Research for this article was carried out with support from an NEH Fellowship for University Teachers. Many thanks to Alejandro de la Fuente, Richard Oestreicher, and Gay Seidman for their helpful comments and criticisms.

1. da Costa, Emília Viotti, “Brazilian Workers Rediscovered,” International Labor and Working-Class History 22 (1982):33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. On this period, see Spalding, Hobart, Organized Labor in Latin America (New York, 1977), 1–93;Google ScholarGodio, Julio, Historia del movimiento obero latinoamericano, vols. 1, 2 (Mexico, 1980, 1983);Google ScholarCasanova, Pablo González, ed., Historia del movimiento obrero en America Latina, 5 vols. (Mexico, 1984, 1985);Google ScholarBergquist, Charles, Labor in Latin America: Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia (Stanford, 1986).Google Scholar

3. On the boom itself, see Cortés-Conde, Roberto and Hunt, Shane, eds., The Latin American Economies: Growth and the Export Sector, 1880–1930 (New York, 1985);Google ScholarBulmer-Thomas, Victor, The Economic History of Latin America since Independence (Cambridge, 1994), 46–193.Google ScholarOn the processes of class and state formation that it set in motion, see Bergquist, , Labor in Latin America; Tulio Halperin Donghi, The Contemporary History of Latin America (Durham, 1993), 158–208;Google ScholarCollier, Ruth Berins and Collier, David, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America (Princeton, 1991).Google Scholar

4. “‘[R]ace’ [was] an idea which penetrated the ideology of the period almost as deeply as ’”: Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (New York, 1987), 32.Google ScholarOn the rise of segregation and apartheid, see Greenberg, Stanley, Race and State in Capitalist Development: Comparative Perspectives (New Haven, 1980);Google ScholarCell, John W., The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South(Cambridge, 1982);CrossRefGoogle ScholarMarx, Anthony W., “Race-Making and the Nation-State,” World Politics 48 (1996): 180–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. Lombardi, John V., The Decline and Abolition of Negro Slavery in Venezuela, 1820–1854 (Westport, 1971), 46.Google Scholar

6. Aguirre, Carlos, Agentes de su propia libertad: Los esclavos de Lima y la desintegración de la esclavitud, 1821–1854 (Lima, 1993), 120–25, 276–84;Google ScholarBlanchard, Peter, Slavery and Abolition in Early Republican Peru (Wilmington, 1992), 95–125.Google Scholar

7. Quoted in Claudia María Correa González, “Integración socio-económica del manumiso caucano” (trabajo de grado, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá, 1987), 235; see Taussig, Michael, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill, 1980), 49–69.Google Scholar

8. Mina, Mateo [Michael Taussig], Esclavitud y libertad en el Valle del Río Cauca (Bogot´, 1975), 62.Google Scholar

9. See the essays in Aguirre, Carlos and Walker, Charles, eds., Bandoleros, abigeos y montoneros: Criminalidad y violencia en el Perú, siglos XVIII–XX (Lima, 1990).Google Scholar

10. Jaramillo, Carlos Eduardo, Los guerrilleros del novecientos: La fiesta liberal (Bogota, 1991).Google Scholar

11. Franks, Julie, “The Gavilleros of the East: Social Banditry as Political Practice in the Dominican Sugar Region, 1900–1924,” Journal of Historical Sociology 8 (1995):158–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. LeGrand, Catherine, Frontier Expansion and Peasant Protest in Colombia, 1830–1936 (Albuquerque, 1986), 33–61;Google ScholarCalder, Bruce, The Impact of Intervention: The Dominican Republic during the US. Occupation of 1916–1924 (Austin, 1984), 102–10.Google ScholarOn similar dispossessions of mestizo peasants in Venezuela, see Yarrington, Doug, “Public Land Settlement, Privatization, and Peasant Protest in Duaca, Venezuela, 1870–1936,” Hispanic American Historical Review 74 (1994):33–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. de Friedemann, Nina, “‘Troncos’ among Black Miners in Colombia,” in Miners and Mining in the Americas, ed. Greaves, Thomas and Culver, William (Manchester, 1985);Google Scholarde Friedemann, Nina and Arocha, Jaime, De sol a sol: Génesis, transformación y presencia de los negros en Colombia (Bogotá, 1986), 231–300.Google Scholar

14. Correa Gonzalez, “lntegración socio-económica,” 126; on this period more generally. see 153–90.

15. “The human body in the Pacific littoral is continuously beset by debilitating deadly forces which cause oozing sores, infected sputum, vile colored stools, and pain. A restricted life cycle, and late maturity are an expected part of the human condition.” Whitten, Norman, Black Frontiersmen: A South American Case (New York. 1974). 28.Google Scholar

16. Wade, Peter, Blackness and Race Mixture: The Dynamics of Racial Identity in Colombia (Baltimore, 1993), 137.Google Scholar Foreign companies launched a second and more effective offensive in the region in the late 1900s, at which point black communal land claims became an issue of national importance, addressed in the Colombian Constitution of 1991. See Arocha, Jaime, “Los negros y Ia nueva constitución colombiana de 1991,” América Negra (Bogota) 3 (1992):39–54;Google Scholar Wade, Blackness and Race Mixture, 351–57.

17. de Castro, Hebe Maria Mattos, Das cores do silêncio: Os significados da liberdade no sudeste escravista–Brasil século XIX (Rio de Janeiro, 1995), 348, 343–50 passim.Google Scholar

18. Scott, Rebecca J., “Defining the Boundaries of Freedom in the World of Cane: Cuba, Brazil, and Louisiana after Emancipation,” American Historical Review 99 (1994):92–93, 96–98;CrossRefGoogle ScholarScheper-Hughes, Nancy, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley, 1993), 43–49.Google Scholar

19. In addition to the Brazilian northeast, see the case of Colombia's Cauca Valley, where Afro-Colombian tenants continued to work on the sugar plantations until the 1960s and 1970s, when a revived sugar industry removed them from the land and converted them into wage laborers, with the same devastating consequences—widespread unemployment and malnutrition—as in Brazil. Friedemann and Arocha, De sol a sol, 208–25; Taussig, Devil and Commodity Fetishism, 82–92.

20. Scott, Rebecca J., Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Princeton, 1985).Google Scholar

21. Scott, Slave Emancipation, 240–42; Bergad, Laird W., Cuban Rural Society in the Nineteenth Century: The Social and Economic History of Monoculture in Matanzas (Princeton, 1990), 285.Google Scholar Black tenant farmers, who had cultivated twelve percent of the island's arable land in 1899, farmed only four percent of national farmland in 1931, a decline of two-thirds. During the same period the proportion of farmland cultivated by Afro-Cubans who owned their land held steady at four percent. de la Fuente, Alejandro, “‘With All and For All’: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Cuba, 1900–1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1986), 117.Google Scholar

22. Perez, Louis A., “Politics, Peasants, and People of Color: The 1912 ‘Race War’ in Cuba Reconsidered,” Hispanic American Historical Review 66 (1986):509–39; also on the Race War,CrossRefGoogle Scholarsee Heig, Aline, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 193–226.Google Scholar

23. Castro, Cores do silêncio, 327–42; Stein, Stanley J., Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850–1900, 2nd ed. (Princeton, 1985), 271–88.Google Scholar Many of the workers in Rio de Janeiro's turn-of-the-century textile factories were in-migrants from the older coffee zones of the Paraiba Valley seeking work in the city. Keremetsis, Eileen, “The Early Industrial Worker in Rio de Janeiro, 1870–1930” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1982), 62.Google Scholar

24. Of 36,600 owners of agricultural enterprises in Sāo Paulo in 1940, only 2,000 were Afro-Brazilian. Instituto de Geografia e Estatística, Brasileiro, Recenseamento geral de 1940. Censo demográfico: Estado de Sāo Paulo (Rio de Janeiro, 1950), 24.Google Scholar On the formation of the rural middle class, see Holloway, Thomas, Immigrants on the Land: Coffee and Society in Sāo Paulo, 1886–1934 (Chapel Hill. 1980). 139–66;Google Scholar on racial preferences in plantation employment, see Dean, Warren, Rio Claro: A Brazilian Plantation System, 1820–1920 (Stanford, 1976), 152–74 passim;Google ScholarBeiguelman, Paula, Formaço do povo no compleixo cafeeiro, 2nd ed. (Sāo Paulo, 1977).Google Scholar

25. Nugent, Walter, Crossings: The Great Transatlantic Migrations, 1870–1914 (Bloomington, 1992);Google ScholarSánchez-Albornoz, Nicolás, The Population of Latin America: A History (Berkeley, 1974), 146–67;Google ScholarMörner, Magnus, Adventurers and Proletarians: The Story of Migrants in Latin America (Pittsburgh, 1985), 47–66.Google Scholar

26. On the racial doctrines of the period, see Skidmore, Thomas, Black into White: and Nationality in Brazilian Thought, 2nd ed. (Durham, 1993);CrossRefGoogle ScholarWright, Winthrop, Café con Leche: Race, Class, and National Image in Venezuela (Austin, 1990);Google ScholarGraham, Richard, ed., The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940 (Austin. 1990).Google Scholar

27. Merrick, Thomas W. and Graham, Douglas H., Populaçāo e desenvolvimento econdmico no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro, 1979), 123;Google Scholar Sánchez-Albornoz, Population of Latin America, 167.

28. Andrews, George Reid, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900 (Buenos Aires, 1980), 180–88.Google Scholar

29. Fernandes, Florestan, A integraçāo do negro na sociedade de classes, vol. 1 (São Paulo, 1978), 60–97;Google ScholarAndrews, George Reid, Blacks and Whites in Sāo Paulo, Brazil, 1888–1988 (Madison, 1991), 66–71.Google Scholar

30. Stokes, Susan, “Etnicidad y clase social: Los afro-peruanos de Lima, 1900–1930,” in Lima obrera, 1900–1930, ed. Stein, Steve, vol. 2 (Lima, 1987). 197–99.Google Scholar

31. Adamo, Sam, “The Broken Promise: Race, Health, and Justice in Rio de Janeiro, 1890–1940” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 1983), 50–79;Google Scholar Keremetsis, “Early Industrial Worker,” 62, 84, 116. At the height of immigration, in 1920, Afro-Brazilians outnumbered immigrants in the city, 372,000 to 239,000. Adamo, “Broken Promise,” 6, 15.

32. On the tobacco industry, see Stubbs, Jean, Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History, 1860–1958 (Cambridge, 1985), 70, 79–80;Google ScholarCórdova, Efrén, Classe trabajadora y movimiento sindical en Cuba, 1819–1959 (Miami, 1995), 69, 92.Google Scholar

33. Quoted in de la Fuente, “‘With All and for All’,” 131; see chap. 2 of that dissertation. See also de Motes, Jordi Maluquer, Nación e inmigración: Los españoles en Cuba (ss. XIX y XX) (Colombres, Spain, 1992), 141–45.Google Scholar

34. As late as the 1970s and 1980s, Afro-Latin-American workers retained strong memories of slavery and a burning determination to avoid anything resembling it. Residents of a black village in Sāo Paulo state described wage employment on nearby plantations as “like slavery that is coming back again. You won't believe it, but the elders used to tell us how slavery once was obligatory. Not today. Slavery is coming back again, but not for everyone, only for those who give themselves over it.” Queiroz, Renato, Caipiras negros no Vale do Ribeira (Sāo Paulo, 1983). 81.Google Scholar See also Taussig, Devil and Commodity Fetishism, 67–68, 93; Bourgois, Philippe, Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (Baltimore, 1989), 84.Google Scholar

35. On outmigration by Europeans, see Mörner, Adventurers and Proletarians, 67–69.

36. Rock, David, Argentina, 1516–1987: From Spanish Colonization to AlfonsIn (Berkeley, 1987), 175;Google ScholarDean, Warren, The Industrialization of Sāo Paulo, 1880–1945 (Austin, 1969), 49–66;Google Scholar Córdova. Classe trabajadora, 93.

37. Sánchez-Albornoz, Population of Latin America, 167; Wright, Café con Leche, 77; Conniff, Michael L., Black Labor on a White Canal: Panama, 1904–1981 (Pittsburgh, 1985), 29.Google Scholar

38. Skidmore, , Black into White, 137, 192–200;Google ScholarMeade, Teresa and Pirio, Gregory Alonso, “In Search of the Afro-American ‘Eldorado’: Attempts by North American Blacks to Enter Brazil in the 1920s,” Luso-Brazilian Review 25 (Summer 1988): 85–110;Google ScholarBerglund, Susan, “Las bases sociales y económicas de las leyes de inmigración venezolanas, 1831–1935,” Boletín de la Academia Nactional de Historia 65 (10–12 1982): 951–61.Google Scholar

39. De la Fuente, “‘With All and For All’,” 44–102.

40. McCullough, David, The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 (New York, 1977), 559.Google Scholar

⁴¹Chomsky, Aviva, West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870–1940 (Baton Rouge, 1996), 44–47.Google Scholar

42. Conniff, Black Labor, 31–36; Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work, 86–88.

43. Conniff, Black Labor, 61–63, 88. On similar strategies among West Indian workers for US oil companies in Venezuela during this period, see Bergquist, Labor in Latin America, 218.

44. Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work, 66–84. During the 1980s a second wave of plant disease devastated the cacao groves planted by many of the black smallholders, leading to the closing of many of their farms and a sharp decline in black landholding in the region. See Palmer, Paula, “Wa'apin man”: La historia de Ia costa talamanqueña de Costa Rica (San José, 1986), 281–83;Google ScholarPurcell, Trevor W., Banana Fallout: Class, Color, and Culture among West Indians in Costa Rica (Los Angeles, 1993), 57–58.Google Scholar

45. On West Indian upward mobility in Venezuela and the Dominican Republic, see Pollak-Eltz, Angelina, La negritud en Venezuela (Caracas, 1991), 80–85;Google ScholarDerby, Lauren, “Haitians, Magic, and Money: Raza and Society in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands, 1900 to 1937,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 36 (1994):516–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

46. Bergquist, Labor in Latin America.

47. See Ibid., 11; Spalding, Organized Labor, 14–15; Godio, , Historia del movimiento obrero, vol. 1, 92–100.Google Scholar

48. Gitahy, Maria Lúcia, Ventos do mar: Trabahadores do porto, movimento operário e cultura urbana Santos, 1899–1914 (São Paulo, 1992);Google ScholarMaram, Sheldon, Anaquistas, imigrantes e o movimento operário brasileriro, 1890–1920 (Rio de Janeiro, 1978), 32;Google Scholar Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 282.

49. Valdés, Rafael López, “La sociedad secreta ‘Abakuá’ en un grupo de obreros portuarios,” Etnología y Folklore (Havana) 2 (1966): 21–22.Google Scholar

50. Bourgois, Ethnicity at Work, 55–65; Chomsky, West Indian Workers, 147–72, 209–51.

51. Chaihoub, Sidney, Trabalho, lar e botequim: O cotidiano dos trabalhadores no Rio de Janeiro da Belle Époque (São Paulo, 1986), 58–88, 101–11.Google Scholar

52. Hahner, June, Poverty and Politics: The Urban Poor in Brazil 1870–1920 (Albuquerque, 1986), 150;Google Scholar Keremetsis, “Early Industrial Worker,” 99–100; Fausto, Boris, Trabaiho urbano e conflito social 1890–1920 (São Paulo, 1977), 33–36;Google Scholar Chalhoub, Trabalho, lar e botequim, 108–9.

53. Córdova, Classe trabajadora, 82–84, 92–95; Stubbs, Tobacco on the Periphery, 110–13.

54. Stubbs, Tobacco on the Periphery, 115 (emphasis in original).

55. Chomsky, West Indian Workers, 237, 235–38.

56. Echeverri-Gent, Elisavinda, “Forgotten Workers: British West Indians and the Early Days of the Banana Industry in Costa Rica and Honduras,” Journal of Latin American Studies 24 (1992):301–3.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

57. Conniff, Black Labor, 84.

58. Fiehrer, Thomas, “Political Violence in the Periphery: The Haitian Massacre of 1937,” Race and Class 32 (1990):1–20;CrossRefGoogle ScholarDerby, Robin L. H. and Turits, Richard, “Historias de terror y los terrores de la historia: La masacre haitiana de 1937 en la República Dominicana,” Estudios Sociales 26 (1993):65–76. On ethnic tensions among native-born and West Indian workers in the Dominican Republic,Google Scholarsee Cassá, Roberto, Movimiento obrero y lucha socialista en la República Dominicana (desde los orígenes hasta 1960) (Santo Domingo, 1990), 61–68.Google Scholar

59. On the Rio unions, see Hahner, Poverty and Politics, 98–102, 105, 223–24; Fausto, Trabalho urbano, 41–60. On São Paulo, Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 60–66.

60. Quoted in Chomsky, Aviva, “Race, Class, and Resistance: Afro-Cubans and West Indian Migrants after 1912,” paper presented at the Latin American Studies Association Congress, Washington, D.C., 1995, 24.Google Scholar

61. Scott, “Defining the Boundaries of Freedom,” 89.

62. Córdova, Classe trabajadora, 171–72, 187–88, 210; Carr, Barry, “Identity, Class and Nation: West Indian Sugar Workers and Cuban Society, 1925–1934,” paper presented at the American Historical Association meeting, San Francisco, 1994, 21–36.Google Scholar

63. Greenberg, Race and State in Capitalist Development.

64. On Communist organizers in particular, see Bourgois, , Ethnicity at Work, 59, 102–07;Google Scholar Chomsky, West Indian Workers, 239–53; Tennassee, Paul Nehru, Venezuela, los obreros petroleros y la lucha por la democracia (Madrid and Caracas, 1979), 218–21; and sources cited in note 62.Google Scholar

65. In addition to examples cited earlier, see Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 64–65.

66. On the Caste Regime, see Rout, Leslie B., The African Experience in Spanish America: 1502 to the Present Day (Cambridge and New York, 1976), 126–61.Google Scholar

67. Long, Gary, “‘The Dragon Finally Came’: Industrial Capitalism, Urban Artisans and the Liberal Party in Colombia, 1910–1948” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1995), 190–91;Google ScholarBraun, Herbert, The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia (Madison, 1985), 82–83.Google Scholar

68. On Afro-Latin American underrepresentation in the middle class, see Andrews, Blacks and Whites, 125–80; Andrews, George Reid, “Racial Inequality in Brazil and the United States: A Statistical Comparison”, Journal of Social History 26 (1992):229–63;CrossRefGoogle ScholarWade, , Blackness and Race Mixture; Graceras, Ulises et al. , Informe preliminar sobre la situación de la comunidad negra en el Uruguay (Montevideo, 1980).Google Scholar On the important exception of revolutionary Cuba, see de la Fuente, Alejandro, “Race and Inequality in Cuba, 1899–1981”, journal of Contemporary History 25 (1995), 131–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁶⁹Several studies caution, however, that we should not underestimate levels of racism and prejudice among the region's workers. See, for example, Maria Suely Kofes de Almeida, “Entre nós, os pobres, eles, os negros” (dissertacao de mestrado, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 1976); Lourdes SerranoPeralta, “Estructura y relaciones raciales en un barrio popular: Mujer, instrucción, ocupación y color de la piel,” paper presented at the Latin American Studies Association Congress, Washington, D.C., 1995; 54–74.