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French Colonialism Unmasked
The Vichy Years in French West Africa
By Ruth Ginio
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright © 2006
University of Nebraska PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8032-2212-2
Introduction
No Ground to Rest
For years Felipe Tirado and his family lived in Barrio Borinquen, working
the land that was the base of their daily sustenance. They knew the color
and smell of the soil as they walked, harvested, tilled, and ploughed every
inch of their sharecropped farm. But in 1880 the owner of the farm,
Pantaleón María Colón, asked Tirado to gather his things and depart
with his family. Tirado refused to leave, for he had poured into that soil
not only his and his family's sweat but also his emotions and a part of
himself. Colón put the whole value of the soil on his title of ownership
and, in August 1881, contacted the police to evict Tirado and his family
from the farm. When Tirado still refused to leave, Colón asked the police a
second time to evict Tirado from his property. There is no other mention
of this case in the archives, but it seems that Tirado was, in fact, thrown
off his farm. According to the 1882 census, Tirado remained in the barrio
but was no longer a sharecropper. He was forced to look for another way
to make a living and became a day laborer.
This case is representative of land privatization in late-nineteenth-century
Puerto Rico. Both parties justified their position with legal principles-Colón
citing his title of ownership and Tirado citing his right of
use. Tirado's refusal to leave the farm was more an assertion of longstanding
legal principles than a challenge to authorities, and although the
authorities in Puerto Rico eventually reinstituted use as a legitimate, albeit
limited, claim to land, in this case the system favored Colón because of
his title of ownership.
By examining the process of land privatization in Caguas, Puerto Rico,
in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century,
this book discusses how the rural poor compelled the government to
recognize and protect what they considered to be their basic rights. "Land
privatization" refers to the process by which land titles were formalized,
which was manifested at every social level in the countryside, and to the
resulting loss of access to land by those who were unable to formalize titles
of ownership, as happened to Felipe Tirado. Beginning with the Mortgage
Law of 1880, the process of land privatization unleashed a series of negotiations
for natural resources between the poorest sectors of society and
the landed elite, who greatly influenced the municipal government. After
1880 people from the upper class, large landowners in particular, organized
their lives and government according to land access and agrarian
wealth. Even though agrarian wealth had been part of large landowners'
lives before that time, it acquired an unprecedented significance because
the new law of land privatization reinforced its relevance.
In Puerto Rico land ownership traditionally had guaranteed citizenship
and had been the most common indicator of status. Land accumulation
epitomized elites' desires for social control and political power. There
was not enough land to satisfy the needs of all, not to mention the greed
of the landed elite, and the geographic limitations of the small island first
affected those in the poorest sectors of society, as they were forced to seek
a respectable livelihood apart from land ownership. Seeking to establish
a person's capacity to work as an alternative source of legal identity, they
put in motion a series of civil claims that protected people's mobility rights
and access to land. In the end, these civil claims broke the constraining
bubble of the landed elite, and though the process of land privatization
affected the poor negatively, their claims to mobility rights and access
to land popularized a mechanism to fight for a more egalitarian society
in which land was not the only determining factor for social well-being.
They sought a patria (nation or fatherland) for the landless, or a landless
patria for all.
A landless patria for all also meant breaking with racial barriers and
color lines. The Mortgage Law of 1880, which officially ignited the process
of land privatization, was issued seven years after the abolition of slavery
(1873). Not coincidentally, land privatization targeted former slaves,
their descendants, and, in general, people of color. Specifically, the law
was intended to bar former slaves and their descendants from obtaining
a formal title to a piece of land. Thus, the accumulation of land in private
hands had the twofold effect of enriching the elite and asserting white
privileges over the colored population. In this sense land ownership was
not only a symbol of status and a requisite of citizenship but also the
basis of elites' ideological and political power. Controlling the land and
its accumulation was, in part, an ideological and practical extension of the
world of slavery and its racial divisions. Elites' worldview became very
narrow as people of color asserted their mobility rights and developed
alternatives to access land. The U.S. invasion of the island also challenged
elites' social and political control, giving some civil liberties to people of
color.
The scope of this book extends to the early 1900s and the inception of
U.S. colonialism on the island. After 1898 many of the popular demands
for equality found their way into the legal system as the U.S. colonial government
put new pressures on local elites and restructured the government
and economy. Although literacy and property holding were required for
voting, the rural poor continued to demand social equality through labor
organization. They joined labor organizations and political parties and
expected social justice from a democratic nation like the United States.
These labor organizations voiced some of their concerns and advocated
for greater political representation. In part because of such tactics, the
U.S. government granted universal male suffrage in 1904.
The Country, Its Space, and Its Peoples
Reviewing the vast literature on Latin American peasantry is beyond the
scope of this discussion. I will turn instead to a brief discussion of recent
works that link peasants, politics, and issues of citizenship, focusing on
peasant political culture.
Recent studies attempt to reconstruct peasant political culture by examining
peasant consciousness of social conflict and interchange with elites
and non-peasant groups in the context of the larger society-even the international
arena-and within specific historical periods. Most of these
studies define peasant political culture through analysis of gender, generation,
race, class, and ethnicity. They demonstrate that peasant political
culture was not merely informed by and forged in reaction to elite political
culture, but rather it actually contributed to the creation of elite and "formal"
political culture. For example, the emergence of popular liberalism
in some Latin American countries illustrates how elites achieved political
power only after negotiating with popular sectors and incorporating
multiple popular demands. The discussion also examines the process
of nation formation and its outcome and focuses on political discourses
of class, gender, and race that were fought over and negotiated among
rural populations, the state, and upper classes. This literature describes
nationalism as a conglomerate of different political projects that were
elaborated by peasants and non-peasants or as a language recognized and
shared by all social sectors within a specific society and manipulated in
various ways by local and national interests. These studies analyze the
nation-state as the product of the struggles over such nationalism(s) or
manipulations of national discourses.
In Our Landless Patria, I apply recent theoretical and methodological
studies of peasant political culture developed in Latin American scholarship
to the agrarian history of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. For the most
part, studies of Caribbean peasants have focused strictly on economic and
family issues. Peasant studies in Puerto Rico have linked agrarian history
with modernization projects from the late nineteenth century to the
1960s. In the first half of the twentieth century, such studies emphasized
modernization as modeled on the economic growth and industrialization
of the United States. These scholars, mostly North Americans, conceptualized
the Puerto Rican countryside as an obstacle to modernization in
economic, cultural, and social terms. They viewed rural areas as being
in need of major intervention in order to achieve a healthy development
and believed poverty justified any intellectual or state intervention into
the lives of rural peoples in Puerto Rico. The eradication of poverty
became a civil and legal concern for intellectual and colonial authorities,
who associated poverty with earlier forms of agrarian production.
As part of the revisionist attempts to understand agrarian unrest in
Latin America in the 1970s and the 1980s, intellectuals, mostly from
Puerto Rico, produced a new series of studies of rural peoples on the
island. Highly influenced by the Annales School, these studies focused
mostly on the nineteenth century and on the rural populations of the
western Puerto Rican countryside and the coast-areas dominated by the
production of coffee and sugar. However, this scholarship stressed only
some aspects of the socio-economic structures of rural societies, specifically
class formation and the processes of peonization and proletarianization.
Moreover, the few studies of the twentieth century consider only
landholders. Additionally, while this literature did attempt to recognize
women as part of history, it focused on the urban population.
Since the 1990s practitioners of the new cultural history have examined
important elements of the mentalities of rural Puerto Ricans. Francisco
Scarano analyzes the ways in which Puerto Rican Creole writers in the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries defined national identity and
defied colonial policies by using the trope and the language of the rural
poor (the jíbaro, or peasant). Lillian Guerra echoes Scarano's analysis
for a later period. She proposes that Puerto Rican intellectuals of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries imagined a nation whose
membership was defined by both whiteness and Hispanism. Elites used
the jíbaro as a symbol of this imagined nation and as a myth to protest their
oppression under U.S. colonialism. Guerra maintains that popular masses
concomitantly developed discourses of national and communal identity
that expressed a more egalitarian worldview than the one imagined by
the elites. Women, coloreds, and outlaws were accepted members within
this community of the masses.
While these studies are fascinating and innovative, they focus on literary
works. I will follow their lead but emphasize instead real people
and their actions as a source of meaning and interpretation. As Mary Kay
Vaughan suggests, the study of local history might be one of the soundest
methods to write cultural history: "As a method, local history may
be more effective than trying to read popular consciousness and culture
across regions because it contextualizes meaning and action. Specificity
becomes the vehicle for comparison." As Paul E. Lovejoy puts it, "transformations
always occur in context, which is inevitably local."
Local history provides a basis for analyzing not only the cultural images
of and about rural populations but also the specific material and political
contexts that contain those images. By analyzing culture, politics, and
material conditions at the local level, my study of the rural populations
of Caguas, a town south of San Juan (see map 1), tries to avoid what
Michael Kearny calls "bipolar structures" through which peasants have
been studied. Kearny argues that the concept of the peasantry emerged
as a category of analysis in the mid-twentieth century in an attempt to
prolong the life of a threatened bipolar thought-classic anthropology's
binary notion of primitive versus civilized. The peasant concept served to
maintain that line of thinking by simply changing the equation to peasant
versus modern. Bipolar structure still informs studies of the countryside
today, but I think that we cannot simply discard such binaries because
they were recreated and incorporated into the political agendas of nation-states
and colonies and their projects of controlling and containing rural
populations. By representing peasants in a category of their own, state
official policies often denied them basic civil rights. But as more and more
people claimed individual rights, country people ascertained their status
as citizens. Their claims to citizenship in the local context constituted a
new understanding of civil rights based on a combination of old principles
and new circumstances.
Marginal Citizenship: A New Perspective
Recreating any aspect of daily life in the past is difficult, but the task
is especially daunting when examining citizenship issues. It is very hard
to find historical data on autonomous legal identities because in day-to-day
life, as Elizabeth Jelin explains, "subordinated social sectors tend to
consider their subordination as 'normal,'" and "a naturalizing view of
social hierarchy predominates." However, many people's actions contradicted
what was thought of as normal behavior, challenging both social
hierarchies and social subordination. Thus, people's actions within the legal
system represent the best window available to study perceptions of
what was right and what was unacceptable because in Puerto Rico, as
in colonial Latin America, the judiciary and the administrative branches
were not clearly separated under Spanish rule; therefore, the legal system
was central in administration. As Charles Cutter concludes for colonial
Mexico, "Spanish subjects from all stations sought to articulate their
identities in juridical terms; that is, they sought to construct plausible
legal identities." In Caguas, people also sought resolution to conflicts
within the legal system, building their identities in legal terms because
the local courts were readily accessible to the majority of the population,
including marginalized sectors such as free people of color. Also, voting
and holding political office were the prerogative of a wealthy few, as
discussed in chapter 2, leaving local courts as the only viable alternative
for the majority of the population. Local courts became true forums of
claims for popular justice because in them the landed elite's influence was
limited. Judges responded directly to the mayor and the governor, as they
did in other areas of Latin America, rather than to local elites. Since the
late eighteenth century, the Spanish Empire in the Americas gave priority
to restricting the power of local elites in the judicial system and named
Spanish judges who were mostly foreigners to the locality. This was the
case in Caguas, where judges were outsiders to the town and had little
connection with the local elites. Therefore, the law and the court were
central to claims of citizenship. This trend continued after 1898 and was
solidified by U.S. authorities in an effort to democratize justice on the
island. In 1908 the governor of Puerto Rico, Regis H. Post, emphasized
the significance of municipal courts because they were "essentially the
courts of the poor people, where the great mass of small cases involving
their property and social relations are disposed of."
Because citizenship's definitions and uses in the Western tradition have
been analyzed elsewhere, I refer only briefly to those elements that directly
apply to the case of Puerto Rico. Generally, modern citizenship
entails a system of rights, mainly civic, political, and social. Civic rights
refer to individual freedom and are usually related to a court system.
The political aspect of citizenship entails participation in the exercise of
political power. The social part of citizenship "is made up of a right to the
prevailing standard of life and the social heritage of the society." Citizenship
also "presupposes authority," because it implies a relationship
between rulers and those who are ruled. In this sense, rulers and ruled
are bound by the recognition of authority, either by representing authority
itself (i.e., holding office) or by accepting it. This link is usually described
in political theory as high and low citizenship. High citizenship refers to
an ideal relationship in which each citizen has equal opportunity to rule,
as the political community is an aggregate of equals. Low citizenship accepts
inequality among the members of the political community, crystallizing
empirical forms of citizenship; it is also described as "chastened" or
second-class citizenship. In its empirical interpretation, low citizenship
offers an opportunity to analyze the ways laws and government work in
practice, but because of its different meanings and uses, I introduce the
phrase "marginal citizenship" to describe the concrete, historical example
of citizenship in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Caguas.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from French Colonialism Unmasked
by Ruth Ginio
Copyright © 2006 by University of Nebraska Press.
Excerpted by permission.
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