6 - Agrarian structures

Summary

There are few detailed historical studies of changes in the agrarian structure in the period. There are exceptions, but these are case studies of local-level processes. One of these exceptions in Luis González, Pueblo en Vilo: Microhistoria de San José de Gracia (Mexico, D.F., 1972); Eng. trans., San José de Gracia: Mexican Village in Transition (Austin, Tex., 1974), a careful reconstruction of social and economic change in the Mexican historian’s home town, which is the centre of a mainly ranching economy in the west of Mexico. A useful historical account, written by an anthropologist, again for Mexico and for a ranching economy, is Frans Schryer, The Rancheros of Pisaflores: The History of a Petty Bourgeoisie in Twentieth Century Mexico (Toronto, 1980), which traces political and social change up to the late 1970s. Gavin Smith’s Livelihood and Resistance: Peasants and the Politics of Land in Peru (Berkeley, 1989) is also written by an anthropologist, and provides a detailed historical study of the struggles of one community for land from 1850 to the mid-1970s, showing how changes in livelihood affected political action and consciousness. For Brazil, Verena Stolcke’s Coffee Planters, Workers and Wives (New York, 1988) gives a history of the labour system on the São Paulo coffee plantations from 1850 to 1980 as it passed from slavery to forms of share-cropping to casual wage labour.