Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Tables
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- 1 THE PUZZLE OF INSURGENT COLLECTIVE ACTION
- 2 ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH IN THE SHADOW OF CIVIL WAR
- 3 REDRAWING THE BOUNDARIES OF CLASS AND CITIZENSHIP
- 4 FROM POLITICAL MOBILIZATION TO ARMED INSURGENCY
- 5 THE POLITICAL FOUNDATIONS OF DUAL SOVEREIGNTY
- 6 THE REEMERGENCE OF CIVIL SOCIETY
- 7 CAMPESINO ACCOUNTS OF INSURGENT PARTICIPATION
- 8 EXPLAINING INSURGENT COLLECTIVE ACTION
- Epilogue: Legacies of an Agrarian Insurgency
- Appendix: A Model of High-Risk Collective Action by Subordinate Social Actors
- Chronology of El Salvador's Civil War
- References
- Index
- Other Books in the Series
1 - THE PUZZLE OF INSURGENT COLLECTIVE ACTION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Tables
- Preface and Acknowledgments
- List of Abbreviations
- 1 THE PUZZLE OF INSURGENT COLLECTIVE ACTION
- 2 ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH IN THE SHADOW OF CIVIL WAR
- 3 REDRAWING THE BOUNDARIES OF CLASS AND CITIZENSHIP
- 4 FROM POLITICAL MOBILIZATION TO ARMED INSURGENCY
- 5 THE POLITICAL FOUNDATIONS OF DUAL SOVEREIGNTY
- 6 THE REEMERGENCE OF CIVIL SOCIETY
- 7 CAMPESINO ACCOUNTS OF INSURGENT PARTICIPATION
- 8 EXPLAINING INSURGENT COLLECTIVE ACTION
- Epilogue: Legacies of an Agrarian Insurgency
- Appendix: A Model of High-Risk Collective Action by Subordinate Social Actors
- Chronology of El Salvador's Civil War
- References
- Index
- Other Books in the Series
Summary
This is what I think: what was the war for? For the solution to the land problem. We feel something already, and we're sure that we will be free – that is a point of the war that we have won. Higher incomes? Who knows? But that we not be seen as slaves, that we've won.
Member, Land Defense Committee, Las Marías, 1992Before the civil war in El Salvador, almost everyone in Tierra Blanca worked on the Hacienda California, a giant farm stretching from the edge of town across the fertile coastal plain to the Bay of Jiquilisco ten kilometers to the south. From their small houses in town or their shacks along the railway and roadways, every morning the workers walked past the hacienda's security post, past the gun ports of the fortified bunker, and through the gated entrance. They continued past the hacienda compound and the soldiers' quarters, past the barracks that housed the migrant workers during the harvest, and on toward the vast cotton fields, pastures, and salt flats beyond.
Before the war, the children of this town in southwestern Usulután had little reason to doubt that when they grew up, they would join their parents tending cotton and cattle and processing salt on the Palomo family's vast and well-guarded estate.
But in the mid- and late 1970s, some residents of Tierra Blanca joined in local protests and strikes, a few marched in the capital, San Salvador, and a very few collaborated with guerrilla organizations that would become the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (Farabundo Martí Front for National Liberation, or FMLN).
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003