This is the most thoroughly researched and documented long-range study to date of working conditions and protest movements on Peru’s north coast sugar estates between the onset of modern labor agitation shortly after 1900 and the military revolution of 1968. Based on extensive estate and union files from four of Peru’s largest sugar enterprises—Casa Grande, Cartavio, Chiclin, and Boma, in the Chicama valley just north of Trujillo—the study analyzes nominal and real wages, supplementary provisions, housing, and fringe benefits as well as workers’ demands, forms of labor protest, organization, and the degree of mobilization during the four periods of greatest labor agitation on the north coast: 1909-17, 1921, 1945-48, and 1956-68. Kammann convincingly demonstrates that the living conditions of workers and their families depended as much on food rations and, after 1945, an ever-broadening range of benefits and compensations as they did on shifts in the level of monetary wages. While most authors have stressed the cleavages between temporary workers of peasant origin, recruited to the haciendas by enganche contracts since the 1890s, and the full-time workers, Kammann demonstrates that conflicts of interest between different categories of fully proletarianized sugar workers—field hands, operators in the workshops, factory workers, and white collar employees—were of equal importance.
Labor struggles on the Chicama valley sugar estates shifted from radical social movements before 1921 to union movements of well-entrenched and increasingly well compensated groups of sugar workers during the 1950s and 1960s. While Kammann vividly shows how since the 1940s APRA instrumentalized the sugar workers’ struggles for its own political goals, he rejects the notion that this explains the waning revolutionary fervor of the sugar workers. The labor movement on the Chicama valley estates was controlled by workers, especially from the workshops, the mills and, after 1958, low-level office employees, who had gained job security and substantial material benefits through struggle and negotiation with management. This convivencia between Aprista sugar unions and management emerged before the convivencia between APRA and President Prado.
Perhaps most revealing in this history is the unions’ complete lack of interest in protecting the large numbers of workers, especially field hands, who were losing their jobs to mechanization between the mid-1950s and 1960s. Even the union opposition movement of the mid-1960s did nothing to stop the massive reductions of field hands. Between the late 1910s and the 1950s it had been the large number of field hands who had given muscle to the labor movement during strikes, even though they were consistently underrepresented in the union leadership.
Kammann’s painstaking quantification of workers’ wages and other forms of compensation (even down to the caloric value of food rations) allows him to challenge the conventional view that north coast labor militancy in 1917 and 1921 was primarily caused by declining real wages. His analysis stresses the exceptional militancy of the 1921 strike movement. He follows Michael Gonzales in suggesting that it was the first movement carried jointly by new groups of skilled workers, old artisanal groups in the workshops, and the field workers of peasant origin. Yet he rejects the notion that all groups shared the same interests or, in fact, were willing to pursue the same forms of struggle. Field hands, while willing to strike, were as yet not willing to join the mutual societies, and when during the second wave of strikes in 1921 government repression became severe, they once again returned to older forms of struggle like the burning of fields and other violent acts, as well as exodus back to the sierra. Rather than viewing 1921 as the onset of the homogenization of all sugar workers’ conditions and interests, Kammann reinterprets this pivotal movement as the point of transition from old cleavages to new ones, the beginning of the pattern in which workshop and factory workers would exploit field workers—increasingly proletarianized—for their own goals.
The book was written as a dissertation, and that remains evident in its at times tedious style and excessive documentary and statistical detail. Although Kammann explicitly wishes to overcome simplistic modernization-theory notions about more or less progressive forms of social protest, he does not fully escape the influence of such debates from the 1970s. He gives us no glimpse of the everyday lives of workers and their families, no qualitative reconstruction of how peasant field hands, workshop artisans, or modem tractor drivers might have construed their own groups’ identities. We are left with a sense of censure for an emerging workers’ aristocracy singlemindedly pursuing a project of collective group egotism without hearing their side of the story, the broader political and social notions that informed their course of action.
But such shortcomings, serious as they are, cannot detract from Kammann’s accomplishments. He has put the history of Peru’s twentieth-century sugar workers’ movement on a solid empirical base. His sophisticated methodological approach has allowed him to put forth some major reinterpretations of that history. It is only to be hoped that the language barrier will not rob this monograph of the careful attention from Peruvianists and Latin American labor historians that it deserves.