This excellent book analyzes the interrelationship of work and family relationships in the context of the Brazilian coffee economy from the 1870s to the 1970s. For the 1870s Stolcke argues that a previously neglected feature of the colonato system—its exploitation of family labor—was in fact critical to the expansion and survival of the São Paulo coffee economy through the economic crises of the period from the 1880s to the 1940s or 50s. While price-support schemes adopted in 1931 have been credited by some scholars (most notably Celso Furtado) for supporting employment and income levels in the export sector in this period, Carlos Peláez maintains that these schemes were not so successful. Stolcke believes that the sector survived because the colonos were forced to accept lower wages and were allowed to plant more subsistence crops between the coffee trees.
The coffee growers’ power was based on their ability to control coffee policy and labor costs. The coffee growers replaced the colonato system with wage labor only when they lost control of labor costs because of protective legislation. The Rural Labor Statute of 1963 forced the growers to pay for the labor of family members individually, rather than as a family, and also mandated a rural minimum wage. Labor contractors who guaranteed delivery of a labor force to growers on a daily basis emerged, and the laborers were gradually transformed into a rural proletariat who lived in the cities and were carried to the plantations daily on trucks. This mode of labor was dominant in coífee by the 1970s.
The last and, in many ways, the most fascinating part of this well-argued book is Stolcke’s focus on the impact of the transition from colonato to wage labor on family and, especially, gender relations. The new wage relations caused severe strains in family relations, but the ideology of the family and of motherhood continues strong. Women are conscious of their family’s exploitation, but nevertheless blame their husbands for the extra burden which they as women and mothers carry.
Stolcke uses both primary and secondary sources to argue her case for the larger history of the coffee economy, and, for the last section, uses oral interviews with women wage laborers in coffee. This anthropological history is well worth the attention of all family historians and Brazilianists.
