscript ‘all robust and rigorous naturales [indigenous people]’, local officials and the families of those ‘torn from their work’ protested that ‘planted fields and fincas [large-landed estates] were ruined, [and suffered] grave losses’.Footnote 14 To their minds, both small- and large-scale agriculture were imperilled. In correspondence that belittled indigenous people and the military alike, petitioners warned, ‘indígenas [indigenous people] who were inclined toward vices even when they have full-time work’ would become ‘terrible instruments against the same society’ once they were exposed to the idleness of the military. ‘We wish to preserve … the naturales’ custom … we do not want them to lose their love of work and more importantly … forget the respect that they profess to authorities who are convinced they are the only useful agricultural workers’, the community spokesperson José López explained.Footnote 15 His mid-century praise for indigenous industriousness stood in stark contrast to his contemporaries and successors who dismissed indígenas as lazy drunks, even as the nation depended on their labour. When it served their interests, elites softened racist disparagement and portrayed indígenas as noble and hard-working.
Representing municipal officials (whose ethnicity is often unclear in archival sources), López argued conscription violated 1839 laws against abandoning productive properties and ‘snatch[ing] indígenas from their work or giving them jobs against their will and against their natural inclination’.Footnote 16 Perhaps seeking to extend the protected status indígenas enjoyed during the colonial period, he insisted, ‘The Supreme Government in the end has recognised the force of those laws … [and] always has exempted indigenous people from military service.’Footnote 17 Neither those laws nor the long tradition of exempting indigenous people from military service were compelling enough to sway authorities, however.
The military enjoyed a privileged position over the concerns of indigenous residents. Tasked by Carrera with recruiting a force of 100 men, Commander O. Saenz insisted he had conscripted only 15 men, six of whom he released because they were married. If everyone received an exemption, ‘angels will have to descend from heaven to protect Antigua’, he quipped.Footnote 18
In response, local indígenas deployed another vital cog in the country's progress: domestic agriculture. When corregidor (magistrate) Mariano Rosa Blandera favoured Commander Saenz’ reasoning, four Aguascalientes men whose sons had been conscripted appealed directly to President Colonel Mariano Paredes (1848–51): ‘They should be released because … our milpas are going to waste in their absence, no one will do the work that needs to be done.’ The men demanded their sons ‘be freed immediately and surrendered under the condition that they not be apprehended as soldiers again’.Footnote 19
Impressed by the Aguascalientes fathers’ argument about the vulnerability of DUA, but also aware of the recruitment decree, President Paredes – a military man – ordered that Aguascalientes indígenas be replaced ‘with other individuals’ and ‘returned to their pueblo in liberty’. Paredes’ insistence that conscription be continued with a different target population demonstrates he was less concerned about recruiting young indígenas than he was about maintaining their domestic agricultural production. To his mind, milpas were as important as the military. Indigenous farmers were wise to insist that harvests would fail without their labour. Throughout the colonial and national periods, indigenous farmers used their involvement in agricultural production as a strategy to avoid conscription and coerced labour.Footnote 20
If maize shortages between 1840 and 1940 are any indication, highland petitioners were acutely aware of the importance of their agricultural production.Footnote 21 Droughts, downpours, hurricanes, locusts, farming ‘tiny plots of exhausted land’ and other challenges compelled governments to provide food aid.Footnote 22 Subsidies, such as the Carrera government's 1847 allocation of funds for seeds, helped stave off the chain reaction of bad harvests whereby the increased price of grains one year contracted cultivation the following year because seeds were subsequently more expensive.Footnote 23 Authorities deployed a number of strategies – price controls, tax exemptions, collection of agricultural data, encouragement of increased production – to hold famine at bay. To offset the economic crisis set off by an 1854 locust invasion, the Carrera government controlled the price of maize and stimulated highland farming.Footnote 24 From the 1850s, when communal land lay fallow, municipalities distributed it among the ‘poorest families’ so they could grow their own crops.Footnote 25 Some indigenous groups and government officials mobilised communal labour to plant and harvest communal land.Footnote 26 Dramatic price fluctuations of maize, beans, rice and wheat in the 1850s and 1860s reflected the instability of daily nutritional and calorific intake, particularly during the winter months from May to October. Between 1853 and 1866, the cost of a fanega (bushel) of maize ranged from 50 centavos to 10 pesos; the cost of a fanega of beans and wheat flour similarly fluctuated between 1.25 and 9 pesos, and between 2.50 and 11.75 pesos respectively.Footnote 27 The Aguascalientes justice of the peace was especially thankful when the corregidor delivered grains in June 1860.Footnote 28
Crucial to economic development, foodstuff production for the domestic market often trumped other concerns. In an 1859 letter to the government minister in which he criticised artisans for failing to expeditiously deliver tools to small-scale farmers, the Sacatepéquez corregidor insisted: ‘The neighbours in agriculture [vecinos en agricultura] have become so important that they can be considered the greatest and most active source of national wealth.’ Being ‘convinced of this truth and treasure’, he sought to remove any barriers to domestic agricultural production.Footnote 29 Invoking the term vecinos en agricultura to refer to local, primarily milpa farmers, the corregidor advanced the small-scale farmers’ interests.
Amid maize shortages, agro-exports continued to expand. After Carrera's death in 1865, coffee entrepreneurs increasingly accessed indigenous lands and labour.Footnote 30 Facing a severe grain shortage in 1868, President Vicente Cerna (1865–71) lifted import taxes on maize, beans, lentils, chickpeas, rice and potatoes.Footnote 31 Despite such shortages, many indigenous farmers could not focus solely on these crops because they were indebted labourers on coffee fincas.Footnote 32 A group of Kaqchikel farmers from Tecpán (Chimaltenango) countered: ‘The indigenous people believe they are not slaves to anyone and for that reason should not be obligated to work.’Footnote 33 Some intellectuals and authorities similarly opposed mandamientos (forced or drafted labour). When workers in Sololá resisted mandamientos in 1868, the Sololá corregidor recommended ‘salaried work regulations’ for coffee workers.Footnote 34 At the turn of the century, Guatemalan intellectual Antonio Batres Jáuregui argued forced labour was not only ‘barbarous and unconstitutional … [and] immoral’, but it also undermined domestic foodstuff production: ‘The Indians are the ones who plant, cultivate, and harvest maize, beans, potatoes, peas, rice, vegetables and all that supplies the markets.’Footnote 35 He insisted, ‘agriculture would undoubtedly benefit if the mandamientos were abolished; because free labour is more productive and produces better fruits’.Footnote 36 The Quiché governor concurred, ‘the exploitation of forced labour’ was to blame for the department's low food production.Footnote 37
As the population grew, food shortages persisted.Footnote 38 Even copious harvests were insufficient. In 1866 an official in Ciudad Vieja – a town in Sacatepéquez that borders Antigua – explained: ‘The harvests of maize, beans and cochineal have been abundant … but the ejido [communal land] is very small and is limited to the skirts of Agua volcano, whose lands are worn out from being worked too much.’Footnote 39 Insufficient farmland compelled 800 residents of Ciudad Vieja to relocate to Escuintla in search of sustainable livelihoods.Footnote 40 Once population growth surpassed resources in late-nineteenth-century Guatemala, land pressure seldom waned.Footnote 41 On the eve of the twentieth century, the San Andrés Ceballos (Sacatepéquez, henceforth Ceballos) mayor could say with confidence: ‘There are no virgin lands here. If it is not planted now, it has been in the past.’Footnote 42 With frequently depressed harvests and growing populations, communities depended on each other and regional markets for provisions.Footnote 43
In 1887, the government distributed ‘special instructions … to protect agriculture and remove any obstacles … to its greatest development’.Footnote 44 Even as the Sacatepéquez jefe político (governor) who posted those instructions was concerned with coffee theft, he insisted that his job was ‘to safeguard the security of the department's inhabitants … and everyone who possessed property’ – small- and large-scale landowners alike.Footnote 45
Guatemala was not alone in facing food security challenges. When severe locust invasions in 1882 destroyed maize crops, Mexico's Yucatán peninsula imported maize. Not until 1892 did the region recover enough to provision itself. Failing harvests at the turn of the century again compelled the region to import maize.Footnote 46 Like Mexico, Guatemala's struggles continued in the late nineteenth century. A June 1895 hailstorm wiped out a third of the bean crops in San Lorenzo El Cubo (henceforth El Cubo).Footnote 47 In the neighbouring town of San Miguel Dueñas (henceforth Dueñas), ‘very irregular rainfall’ in 1898 undermined a dependable source of water for farming.Footnote 48
Coffee Expansion and Indigenous Investment
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, coffee developed as an agro-export in Guatemala.Footnote 49 From constituting less than 1 per cent of total exports in 1852, coffee revenues increased to comprise half of the nation's exports by the end of Conservative rule in 1871.Footnote 50 With 263,533 trees planted and 69,155 already producing fruit in 1862, Sacatepéquez was one of the first departments to embrace the coffee economy. In another indication of Kaqchikel farmers’ and labourers’ vital role in the coffee economy, Chimaltenango too housed important fincas.Footnote 51 As the coffee economy grew, so too did the social status of those associated with it.Footnote 52 Beginning in 1873, President Justo Rufino Barrios (1873–85) shepherded a series of decrees that transferred some of the most fertile piedmont to potential coffee planters when local residents could not produce legal land titles. While the loss of maize cultivation on the piedmont contributed to food shortages, increased agricultural investments during the 1880s and 1890s undergirded the expansion of coffee exports.Footnote 53 Sacatepéquez and Chimaltenango continued to figure prominently in the growth of the coffee economy, harvesting 38,000 and 25,000 quintals of coffee in 1887 from 3.7 and 4.9 million trees respectively.Footnote 54
By shifting land control from indigenous communal holdings to foreign and ladino (non-indigenous Guatemalan) private ownership, Barrios also sought to provide a steady supply of labour: dispossessing indigenous people of their livelihoods forced them into the cash economy.Footnote 55 Ranging from adhering to their milpa agriculture to embracing coffee production, highland indígenas’ responses allowed some to maintain their land and autonomy in diverse ways, which at times marginalised their poor and working-class counterparts.Footnote 56 A few indigenous communities expanded their communal land holdings via the coffee economy.Footnote 57
When coffee production infringed upon people's quality of life and well-being, however, residents resisted it. In 1867, indígenas from Carchá (Alta Verapaz), who had been displaced from their farms by the expanding coffee economy, decried local officials who were forcing them to grow coffee and work on coffee plantations. The petitioners insisted that planting coffee in their cornfields ‘would seem to have no other intention but to exterminate us’.Footnote 58 While some indígenas penned petitions, others rebelled.Footnote 59 Maya-Mam farmers in the departments of Suchitepéquez and Retalhuleu destroyed coffee trees that encroached upon their farms.Footnote 60 Infringements on indígenas’ quality of life elicited firm responses. In 1889, when Don Manuel Quinones’ workers used the Choy river in Sacatepéquez to peel and clean the fruit, the waste was ‘infesting in a way that at times was unbearable’ when it reached the village of Dueñas downstream.Footnote 61 ‘To avoid illnesses in this town that can be caused’ by such sanitation problems, José Mariano Ortiz asked the Sacatepéquez jefe político to prohibit that finca’s practice.Footnote 62 Although the jefe político’s response is lost, clearly public health was a powerful card to play.Footnote 63
Despite these drawbacks, coffee cultivation continued to grow. Unlike sugar production, it lent itself to small-scale land ownership, as evidenced in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica and Puerto Rico.Footnote 64 Often associated with coffee labour, indigenous people were also coffee entrepreneurs; many in Sacatepéquez transitioned their milpa farms to coffee groves. Of the 4,506 trees in Santa Catarina Barahona (henceforth Barahona) by 1887, the indigenous landowner José María Saqche had planted 1,200 (more than 25 per cent) of them. That year he harvested ten quintals.Footnote 65 Five years later in Dueñas, at least four of the 14 farmers who planted coffee were indigenous (and indebted).Footnote 66 Indigenous coffee farmers in Guatemala enjoyed success similar to that of nineteenth- and twentieth-century small-scale Costa Rican farmers who adeptly managed capital, migration, cyclical production and price crises to become self-sufficient coffee producers, exporters and employers.Footnote 67 While historiography tends to highlight how forced labour mechanisms and other factors compelled indigenous migrants to pick coffee, indigenous coffee producers have yet to receive much attention.Footnote 68
By the turn of the century, coffee had become the principal crop in many Sacatepéquez communities.Footnote 69 The growing, if uneven, trend of shifting from milpa to coffee agriculture undermined food security in some places.Footnote 70 In 1895 a Dueñas official lamented that the maize and bean ‘quantities are not sufficient to last the twelve months to the next harvest, given the number of inhabitants in the pueblo. Only coffee is sufficient for local consumption. It is … certain [there will be] a shortage.’Footnote 71 Bean cultivation had become scarce in Aguascalientes and Ceballos too.Footnote 72 If such sobering reports discouraged coffee cultivation among local farmers and national authorities, evidence of this is hard to find until the 1910s. In a dramatic shift from a long-standing history of milpa agriculture, Ceballos claimed coffee as its ‘principal crop’ in 1899.Footnote 73 The allure of agro-exports had similar effects in Mexico. By the early 1900s, henequen production in the Yucatán had so trumped maize production that diets suffered and levels of malnutrition grew.Footnote 74
Experimentation with new crops did not necessarily lead to domination, however. Guatemalan communities like El Cubo continued to dedicate most of their land to maize and bean production and only planted coffee ‘on a small scale’ in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 75 Because the coffee economy depended on maize, balancing milpa and coffee agriculture served indigenous farmers and their communities well.
DUA and Labour
Relying on coercion rather than the free movement of labour, the government and private entrepreneurs invested in means of repression.Footnote 76 With suppressed wages and maize serving as currency in most highland communities into the early twentieth century, few indigenous agriculturists felt compelled to leave their highland plots for wages.Footnote 77 Like the Aguascalientes farmers who insisted ‘our milpas are going to waste’ because their sons had been conscripted, five El Cubo men who petitioned for a two-year reprieve from compulsory labour in 1903 argued that forced labour mechanisms undermined domestic production: ‘The mandamientos have … left our families desolate and destitute … because of the continuous demands, we have neglected our work to the extreme of not having finished harvesting [maize] nor have we prepared our fields to plant garbanzos and sweet potato … our agriculture has suffered a great setback. How can our families support themselves with the groceries so expensive?’Footnote 78 In addition to warning of impending crop shortages, the petitioners pointed out they were better off producing their own food than earning wages to purchase it. Although the governor's response is lost, if the broader archival record is any indication, like their Quiché counterparts in Quezaltenango who supplied the region with maize and other vital products, Kaqchikel farmers who provisioned the capital with foodstuffs enjoyed some leverage against corvée labour and other directives.Footnote 79
The following year, Guatemala's jefe político lamented that he could not send workers to clean the cemetery – an activity he and his counterparts considered crucial to the capital's public health. ‘Against my good wishes, I ordered San Pedro Sacatepéquez to suspend the remission of workers to clean the cemetery, because I want the indígenas to plant their maize and beans’, he explained.Footnote 80 Indicating indigenous farmers’ privileges were limited to periods when DUA labour was in great demand, the governor regularly conscripted indígenas from surrounding villages when they were neither planting nor harvesting their crops. Although permanent forced labour exemptions were rare, indigenous farmers could expect regular reprieves during certain times of the agricultural cycle.Footnote 81
Sacatepéquez officials who enforced national mandates for increased yields in the early 1900s reminded their superiors that farmers had agricultural knowledge based on ‘many years of experience’, and thus it was best not to ‘contradict’ the wisdom regarding ‘maize, the precious grain and wholesome nourishment, of the sons of the country’.Footnote 82 These officials afforded indigenous farmers crucial concessions with regard to their labour and practices.
In the midst of modernisation programmes aimed at stimulating agro-exports, officials hailed maize as a crucial component to the nation's development. In his 1898 report, the Aguascalientes mayor emphasised subsistence production and the expertise of the Guatemalans who toiled in it: ‘With the advantage that farmers always sow what is necessary to live, that very necessary element is always supplied.’Footnote 83 To underscore the importance of that production, he later explained that the price of maize and beans doubled during shortages.
National authorities too saw the value in the production of basic foodstuffs. In a reflection of colonial-era tributes that suggested how central maize was to the nation, the government collected maize as a form of taxation and municipal leaders submitted lists of people who provisioned troops with totopostes (crispy tortillas).Footnote 84 Keen to understand, maintain and expand DUA, in the early 1900s the Guatemalan government distributed census forms to gather information about the planting and harvesting of staples such as maize, beans, wheat, rice and potatoes.Footnote 85 Even as agriculturists increased milpa yields and introduced new crops like potatoes and chickpeas,Footnote 86 municipal officials inspected farms to ensure farmers complied with mandates to expand domestic foodstuff production.Footnote 87 If agricultural data is any indication, most did.Footnote 88 As the mayor of Aguascalientes explained in 1917, ‘Like other towns … neighbours have remained well informed about the present need to increase sowing articles of consumption.’Footnote 89 Inspectors and assistants ‘monitored the exact compliance of the instructions … They are taking a census of property owners to see the property area under cultivation, and for those who have leftover land, they will invite and demand that they provide [land] to those who want to plant but do not have anywhere’ to do so.Footnote 90 In his report, the mayor detailed the maize, bean, chickpea and sweet potato production in Aguascalientes, Barahona, Zamora, El Cubo and Ceballos. Even though most of these towns also produced coffee, he did not mention it. Indicating the level of detail to which officials monitored towns, he also listed property owners’ names and how many cuerdas (acres) they sowed of each staple crop. The time, energy and resources authorities dedicated to monitoring and encouraging the expansion of DUA demonstrate how important it was to the region and the nation.
Most domestic-use agriculturists maintained their commitments to their subsistence crops. ‘When the workers are engaged in their own farming, they are scarce’, explained the Ciudad Vieja mayor in 1899.Footnote 91 Even though the coffee harvest coincided with a period in highland milpa agriculture when farmers were waiting for maize to mature, local labour was not necessarily abundant. While some labourers were jornaleros (day labourers) who seasonally migrated to coastal fincas in October and November, others were committed to working on highland estates year-round.Footnote 92
Officials who regularly engaged with indigenous agriculturists had varied opinions about them that changed over time. Informed by disparaging discourse, many local officials situated indigenous labourers somewhere between ‘indolence and activity’.Footnote 93 The Santiago Zamora (Sacatepéquez) mayor insisted, ‘The majority of naturales in this town are … more lazy than active.’Footnote 94 Despite such prejudices and structures that privileged finqueros (large-landed-estate owners), local and regional leaders with a keen sense of domestic agricultural production generally knew indigenous labourers to be hard-working, forward-thinking and honest. Unlike contemporary elites who assumed labour shortages in the agro-export economy were attributable to indigenous indolence, the Ciudad Vieja mayor's understanding of their realities informed his respect for them. He noted that they were ‘robust, active in their work, and the heart of the country’.Footnote 95 Other Sacatepéquez authorities similarly described them as healthy, obedient and committed.Footnote 96 Laudatory descriptions were not limited to local indigenous labourers, as evidenced by the Ceballos mayor's assertion that migrant labourers from Chimaltenango who filled labour lacunas in his town were ‘robust … and without vices’.Footnote 97 Some authorities associated indígenas with intelligence.Footnote 98
Although dictators such as Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920) and Jorge Ubico (1931–44) did not tolerate collective labour organisation, occasionally some small-scale agriculturists enjoyed considerable sway during despotic rule. Ubico regularly listened to rural indígenas’ concerns and granted them concessions (see Figure 1). At times, he adjudicated indigenous land disputes.Footnote 99 As the Department of Public Works sought to extirpate livestock and agriculture from the capital during Ubico's reign,Footnote 100 Guatemala City depended on rural areas to feed it. That dependence raised the stakes for foodstuff production. In an indication that political structures at times facilitated DUA, the rural intendants appointed by Ubico in the mid-1930s highlighted maize production in their districts as indicators of economic development.Footnote 101
Figure 1. Jorge Ubico with Representatives of the Native Race
Competition and Collaboration in the Maize and Coffee Economies
As the twentieth century progressed, maize and other staple-food production continued to vary dramatically and concern authorities. Like their predecessors, officials focused on indigenous communities and farmers to address shortages. In 1902, the minister of agriculture reported, ‘In the past, municipalities had a custom of mandating maize and bean sowing, called communal [planting], but lately that has fallen into disuse in some municipalities.’Footnote 102 Compounding this drop in production, the following year the Santa María volcano erupted and covered crops with a ‘thick cap of volcanic material’ that caused ‘the complete loss of the wheat, maize, oatmeal, and potato harvests’.Footnote 103 Indigenous farmers continued to leverage low yields and fears thereof to extricate themselves from forced labour. When indigenous wheat farmers from Tecpán complained to the Ministry of Agriculture that local authorities forced them to work on coastal fincas, the secretary of agriculture ordered municipal authorities to ‘leave them in peace’.Footnote 104
Notwithstanding occasional increases, net capital flows to agriculture decreased in the early twentieth century.Footnote 105 Between 1910 and 1914, agriculture investments were only 12 per cent of what they had been between 1895 and 1899.Footnote 106 Even in areas with rich, volcanic, ash-infused soil, growing harvests could not always meet the demand of growing populations.Footnote 107 An Aguascalientes corregidor reported: ‘Many years ago the municipalities in this district did not sow communal land, but today everyone farms according to the land available to them.’Footnote 108 Relating low harvests to low wages, he informed residents and mayors they should pay labourers ‘a just wage’.Footnote 109 Instead of raising wages, however, planters often offered the more powerful incentive of free or below-market-price maize to workers.Footnote 110 Many planters argued raising wages would only reduce the labour supply because indígenas would stop working once they amassed enough income to meet their needs.Footnote 111
Competition for land and labour meant export agriculture and provisional production often worked at cross purposes. With its emphasis on agro-exports, Mexico was harvesting barely 300 pounds of maize per person in 1910 – a nearly 20 per cent drop from the 1890s.Footnote 112 But emphasising one aspect of the agricultural economy did not necessarily mean discounting another. Introduced in the late nineteenth century and subsidised by São Paulo to address labour shortages, the colonato system afforded coffee workers (colonos) land on which to farm crops for consumption and the market. By reducing workers’ dependence on wages, this autonomous production helped Brazilian planters survive downturns in international coffee prices by keeping wages low.Footnote 113 Historian Verena Stolcke asserts:
The belief that monoculture for export expands to the detriment of domestic market crops often rests … on a misconception that obscures the multiple advantages of self-provisioning by family labour. Under the São Paulo colonato system and wherever coffee is grown by family labour units in combination with food crops … a symbiotic relationship … between coffee and food crops … provided planters or merchants a measure of flexibility in the face of price slumps on the world market.Footnote 114
So intimately tied were the export and domestic agricultural economies that one agronomist calculated the cost of coffee in maize: processing one quintal of the former required more than ten pounds of latter at the turn of the century.Footnote 115 Recognising that ‘throughout the isthmus … agriculture for export [was] more important than DUA’, economic historian Victor Bulmer-Thomas argues that ‘under the appropriate conditions (invariably involving active state policy) the relationship can become, if not complementary, at least non-competitive’.Footnote 116 Stolcke argues that the relationship in São Paulo was complementary: ‘as coffee expanded, so did food crops’.Footnote 117
The Guatemalan case suggests a complicated relationship between maize and coffee production. In his study of rural Guatemala, historian David McCreery argues, ‘Coffee did not so much subtract significant amounts of land from maize production as block the expansion of subsistence cultivation into new areas to help meet the needs of a growing population.’Footnote 118 While that holds true for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Sacatepéquez, by the late 1910s maize was again reigning supreme as many Kaqchikel agriculturists favoured milpa agriculture over coffee cultivation. Within two decades of claiming coffee as its principal crop, milpa agriculture reclaimed that title in Ceballos; in 1916, 41 manzanas (land areas that average around 1.7 acres) were planted with maize and beans, compared with only two manzanas of coffee trees. Santiago Zamora had a similar ratio. For all its coffee trees, Barahona had only ten manzanas dedicated to coffee cultivation; it was outnumbered by maize (347 manzanas) and bean and chickpea (118 manzanas) fields.Footnote 119 By 1917, El Cubo farmers stopped sowing coffee altogether.Footnote 120 Resistance to coffee expansion in these communities around the capital reflected a national trend of decreased coffee cultivation.Footnote 121
A shift in priorities, or at least privileged positions, was also apparent in national exhibitions and fairs. In the 1920s and 1930s, the government asked towns to send samples of their agricultural products to be exhibited in expositions.Footnote 122 That most of these goods were cultivated for the domestic market speaks to the importance of non-export agriculture at the local level in a nation that is most often associated with the export production of coffee, bananas, cattle and sugar.
In addition to individual farmers’ decisions, government strategies encouraging agro-export production without undermining domestic production shaped that trend. Although Guatemala never promoted domestic food production as explicitly as did the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo (1930–8, 1942–52), who initiated colonisation projects and doled out land grants,Footnote 123 neither did it stimulate agro-exports like the Yucatán peninsula, where interest in food production dwindled as the international market for henequen soared.Footnote 124 Whereas Guatemalan agro-exports annually contributed about US$10 million more to the economy than DUA from 1920 to 1928, this relationship flipped during the Great Depression and the Second World War. In the 1920s, DUA seldom kept pace with demographics, leaving imports to fill the gap. To close this gap, the state began shifting resources to DUA in the 1930s, and gradually it surpassed agro-exports’ value added. The concurrent expansion of the road network facilitated the transportation of foodstuffs and provided previously isolated rural communities with access to markets. As DUA expanded to feed the growing population, its production greatly exceeded that of agro-exports from 1929 to 1950.Footnote 125 By the 1940s, DUA was contributing over US$100 million more to the economy than agro-exports.Footnote 126 The rebound in domestic maize and bean production can be attributed to small-scale farmers who prioritised foodstuff production for the domestic market, and national officials who emphasised increasing yields of ‘articles of first necessity’.Footnote 127
Coffee and milpa agriculture were complementary in the eyes of many authorities and indígenas. The latter farmed maize in the hills and coffee in the valleys in places like San José Poaquil (Chimaltenango).Footnote 128 By 1933, San Miguel Pochuta (Chimaltenango), where indígenas comprised 80 per cent of the population according to the 1921 census, was ‘strictly coffee-growers’.Footnote 129 In 1934, the Sacatepéquez governor reported that maize, beans and coffee all enjoyed ‘excellent cultivation’.Footnote 130 During a time when Chimaltenango harvested 423,035 quintals of maize, it also produced 66,981 quintals of coffee.Footnote 131
Despite indigenous farmers who transitioned back to milpa agriculture from coffee production during the 1910s, the nation suffered maize shortages throughout the following decade.Footnote 132 Not until 1929 did the nation produce as much maize as it did in 1920. Similarly, the 1921 bean harvest was not reached, let alone bested, until 1928 (see Tables 1 and 2). While wheat production remained relatively constant (except for a precipitous drop in 1924) during the first half of the decade, yields decreased in the second half and did not recover until 1935 (see Table 3). Having caused ‘suffering for some years’,Footnote 133 locust plagues and droughts compelled the government to eliminate import taxes on maize in 1923 and 1924, when the minister claimed the harvest decreased by 10 per cent despite ‘energetically combatting’ plagues.Footnote 134 After scarce rains at the beginning of the 1926 season and prolonged rains at the end of it damned harvests, the government imported 10,000 quintals of maize.Footnote 135 A better than expected harvest of 2.4 million quintals the following year provided a much needed respite, but another 10 per cent drop thereafter compelled the government to import an astounding 411,436 quintals in 1928.Footnote 136 Two years later, the government imported 461,620 quintals of maize, 12,062 quintals of beans and 1,162 quintals of wheat. In short, the government imported the equivalent of more than one-fifth of its maize harvest in 1930. Whereas Sacatepéquez imported only 5,216 quintals of maize for 46,453 residents, Chimaltenango imported 26,294 quintals of maize for 88,030 residents.Footnote 137 With a population of a little more than half that of Chimaltenango, Sacatepéquez imported only one-fifth of the maize Chimaltenango did – suggesting its per capita maize production was more efficient than Chimaltenango's.
Table 1. Maize Production in Kaqchikel Departments and Guatemala
Source: Memoria del Ministerio de Agricultura (Guatemala City: Tipografía Nacional), 1922–44. *A manzana equals roughly 1.7 acres. **A quintal equals 100 pounds.
Table 2. Bean Production in Kaqchikel Departments and Guatemala
Source: Memoria del Ministerio de Agricultura (Guatemala City: Tipografía Nacional), 1922–44.
Table 3. Wheat Production in Kaqchikel Departments and Guatemala
Source: Memoria del Ministerio de Agricultura (Guatemala City: Tipografía Nacional), 1922–44.
To understand why a nation with such fertile land had to import maize and beans, the minister of agriculture commissioned a study. Like his predecessors, his initial inclination was that agriculturists needed to produce more.Footnote 138 Rural indigenous farmers remained central to officials’ notions of agricultural production.
The Elusive Elimination of Forced Labour
Although the new government sought to transition to free wage labour after the overthrow of Estrada Cabrera in 1920, mandamientos and forced labour in other guises persisted while debt peonage continued to ensnare workers.Footnote 139 To weather the Great Depression, authorities reduced wages and planters paid down workers’ debt instead of paying cash.Footnote 140 As the economy was recovering, the editors of the Diario de Centro América (the official daily of the government) asserted that those who benefitted most from forced labour schemes were labour brokers who earned a commission and authorities whose bribes ‘exceeded what the workers earned during a whole season of work’.Footnote 141
When Ubico replaced debt peonage with a vagrancy law in 1934, labour relations shifted. Since it applied equally to (poor) ladinos, many indígenas lauded the vagrancy law.Footnote 142 After six years of implementation, the Ministry of Agriculture too praised the law, though from a different perspective: ‘Our autochthonous race … has been liberated with power to find work voluntarily or dedicate all their attention to their own crops.’Footnote 143 According to the Ministry, the vagrancy law precipitated the ‘resurgence of a new type of aborigine within whom has been created ambitions and needs, and one can say without exaggeration that this new rural man has abandoned vices like laziness and alcoholism’.Footnote 144 In a more balanced assessment, the Diario de Centro América asserted: ‘If the law is judged to be a slavery measure, it can be criticised, but it merits only praise if analysed from the point of view of the national economy.’Footnote 145 Some authorities explicitly related the law to milpa agriculture. The minister of agriculture explained how the requisite days of work depended on how much land each individual cultivated. Individuals with little or no land had to work 150 days per year for a landowner, whereas those whose ‘crops comprised at least 10 cuerdas by 20 brazadas of maize, bean, etc.’ only had to work 100 days per year for someone else.Footnote 146 By specifically identifying small-scale milpa agriculture, the minister highlighted its vital role in the nation's economy. Reduced forced labour requirements for those farmers underscore their crucial contributions and influence vis-à-vis officials. Even as the nation was modernising with a view toward emulating industrialised economies, DUA continued to figure prominently in its plans for progress.
The vagrancy law did little to alter plantation power relations, however. In 1934, the Chimaltenango governor explained that his office ‘attended in a special manner to finqueros’ petitions, punishing and ordering the capture of fraudulent workers’.Footnote 147 Taking a different tack, the minister of agriculture was convinced that the new law had ended ‘work slavery’ and undercut ‘those who previously ignominiously exploited’ workers.Footnote 148 The chief of police offered a more nuanced analysis: ‘Some reactionary elements, taking advantage of indigenous ignorance, tried to distort the indisputable benefits of the law … [particularly] resentful finqueros and habilitadores.’Footnote 149 Despite ‘a few difficulties between owners and workers not worth mentioning’, the Chimaltenango governor reported that finqueros enjoyed sufficient access to labour and increased agricultural production in his jurisdiction in 1937.Footnote 150
Even as claims that the vagrancy law would facilitate the ‘liberation of the indio’ seemed disingenuous,Footnote 151 Ubico's praise of indigenous people's diligence shaped broader discourses about indigeneity. In contrast to many labour brokers, finqueros and others who considered laziness indigenous people's ‘natural inclination’,Footnote 152 the Diario de Centro América portrayed indigenous people as hard-working contributors to the national economy, especially regarding the production of maize. Stressing the importance of teaching ‘rural people’ about ‘scientific agriculture’, one journalist insisted, ‘the indio’ was quick to learn a new technique ‘even though he did not understand the scientific reasoning’.Footnote 153
Celebrating indigenous diligence, if not intelligence, spread beyond agricultural toil to the infrastructure that facilitated the domestic distribution of foodstuffs. ‘The municipalities that have the best roads are those where the indigenous population is plentiful; they prefer to provide two weeks of service annually than to commute the ticket.’Footnote 154 In calling attention to the ethnicity of road building, the Diario de Centro América editors glossed over its relationship to class: few rural indigenous people could afford to pay the tax that would have relieved them of their obligatory labour.Footnote 155 By 1936, the Diario de Centro América editors had noted road construction advanced foodstuff production by facilitating the movement of ‘the abundant harvests that descend from the farmhouse to the city, where they inundate the markets to satisfy the demands of millions and millions of consumers’.Footnote 156 References to the farmhouse and urban markets highlight these consumers as national, not foreign. Providing the vast majority of road and agricultural labour, indigenous people were vital to the nation's economic development and sustenance.
By the 1930s, indigenous coffee-growers had been all but forgotten as Ubico refashioned the Oficina de Café, ‘to conquer new markets’ and elevate Guatemalan coffee's international reputation.Footnote 157 ‘The experts are our coffee-growers and their indigenous helpers’, reported one journalist in 1933.Footnote 158 Relegating indígenas to subservient roles by ignoring their entrepreneurship played into the image Guatemalan capitalists wanted to project to the world. The government assured US, European and Cuban consumers that ‘the best coffee in the world’ benefitted from highland climates and ‘indigenous Guatemalans’ who carefully handpicked each bean ‘to prevent green coffee from mixing with the ripe [coffee]’.Footnote 159 Even as the nation promoted its coffee abroad, it continued to celebrate domestic agriculture at national fairs and remained vigilant about provisional production.
Modernisation, Indigeneity and Increased Production
As pressure to modernise mounted during the twentieth century, false dichotomies set progress against tradition (read indigeneity); in turn, authorities decreasingly championed indigenous people. By the early 1930s, the Ministry of Agriculture's chemical laboratory had ‘conducted various important technological studies of scientific and industrial character’.Footnote 160 Even as Guatemalan intellectuals hailed science, they recognised how crucial the ‘hard-working man’ was to agriculture. But they denigrated the particular men who dominated agricultural labour. One 1933 editorial contrasted indigenous people and Africans, who enjoyed rich natural resources but never fully capitalised on them, with western Europeans, who maximised the limited resources available to them.Footnote 161 Less than two decades after Sacatepéquez authorities lauded indigenous agricultural knowledge and practices, national officials were convinced that modern agronomy was as much about introducing new techniques as ‘removing the superstition that still reigns among campesinos, like a harvest of closed ignorance’.Footnote 162 According to Guatemalan elites, rural farmers had not emerged from the ‘primitive stage’ of agriculture. The Diario de Centro América criticised farmers for ignoring foreign brochures and other publications distributed by the Ministry of Agriculture, which helped explain why ‘our harvests [are] poor in comparison to those obtained in North America’.Footnote 163
To help rural populations evolve beyond their ‘customs and superstitious beliefs’, the Ubico administration ‘organised missions of experts … to replace true prejudices that have hindered our agricultural evolution’.Footnote 164 The goal was not to incorporate new techniques with time-proven practices of indigenous farmers (let alone learn from those approaches), but rather to encourage rural agriculturists to abandon their approaches for modern agronomy.
Aware that science alone could not expand yields, officials deployed other strategies to increase harvests. In a government publication that otherwise touted science as crucial to the nation's agricultural production, some agronomists encouraged homemade remedies for combatting locusts and plagues, thereby facilitating small-scale farmers’ pursuit of practical solutions.Footnote 165 Other experts warned that ‘continued use of chemical fertilizers exhausts the supply of [natural] minor elements’.Footnote 166 In a nod to domestic foodstuff production, Ubico sought to ‘promote the cultivation of wheat’ by banning San Juan Ostuncalco's (Quezaltenango) wheat tax.Footnote 167 When landowners neglected their farms, local officials informed national authorities.Footnote 168 Identifying another problem, the Guatemalan intellectual Carlos Wyld Ospina was convinced that maize shortages were not the result of ‘weather or sowing but … an army of hagglers and speculators of all sorts’ whose ‘punishable activities’ were shorting the market.Footnote 169 Ever promoting its accomplishments (and often denying that the country imported maize), the Ubico administration tended to highlight (and manufacture) data that demonstrated its agricultural mandates’ effectiveness and attributed shortcomings to external malevolence.Footnote 170
Even during Ubico's authoritarian regime, agricultural production took precedence over military training. Shortly after assuming the presidency, he reminded local authorities that militiamen were only to train twice a season, ‘with the objective that workers can attend to their commitments and crops and gather maize and other essential grain harvests’.Footnote 171 While the military served a number of important purposes, DUA was paramount.
When Ubico assumed office, Guatemala enjoyed bumper crops. The campaign against locusts had become increasingly efficacious by 1931, which coincided with a ‘very rainy year’ and a ‘considerable increase in land sown [with maize] and [thus] in the harvest obtained’.Footnote 172 Bean harvests also increased in 1931.Footnote 173 Since the administration celebrated domestic agriculture at national fairs, maize regularly caught officials’ attention. ‘The maize harvest was sufficient, there was no need to import it from other parts. Maize is our most important product’, insisted the minister of agriculture in 1933.Footnote 174 The next few years, however, were worse. In 1933, the Chimaltenango governor reported that four Kaqchikel towns suffered ‘enormous frosts’ that caused ‘considerable losses in the bean and maize seeding’.Footnote 175 Production in Chimaltenango dropped by nearly 44,515 quintals and national production fell by 206,683 quintals (see Table 1). Nationally, maize production dropped each year from 1931 to 1934. As more efficient mechanisms and access to labour permeated agriculture, national maize, bean and wheat harvests generally increased between 1933 and 1942, with the exception of wheat from 1937 to 1939 and beans from 1937 to 1938 (see Tables 2 and 3). Nationally, land sown with maize continued to increase from 1935 to 1942 and production increased each year from 1933 to 1942 (see Table 1).
Indigenous farmers in Sacatepéquez and Chimaltenango contributed to increased production. In 1933, Sacatepéquez produced a surplus of staple goods.Footnote 176 The late-1930s surge in maize and bean harvests was largely attributable to the dramatic increase in manzanas sown with these grains (see Tables 1 and 2). In 1940, the minister of agriculture noted: ‘Despite the bad atmospheric conditions and shortage of rain, maize and beans achieved a volume that satisfied demand and [facilitated] exporting beans.’Footnote 177 National officials’ concessions to small-scale farmers and the push to expand land dedicated to maize, bean and wheat sowing (which increased by 509,569, 89,646 and 18,596 manzanas respectively from 1920 to 1942), alongside small-scale farmers’ commitment to staple crops, increased DUA production. From 1922 to 1942, maize, bean and wheat harvests increased by 12.4 million, 1.5 million and 397,770 quintals respectively. From having to import nearly half a million quintals of maize in 1928 to no longer needing imports in 1933 to producing enough in 1939 to export beans, the nation's domestic agricultural economy was on solid footing. Hints of collaboration and respect emerge in the archival record in officials’ appreciation for indigenous agricultural wisdom and small-scale farmers’ favourable responses to inspectors’ requests to cultivate more land. As these relationships developed, officials continued to remove obstacles to DUA, as we will see.Footnote 178
Even as national authorities encouraged an expansion of cultivated land, not all local officials facilitated that process. To make up for low yields the previous year, in 1934 the Chimaltenango governor encouraged mayors to increase farming on ‘communal, municipal, and bald í o [fallow] land’.Footnote 179 When Poaquil residents requested communal land be distributed among them, however, municipal authorities neglected to do so because the petitioners could not afford to pay a surveyor. Such obstacles were likely the exception, though, as the governor boasted that his intensification programme went beyond supplying his own department to producing a surplus for surrounding ones.Footnote 180 He concluded: ‘Harvests were abundant and the price of grains is completely low, avoiding in this manner the hunger that the farming people have felt.’Footnote 181 Proud of this progress, a few years later the governor noted, ‘following the instruction I received for the agriculturists … to intensify their plantings, managing in that way that when the country suffered scarcity of articles of first necessity, especially maize, this department not only had what was needed for its inhabitants’ consumption, but also redistributed great quantities to the capital and neighbouring departments’.Footnote 182 Like their counterparts in Sacatepéquez, many small-scale farmers in Chimaltenango embraced the call to expand cultivated land. Such collaboration helped to increase DUA production in both departments and the nation during the 1930s (see Tables 1, 2 and 3).
Democratic Continuity and Change
When domestic production increased and staple goods became more affordable in the 1940s, the nation remained vigilant about expanding maize production. After the 1944 Revolution, officials buttressed domestic foodstuff production by providing financing for small-scale farmers.Footnote 183 Trying to intensify maize planting in the 1940s, ‘with the goal of propelling what for our nation is a principal economic resource’,Footnote 184 Sacatepéquez Governor Juan Sierra insisted ‘that fundamental article is a vital point in our general economic development’.Footnote 185 By highlighting that ‘beans and maize [comprise] the basic diet of our indigenous class’, Sierra pointed to the ethnicity of subsistence agriculture.Footnote 186
Municipal officials depended on the new democratic government (1944–54) for food aid to cover low maize production in 1945 and 1946.Footnote 187 Despite what Sierra considered a decent harvest in 1946, Sacatepéquez faced a maize deficit of 34,765 quintals.Footnote 188 By 1949, efforts to stimulate DUA had paid off – that sector grew by 3.6 per cent from 1944 to 1949, while agro-exports increased by only 0.3 per cent.Footnote 189
In some places, agricultural exports stimulated food markets. Such was the case in Nicaragua and El Salvador, where the cotton boom in the second half of the twentieth century invigorated the market for maize and other basic grains. When cotton agriculture usurped the best lands, fewer farmers could survive on subsistence crops so they had to purchase basic grains. Cotton wages pumped cash into the pockets of rural migrants, who spent it on foodstuffs.Footnote 190 As coffee marched toward agricultural dominance in the Central Valley of Costa Rica, a similar process unfolded whereby the coffee economy displaced domestic agriculture in some areas and catalysed the rapid commodification of foodstuffs in others.Footnote 191 The colonos who produced surplus foodstuffs while working in coffee plantations enriched São Paulo's domestic market. Although Guatemala did not follow this broad pattern of agro-exports stimulating the commodification of foodstuffs, Costa Rican farmers on the frontiers of coffee regions, who mixed commercial and subsistence crops, and Brazilian colonos, who also farmed both, mirrored highland Guatemala farmers who combined coffee and milpa production. As was true in some areas of Costa Rica and São Paulo, the combination of mixed farming routines and labour shortages (real or imagined) retarded dependence on coffee monoculture in the central highlands of Guatemala.Footnote 192
Unlike in São Paulo and Costa Rica, where slavery and forced labour schemes gave way to a free labour market by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, corvée labour persisted in Guatemala, even under its democratic government, as authorities enforced vagrancy laws to ‘expand cultivation’.Footnote 193 Guatemala's contradiction of democracy and forced labour stood in stark contrast to São Paulo, where historians have argued that increasingly autonomous colonos, particularly those who parlayed their foodstuff production into savings that allowed them to purchase land, helped to democratise the state and nation by undermining traditional large-landed coffee planters’ political and economic hegemony.Footnote 194
Prioritising road building and foodstuff production, some Guatemalan officials kept the demand for coffee labour at bay in Sacatepéquez’ indigenous communities. Conscription had so skewed labour relations that even those who advocated fair pay warned about its unintended effects. Explaining that paying men 35 centavos a day to work on the roads (10 centavos more than they could earn on fincas in 1945) produced good results, Sierra cautioned authorities to ‘take into consideration the agricultural needs of each zone’.Footnote 195
With officials trying to balance competing concerns, some mandates contravened proven agricultural practices. On 11 December 1945, two literate farmers complained that the intendente (mayor) insisted they plough their sweet potato fields horizontally instead of vertically. For ‘many years’ they had been working with vertical furrows because horizontal sowing did not yield a good harvest. To compromise, ‘they offered to use vertical furrows on land that was not level, but the intendente would not accept it’.Footnote 196 When the governor's inspector sided with the intendente, farmers from Aguascalientes and Barahona refused to cultivate their land, even though they had tilled it. ‘That prohibition does us grave harm because we will lose our work and the means to support our families’, they explained.Footnote 197 Reconsidering his initial decision, the governor asked the Barahona mayor to investigate. Noting that farmers in the area had been growing sweet potato ‘for about 100 years … and experience has advised them to do it that way’, the investigative commission suggested adhering to that wisdom.Footnote 198 Conceding local expertise, the governor concurred.
During the democratic government and subsequent military rule, officials reserved the right to intervene in agriculture and the economy. ‘As an emergency measure and … to avoid improper speculation’, the Revolutionary government set prices for ‘articles of first necessity’ such as maize, beans and other staples.Footnote 199 Ten years later, in 1955, the military government initiated a ‘programme of maize cultivation intensification, as a necessary measure to counteract the scarcity of that article of daily consumption’.Footnote 200 The government also tasked ‘vegetative health agents’ with intensifying their fight against locusts.Footnote 201
Conclusion
In a nation bent on modernising its economy to buoy its international standing in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the export production of coffee, sugar and bananas was paramount to achieving that goal. While historians have shed a bright light on these economies, DUA has received comparatively little attention despite feeding the nation and adding more value to the economy than agro-exports from 1929 to 1950.Footnote 202 According to oral histories and ethnographies, maize was regularly on the minds of most highland denizens.Footnote 203 Archival records reveal government officials and regional authorities too paid careful attention to it and other subsistence crops. So crucial was milpa agriculture to sustaining life in rural and urban Guatemala that its decline threatened national calorific intake. Faced with food insecurity, nimble indigenous farmers who had embraced coffee production had transitioned back to milpa agriculture by 1920. Afforded their own land for DUA, colonos on Brazilian coffee plantations helped that economy survive volatile drops in coffee prices. The importance of DUA and small-scale farmers’ ability to adapt to changes in agricultural export and domestic markets was also evident in Costa Rica where the two economies often complemented each other. In addition to revealing symbiosis between coffee (if not other agro-exports) and foodstuff production, the Costa Rican, Brazilian and Guatemalan cases demonstrate how the combination of mixed farming routines and labour shortages retarded dependence on coffee monoculture.
As forced labour mechanisms funnelled workers to agro-export economies, some indigenous and other small-scale agriculturists used their domestic production to exempt themselves from compulsory labour. Their intermittent efficacy suggests authorities recognised the importance of DUA and the small-scale farmers who fuelled it.Footnote 204 Corrupt, exploitative and racist officials notwithstanding, some authorities respected local agriculturists’ epistemologies. Indigenous farmers – some of whom planted coffee – and their knowledge enjoyed sway that a scholarly focus on agro-exports in Guatemala and elsewhere in Latin America has largely overlooked. By highlighting the importance of their agricultural production for the domestic economy, indigenous and other small-scale agriculturists could buoy their positions within the nation. The same was true of Costa Rican farmers and Brazilian colonos, whose agricultural production afforded increased autonomy which in turn undergirded democratic development in their nations. Although identifying a causal relationship between indigenous agricultural entrepreneurship and the national turn toward democracy begs further research, indígenas’ increased autonomy and power vis-à-vis local and regional officials, even when only temporary, speaks to the ways indigenous peoples shaped their communities and nation.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Chris Lutz for sharing his archival materials, some of which informed this article. In a generous act that enhanced the field of Latin American history, Chris made them publicly available – first at the University of Southern Maine, then at Loyola University, Maryland, and the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (Centre for Meso-American Research, CIRMA) in Antigua, Guatemala, and also electronically through ‘The Guatemala Collection: Government and Church Documents for Sacatepéquez (1587–1991)’, available at brill.com. I also want to thank Doug Hurt, who first invited me to organise and present these ideas at the 2016 American Historical Association Annual Conference. Allen Wells, Lowell Gudmundson, J. T. Way and the three anonymous reviewers at JLAS offered critical commentary and insights that immensely improved earlier drafts of this article.
