Michael J. Gonzales

Chinese Plantation Workers and Social Conflict in Peru in the late Nineteenth Century

As the world capitalist system developed during the nineteenth century non-slave labour became a commodity that circulated around the globe and contributed to capital accumulation in metropolitan centres. The best examples are the emigration of millions of Asian indentured servants and European labourers to areas of European colonisation. Asians replaced emancipated African slaves on plantations in the Caribbean and South America, supplemented a declining slave population in Cuba, built railways in California, worked in mines in South Africa, laboured on sugarcane plantations in Mauritius and Fiji, and served on plantations in southeast Asia. Italian immigrants also replaced African slaves on coffee estates in Brazil, worked with Spaniards in the seasonal wheat harvest in Argentina, and, along with other Europeans, entered the growing labour market in the United States. From the perspective of capital, these workers were a cheap alternative to local wage labour and, as foreigners without the rights of citizens, they could be subjected to harsher methods of social control. 1

Capitalist Agriculture and Labour Contracting in Northern Peru, 1880–1905

Latin Americanists have become increasingly intrigued with questions concerning rural labour and oppression. In recent publications, traditional interpretations of peonage, labour contracting, wage labour and other topics have been questioned by historians with access to new documentary materials. Peru has been the setting for much of this discussion because of the important changes which occurred during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the unusual opportunity to understand them since the creation of the Archivo del Fuero Agrario.1 Much of the interest in Peru has centered on the expansion of the sugar industry and the efforts of sugar planters to reach out into the highlands to acquire labourers from among peasant communities. This process has been referred to as enganche, from the verb enganchar, meaning to hook or to entrap. At the time, it evoked the wrath of the pro-Indian intelligentsia who wrote exposes condemning the system as little better than slavery.2 While their heart was in the right place, these writers did not have the detachment, access to documentary materials nor the advantage of historical perspective to write completely accurate and unbiased accounts. Nevertheless, until recently they were the principal sources for studying enganche. This is reflected in the early work of Peter F. Klaren and others where unsuspecting highlanders are tricked and exploited at every turn by un-

Imagining Mexico in 1910: Visions of the Patria in the Centennial Celebration in Mexico City *

Mexicos 1910 Centenario reflected a popular trend in Western Europe and its former colonies to use centenaries of important historical events to promote political programmes and philosophies through the construction of historical memory. Centennial organisers in Mexico linked Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and Jose Maria Morelos to President Porfirio Diaz in words and symbols, and associated state formation and civic culture with Liberal leaders and policies, such as public education, material progress and secularism. The planners also promoted Morelos as a mestizo icon and symbol for national identity and integration, while they simultaneously celebrated Mexicos pre-Columbian cultures and criticised contemporary natives as impediments to progress. The Centennials audience included hundreds of thousands of Mexicans as well as foreigners from around the globe, who came away with different impressions based on their cultural perspectives, political philosophies and material interests. Following the overthrow of Diaz in 1911, Mexicos revolutionary governments continued to use Independence Day celebrations to promote their programmes, including some whose origins lay in the Porfiriato . As we approach the bicentenary of Latin American independence, competing visions of patrias will likely surface and provide insights into the construction of historical memory and contemporary political discourse.

United States Copper Companies, the State, and Labour Conflict in Mexico, 1900-1910

No topic encapsulates better the fundamental contradiction in capitalist development in Porfirian Mexico than the turbulent history of the copper industry. Within the space of a few years, the industry simultaneously experienced rapid growth, labour conflict and political controversy with international implications. This historical dynamic was unleashed, in part, by the Mexican governments policy of attracting overseas investors to Mexico through generous concessions and tax breaks that facilitated foreign control over key industries. The privileged position that public policy afforded foreign companies resulted in a nationalist backlash and exacerbated tension between native labour and foreign capital. The famous strike at Cananea, Sonora, in 1906 brought to national attention the grievances of Mexican workers over wage scales that favoured foreign workers over natives, falling real wages, and the power and arrogance of United States companies in Mexico. The strike became a scandal when armed North Americans from nearby Arizona crossed the border and assisted local authorities in crushing Mexican workers. This violation of Mexican sovereignty caused a storm of protest from both liberals and conservatives and unsettled the Diaz regime on the eve of the Mexican Revolution.

Planters and Politics in Peru, 1895-1919

Research for this article was funded by a Ford Foundation Fellowship in 1974-5 and by a Fulbright Fellowship in autumn 1987.

Revolution in the Andes: The Age of Túpac Amaru by Sergio Serulnikov (review)

World history and food studies are both relatively new disciplines. The study of world history comes at a time when people are trying to understand today’s global hyper-circulation of commodities, ideas, and power. Work in food studies gravitates toward the intimate and commensal, whereas new food-history encyclopedias tend to present global facts without sufacient analysis of global context. World histories of particular foods, though astute and informative, generally avoid analysis of the global systems in which they circulate. Meanwhile, mega-theory books, like Mann’s 1491 and 1492, have popularized Crosby’s notion of the Columbian Exchange—the era when geographical boundaries began to shatter for plants, animals, and humans.1 Notwithstanding Laudan’s occasional disagreements with Crosby, her Cuisine and Empire—a tour-deforce of both erudition and analysis—is certainly closer to his work than to the encyclopedias. It not only shows what kinds of cuisine moved around the globe; it also offers a clear explanation of how and why. Laudan knows more about the world history of cooking than any other scholar alive, but she also does more with her knowledge than just alling pages with facts. Cuisine and Empire is organized by a theoretical framework that structures her argument about how world history works. Laudan’s answer to the how and why questions revolves around the notion of power. Cuisines moved with conquest, whether accomplished with swords, powerful religious ideas, or both. She follows the history of how Greek and Roman conquest led to the spread of animal sacriace and then moves to the more complex history of how Buddhist monks’ ideas about food affected rulers who wavered between Buddha and Confucius. Upon this foundation she layers the inouence of Islamic expansion, such as the Mughal conquest of India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In all of these cases she follows the threads of how soldiers and priests helped to determine what people ate. When Laudan refers to the creation of “empires,” she means how people with certain ways of cooking were able to extend their spheres of inouence—by conquest, by conversion, or simply by immigration. In her framework, those who exercised power used a “high” cuisine to display their might and status, with retinues of cooks and slaves, run by master courtiers, at their service. Laudan compares this elevated fare to the meals of the humble, most of which had little nutritional value. One can imagine a parallel history detailing the diseases of malnutrition and stunted growth, and the epidemics of early mortality based on some of these diets. Laudan also reveals where and when peasants, Reviews