This is the second, and one of the last to be published, of a five-volume series. In the words of its coordinator, Mexican social scientist Pablo González Casanova, it tries to provide Latin American readers “for the first time . . . the twenty-one histories of a single struggle, that of peoples and workers for their liberation.” As is the case for the other volumes in the series, the chapters of this Central American volume are written by activist-scholars from various countries. With notable exceptions, however, there is more activist sentiment than professional scholarship and analysis in the surveys commissioned for the volume.
As a whole, the essays have the virtue of providing a detailed chronicle of the institutional development of Central American labor movements. We learn the names of the first mutual-aid societies, the dates of crucial strikes, the timing of important labor legislation, the historical fates of rival labor centrals. For the most part, the authors cull these facts from published works; and most—particularly José Luis Balcárcel (Guatemala), Rafael Menjívar Larín (El Salvador), Gustavo Gutiérrez Mayorga (Nicaragua), and Manuel Rojas Bolaños (Costa Rica)—provide adequate bibliographies of the secondary work on labor in the countries of the region. Most also attempt, within a standard Marxist framework, to place labor developments within the broader economic and political history of the various Central American countries. And most try to relate national developments to regional and world economic and political trends, particularly the impact of the Great Depression, the evolution of the international Communist movement, and the efforts of the United States government and the institutionalized U.S. labor movement to combat the rise of Marxist labor in the region.
Unfortunately, these efforts to relate labor’s struggle to the broader history of national liberation are largely unsuccessful. Part of the reason undoubtedly lies in the underdeveloped state of the historiography of the region; part of it in the failure of several of the authors to come to terms with important published work. (For example, Menjívar Larin treats the pivotal worker revolt of 1932 in El Salvador without describing what is known about the social relations of production in the coffee economy or analyzing significant publications on that turning point in national history.) Part of the reason also lies in the lack of even a modicum of primary research in many of the essays. And part, in my opinion, lies in the uncritical application to Central America of universal theory more appropriate to the industrialized center of the world economy, and the failure to emphasize the comparative dimensions of Central American labor history.
One of the essays, however, that by Víctor Meza on Honduras, succeeds admirably in overcoming these weaknesses. It synthesizes available published work and relies on a substantial amount of primary research (in newspapers and Honduran and U.S. government documents). Equally important, Meza conceptualizes Honduran labor history differently from that of his coauthors. He focuses not on urban artisans and manufacturing workers, but on workers employed in the axis of the Honduran economy, the banana workers of the north coast. By doing so, he is able to illuminate the paradox of Honduran history in comparative Central American perspective. For Honduras, the least developed, most “backward” of Central American societies, proves to have the most “modern” labor history. Meza demonstrates how, in Honduras, labor’s struggle is more than the heroic failure chronicled in most of the other essays; labor deeply influences Honduran political and economic development and, by forcing its early incorporation into the legal life of the nation, succeeds in moderating and reforming the exploitative capitalist society in which it struggles.
Meza’s essay demonstrates the utility of modifying the traditional and Eurocentric Marxist emphasis on urban workers in the labor history of the region. By focusing in the first instance on workers in export production, he is able most successfully to fulfill the stated purpose of the series—that of revealing labor’s pivotal role in the democratic struggle for national liberation.
Readers primarily concerned with contemporary developments will be disappointed to learn that, despite the volume’s publication date, these essays, which cover post–World War II developments in greatest detail, were written in 1978.
