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The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil by Thomas D. Rogers (2010)

by Elizabeth O’Brien

There is a vast historiography on worker strikes and resistance to economic exploitation in Latin America and Brazil, yet most scholars disregard the environmental backdrop to struggles over land, labor, and resources. Aiming to fill this lacuna, The Deepest Wounds is a combination of labor and environmental histories, and it has elements of commodity-chain and literary analysis as well. Examining over four centuries of sugar production in Pernambuco, Brazil, Thomas Rogers demonstrates that sugar monocropping not only changed the environment, it also altered the nature of politics, social dynamics, and labor mobilization in the region. Above all, Rogers claims that the exploitation of nature and labor shaped the power dynamics that harmed workers and damaged the land itself.

Rogers claims that discourses of landscape underscored the transition from slavery to a new paradigm that relied on old logic: the planter class still saw the landscape and the workers as objects to be controlled. Pointing to literature for evidence, Rogers proposes that novelist Joaquim Nabuco’s nostalgia for a landscape actually represented his longing for the paternalistic racism of slavery. José Lins de Rego and Gilberto Freyre, on the other hand, protested the havoc that cane monoculture wrought on humans and nature alike. Workers, for their part, allegedly used a language of captivity to describe post-slavery social conditions, and, by highlighting worker poverty and lack of opportunity, Rogers points to the persistence of slave-like exploitation throughout the twentieth-century.

Rogers chronicles the development of usinas (sugar mills), which grew immensely between the mid-1930s and the 1950s. Powerful families still controlled the mills, but centralization and modernization occurred under the Vargas regime. For example, the use of fertilizer in the 1940s led one producer to increase sugar output by 220% in just a decade and a half. The establishment of the Institute of Sugar and Alcohol (IAA sparked economic and labor reforms. Yet rationalization was patchy in these decades and worker-patron relations still functioned as patronage. By paying close attention to agricultural processes, Rogers shows that modernization altered systems of work without eliminating oppression. Agrarian reform laws, for example, required bosses to pay workers by the task instead of by the day. Patrons manipulated this system so that it did not result in higher wages: instead, workers labored in tasks for longer periods of time.

Many laborers resisted abuse and exploitation, and their struggles evoked solidarity from union organizers, communists, and Church groups. Overt politicization of the sugar fields began in the 1940s, and the first rural union emerged in 1946. Communist leaders organized a conference of rural workers in 1954. Shortly thereafter, 550 “suspected militants” were arrested and the regional committee collapsed. Peasant leagues soon spread throughout the region, and the Sociedade Agro-Pecuária de Pernambuco (SAAP) gained particular prominence. Governor Sampaio selectively acquiesced to union demands, eventually distributing land to members of the peasant league. Not surprisingly, some mill-owners resented the mobilizations and retaliated by shooting and killing union delegates. As a result of continued agitation and struggle, November 1963 saw the biggest strike in Brazil’s rural history: an estimated 90% of the region’s workers (200,000 people) halted production in order to protest abuses in the cane fields.

By focusing on environmental history, Rogers shows that the 1960s was an important decade for additional reasons. Scientists and mill owners introduced CO 331, a strain of sugar cane known as 3X, with the goal of increasing cane output. By 1963, mill owners were mono-cropping the strain, and 3X accounted for about 80% of state’s harvest. The per-hectare weight of yields rose, but the amount of sugar per ton of cane fell dramatically — by as much as 20 kilograms per ton between the mid-1950s and 1964. The combination of economic pressure and worker strikes weakened production, and enhanced state opportunities for intervention. Wielding the language of science and technocracy, the military regime stepped in to assert control over sugar production in 1964.

Under the military regime, agricultural workers experienced new forms of state control. The state issued identification cards designed to transform anonymous workers into “fichados,” or documented employees. Women often secured cards instead of working alongside men without their own proper wages. Characterizing worker incorporation into the state as proletarianization, Rogers points out that laborers could benefit from new legal channels and use them to challenge patrons. Nevertheless, oppressed and underpaid workers continued to organize strikes in order to protest labor abuses, and the state began to repress workers to a greater degree than before.

State incorporation did not free workers, and sugar cane production continued to pollute the environment and generate proletarian struggle.

Photo Credits:

A Brazilian worker harvests sugar cane (Image courtesy of Webzdarma.cz)

A mills worker in Moema, Brazil puts out fires in a sugar cane field. To reduce labor costs, the leaves of the plants are burned off prior to harvest (Image courtesy of the United Nations, Photo # 160780)

Images used under Fair Use Guidelines

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Further Reading:

Eyal Weinberg writes about the Brazilian government’s efforts to promote “social peace” among the working class

And Darcy Rendón explores the origins of Brazil’s lottery, jogo do bicho

Riveting and Welding: The Revolution of Women in the Workforce

by Julia Mora and Sophia Mora

Rosie the Riveter, with her red handkerchief and sculpted biceps, has become an easily recognizable national cultural icon. But what about the message behind the poster? From where did this image of a strong, confident, working woman originate? Julia Mora and Sophia Mora answer these questions and much more in their new website: “Riveting and Welding: The Revolution of Women in the Workplace.”

Julia and Sophia argue convincingly that Word War II triggered a female labor revolution by allowing women to leave the home and apply for jobs previously reserved for men. Once the war ended, men returned home with the expectation that women should abandon their jobs and return home.

However, World War II work enticed new feminist thoughts, and they began to think about life outside the home. This thought process triggered a series of labor, legal, and social reforms for women – what the Moras call a real “revolution” – resulting in a more female-friendly workforce today.

“Riveting and Welding” highlights the origins of the revolution and the legislative and social reforms it sparked, as well as popular reactions to women’s newly visible presence in the traditionally male-dominated workplace and the revolution’s legacy in today’s feminist movement. (Don’t miss out on an excellent critique of the portrayal of women in the TV show “I Love Lucy”).

Countless photographs, videos, audio clips, primary source documents, and timelines guide readers through more than half a century’s worth of information about women’s long road from the home to the workplace.

Photo credits:

All photos courtesy of “Riveting and Welding: The Revolution of Women in the Workplace.”

Borderlands Business: Conflict and Cooperation on the US-Mexico Border

by Anne M. Martínez

The economic ties between the United States and Mexico are well over a century old, but the coverage of the border rarely contextualizes it in these terms. In order to understand the violence we see today, we must consider the violence that erupted there in the early 1990s. The film Señorita Etraviada/Missing Young Woman (2001) chronicles the mysterious deaths of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez starting two decades ago. Filmmaker Lourdes Portillo challenges us to look beyond our assumptions about Mexican culture and biases about working-class women to recognize an epidemic of violence costing Mexico a generation. Portillo finds the maquiladoras, the factories on the border that manufacture products largely for American consumption and largely profiting American corporations, at the middle of the chaos that allowed the murders of these women.

Alejandro Lugo’s book, Fragmented Lives, Assembled Parts: Culture, Capitalism and Conquest at the U.S. Mexico Border, considers the historical legacy of the twin cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, Texas. Lugo suggests that the placement of Juárez, at the intersection of the Iberian Century and the American Century, brings together global capitalism and imperial conquest in a way that reduces the human element – the maquiladora workers – to a cog in a global machine. To explore the historical legacy of the borderlands even futher, consider Intepreting Spanish Colonialism: Empires, Nations and Legends, edited by Christopher Schmidt-Nowara and John M. Nieto-Phillips. This collection of essays examines nation-building and historiographies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, centering on the narratives of Spain and its colonies as backward in comparison to the narratives of progress associated with Great Britain and its colonies. These historical legacies have stuck, in great measure, and they intersect in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre present a different view of the maquiladoras in their documentary, Maquilapolis (2007). In a colonia on the edge of Tijuana, women maquiladora workers organize to fight for severance pay, safe working conditions, and to clean up of the toxic waste polluting their community. American business interests and Mexican government officials insist their workers have good lives, but we see otherwise in the tours the women give us of their communities. (Watch the trailer here.)

There are examples of productive cross-border alliances as well. The photographer David Bacon documents many of the efforts to build solidarity across the border, including the deep roots of many non-governmental organizations. There are also corporate projects that change the relationship between U.S. and Mexican partners. For example, PepsiCo has undertaken a new initiative that saves the corporation money, but also benefits small corn and sunflower farmers in Mexico. The elimination of middlemen and strategic use of regional production facilities, helps both the corporation and the farmers. Such projects, while still profit-oriented, can enhance communities in Mexico and reduce migration to the United States.

For more reading and viewing, take a look at Anne Martínez’s “Rethinking Borders” in DISCOVER.

Photo Credit:
Guldhammer, A Maquiladora factory in Mexico, via Wikimedia Commons

Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption & Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States by John Soluri (2005)

The title of this book is plural for a reason. John Soluri ranges across borders in both directions to show the links between the culture of banana consumption in the United States and its effects on workers and the environment in Honduras, as well as how the realities of banana plantations shaped the banana culture in the United States. While many authors focus on the fruteras, banana companies such as United Fruit (present day Chiquita), Soluri shows how the companies, the workers, and even banana pathogens were all actors in shaping what he calls “banana cultures,” even if they are not equal in their power to do so.

The early banana trade came at a time when few North Americans had ever tasted a banana; the now familiar fruit was still strange and exotic. Some early twentieth-century cookbooks even warned mothers to cook bananas before serving them to children. Soluri traces the first transactions, when islanders sold bananas at dockside to passing schooner captains, who soon figured they could make a handsome profit importing the exotic fruit. Residents of the Bay Islands on the North coast of Honduras soon started farms, but within a decade, their production declined heavily as soils weakened. This would be just the first of many problems encountered in the cultivation of bananas as a monoculture, problems that would shape the history of its cultivation as various pathogens affected large plantations in the prominent Honduran north coast, where a good percentage of United States supply was grown. As the fruteras started planting on the north coast, the political interference that other historians have so well documented soon followed, such as the planters’ involvement in a coup d’etat to secure government concessions. Soluri, however, argues that political machinations are not the greatest concern in this history, since the fruit companies would soon find that dealing with workers, independent growers, and banana pathogens would prove much harder than bribing or pressuring politicians.

*Bananas being unloaded from mule carts at a market in Belize circa 1890. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

With the banana monoculture spreading along the Honduran north coast, the importance of workers and pathogens as two principal actors in this book comes to light. The advent of the Panama disease, which was not a problem in dispersed small scale farms, but now spread like wildfire in massive plantations, brought about monumental changes. Soluri very meticulously documents the scientific struggle to fight the disease and its correlation to market pressures in the North American market. Because it was easy for the fruteras to get land concessions from the Honduran government, and because they failed to solve the problem through the creation of hybrids, the companies set about shifting plantation grounds to escape the disease, a land grab with great impact on the north coast and its availability of fertile soils.

Soluri narrates the struggles of workers and independent banana growers based on a number of sources, including censuses, local papers, letters between organizations and officials, worker organizations, literature and more. He dispels the notion that leviathan fruit companies completely pushed out small growers, and rather documents how, in many cases, they were able to use their strength to gain bargaining power. Later on after the 1950s, company employees did the same thing.

Growers and workers used nationalist rhetoric, proposing colonization projects to plant in Indian lands, and they used the fruit companies’ discourse of bringing modernity to the indomitable and disease ridden jungles. They requested the same kind of land concessions the fruteras obtained from the government, but did so as “true sons” of the Honduran nation. Growers and employees, Soluri demonstrates, had more power to shape the banana monoculture than previously thought, although expensive treatments against banana pathogens favored the large fruit companies whose massive operations could better absorb the new costs.

*Unloading Bananas, Galveston, Texas circa 1916. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

Soluri’s narrative, well-written and informed by popular culture and oral histories, is also very engaging for readers of any background. By providing a comparative perspective in his last chapter, he also highlights the implications of his approach and points to some other commodities, such as coffee and sugar, that could benefit from his approach.

Considering that literature on Honduras is so scant, Soluri could have written an exciting and easily publishable narrative of the fruteras’ involvement and strong-arming of the Honduran government. Instead, Soluri breaks the mold with Banana Cultures and shows us that borders, national or disciplinary, should have little meaning for a historian if his subject of study is constantly crossing them.

Further reading:

Author Dan Koepel’s Banana Blog.

An excerpt from Banana Cultures, courtesy of the University of Texas Press.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

“Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas; Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II” by Emilio Zamora (2009)

Relations between Mexico and the United States appear so disappointing these days that we may find it difficult to remember them differently. Mexico-U.S. relations, however, have seen better times and recalling them could serve as a model for what is possible. Claiming Rights and Righting Wrong in Texas does this by summoning the memory of World War II, when Mexico and the United States fashioned the closest and most cooperative set of relations that we have ever seen.

The exuberant WWII poster that appears on the book’s front cover captures the celebrated unity between wartime neighbors, when Mexico intervened on behalf of Mexicans in the United States and the State Department initiated a campaign to improve relations between Mexicans. Mexico’s insistence on elevating racial discrimination to a higher level of importance and the U.S.’s decision to expand its Good Neighbor Policy into the domestic arena, by investigating and settling cases of discrimination during the war, demonstrates how Mexican Americans entered center stage in the political arena of minority and labor politics by way of an international, or more precisely hemispheric, body politic.

Mexico’s decision to deny their contract workers to Texas farmers who were especially known for their lack of hospitality towards Mexicans and the State Department’s insistence on good neighborliness in Governor Coke Stevenson’s administration made the Lone Star state a key site of continued negotiations over racial discrimination and the government’s role in combating it.

Book cover of Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas: Mexican Workers and Job Politics during World War II by Emilio Zamora

Claiming Rights and Righting Wrongs in Texas also shows that state and federal agencies promoting good neighborliness contributed to improvements in the social standing of Mexicans, but only to a minor extent. The expanded wartime economy with its unprecedented employment opportunities must be credited with much of their recovery from the hard times of the Depression. Recovery, however, was uneven for both U.S. and Mexico-born as they typically exited the farms and entered the urban-based and higher-paying manufacturing jobs at a slower rate. Inequality for Mexicans, as well as for African-Americans, remained relatively unchecked.

The increased diplomatic cooperation that promoted good will and improved understanding in diplomatic and ethnic relations also allowed for the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) to emerge as the one of the leading proponents of equal rights in the United States. Culturally adept at working the English and Spanish speaking worlds, LULAC representatives acted as intermediaries between Mexican communities in Texas and government officials from Washington, D.C., Austin, and Mexico City. As a result, they built a reputation for LULAC as one of the most effective Mexican organizations coming out of the period of the Second World War.

Despite nagging problems like the persistence of racial discrimination and inequality, the unprecedented attention that Washington, D.C. directed at Mexico and the Mexicans in the United States raised postwar expectations for better relations and encouraged further official activism and Mexican agitation for equal rights in the postwar period.

The good relations that Mexico and the United States established during the war years and the policy focus that they placed on discrimination and inequality among Mexicans in Texas may have been primarily intended as a wartime imperative. But then as now, necessary policies that better relations can provide for expanded visions of improved understanding and good will between governments and peoples.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

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