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“Resocializing” Latin American Banditry: A Reply

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Gilbert M. Joseph
Gilbert M. Joseph*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
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Abstract

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Type
Commentary and Debate
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , 1991 , pp. 161 - 174
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by the University of Texas Press

References

Notes

1. Bandidos: The Varieties of Latin American Banditry, edited by Richard W. Slatta (New York: Greenwood, 1987). My initial review appeared in Inter-American Review of Bibliography 38, no. 2 (1988):223–25.

2. Here and in my essay “On the Trail of Latin American Bandits: A Reexamination of Peasant Resistance,” I am defining peasants in the broad sense: as rural cultivators from whom an economic surplus is extracted in one form or another by nonproducing classes. When appropriate, I employ other terms to characterize the various structural and cultural differentiations encompassed by such a broad construction of peasantry.

3. Contrary to Birkbeck's contention, the review of the literature on Latin American banditry that appears in my essay goes well beyond that literature's concern with Hobsbawm's thesis.

4. Slatta, Bandidos, 192.

5. Billy Jaynes Chandler, “Brazilian Cangaceiros as Social Bandits: A Critical Appraisal,” in Slatta, Bandidos, 109; compare Slatta's remarks in the present comment.

6. For example, see two recent collections: Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, 18th to 20th Centuries, edited by Steve J. Stern (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); and Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico, edited by Friedrich Katz (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).

7. See particularly my discussion of the work of Andeanists Erick Langer, Benjamin Orlove, and Deborah Poole, Colombianists Gonzalo Sánchez and Donny Meertens, and Cubanist Louis Pérez in “On the Trail.” Each of these authors integrates banditry into broader social contexts.

8. Catherine LeGrand, review of Slatta's Bandidos in the American Historical Review 93, no. 4 (Oct. 1988):1145.

9. See my discussion of the work of E. P. Thompson, Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, Richard Cobb, and others in “On the Trail.”

10. Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Stern et al., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness; Eric Van Young, “Mentalities and Collectivities: A Comment,” in Rebellions in Mexican History, edited by Jaime E. Rodríguez (Los Angeles: Latin American Center, University of California, Los Angeles, forthcoming).

11. For the main works of Guha and the subalternists, see “On the Trail,” nn. 65 and 67; see also Selected Subaltern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

12. The principal works of James Scott, Michael Adas, and other Asianist resistance scholars are cited in “On the Trail,” nn. 44 and 97. For recent Africanist contributions, see Banditry, Rebellion, and Social Protest in Africa, edited by Donald Crummey (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1986).

13. Stern et al., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness; also see the contributions of Daniel Nugent, Ana María Alonso, and María Teresa Koreck cited in “On the Trail,” n. 66.

14. For a trenchant critique of poststructuralism a ultranza, of a discourse theory that would substitute language for history, see Bryan D. Palmer, Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).

15. Here again, Birkbeck fails to acknowledge a theme that is featured prominently in my essay (see particularly pp. 19, 25–33).

16. James Scott, “Resistance without Protest and without Organization: Peasant Opposition to the Islamic Zacat and the Christian Tithe, ” Comparative Studies in Society and History 29, no. 3 (July 1987):419. In Slatta's comment and in his recently published essay, “Banditry as Political Participation in Latin America,” he characterizes banditry as “a weaker strategy” to be employed “only when other tactics … were not available.” See “Banditry as Political Participation,” Criminal Justice History 11 (1990). Do I really misrepresent him, then, in suggesting that he views banditry as “a tactic of last resort”? In my essay, rather than attaching a priori value to these social forms of action (such as “weaker” or “stronger”), I contextualize them. Thus like Scott, Adas, Stern, and other students of resistance, I regard all these forms as strategic options, whose actualization depended on both historical circumstances and the cultural resources that a peasant community possessed.

17. See, for example, Gilbert M. Joseph and Allen Wells, “El monocultivo henequenero y sus contradicciones: estructura de dominación y formas de resistencia en las haciendas yucatecas a fines del Porfiriato, ” Siglo XIX 6 (July–Dec. 1988):215–77; and Joseph and Wells, “Seasons of Upheaval: The Crisis of Oligarchical Rule in Yucatán, 1909–1915,” in The Revolutionary Process in Mexico: Essays on Political and Social Change, 1880–1940, edited by Jaime E. Rodríguez (Los Angeles: Latin American Center, University of California, Los Angeles, 1990); compare Van Young, “Mentalities and Collectivities.”

18. These quotations are drawn from Slatta's present comment and his article, “Banditry as Political Participation.”

19. James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 300.

20. For a discussion of these authors' works, see “On the Trail,” 17 and n. 60.

21. See, for example, Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983), 76–108; Michael Adas, “From Footdragging to Flight: The Evasive History of Peasant Avoidance Protest in South and Southeast Asia,” Journal of Peasant Studies 13, no. 2 (Jan. 1986):64–86; and Joseph and Wells, “Seasons of Upheaval.”

22. Despite Slatta's skepticism regarding my (modest) use of Foucault, note the nice conceptual fit between Slatta's discussion of “conflict criminology” in “Banditry as Political Participation,” and my treatment of labeling and deviance in “On the Trail,” 21–22 and nn. 147–48. Also see Slatta and Karla Robinson, “Continuities in Crime and Punishment: Buenos Aires, 1820–50,” in The Problem of Order in Changing Societies: Essays on Crime and Policing in Argentina and Uruguay, edited by Lyman Johnson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), 19–45, especially 38–40.

23. The italics are mine. This is not to say that class ties were not controlling in certain historical contexts. For example, see Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 1:123–26, 352.

24. For example, compare Hobsbawm's discussion in the revised edition of Bandits (New York: Pantheon, 1981), especially chapter 6, with that in Anton Blok's classic revisionist treatment, The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, 1860–1960 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), chapter 5, or with that in Phil Billingsley's more recent Bandits in Republican China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1988).

25. Knight, The Mexican Revolution, 1:122–26, 352–55; and Pat O'Malley, “Social Bandits, Modern Capitalism, and Traditional Peasantry: A Critique of Hobsbawm,” Journal of Peasant Studies 6, no. 4 (July 1979):489–501, quotation 492.

26. Slatta, “Banditry as Political Participation.”

27. Compare my critique in “On the Trail, ” 12–13, with those of Judith Ewell in her review of Bandidos in The Americas 45, no. 1 (July 1988):131–33, and Arnold Bauer's review in the Journal of Social History 22, no. 3 (Spring 1989):562.

28. Dretha Phillips, “Latin American Banditry and Criminological Theory,” in Slatta, Bandidos, 187. For example, how would Slatta begin to type the complex actions and motivations of Maya villagers that Allen Wells and I have traced in both official and popular sources in our research on Yucatán during the late Porfirian and early revolutionary periods (circa 1908–1920)? Here were campesinos who operated at various times as individuals, in small informal groups, or in larger insurgent bands, depending on the possibilities and options that circumstances provided. Members of several communities on the frontier of henequen export production who were tenaciously defending the last remnants of their agrarian patrimonies, these individuals first came to our attention in the records of the Porfirian criminal courts, where they were charged as thieves and rustlers by the hacendados for whom they periodically labored. Later, come the Revolution, they were redefined, if only temporarily, by the winning elite faction as revolutionaries, even though their activities remained much the same as before. Finally, when some of them parted company with the new order then being consolidated by the (not very) Revolutionary State, their activities once more became problematic and they were again labeled as bandits and thieves. Historians can find support in the activities and (court-mediated) testimonies of these campesinos to justify classifying them as everyday resisters, guerrilla-bandits, political bandits, and social (or antisocial) bandits. Nevertheless, none of these ideal types brings us very close to the complex behavior and perceptions of these historical actors or promotes a more nuanced understanding of their social context.

29. Slatta, “Banditry as Political Participation.”

30. Slatta's invocation of Time on the Cross as emblematic of the kind of methodological worst-case scenario to be avoided at all costs is rather ironic. Some of the harshest critics of that book and of cliometrics are social historians who allow discourse analysis a place in historical interpretation but insist that it be rooted in its social context. Bryan Palmer, for example, in Descent into Discourse, characterizes Time on the Cross as the “fetishization of method” (p. 52).

31. In addition to Palmer and the “subaltern studies school,” American historian Joyce Appleby provides insights on how a contextualized approach to discourse can profitably inform strategies of historical interpretation. See Appleby, “One Good Turn Deserves Another: Moving beyond the Linguistic,” American Historical Review 94, no. 5 (Dec. 1989):1326–32.

32. Birkbeck is correct to locate my work (and Slatta's) within a broader tradition, the social historiography of rural crime, in which Hobsbawm has been a pioneer. Thus my conceptualization of peasant resistance is meant to extend and add nuance to Hobsbawm's arguments rather than to reject his line of inquiry. But here, as elsewhere, Birkbeck tends to exaggerate or misrepresent my argument. Despite his statement to the contrary, I have been careful to specify why I find Hobsbawm's thesis to be “constricting.” First, Hobsbawm's failure to define social banditry, coupled with his typological approach, has generated an increasingly arid debate over classification of bandit phenomena. Second, although Hobsbawm provocatively asserts the primacy of peasant-bandit solidarity, he never really explores the mental realm of that presumed partnership.

33. I discuss these problems in some detail in “On the Trail” (see especially pp. 18–22). Although an explicit definition of consciousness does not appear in the essay, it should be clear that I operationalize the concept along much the same lines that E. P. Thompson does in his classic treatment of English workers: “The consciousness of a worker is not a curve that rises and falls with wages and prices; it is an accumulation of a lifetime of experience and socialization, inherited traditions, struggles successful and defeated. … It is this weighty baggage that goes into the making of a worker's consciousness and provides the basis for his [political] behavior.” Thompson as cited in Peter Winn, Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile's Road to Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Stern wrestles with the concept provocatively in his introductory essay to Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness.

34. Of course, it would be a mistake to conceive of pristine, “authentic” popular sources or discourses on banditry neatly juxtaposed with their official counterparts. As cultural theorist Stuart Hall has observed, “Popular culture [exists] in a continuing tension (relationship, influence and antagonism) to the dominant culture.” Thus discursive relations between elites and subaltern groups proceed dialectically, in a “state of play.” From time to time, elements of official discourse may be selectively incorporated into popular discourse to mediate self-understanding and communication. See Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,‘” in People's History and Socialist Theory, edited by Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 227–40, quotation 235.

35. Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Guha and Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies, 37–84 (quotation, 55).

36. For example, see the essays in Stern, Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness, the works cited in “On the Trail,” nn. 66 and 138, and Ana María Alonso, “The Effects of Truth: Re-Presentations of the Past and the Imagining of Community,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1, no. 1 (Mar. 1988):33–57.

37. Edward Said, “Foreword,” in Guha and Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies, vi.

38. See, for example, Knight, The Mexican Revolution, and the revisionist works cited in “On the Trail,” nn. 13–16.

39. But note the subalternists' discussion of the dangers that attend assimilating the complex history of peasant protest into larger, encompassing projects, causes, and ideologies. For example, see Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Guha and Spivak, Selected Subaltern Studies, 70–84.

40. This new research is discussed and referenced in “On the Trail,” 34–35 and nn. 141–45.