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Peasants and Petty Capitalists in Southern Oaxacan Sugar Cane Production and Processing, 1930–1980

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Leigh Binford
Leigh Binford
Affiliation:
Leigh Binford is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Connecticut.
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Extract

The documented history of Mexican sugar in the twentieth century begins with the introduction of vacuum-pan technology between 1880 and 1910, subsequently chronicling the progressive expansion and concentration of the industry, and the creeping State intervention which eventually resulted in the nationalisation of most private sugar mills during the 1960s and 1970s.1 Small-scale, labour-intensive rural trapiches producing panela (an unrefined form of semi-crystalline sugar) have largely been left out of this history, despite the fact that trapiches were often predecessors to modern sugar mills and in many areas survived displacement by them. Surveying Oaxaca's Isthmus of Tehuantepec region in 1940, for example, Ybarra recorded three industrialised mills and 37 small, motorised, panela- producing trapiches.2 In 1947, according to Aragón Calvo and Vargas Comargo, panela accounted for an estimated 25% of Mexican sugar production overall, and consumption of panela exceeded that of refined sugar in the states of Veracruz and Guerrero.3Panela continues to be produced and consumed in Mexico today — albeit in reduced quantities. In Panama, Colombia, India and other nations, panela (or the local equivalent) is an even more important sugar source than in Mexico.4

Nationally the labour-intensive panela industry pales into insignificance next to the modern sugar sector. However, in particular regions and communities, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, it has been an important source of employment and capital, providing rural dwellers with their first experience of disciplined factory work and numerous small entrepreneurs with profits that were invested back into the communities to expand control over local land and businesses.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , February 1992 , pp. 33 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

1 Warman, Arturo, ‘The Cauldron of the Revolution: Agrarian Capitalism and Sugar Industry in Morelos, Mexico, 1880–1910’, in Albert, Bill and Graves, Adrian (eds.), Crisis and Change in the International Sugar Economy, 1860–1914 (London, 1984), p. 169.Google Scholar Among the best-known works on the Mexican sugar industry are the following: Machorro, Carlos Bonilla, Caña amarga: Ingenio San Cristobal 1972–73 (México, 1981)Google Scholar; Espinosa, Miguel, Zafra de odios, azúticar amargo (Puebla, 1980)Google Scholar; Ronfeldt, David, Atencingo: La politico de la lucha agraria en un ejido mexicano (México, 1973)Google Scholar; Paré, Luisa (ed.), Ensayos sobre el problema cañero (México, 1979).Google Scholar

2 Ybarra, R. A., Los transportes en el Istmo de Tehuantepec (Mexico City, 1949), pp. 110–111.Google Scholar

3 Horacio Leobardo Aragón Calvo and Valente Vargas Comargo, Antiproyecto de ana planta productor de piloncillo y aprovechamiento de sus subproductos en Tepechicotlán, edo. de gurerrero (UNAM, 1973), p. 2.Google Scholar

4 According to Indian statistics for 1982 panela (gur and jaggery) was produced in 6,000–8,000 crude open pan mills and about 100,000 unmechanised, household-based operations. In the same year India had 313 modern vacuum-pan sugar mills: Kaplinsky, Raphael, Sugar Processing: The Development of a Third World Technology (London, 1983), p. 35.CrossRefGoogle Scholar In Panama in 1980, 1,673 panela enterprises concentrated in the provinces of Chiriquí (791) and Coclé (458) produced more than 2,200 tons of panela: Dirección de Estadística y Censo, Censos Nacionales de 1980: Cuarto Censo Nacional Agropecuario, vol. iv: Compendia General (Panama City, 1981), p. 103.

5 Cook, Scott and Binford, Leigh, Obliging Need: Rural Petty Industry in Mexican Capitalism (Austin, 1990).Google Scholar

6 Brinkley, Wendell W. and Wolfstrom, Melville L., Composition of Cane Juice and Cane Final Molasses (New York, 1953), pp. 2–13.Google Scholar

7 Barrett, Ward, Las haciendas azucareras del marquesado del valle: 1550–1910 (Mexico City, 1977), pp. 138–139.Google Scholar

8 Vega, Rodolfo Lara, El cultivo de la caña de azúcar en el estado de Yucatán (Mérida, 1939), p. 82.Google Scholar

9 On the evolution of mill technology see Deerr, Noel, The History of Sugar, vol. II (London, 1950), pp. 534–589.Google Scholar

10 See Cook, Scott, Petty Capitalist Industry: Piecework and Enterprise in Southern Mexican Brickyards (Washington, 1984).Google Scholar Cook, Scott and Binford, Leigh, Obliging Need…Google Scholar

11 A complete record of trapiche wages for 1936 appears in a ‘Proyecto de contrato’ between Alberto Cagigas and the Sindicato de Trabajadores de Zafra de Tehuantepec, dated 20 Nov. 1936. Archives de la Junta de Conciliación y Arbitrage (hereafter AJCA), no. 324, dossier 14, exp. 20. A slightly different set of figures is recorded in a contract signed between the Frente Unico and Constantino Cabrera, 16 Dec. 1934. ‘Contrato colectivo de trabajo celebrado entre Constantino M. Cabrera y el Frente Unico de trabajadores y campesinos de Mixtequilla, Finca “La Aurora”’, AJCA, no. 2,404, dossier III, exp. 15. The AJCA archives contain no published list of wages for Laollagan trapiches from the 1930s, but it is unlikely that Laollagan wages departed significantly from those in Tehuantepec or Mixtequilla.

12 A February 1930 agrarian census enumerated 886 inhabitants including 248 males at least 16 years old. Dibujante Auxiliar de la Comité Nacional Agraria to the president of the Comisión Local Agraria, 18 Feb. 1930, Archives de la Secretaría de Reforma Agraria, Oaxaca (hereafter ASRA), Santiago Laollaga, vol. I.

13 Seven simultaneously functioning trapiches would require a labour force of approximately 315 persons. During fieldwork in 1980–1, 1987 and 1988 the vast majority of adult males with whom I discussed the panela industry recounted experiences as growers, field workers, factory labourers, or processors. Most had occupied two or more of these roles at one time or another.

14 Prieto, Alejandro, La colonización del Istmo de Tehuantepec (México, 1884), p. 18Google Scholar Paré, Luisa, Juárez, Irma, and Salazar, Gilda, Caña Brava (México, 1987), pp. 167–182.Google Scholar

15 Report by Ing. José Angel Sarmiento, 15 March 1933, ASRA, Santiago Laollaga, vol. I; Prieto, , La colonización del Istmo de Tehuantepec, p. 18.Google Scholar

16 ‘Certificado de escritura no. 8877’, expedited 2 Feb. 1938 from the Adjudicación de Bienes en Remate Judicial, Mexico City. ASRA, Santiago Laollaga, vol. I.

17 J. M. Viuda de Levin to C. Ing. Francisco J. García, Delegado del Departamento Agrario in Ixtepec, 28 Aug. 1937. ASRA, Santiago Laollaga, vol. I.

18 On 21 Sept. 1930, Laollagans requested that a ‘zona de protección’ (buffer zone) 25 metres in width be created between Santa Cruz and Laollaga; the hacienda boundary was very close to the community, and frictions were common over the passage of animals. Levin acquiesced, but with the stipulation that no houses could be constructed in the zone. ‘Acta levantada en Santiago Laollaga’, 21 Sept. 1930, ASRA, Santiago Laollaga, vol. I.

19 ‘Acuerdo que fija la zona de abastecimiento cañero, para el Ingenio de Santa Cruz, en Laollaga, Oaxaca’, Periódico Oficial del Gobierno del Estado de Oaxaca, 9 Aug. 1945.Google Scholar

20 Documentation may be found in the Archivos de la Junta de Conciliación y Arbitraje, Oaxaca. For instance, ‘Frente Unico de Trabajadores de Zafras y Campesinos de Mixtequilla contra el síndico provisional de la liquidación juridical de Juana C. Romero, Santa Teresa de Jesús. Tehuantepec’, 20 Feb. 1935, AJCA, no. 116, dossier 6, exp. 2.

21 ‘Demanda presentada por el Sindicato de Trabajadores de Zafra contra Adelaide Piñon Chiñas por la firma de un contrato colectivo de trabajo. Tehuantepec’, 27 June 1935, AJCA, no. 179, dossier 8, exp. 21; ‘Demanda presentada por el Sindicato de Trabajadores de Zafra en contra la Sra. Catarina Ortega para la firma de un contrato colectivo de trabajo. Tehuantepec’, 27 June 1935. AJCA, no. 182, dossier 9, exp. 3.

22 ‘Contrato de trabajo celebrado entre la Unión de Trabajadores de la hacienda Santa Cruz y el Señor Jesús Levin. Tehuantepec, Oaxaca’, AJCA, no. 2,414, dossier III, exp. 25.

23 The ejido grant totalled 879.6 hectares, of which 249.6 were irrigated. Of the remaining 630 hectares, 336 were judged to be seasonally cultivable and 294 non-cultivable. ‘Dictamen’ on the disposition of Santa Cruz by Noé Figueroa, President of the Comisión Agraria Mixta, 20 June 1940, ASRA, Santiago Laollaga, vol. I. It was published in the Periódico Oficial, 31 Aug. 1940, p. 264. The definitive presidential resolution appeared in the Periódico Oficial on 26 June 1941, p. 205. By way of comparison, Santo Domingo's ejido was formed of 10,286.7 hectares (1,457 irrigated) expropriated from Finca Ingenio Santo Domingo, and was distributed among, 1,027 recipients. Periódico Oficial, 16 March 1940, pp. 79–80.

24 Binford, Leigh, ‘Agricultural Crises, State Intervention, and the Development of Classes in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, Mexico’, unpubl. PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 1983, pp. 185–280.Google Scholar

25 UNPASA, Estadísticas Azucareras, p. 44.

26 A similar system of financing sugar cane production was employed by the State when it assumed ownership of indebted mills in the 1960s and 1970s.

27 Purcell, Susan Kaufmann, ‘Business-Government Relations in Mexico: The Case of the Sugar Industry’, Comparative Politics, vol. 13, no. 2 (1981), pp. 227–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Like gur in India and Pakistan, panela in Mexico is associated with the rural poor, sugar with urban middle and upper income groups. Gur continues to supply a substantial proportion of the market for sweetners in many Asian countries. See Delasanta, David. W. and Morgan, Robert P., ‘The Choice of Sugar Cane Processing Technique for Pakistan’, World Development, vol. 8 (1980), p. 732.CrossRefGoogle Scholar According to Aragón Calvo and Vargas Camargo, panela accounted for 25% of Mexican sugar production in 1947; the principal consuming states were Veracruz, San Luís Potosí, Jalisco, Chiapas and Guerrero: ‘Antiproyecto de una planta productor de piloncillo y aprovechamiento de sus subproductos en Tepechicotlán, estado de Guerrero’, p. 2. Although there are no recent statistics dealing with panela consumption in Mexico, it is clear that it has suffered a tremendous decline; even the Mexican poor are now addicted to highly sweetened products such as soft drinks, cookies, and other industrialised foods heavily promoted on television and radio by domestic and transnational corporations. Thus, industrial consumption of sugar rose from 36% of total consumption in 1968 to 54% in 1980: Estadisticas Azucareras (México, 1980), p. 96Google Scholar; Estadisticas Azucareras (México, 1982), p. 101.Google Scholar

29 The only systematic price series for panela encompasses the period from 1921 to 1950. The per kilo price of a truckload of panela in the Federal District averaged 78% of the wholesale price of standard, granulated sugar. In only one year (1944) did the price of panela exceed that of sugar: UNPASA El desarrollo de la industria azucarera en México durante la primera mitad de sigle XX (México, 1950), p. 51. Laollagan informants reported the following post-1950 panela prices (per pantle = 6.7 kg.): 1952, 5 pesos; 1958, 6–7 pesos; 1961, 6–7 pesos; 1963, 7–8 pesos; 1970, 14 pesos; 1975, 16 pesos; 1980, 45 pesos; 1981, 100 pesos; 1986, 1,000 pesos. On government regulation of sugar prices see Crespo, Horacio, ‘The Cartelizadon of the Mexican Sugar Industry, 1924–1940’, in Albert, Bill and Graves, Adrian (eds.), The World Sugar Economy in War and Depression, 1914–1940 (London, 1988), p. 91.Google Scholar Kaplinsky shows that the price of Indian jaggery (panela) during the 1970s was below that of both open-pan sugars and vacuum-pan sugars: Sugar Processing: The Development of a Third World Technology, p. 27. Nonetheless, in the 1980s wholesale panela prices in Laollaga tended to be 15–30% higher than retail sugar prices, indicating that sugar's regulatory role was weakening. Panela is also more expensive than sugar in contemporary Panama: Dania Branford-Calvo, personal communication.

30 Gallaga, Roberto, ‘La historia del trabajo de los campesinos cañeros en el siglo XX’, in Frost, Elsa Cecelia et al. , El trabajo y los trabajadores en México (México, 1979), p. 573Google Scholar Crespo, , ‘The Cartelization of the Mexican Sugar Industry, 1924–1940’, pp. 86–87.Google Scholar On the destruction of the Morelos sugar industry see Warman, Arturo, We Come to Object: The Peasants of Morelos and the National State (Baltimore, 1980), pp. 106–110Google Scholar; Womack, John, Zapata (New York, 1968).Google Scholar

31 Igartúa, Gabriela, ‘La crisis de la industria azucarera’, in Paré, Luisa (ed.), El estado, los cañeros y la industria azucarera 1940–1980 (México, 1987), p. 20.Google Scholar See ‘Acuerdo que fija la zona de abastecimiento cañero, para el Ingenio de Santa Cruz, en Laollaga, Oaxaca’, 9 Aug. 1945.Google Scholar

32 Purcell, , ‘Business–Government Relations in Mexico’, pp. 222–228Google Scholar; Crespo, , ‘La crisis de la industria azucarera’, pp. 39–43.Google Scholar

33 Kaplinsky, , Sugar Processing, pp. 28–77.Google Scholar Aragón Calvo and Vargas Camargo designed an efficient system designed to reactivate a defunct trapiche in Tepechicotlán, Guerrero. The design called for a processing capacity of 180 tons of cane daily (with an extraction rate of 82.5%) into panela. The more than five million peso cost of constructing this system–which included a system of mechanical knives to pre-cut the cane prior to crushing, a sequence of three sets of crushers, the use of electric pumps and steam heating – would have been beyond the financial capability of the wealthiest Laollagan. ‘Antiproyecto de una planta productor de piloncillo’, pp. 8–9, 69–70 and 80.

34 But clearly does not prevent it, as trapiche worker mobilisations in Tehuantepec and Mixtequilla during the Cárdenas era (1934–40) demonstrate.

35 In 1980 the average age of thirteen sugar cane fields since planting was twenty years, with a range from six to thirty-two years.

36 In other words, sugar cane producers who execute all necessary field tasks themselves receive an average daily return on labour exceeding the social wage when their share of the panela yield exceeds the number of days worked. It is important to note, however, that it is impossible for cane producers to do everything themselves. Some tasks, such as harvesting the cane and transporting it to the factory prior to processing, must be accomplished quickly and require a labour gang of ten or more workers – which necessitates the hiring of labour power.

37 Delasanta, and Morgan, , ‘The Choice of Sugar Cane Processing Technique for Pakistan’, p. 733.Google Scholar

38 Arce, Francisco Pérez, ‘El marco económico y jurídico del problema cañero’, in Paré, Luisa (ed.), Ensayos sobre el problema cañero, p. 21.Google Scholar

39 Delasanta, and Morgan, , ‘The Choice of Sugar Cane Processing Technique for Pakistan’, p. 727Google Scholar; Vega, Lara, ‘El cultivo de la caña de azūcar en el estado de Yucatán’, p. 79.Google Scholar The remainder of the cane juice remains in the bagasse, which must there by be thoroughly dried in an adjacent field before it can be burned in the trapiche furnace. The trapiche labour force includes one bagasero verde (carrier of green bagasse) to convey the crushed bagasse from the mill to the drying patio, usually a portion of an uncultivated cornfield, and a bagasero seen (carrier of dry bagasse) to transport dried bagasse from field to the oven mouth. A volteador (bagasse turner) turns half-dried bagasse with a pitchfork to speed up the drying process.

40 Chayanov explained peasant reproduction in terms of marginal economic theory. He claimed that in so far as peasant income remained below the ‘community standard’, the marginal value of each additional unit of work outweighed the drudgery of the labour; once the ‘community standard’ was obtained, work effort fell off because the ‘value’ of each additional unit of output was outweighed by the drudgery of the labour required to produce it. The argument revolves around the assumption of an explicit peasant consciousness that aims at meeting established social standards and little more: Chayanov, A. V., The Theory of Peasant Economy (Madison, 1986).Google Scholar James Scott developed the ethical implications of Chayanov's perspective to argue that peasants accept levels of exploitation that do not encroach upon provision of basic needs, and that they rebel when landlords force consumption levels below this recognised social standard. Scott, James, The Moral Economy of the Peasantry (New Haven, 1976).Google Scholar More recently Scott has argued that such acceptance is tempered by ongoing resistance as well – what he refers to as ‘small arms in the class war’: Scott, , Weapons of the Weak (Yale, 1985).Google Scholar Numerous students of Mexican rural life have uncritically accepted these formulations, as evidenced by their use of concepts such as ‘the peasant economy’ and ‘the peasant mode of production’. For example, see CEPAL, , Economia campesina y agricultura empresarial (México, 1982), pp. 62–71.Google Scholar

41 This argument awaits better historical documentation. It is based upon the limited pricing information for Mexican panela as well as the belief that gur/sugar price ratios, well documented in Asian countries such as Indian and Pakistan, will prove relevant to Mexico as well.

42 Those cultural preferences are also changing, as noted by Sidney Mintz: Even in the case of societies that have been sucrose consumers for centuries, one of the corollaries of ‘development’ is that older, traditional kinds of sugar are being gradually replaced with the white, refined product, which the manufacturers like to call ‘pure’. In countries like Mexico, Jamaica, and Colombia, for example, all very old sugar producers and consumers, the use of white sugar and of products fabricated with simple syrup has spread downward from the Europeanized elites to the urban working classes, then outward to the countryside, serving as a convenient marker of social position or, at least, aspiration; the older sugars are meanwhile eliminated because they are ‘old-fashioned’ or ‘unsanitary’ or ‘less convenient’.

On the other hand, the traditional sugar may ‘survive as heirlooms of a sort –expensive relics of the past – whereupon they may reappear as stylish “natural” or conspicuous items on the tables of the rich, whose consumption habits helped to make them rare and expensive in the first place, now produced in modern ways that make money for people quite different from those who formerly produced them’: Sweetness and Power (New York, 1984), pp. 193–4. Finally, in the context of its decline, one may legitimately question whether or not panela's consumption role is changing in function nationally, displaced as a food by processed sugar only to assume for the majority of consumers the role of spice, in which case sugar may no longer serve as price regulator. After 1950 the Mexican government ceased to collect systematic information on panela, one index of its decline. In Panama panela remains a more important component of rural diets than in Mexico. None the less, national panela production was only 1,718 tons in 1982–5, down from 2,649 tons in 1970 and 4,188 tons in 1960. Taking into account population growth, annual per capita production declined 70%, from 3.9 kg in 1960 to 1.2 kg in 1980: Dirección de Estadística y Censo, Censos Nacionals de 1980, p. 103; de Estadística y Censo, Dirección, Panamá en Cifras Años 1984–1988 (Panama City, 1989), p. 46.Google Scholar

43 Under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari the State sector of the sugar industry has been dismantled and 45 of 64 State-owned mills have been sold to private interests, many of which are soft-drink and processed-food companies seeking cheap access to a secure supply of a major raw material: ‘Government Rids of Subsidy Obligations’, U.S. Mexico Report, July 1990, p. 22.Google Scholar

44 Each trapiche serviced eight to ten producers, each with between 0.25 and 1.00 hectares of sugar cane.

45 Sugar cane tended to be destroyed gradually, with a section of the field disappearing each year. By 1988 most remaining sugar cane cultivations were a half hectare or less; agriculturalists dedicated the remainder of their irrigated land to other crops.

46 For discussion of economic developments in other areas of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, see Binford, Leigh, ‘National Development at the Margins: An Irrigation District of Southern Oaxaca, Mexico’, unpubl. MS, pp. 21–29.Google Scholar

47 Statistics based on the migration histories of 136 native Laollagans from seven extended family groups (three ascending generations each) indicate that almost 60% of the adult males and females had left the community, usually to become settled migrants in urban areas. Eighty per cent of the migration took place after the mid-1960s.

48 Receipts from tariffs paid by outside buyers for the right to purchase mangoes in Santiago Laollaga were the basis for a calculation that in 1980 the community produced more than 500 tons of mango worth more than 3.8 million pesos on the local market. See Binford, , ‘Agricultural Crises, State Intervention, and the Development of Classes in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca’, pp. 337–339.Google Scholar

49 In winter 1981, for instance, sugar cane harvesters earned 70–100 pesos for three to five hours work; mango pickers earned 100–150 pesos per 1,000 mangoes picked, with an average picking rate of 500 per hour. On a pro rata basis earnings were, therefore, at least three times higher in mango picking than in sugar cane harvesting. Wages for eight hours of dangerous, sweaty trapiche work varied from 100 pesos (‘helper’) to 300 pesos (‘furnace stocker’). Ibid., pp. 313 and 351. The response of Laollagan agriculturalists to the post-1982 Mexican economic crisis is discussed in Binford, Leigh, ‘Economic Crisis and Peasant Defense in Southern Oaxaca’, University of Connecticut/Brown University Occasional Papers in Latin American Studies (Storrs, 1989).Google Scholar

50 Segura, Jaime, ‘Los indígenes y los programas de desarrollo agrario (1940–1964)’, in Reina, Leticia (ed.), Historia de la cuestión agraria mexicana: estado de Oaxaca, 1925–1986, vol. II (México, 1988), p. 220.Google Scholar

51 Flores, Guillermo Garmendia, Elementos para una evaluación preliminar del mercadeo y comercialización de los productos agropecuarios de estado de Oaxaca (Oaxaca, 1968), pp. 80–82.Google Scholar Garmendia Flores enumerated four trapiches in the Isthmus at a time when there were five in Santiago Laollaga alone. Other Isthmus sites of panela production included Chihuitán, Tehuantepec (where the industry was destroyed in a hurricane that struck the area in 1968), and Jalapa del Marqués (until the old town site was sacrificed in 1960 to waters rising behind the Benito Juárez dam).

52 One of the best examples concerns the Mexican border brick industry where enterprises of widely varying scale and technical sophistication produce bricks both for domestic sale and export to the United States, where they compete with bricks produced in highly rationalised US brick factories: Cook, Scott, ‘Economic Fluctuation, Market Structure, and Changes in the Organization of Mexican Brick Production along the Texas–Mexico Border’, unpubl. MS (1987).Google Scholar On mezcal production see Montes, Fausto Díaz, ‘La producción de mezcal en Oaxaca’, in Zenteno, Raul Benítez (ed.), Sociedad y politica en Oaxaca 1980: 15 estudios de caso (Oaxaca, 1982).Google Scholar