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Comunes y haciendas: Procesos de comunalización en la Sierra de Piura (siglos XVIII al XX)El Norte en la historia regional, siglos XVIII–XIX

2001; Duke University Press; Volume: 81; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-81-1-162

1527-1900

Nils Jacobsen,

Latin American history and culture

These two books impressively demonstrate the growth in research on and understanding of the history of northern Peru and southern Ecuador during the past two decades. Until recently, the region had appeared in the broader tapestry of the viceregal and national history primarily as the site of coastal sugar plantations and slave populations, and the postemancipation economic and political structures arising from that complex. Now we are beginning to get publications based on serious archival research on diverse areas in the north, from the eastern slopes of the Andes through various highland settings—from Ancachs to Cajamarca and Piura, and Loja and Cuenca in Ecuador—to the variegated coastal valleys and despoblados, and on topics ranging from resistance and identity formation in highland and coastal indigenous communities to fishermen and the aristocratic life styles of the region’s urban elites. What is emerging is an image of an internally complex northern Andean and coastal region with major differences from the central and southern Peruvian regions on which so many of our notions about the historical trajectory of Peru have depended to date.Alejandro Diez Hurtado’s excellent monograph about landholding regimes and communal institutions in the rural spaces of the Sierra de Piura (bordering on Ecuador) is a case in point. The book, a revised version of the author’s doctoral thesis written under the guidance of Nathan Wachtel at the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, traces the weakening of decentralized and badly consolidated haciendas, and the formation of new indigenous communities from the late eighteeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. Local populations from the coast, the highlands and the adjacent piedmont regions were subjected to a complex and bloody double-colonizing experience, first by the Incas and then by the Spaniards, in which they were repeatedly moved and assigned to various authorities with shifting jurisdictional boundaries. By the late colonial period, most peasants in the region did not speak an indigenous language any more. Land tenure was particularly complex, with haciendas, estancias and sitios owned by individuals or groups of Spaniards, mestizos, and Indians, and many of the largest estates divided among tenants. Labor conditions on the estates were also more fluid and diverse than we are accustomed to finding in the southern Andes, with labor tenants, regular tenants, mitayos, a few slaves, and seasonal wage laborers all working side by side, and something like a stable resident labor force (yanaconas and colonos) developing on most estates only in the course of the eighteenth century.Based on impressive research in national, regional, and local archives, Diez Hurtado finds that, in contrast to Peru’s coastal areas and southern Sierra, large estates in the Sierra de Piura did not undergo major expansion into peasant communities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, perhaps because bad transport conditions made the region’s livestock products, sugar, and grains uncompetitive outside a narrowly defined region. Rather, the land tenure pattern was marked during the nineteenth century by border conflicts between haciendas and communities as well as among communities, and by the definition of rights of family lineages to lands within communites. Compared to the southern Andes, these appeared to be less “corporate”: communal repartition lands were less important and after independence many families of mestizos became fully integrated as community peasants. Diez Hurtado finds for the highlands of Piura, as Mark Thurner did for those of Ancachs, that the republic weakened the institutional and political cohesion of the late colonial communities. Yet in contrast to Thurner, he perceives a process of the formation of new communities—the “communalization” from the title of the book—that had its modest beginnings in the 1840s, was in full swing during the thirty years after the War of the Pacific, and culminated in the years following the agrarian reform of 1969. This process originated in the defense of property rights and other interests common to groups of families within sectors of the old colonial communities, but by the twentieth century such new focal points for identity and solidarity also developed within sectors of the haciendas. Mobilized through the War of the Pacific and civil wars of 1879–95, by the early twentieth century, many of these new communal entities had developed stable, complex forms of governance and conflict resolution which would receive official recognition by the 1920s. Diez Hurtado’s important revisionist study suggests the fluidity of social and ethnic categorization schemes and of spatial organization in the Sierra de Piura, as well as the coevolution and in some ways even mutual penetration of organizing principles between communities and haciendas. Most important, his work challenges us to rethink the notion of declining peasant communities during the century after independence. At least in the northernmost part of Peru’s highlands we now have evidence of the genesis of many new and distinct communities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The book edited by the noted Peruvian historian Scarlett O’Phelan and the French historian-turned-diplomat Yves Saint-Geours covers a broader swath of social and economic topics than Diez-Hurtado’s monograph, but focuses on the important “middle period” in the transition from colony to republics, roughly 1750 to 1850. It also covers a broader swath of territory, from Cuenca in the north to Trujillo in the south, an area that roughly coincides with what Susana Aldana, one of the contributors to the volume, has called the “great northern commercial space.” Indeed, the notion of such an integrated space finds support in many of the contributions to this volume: most authors speak of an expansionary trading cycle during the second half of the eighteenth century, based on the export (to Europe or along the west coast between Mexico and Chile) of chinchona bark, tobacco, sugar, silver and soap, and the numerous backward linkages tying the entire gran espacio to the centers of such export complexes. What remains unclear in this volume—with disagreements between various contributors—is the precise chronology of this expansionary cycle (suggestions for its onset range from the early eighteenth century to the 1760s, and for its demise from the 1780s to the 1810s).The chinchona bark trade—discussed in two papers, by Martine Petitjean and Yves Saint-Geours, and by Miguel Jaramillo—grew rapidly between the 1750s and 1790s. It was first centered in the region around Loja and later shifted north towards Cuenca and Riobamba and south towards Jaen and Chachapoyas on the eastern slopes of the Andes, before competition from the yungas of La Paz (1,800 km further south) diminished the trade. The bark was collected on royal lands, often in remote frontier territories, and the crown sought to regulate the business, yet was not willing to invest as much money here as it invested into the tobacco monopoly during the same period. Conflicts between the viceregal authorities, local officers, merchants seeking monopoly contracts and ownership of the land in specific collection areas, muleteers and laborers were rampant, as were contraband and adulteration of high quality bark. These circumstances may have contributed to the decline of the business. In his methodologically rigorous and important paper, Jaramillo demonstrates that chinchona bark represented between one-fifth and one-fourth of total export values for the entire region during the second half of the eighteenth century, that more than 40 percent of the value of the bark in port represented payments for packing and shipping the crop from its points of collection, and that profits, although fluctuating greatly, could be enormous and accrued mostly to the Cádiz merchant houses. Yet similar to the rubber boom one hundred years later, no investments were made to improve quality and productivity and thus assure a stable industry.Several papers discuss indigenous communities’ involvement in the regional economic growth of the eighteenth century. In his excellent contribution, Victor Peralta demonstrates how San Pedro de Morrope, on the southern rim of the Despoblado de Sechura in Lambayeque, was turned from a relatively poor community of fishermen and artisans into a fairly affluent site of muleteers, goat herders and soap makers as well as agriculturalists during the first half of the eighteenth century, so much so that contemporaries described the Morropeños as serious competitors for elite merchants and producers. But this fragile affluence unravelled between the 1780s and 1810s as a consequence of exploitative local authorities, intercommunal rivalries over trading privileges and water rights, and the slackening demand for the products and services of the Morropeños due to the general downturn of the gran espacio’s economic conjuncture. By the 1830s the region’s haciendas expanded into the lands of Morrope and other communities, and the Morropeños fell back on hard times, as fishermen, artisans or labor tenants on nearby haciendas. Susana Aldana’s paper on the tensions between the indigenous community in the port of Paita and the town’s diputado de comercio highlights the savvy political maneuverings and the understanding of viceregal and international power constellations by the community’s leaders. In contrast, the article by Susan Ramírez about the conflicts between communities and haciendas in the Partido de Lambayeque between the 1780s and 1810s—over land, usufruct rights and fees for resources—stresses the different rationalities of hacendados and comuneros, exacerbated by the Bourbon reforms and the expansion and rationalization of hacienda production.Other chapters about the gran espacio’s rural society during the late colonial period by Jacques Simard, Milagros Martinez and Carlos Galvez stress the late consolidation of haciendas, the lingering of the encomienda and mita, prevalence of debt servitude, and the sporadic and local nature of violence in the highlands around Cuenca and in the Sierra de Piura. An excellent paper by Alejandro Diez Hurtado further clarifies how in Piura the formation of republican municipal councils disarticulated the late colonial institutions of the cabildos de indios and their fine-tuned alignment with parcialidades. He asserts that on the coast communities such as Catacaos and Sechura remained more “indigenous” than those in the Sierra de Piura after independence, because of the more pronounced conflict with expansive haciendas and the conscious reliance on cofradías to integrate the people of the community ritually.Two articles discuss important aspects of northern society not focused on rural issues. In her painstakingly researched and innovative paper about the incidence of illegitimacy in the highland silver mining camp of Hualgayoc (partido de Cajamarca) during its boom era (1780–1845), Scarlett O’Phelan confirms the great frequency of children born out of wedlock in this instable social setting, and develops a typology of illegitimacy according to its distinct causes (from sexual unions after betrothal but before the wedding, to issueless marriages, to wanton sexual behavior of certain social types) and to the treatment of the child. She finds a relatively high percentage of illegitimate children recognized by their fathers, and brought up to lead a respectable lives in the community. Paul Rizo Patron and Cristóbal Aljovin present a detailed portrait of the late colonial aristocracy of Trujillo. The relatively few titled families making up the highest echelons of the city’s and region’s society, renovated themselves in the late colonial period through ties to miners, merchants and obraje owners, and sustained their power through positions and influence in church and state.The volume lacks a conclusion and an in-depth introduction. Such “wrap-up” texts would have helped greatly to discern what is unique about this northern Andean region and what held it together. I am left with three broad comparativist impressions: economic growth in this region, at least between the 1750s and 1780 (and perhaps longer on both ends), was stronger than in the southern Andes (the region from Cusco to Potosí); the Bourbon economic growth cycle briefly strengthened surprisingly lively and active indigenous communities in various settings related to export sectors, but in its aftermath tended to exacerbate conflicts; and in spite of the clear evidence for multiple regional linkages in this northern gran espacio during the Bourbon growth cycle, during the subsequent crisis decades evidence for macroregional integration appears much weaker than in the south.Compared to the southern Andean region forged since the sixteenth century around the High Peru silver mining complex, this northern region still leaves the impression of being less integrated and more diverse—economically, socially and ethnically—at least through the mid-nineteenth century. A sign of economic weakness until after independence, this very diversity perhaps began to turn into a strength, at least for a quite a few northern subregions, in the late nineteenth century.