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Black Workers in the Export Years: Latin America, 1880–1930

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

George Reid Andrews
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh

Extract

Some fifteen years ago in these pages, Emília Viotti da Costa noted a characteristic of Brazilian labor historiography that she could have applied to Latin America as a whole. “Historians rarely mention blacks or mulattoes…Clearly there is here a problem that deserves more attention. What role did blacks play in the working class? How did they relate to immigrants and vice-versa?… These are some questions waiting for answers.”

Type
Workers in Racially-stratified Societies
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1997

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References

NOTES

Research for this article was carried out with support from an NEH Fellowship for University Teachers. Many thanks to Alejandro de la Fuente, Richard Oestreicher, and Gay Seidman for their helpful comments and criticisms.

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32. On the tobacco industry, see Stubbs, Jean, Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History, 1860–1958 (Cambridge, 1985), 70, 7980;Google ScholarCórdova, Efrén, Classe trabajadora y movimiento sindical en Cuba, 1819–1959 (Miami, 1995), 69, 92.Google Scholar

33. Quoted in de la Fuente, “‘With All and for All’,” 131; see chap. 2 of that dissertation. See also de Motes, Jordi Maluquer, Nación e inmigración: Los españoles en Cuba (ss. XIX y XX) (Colombres, Spain, 1992), 141–45.Google Scholar

34. As late as the 1970s and 1980s, Afro-Latin-American workers retained strong memories of slavery and a burning determination to avoid anything resembling it. Residents of a black village in Sāo Paulo state described wage employment on nearby plantations as “like slavery that is coming back again. You won't believe it, but the elders used to tell us how slavery once was obligatory. Not today. Slavery is coming back again, but not for everyone, only for those who give themselves over it.” Queiroz, Renato, Caipiras negros no Vale do Ribeira (Sāo Paulo, 1983). 81.Google Scholar See also Taussig, Devil and Commodity Fetishism, 67–68, 93; Bourgois, Philippe, Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (Baltimore, 1989), 84.Google Scholar

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37. Sánchez-Albornoz, Population of Latin America, 167; Wright, Café con Leche, 77; Conniff, Michael L., Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904–1981 (Pittsburgh, 1985), 29.Google Scholar

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43. Conniff, Black Labor, 61–63, 88. On similar strategies among West Indian workers for US oil companies in Venezuela during this period, see Bergquist, Labor in Latin America, 218.

44. Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work, 66–84. During the 1980s a second wave of plant disease devastated the cacao groves planted by many of the black smallholders, leading to the closing of many of their farms and a sharp decline in black landholding in the region. See Palmer, Paula, “Wa'apin man”: La historia de Ia costa talamanqueña de Costa Rica (San José, 1986), 281–83;Google ScholarPurcell, Trevor W., Banana Fallout: Class, Color, and Culture among West Indians in Costa Rica (Los Angeles, 1993), 5758.Google Scholar

45. On West Indian upward mobility in Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, see Pollak-Eltz, Angelina, La negritud en Venezuela (Caracas, 1991), 8085;Google ScholarDerby, Lauren, “Haitians, Magic, and Money: Raza and Society in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands, 1900 to 1937,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36 (1994):516–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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47. See Ibid., 11; Spalding, Organized Labor, 14–15; Godio, , Historia del movimiento obrero, vol. 1, 92100.Google Scholar

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52. Hahner, June, Poverty and Politics: The Urban Poor in Brazil 1870–1920 (Albuquerque, 1986), 150;Google Scholar Keremetsis, “Early Industrial Worker,” 99–100; Fausto, Boris, Trabaiho urbano e conflito social 1890–1920 (São Paulo, 1977), 3336;Google Scholar Chalhoub, Trabalho, lar e botequim, 108–9.

53. Córdova, Classe trabajadora, 82–84, 92–95; Stubbs, Tobacco on the Periphery, 110–13.

54. Stubbs, Tobacco on the Periphery, 115 (emphasis in original).

55. Chomsky, West Indian Workers, 237, 235–38.

56. Echeverri-Gent, Elisavinda, “Forgotten Workers: British West Indians and the Early Days of the Banana Industry in Costa Rica and Honduras,” Journal of Latin American Studies 24 (1992):301–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

57. Conniff, Black Labor, 84.

58. Fiehrer, Thomas, “Political Violence in the Periphery: The Haitian Massacre of 1937,” Race and Class 32 (1990):120;CrossRefGoogle ScholarDerby, Robin L. H. and Turits, Richard, “Historias de terror y los terrores de la historia: La masacre haitiana de 1937 en la República Dominicana,” Estudios Sociales 26 (1993):6576. On ethnic tensions among native-born and West Indian workers in the Dominican Republic,Google Scholarsee Cassá, Roberto, Movimiento obrero y lucha socialista en la República Dominicana (desde los orígenes hasta 1960) (Santo Domingo, 1990), 6168.Google Scholar

59. On the Rio unions, see Hahner, Poverty and Politics, 98–102, 105, 223–24; Fausto, Trabalho urbano, 41–60. On São Paulo, Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 60–66.

60. Quoted in Chomsky, Aviva, “Race, Class, and Resistance: Afro-Cubans and West Indian Migrants after 1912,” paper presented at the Latin American Studies Association Congress, Washington, D.C., 1995, 24.Google Scholar

61. Scott, “Defining the Boundaries of Freedom,” 89.

62. Córdova, Classe trabajadora, 171–72, 187–88, 210; Carr, Barry, “Identity, Class and Nation: West Indian Sugar Workers and Cuban Society, 1925–1934,” paper presented at the American Historical Association meeting, San Francisco, 1994, 2136.Google Scholar

63. Greenberg, Race and State in Capitalist Development.

64. On Communist organizers in particular, see Bourgois, , Ethnicity at Work, 59, 102–07;Google Scholar Chomsky, West Indian Workers, 239–53; Tennassee, Paul Nehru, Venezuela, los obreros petroleros y la lucha por la democracia (Madrid and Caracas, 1979), 218–21; and sources cited in note 62.Google Scholar

65. In addition to examples cited earlier, see Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 64–65.

66. On the Caste Regime, see Rout, Leslie B., The African Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the Present Day (Cambridge and New York, 1976), 126–61.Google Scholar

67. Long, Gary, “‘The Dragon Finally Came’: Industrial Capitalism, Urban Artisans and the Liberal Party in Colombia, 1910–1948” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1995), 190–91;Google ScholarBraun, Herbert, The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia (Madison, 1985), 8283.Google Scholar

68. On Afro-Latin American underrepresentation in the middle class, see Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 125–80; Andrews, George Reid, “Racial Inequality in Brazil and the United States: A Statistical Comparison”, Journal of Social History 26 (1992):229–63;CrossRefGoogle ScholarWade, , Blackness and Race Mixture; Graceras, Ulises et al. , Informe preliminar sobre la situación de la comunidad negra en el Uruguay (Montevideo, 1980).Google Scholar On the important exception of revolutionary Cuba, see de la Fuente, Alejandro, “Race and Inequality in Cuba, 1899–1981”, journal of Contemporary History 25 (1995), 131–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

69Several studies caution, however, that we should not underestimate levels of racism and prejudice among the region's workers. See, for example, Maria Suely Kofes de Almeida, “Entre nós, os pobres, eles, os negros” (dissertacao de mestrado, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 1976); Lourdes SerranoPeralta, “Estructura y relaciones raciales en un barrio popular: Mujer, instrucción, ocupación y color de la piel,” paper presented at the Latin American Studies Association Congress, Washington, D.C., 1995; 54–74.