This impressive volume contains the texts (in French, Spanish, or Portuguese) of forty-nine papers presented at an interdisciplinary conference on the agrarian problems of Latin America held at Paris in 1965. Nine papers deal with Latin America in general, nine with the Plata area, eight with Peru and Bolivia, seven with Mexico, and five with Brazil. Discussions are included. The main themes are small peasants and “comunidades,” large estates, and agrarian reform.
Although conference proceedings are bound to be uneven, the general standard of this volume is unusually high. Its interest for historians should be great, irrespective of the fact that it contains only a few contributions written by professional historians. One of these, Eric Hobsbawm, offers a short, realistic appraisal of the famous “revolutionary” peasant movement in the district of La Convención, north of Cuzco, during 1961-1962.
Many papers presented by sociologists, anthropologists, and geographers throw a fascinating light on historical processes. The Peruvian José María Arguedas shows how the different social status acquired by the serfs of the haciendas and by community peasants was reflected in different kinds of religious myths. Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz explains how a rural community located twenty-five miles from São Paulo and comfortably linked to that city’s market has fallen into isolation and poverty since the 1930s. In his excellent study of the Chancay valley, Peru, José Matos Mar points out that 3/4 of the haciendas in the valley changed hands between 1901 and 1926, while preserving almost intact the borders which had existed since the eighteenth century. This is a striking contrast to the evolution of land tenure in the valley of Puangue, Chile, as studied in the pioneering work of Jean Borde and Mario Góngora (1956).
Several papers touch on the traditional Andean colonato or tenant labor institutions, whose historical origins remain almost unknown, except for a study by Góngora. This type of serfdom was abolished in Bolivia by the agrarian reform of 1952, and it is shown to be declining elsewhere too. Tragically enough, the reasons for this decline are demographic growth and a modernizing attitude on the part of the landowners, utterly devoid of human considerations. Even more shocking misery is bound to follow.
The papers on agrarian reform in Bolivia and Mexico draw attention to the fact that Indian “comunidades” still existing at the time of the reforms were practically unaffected. Rodolfo Stavenhagen points to the increase of miserable, landless farm hands in postrevolutionary Mexico, where they now form about half of the rural population. Such data serve as a warning against glib generalizations about the extent and effect of the reforms.
In his perceptive introductory speech, historian François Chevalier asks for a close collaboration between historians and anthropologists (despite the partly antihistorical tradition of the latter). It is significant that many anthropologists and sociologists at the conference expressed themselves in a similar vein. Richard Schaedel emphasizes that more study on the history of rural societies is needed to understand how they attained their present character. More specifically, José Matos Mar calls for research on the origins and evolution of the hacienda in different parts of Latin America. Several papers reflect the fact that extracontinental or national developments of an economic or political character have often decisively influenced the rise or decline of apparently isolated rural societies. (See also Stavenhagen’s remark, p. 306.)
A circumstance such as this offers a rewarding task for scholars who combine a capacity for painstaking research into primary sources with a vast historical perspective. Indeed, the whole volume reviewed here should serve as a broad challenge to historians of Latin America, for it reminds them of many significant, even urgent problems which they have long neglected.