Rural Workers in Spanish America: Problems of Peonage and Oppression

URING the past few years students from three continents have undertaken a great deal of new research on the rural history of Spanish America. Some of this research grows out of the current interest in social history which has inspired researchers to ask new questions of conventional sources, but much of the new work rests on the papers and accounting records of haciendas and plantations, some of which have been recently confiscated by agrarian reform agencies. Thus a cycle comes to a close as the Spanish American landed estate is given its death blow and then split open so that we may examine its historical entrails. With the beast laid out, the examining doctors have become more charitable about its long past life and there is no doubt that their work, which is just now appearing in print, will fundamentally change our understanding of rural society.' Within this general subject the story of rural working people has been particularly obscure. Lacking direct evidence, what little is known about peasants and peons has been necessarily inferred from the merest scraps in colonial archives and, for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, our notions have come until fairly recently from the accounts of travelers and general texts. The voice of the historical actors itself is rarely heard. Nowhere is this sort of historical impressionism more apparent than in the discussion of debt, or debt peonage, and its role in agricultural labor. Unlike slavery or the systems of