Books at Duke University Press

Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua
Elizabeth Dore

272 pages (January 2006)
17 illustrations

Cloth - $79.95	0-8223-3686-3
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3686-0]

Paperback - $22.95	0-8223-3674-X
[ISBN13 978-0-8223-3674-7]

In Myths of Modernity, Elizabeth Dore rethinks Nicaragua’s transition to capitalism. Arguing against the idea that the country’s capitalist transformation was ushered in by the coffee boom that extended from 1870 to 1930, she maintains that coffee growing gave rise to systems of landowning and labor exploitation that impeded rather than promoted capitalist development. Dore places gender at the forefront of her analysis, which demonstrates that patriarchy was the organizing principle of the coffee economy’s debt-peonage system until the 1950s. She examines the gendered dynamics of daily life in Diriomo, a township in Nicaragua’s Granada region, tracing the history of the town’s Indian community from its inception in the colonial era to its demise in the early twentieth century.

Dore seamlessly combines archival research, oral history, and an innovative theoretical approach that unites political economy with social history. She recovers the bygone voices of peons, planters, and local officials within documents such as labor contracts, court records, and official correspondence. She juxtaposes these historical perspectives with those of contemporary peasants, landowners, activists, and politicians who share memories passed down to the present. The reconceptualization of the coffee economy that Dore elaborates has far-reaching implications. The Sandinistas mistakenly believed, she contends, that Nicaraguan capitalism was mature and ripe for socialist revolution, and after their victory in 1979 that belief led them to alienate many peasants by ignoring their demands for land. Thus, the Sandinistas’ myths of modernity contributed to their downfall.

“As ideal a combination of fine-grained, historically rich ethnography; astute political economy; and powerful feminist scholarship as one could possibly hope for. A standard to emulate.”—James C. Scott, Yale University

“In this uniquely researched study, constructed in dialogue with generations of members of the Diriomo community, written records, scholarly debates, and revolutionary policymakers, Elizabeth Dore shows why debt peonage and land privatization in the Nicaraguan coffee boom failed to generate capitalism. Gender is an important element in her argument and one that economic and social historians can no longer afford to ignore.”—Mary Kay Vaughan, coeditor of The Eagle and the Virgin: Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920–1940

“Myths of Modernity demonstrates why an understanding of history is important to current policy debates and why a misguided analysis of rural class relations contributed to the eventual electoral defeat of the Sandinistas.”—Carmen Diana Deere, coauthor of Empowering Women: Land and Property Rights in Latin America

Elizabeth Dore is Professor in Latin American History at the University of Southampton. She is the author of The Peruvian Mining Industry: Growth, Stagnation, and Crisis; the editor of Gender Politics in Latin America: Debates in Theory and Practice; and a coeditor of Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America, also published by Duke University Press.

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List of Tables and Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Who Controls the Past Controls the Future

1. Theories of Capitalism, Class, Gender, and Ethnicity

2. Indians under Colonialism and Postcolonialism

3. Patriarchal Power in the Pueblos

4. The Private Property Revolution

5. Gendered Contradictions of Liberalism: Ethnicity, Property, and Households

6. Debt Peonage in Diriomo: Forced Labor Revisited

7. Patriarchy and Peonage

Conclusion

Epilogue: History Matters - The Sandinistas’ Myth of Modernity

Notes

Glossary

Bibiography

Index