The Great Boom and Indentured Servitude in Latin America

During the period of 1870-1914, many regions of Latin America became fully integrated into the world economy. Exports of raw materials, including minerals, oil, food products, and fibers, bound Latin America to the industrialized nations. Latin American nations became dependent on the industrial world’s manufactured goods, markets for the export of raw materials, transportation, and credit.

The development of these economies altered patterns of work in the areas they affected. In Cuba, sugar plantations expanded production to supply the growing populations of Europe and North America. Although processing and transportation became mechanized, sugar planting and harvesting remained handwork. The first document I would like you to read (you can read all of the documents by clicking here), taken from the transcription of an oral history of a runaway slave, reveals the social conditions among the workers on the Cuban sugar plantations after the abolition of slavery in 1886. The Spanish government granted abolition after a violent upheaval in Cuba known as the Ten Years War (1868-1878) followed by intense pressure from foreign powers, especially Great Britain and the United States.

The second selection describes conditions on the henequen plantations of Yucatan. Demand for henequen (a cactus-like plant) fibers was directly related to the mechanization of agriculture in the United States. In 1878, Cyrus McCormick added a new knotting mechanism for grain binding to his mechanical reaper. The subsequent search for a strong binder twine led directly to henequen in Yucatan. McCormick imported hundreds of thousands of tons of henequen during the late 19th century. Exports from Yucatan increased from 40,000 bales in 1875 to 600,000 in 1910. In 1902, the same year that McCormick merged with other harvesting machine companies to form International Harvester, he also secretly negotiated lower prices for henequen with the governor of Yucatan in return for steady purchases from the governor’s export companies. With that agreement, International Harvester established its “informal empire” in Yucatan. The company neither needed to own its own land nor produce henequen directly. Production was left in the hands of local landowners and merchants, who became fabulously wealthy and who also controlled the Yucatecan state government.

The expansion of henequen production also affected land tenure and labor relations. When henequen became king, new plantations absorbed native communal land and imposed on their workers a much stricter regime of work. Seedlings and young plants required constant attention until they matured in seven years and harvesting the leaves was done by hand. The need for labor on henequen left little time for traditional cultivation of the Mayan workers’ plots of corn (milpas). Labor shortages also resulted in the importation of Yaqui Indians captured in Northern Mexico and Puerto Rican and Korean workers. But most of all, owners relied on the local Mayan campesinos, whether they wanted to work on the plantation or not.

Once you have read the documents, I would like you to think about and discuss the following: How did the Cuban plantation workers’ conditions change (or stay the same) after the abolition of slavery in 1886? Identify the different types of workers on the sugar plantation. What were the relations among them? What do the narrator’s attitudes toward women and children suggest about family life on the plantation? What are the ties that bound the peon to the henequen hacienda in Yucatan? When and why did henequen become a valuable export product? Describe the moral tone expressed by the Englishmen who wrote the document on Yucatan. What does this suggest about their attitudes toward Latin American civilization in general? How did labor conditions in Latin America compare with those in other parts of the world in the 19th century? How did they compare with European industrial factories for example? Your thoughts…