^1. Mintz, Sidney, “Cañamelar: The Sub-culture of a Rural Sugar Plantation Proletariat”, in Steward, Julian et al. , The People of Puerto Rico (Champaign-Urbana, 1956), pp. 314–417Google Scholar; idem, Worker in the Cane. A Puerto Rican Life History (New Haven, 1960.)

^2. Out of his research on Puerto Rico, Mintz is most directly responsible for the use of the concept in contemporary social science. Adams, Richard, “Rural Labour”, in Johnson, J.J. (ed.), Continuity and Change in Latin America (Stanford, 1964), p. 49Google Scholar. Beyond the Caribbean, Mintz's work on “rural proletarians” became influential in the blossoming field of Latin American studies, in Brazil and the Andean zone. See especially Hutchinson, Harry W., Village and Plantation Labor in Northeast Brazil (Seattle, 1956)Google Scholar. Anthropolo-gist Greaves, Thomas C. referred to Mintz's work on the rural proletariat as his “pioneering contribution”: “The Andean Rural Proletarians”, Anthropological Quarterly, XL (1972), P. 66Google Scholar. At the same time, and while it was invoked with some frequency in social science research in the 1960s–1970s, the concept of rural proletarian was not enthusiastically received – in sharp contrast to “peasant” – and has been something of an ugly duckling an social science (perhaps because of its Marxist ancestry). According to Greaves, research on rural proletarians remained ”uneven” and “not the product of a long-term, broadly shared research concern among Andeanists”: Greaves: “The Andean Rural Proletarians”, P. 66. Curiously, Greaves claimed that only the Andean zone came closest to developing “a significant corpus of ethnography” on rural proletarians: ibid. And yet, accepting the conceptual underpinnings of “peasant” inherently carries, I would argue, acceptance of, “rural proletarian”. In Mexico, the concept of rural proletariat generated broad discussion in the 1970s, though Mintz's work was not addressed and the concept was referred directly to Marx and Lenin. See, for instance, Paré, Luisa, El proletariado agrícola en Mexico: ¿campesinos sin tierra o proletarios rurales? (Mexico, DF, 1977)Google Scholar, and for a more historical approach Arturo Warman, “El problema del proletariado agrícola”, in Paré, (ed.), Polémica sobre las closes sociales en el campo mexicano (Mexico, DF, 1979), pp. 85–96Google Scholar.

³ Frucht, Richard, “A Caribbean Social Type: Neither Peasant nor Proletarian”, in Horowitz, Michael, Peoples and Cultures of the Caribbean (Garden City, 1971), pp. 190–197Google Scholar; Mintz, Sidney, “Petits cultivateurs et proldtaires raraux aux Caraibes”, in Nationale, Centre de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Problémes agraires de I' Améque Latine (Paris, 1967)Google Scholar. In research that is especially apposite to Piñiones, Michael Taussig found that the Cauca Valley's sugar cane labourers were neither peasants nor “full-fledged wage-earning rural proletarians”; they were “liminal beings [ … ] neither what they are, nor what they will become”: Taussig, , “The Evolution of Rural Wage Labour in the Cauca Valley, Colombia, 1700–1970”, in Duncan, Kenneth and Rutledge, Ian (eds), Land and Labor in Latin America (Cambridge, 1977), p. 423Google Scholar; idem, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism (Chapel Hill, 1980), pp. 92, 103. Elsewhere, Taussig characterized the “outlaws” of the Cauca Valley as “black peasants [who] formed a new social class that stood outside society“: Taussig, , “Black Religion and Resistance in Colombia: Three Centuries of Social Struggle in the Cauca Valley”, Marxist Perspectives, VI (1979), p. 102Google Scholar; emphasis added.

⁴ Mintz, Sidney, “The Plantation as a Socio-Cultural Type”, in Union, Pan American, Plantation Systems of the New World (Washington, DC, 1959), pp. 42–50Google Scholar. Mintz's late approaches suggest a reaffirmation of the earlier dichotomy, if now from the point of view of a “peasant” optic. See his critique of a 1978 paper in which Rodney struck a “rural proletarian” note ironically reminiscent of “Cañamelar”: Mintz, , “Descrying the Peasantry”, Review, VI (1982), pp. 609–625Google Scholar. Mintz did not register Rodney's changed perspective in A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881–1905 (Baltimore, 1981). In this lucid parting work, Rodney characterized post-emancipation sugar plantation labourers as “a permanent hybrid of peasant and proletarian”: ibid., p. 218. This suggests a “both” perspective quite different from the 1978 paper, and movement beyond dichotomies and linear history.

⁵ Giusti-Cordero, Juan A., “Labour, Ecology and History in a Caribbean Sugar Plantation Region. Piñones (Lofza), Puerto Rico, 1770–1950” (Ph.D., State University of New York-Binghamton, 1994), ch. 2Google Scholar.

⁶ The concept of “plantation” shares fundamental methodological premises with “peasant” and “proletarian” in that its landholding pattern is defined as large-scale and virtually monopolistic in a zone: hence its labourers are deemed to be either slaves or rural proletarians.

⁷ Giusti-Cordero, “Labour, Ecology and History”. Of course, discussion on peasants and rural proletarians is charged with cultural and political implications. See Warman, Arturo, “Los estudios campesinos: veinte años después”, Comercio Exterior, XXXVIII (1988), p. 658Google Scholar. Peasants and proletarians are far more than “economic adaptations”: see Mintz, , “From Plantations to Peasantries in the Caribbean”, in Mintz, Sidney and Price, Sally (eds), Caribbean Contours(Baltimore, 1985), p. 135Google Scholar.

⁸ Steward et al., The People of Puerto Rico.

⁹ Mintz, , “Cañiamelar: the Culture of a Rural Puerto Rican Proletariat” (Ph.D., Columbia University, 1951)Google Scholar; Wolf, , “Culture Change and Culture Stability in a Puerto Rican Coffee Growing Community” (Ph.D. Columbia University, 1951)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Lauria-Perricelli, Antonio, “A Study in Historical and Critical Anthropology: the Making of The People of Puerto Ricoz” (Ph.D., New School for Social Research, 1989), p. 7Google Scholar.

¹¹ Weisskoff, Richard, Factories and Food Stamps: the Puerto Rico Model of Development (Baltimore, 1985), pp. 85–90Google Scholar. “There is a vast bibliography on Puerto Rico”: Lewis, Gordon, The Growth of the Modern West Indies (New York, 1968), p. IiiiGoogle Scholar. Lewis, W. Arthur abstracted his interpretation of, significantly, rural-to-urban proletarianization in Puerto Rico in the widely influential “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour”, Manchester School (05 1954), pp. 139–151Google Scholar.

¹² Lapp, Michael, “The Rise and Fall of Puerto Rico as a Social Laboratory, 1940–1965”, Social Science History, XIX (1995), pp. 169–199Google Scholar.

¹³ “San José: Subcultures of a ‘Traditional’ Coffee Municipality”, in Steward et al., The People of Puerto Rico, pp. 171–264. The root of the “peasant” concept in contemporary social science is said to lie in the important 1955 paper by Wolf, , “Types of Latin American Peasantry: a Preliminary Discussion”, American Anthropologist, LVII (1955), pp. 452–471CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Silverman, Sydel, “The Peasant Concept in Anthropology”, Journal of Peasant Studies, VII (1980), pp. 54, 63Google Scholar. In his 1955 paper, Wolf defined peasants as agricultural producers who control their land and who produce for subsistence, a conception fairly close to that of the jíbaro. Wolf authored this paper not long after he wrote up his research in Puerto Rico, and while he remained working with Steward at Illinois. On the process beneath and around The People of Puerto Rico, see Lauria-Perricelli, “A Study in Historical and Critical Anthropology”. In Wolf's best-known characterization of peasants, to be sure, the focus is on social and political subordination, through appropriation of surplus product, and at least latent social antagonism: Wolf, , Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, 1966)Google Scholar. Yet the dichotomous construction of peasant and rural proletarian – perhaps the decisive aspect of the pair – is evident.

¹⁴ The “peasant” variant was Robert Manners's study of Barranquitas, “Tabará: Subcultures of a Tobacco and Mixed Crops Municipality”, in ibid., pp. 93–170; the rural proletarian variant was Elena Padilla's study of Barceloneta, “Nocorá”: the Subculture of Workers on a Government Owned Sugar Plantation”, in ibid., pp. 265–313.

¹⁵ As Mintz implied, the peasant-proletarian dichotomy was the linchpin of a whole array of dichotomous pairings: “By and large, the difference between peasantry and proletariat was the difference between highland and lowland, between small and large, between other crops and sugar cane, and – some would argue – between white and black”: Mintz, , “Foreword” to Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez, Sugar and Society in the Caribbean (New Haven, 1964), p. xxxixGoogle Scholar. On the dichotomizing strategies of the People of Puerto Rico project, and their implications, see Lauria-Perricelli, “A Study in Historical and Critical Anthropology”.

¹⁶ Estimates of the Puerto Rico field labour force vary widely. In 1936, the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration arrived at a figure of 92,398, see Rico, Puerto Reconstruction Administration, Special Census (1936)Google Scholar. Mill workers were estimated at 8,482. Others offered a significantly higher figure for field labourers: 113, 161, with mill workers estimated at 10,485:Gayer, Arthur, Homan, Paul T. and James, Earle K., The Sugar Economy of Puerto Rico (New York, 1938), p. 162Google Scholar. In Mexico, Sara Lara found it difficult to separate the rural proletarians statistically – as conceptually – from smallholders: “[T]he principal problem lies in the interpretation of the data, above all in the determination of the agricultural proletariat”: Lara, , “La importancia de la comunidad campesina y las formas de conciencia social de los jornaleros de Atencingo”, in Paré, Luisa and Avila, Ricardo (eds). Ensayos sobre el problema caēero (Mexico, DF, 1979), p. 135Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Puerto Rico Minimum Wage Board, La industria de azúcar de caãa en Puerto Rico (San Juan. 1942), p. 18.

¹⁸ The PPD's “agrarian radicalism [ … ] had won the PPD the votes of the jíbaros”: Carr, Raymond, Puerto Rico: A Colonial Experiment (New York, 1985), p. 67Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Mintz, “Cañlamelar”, pp. 397–399; idem, Worker in the Cane, pp. 193–203.

²⁰ “The emblem of the [PPD] became the jíbaros' straw hat, the pava. To the PPD, the jíbaro, the subsistence farmer of the inland regions who was a loyal PPD voter, became the symbol of Puerto Rican identity”: Carr, Puerto Rico, p. 115.

²¹ Giusti-Cordero, Juan, “Puerto Rico entre los pueblos antillanos y latinoamericanos. Algunos problemas de método”, Plural, IV (1985), pp. 177–195Google Scholar.

²² Rivera, Angel Quintero and García, Gervasio, Desaflo y solidaridad. Breve historia del movimentio obrero puertoniqueño (Río Piedras, 1982)Google Scholar; Taller de Formación Política, La cuestión national: el Partido Nacionalista y el movimiento obrero puertorriqueño (Río Piedras, 1982).

²³ See Lapp, “The Rise and Fall of Puerto Rico as a Social Laboratory”, pp. 169–199.

²⁴ Badillo, Jalil Sued and Cantos, Angel López, Puerto Rico Negro (Río Piedras, 1986), pp. 25–27Google Scholar.

²⁵ US Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census (1910), Population, Barrio Torredlla Baja; Fourteenth Census (1920); Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, Special Census. In 1990, Piñiones' population was 1,978: US Bureau of the Census, U.S. Population Census (1990).

²⁶ As much as 70 per cent of the original Piñiones-Hoyo Mulas wetlands were drained in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century to form canefields and pastures.

²⁷ The earliest Arawak site in Puerto Rico is Hacienda Grande, just across the Río Grande from Piñones (c. AD 100). In Piñiones itself, a preliminary, unpublished survey by the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture established 68 Arawak and pre-Arawak sites in Piñones and 57 additional sites in the cave-rich karst hills 3 km. south: Véiez, Jaime, A Study of the Piñones Special Planning Area(San Juan, 1989)Google Scholar.

²⁸ Badillo, Sued, “EI poblamiento etno-histórico del Valle de Loíza entre los siglos XVIXIX”, Revista de Historia, II (1986), pp. 24–50Google Scholar.

²⁹ Aponte, Gilberto, San Mateo de Cangrejos (comunidad cimarrona en Puerto Rico): notas para su historia (San Juan, 1985), p. 55Google Scholar; Lasierra, Fray Iñligo Abbad y, Historia geográfica, civil y natural de la Isla de San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico (Río Piedras, 1959 [1788]), p. 153Google Scholar.

³⁰ Ibid., p.154.

³¹ In the words of an aged piñonero interviewed by the colonial authorities in 1838. Archivo General de Puerto Rico, San Juan [hereafter AGPR]. Obras Públicas, Propiedad Pública, Box 32 [hereafter AGPR, OP, PP]. Antonio Hermoso to the Intendent, 1 September 1841; emphasis supplied.

³² AGPR, OP, PP, Carolina, Boxes 32 and 120.

³³ AGPR, OP, PP, Box 120. “Relacion general de los habitantes qe residen en la Hacienda que fue de los Frailes Dominicos en Loíza [ … ] ” (1848). The cuerda, the traditional Puerto Rican agrarian measure, equals 0.97 acres.

³⁴ See Picó, Fernando, Historia general de Puerto Rico (Río Piedras, 1986), pp. 173–174Google Scholar; Mintz, Sidney, Caribbean Transformations (Chicago, 1974), pp. 91–92Google Scholar.

³⁵ AGPR, OP, PP, Box 124, Loíza 1873–4, File 517, f. 71.

³⁶ AGPR OP, PP, Box 120, Exp. 1418, f. 78. Tribunal de Hacienda to Superintendent, 19 June 1850.

³⁷ “Charcoal burning involved cutting a large quantity of wood, which was then chopped into smaller pieces, tightly packed, covered with bush and dirt to reduce oxygen, and burned at a very low heat”: Olwig, Karen Fog, Cultural Adaptation and Resistance on St. John. Three Centuries of Afro-Caribbean Life (Gainesville, 1985), p. 109Google Scholar.

³⁸ Post-emancipation St John, again, was comparable: “[t]he descendants of the slaves made their living from small farming, fishing, and charcoal burning. They lived in their own settlements scattered about in the bush on small plots of land.” Olwig, Cultural Adaptation and Resistance, p. 2.

³⁹ Barasoain & Cia. to the Crown Treasury, 6 February 1879. AGPR, OP, PP, Box 126, Loíca 1879–81, Leg. 35, Exp. 18, ff. 1, 9. Another landowner next to the same Real Hacienda lot denounced “the abuses both of cutting trees and making charcoal”. AGPR, OP, PP, Box 126, Exp. 28. Administrador Central de Contribuciones y Rentas a la Intendencia, 13 November 1879.

⁴⁰ “ AGPR, OP, PP, Box 134, Antolín Romero to the Commander of the Department of Puerto Rico, 28 March 1900.

⁴¹ US Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census (1910), Population, Loíza, Barrio Torrecilla Baja; Fourteenth Census (1920).

⁴² Compañĺa de Fomento Industrial vs. Aníbal Quiñones Bulerín, Civil Núm. 69–4980, Tribunal Superior, Sala de San Juan (1969); PFZ Properties, Inc. vs. Demetria Escalera Osorio et al., Civil Núm. 88–1823, Tribunal Superior, Sala de Carolina (1988).

⁴³ Giusti-Cordero, , “Hacia otro 98: el ‘grupo españiol’; en Puerto Rico, 1890–1940 (azúcar, banca y política)“, Boletín del Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, 9 (1995–1996)Google Scholar; idem, ”En búsqueda de la nación concreta: ‘el grupo español’ en la industria azucarera de Puerto Rico, 1890–1920”, in Naranjo, Consuelo et al. , La Nación Soñada: Cuba, Puerto Rico y Filipinos ante el 98 (Madrid, 1996), pp. 211–224Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ AGPR, OP, PP. Box 127, “Expediente levantado por Alcalde de Lofea y el Cbmisario de Torrerillas [ … ] ”. 19 July 1881. f. 60. Two yean later, a Real Hacienda list of squatters on a lot adjoining Virginia included two intrusos “who really and effectively do not possess goods of any kind, living solely from their labour as braceros [agricultural laborers] ”. Alcalde to Administración, 19 November 1883, f. 166.

⁴⁵ Numbers in brackets refer to page numbers in the author's transcript of taped interviews.

⁴⁶ Pollitt, Brian, “Some Problems in Enumerating the ‘Peasantry’ in Pre-Revolutionary Cuba”, Journal of Peasant Studies, IV (1977), pp. 167–168Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ For Mintz's account of “dead time” on the southern coast of Puerto, see Worker in the Cane, p. 22. A mill-centred concept of “dead time” also misconstrues the agrarian cycle of the sugar cane itself. For it is precisely during the “dead time” that cane grows most vigorously and is thus most alive: for the cane, it is the harvest that will mean death.

⁴⁸ Wolf, “San Josó”, pp. 230–232.

⁴⁹ Wolf's account of the Ciales agrarian/religious calendar leaps from Three Kings Day to Holy Week, see ibid., p. 200. This period (January–April) is the height of the sugar harvest on the adjacent coast; many cialeños probably migrated even for day-work, especially in the late 1940s when motor transport was widespread.

⁵⁰ Marx, , Capital, vol. II (Mexico, DF, 1959), chs 12 and 13; csp. pp. 209, 213–216Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Ibid., pp. 209, 213. For some implications of production time vs. labour time, see Mann, Susan Archer, Agrarian Capitalism in Vieory and Practice (Chapel Hill, 1980)Google Scholar; Ayala, César, “La nueva plantación antillana (1898–1934), Boletín del Centro de Investigaciones Históricas. 8 (1994–1995), pp. 121–165Google Scholar.

⁵² Gervasio García writes of the agricultural labourers' “irregular rhythm”, at odds with a “strict labor discipline”: García, , ”Economía y trabajo en el Puerto Rico del siglo XIX”, Historia Mexicana XXXVIII (1989), p. 865Google Scholar. García argues that this “irregularity” was generated by the “intermittent and seasonal labor in the sugar plantations”.

⁵³ In Puerto Rico, the most conspicuous natural seasons are associated with the religious calendar: the dry, warm Lent (Cuaresma) and the cool and rainy Christmas. The former is associated with the best fishing, and occurred in the midst of the sugar cane harvest; and there was alternation between both forms of labour even then. The rainier season at the end of the year made day-long work in the cancfields relatively difficult; but the rains hardly forestalled the more intermittent rhythms of peasant production on the sandy, well-drained Pinones cropland, nor fishing in the lagoon. Indeed, rainy spells are excellent for crab-catching.

⁵⁴ On the superimposition of calendars in slave production in nineteenth-century Martinique, see Tomich, Dale, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar. Martinique in the World Economy, 1830–1848 (Baltimore, 1990), pp. 230–233Google Scholar. “The temporal requirements of sugar production coincided imperfectly with the social relations of slavery”: ibid., p. 232.

⁵⁵ Bourdieu, Pierre, Le sens pratique (Paris, 1980), pp. 23–26Google Scholar; idem, “The Attitude of the Algerian Peasant Toward Time”, in Pitt-Rivers, Julian, Mediterranean Countrymen (Paris, 1963), pp. 56–57Google Scholar. Bourdieu cautioned against confusing “logical models”, oriented to economy of observation and coherence, with the real principles of the practices: Bourdieu, Le sens pratique, p. 25. “Peasant” and “rural proletarian”, of course, are themselves “logical models”.

⁵⁶ On the perils of census categories identifying “primary occupations”, see Pollitt, Brian, Agrarian Reform and the “Agricultural Proletariat” in Cuba, 1958–66: Some Notes (Glasgow, 1979), p. 4Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ US Bureau of the Census, Thirteenth Census (1910); Social and Population Schedules, Lofza, Barrio Torrecilla Baja.

⁵⁸ Jaime Vé1ez, Personal Communication (1995). Velez, an archaeologist, has detected traces of mound formation in the old core of Pinones settlement in La Arena.

⁵⁹ Moscoso, Francisco, Tribu y closes en el Caribe antiguo (San Pedro de Macorís, 1986), pp. 420–428Google Scholar. On Arawak conuco agriculture, see Watts, David, The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change Since 1492 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 53–61Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ See Méndez, Eugenio Fernández, “Los corrales de pesca indígenas de Puerto Rico”, Revista del Institute de Cultura Puertoriqueña, IX (1960), pp. 9–13Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Uttley, Margaret, “Land Utilization in the Canóvanas Sugar District” (Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1937), p. 65Google Scholar.

⁶² I have not detected among the old piñoneros a suspicion of wage payment, much less a sense that it was demoniacal or charged with mystical power, such as Taussig found in The Devil and Commodity Fetishism. Of course, until the 1940s they rarely saw a cash wage, as they were paid in scrip redeemable at the Central store or in other nearby stores.

⁶³ See Taussig, , “Peasant Economics and the Development of Capitalist Agriculture in the Cauca Valley, Colombia”, Latin American Perspectives, V (1978)Google Scholar; idem, “Rural Proletarianization”.

⁶⁴ While boys from Piñiones were active in canefield tasks such as fertilizing, it seems that Pinones women rarely worked in the canefields in any capacity; the women's connection to the canefields was cooking lunch and taking it to their spouses. A number of women from nearby Carolina did work regularly in those tasks.

⁶⁵ Gilmore's Puerto Rico Sugar Manual (New Orleans, 1931), p. 98.

⁶⁶ Uttley, “Land Utilization in the Can6vanas Sugar District”, p. 97; Works, German Kali [F.S. Earle], The Cultivation of Sugar Cane in the West Indies (Havana, 1926), p. 32Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Ibid., p. 33.

⁶⁸ See, for example, Wolf, Eric, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1969), p. 257Google Scholar. In their attitude toward canefield labour, the piñoneros resembled Mintz's main informant Taso Zayas, the “worker in the cane”. Zayas cut cane only once during his decades in the cane, and quit by mid-morning: Mintz, Worker in the Cane, p. 202.

⁶⁹ US Tarriff Commission, 1926, p. 259; emphasis added.

⁷⁰ Manuel Moreno Fraginals, “Plantaciones en el Caribe: Cuba-Puerto Rico-Santo Domingo (1860–1940)”, in idem, La historia como arma (Barcelona, 1983), pp. 56–117.

⁷¹ Walter Rodney wrote that in Guyana field hands took pride “in their proficiency with cutlass, shovel, and fork”: A History of the Guyanese Working People, p. 161. See also Mintz, “Cañamelar”, p. 357; Alier, Juan Martínez, “Tierra o trabajo': notas sobre el campesinado y la reforma agraria, 1959–60”, in Juan, and Alier, Verena Martínez, Cuba: economía y sociedad (Madrid, 1972), p. 174Google Scholar. The phrase “animal spirits” comes from Marx on simple co-operation; see below.

⁷² Scarano, Francisco, “Las huellas esquivas de la raeraoria: antropología e historia en Taso, trabajador de la caña”. Preliminary study to Taso, trabajador de la caña (Río Piedras, 1988), pp. 36, 40Google Scholar, the Spanish translation of Mintz's Worker in the Cane.

⁷³ Mintz, Sidney, “Was the Plantation Slave a Proletarian?”, Review, II (1978), p. 85Google Scholar.

⁷⁴ Bureau, Puerto Rico Labor, Report (1913), p. 34Google Scholar.

⁷⁵ García, “Economía y trabajo”, pp. 858–859. I appreciate Gervasio García's comments on this score. It is significant, in terms of theories of capitalists' role in capitalist development, that the transformation into cash time-wages was accomplished in Puerto Rico after 1938 only through widespread labour agitation and aggressive interventions by the Puerto Rico government (and, indirectly, of at least segments of the US government), and against the wishes of many or most cane employers.

⁷⁶ Significantly, task-work was also the norm in Pifiones peasant labour such as wood-cutting, while piece-work governed coconut husking.

⁷⁷ Task-work remains especially important in the construction industry, especially in smaller projects.

⁷⁸ The question of task-work raises many issues that extend deep into plantation slavery. See Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar, pp. 245–248; Morgan, Philip, “Work and Culture: The Task System and the World of Low Country Blacks, 1700–1880”, William & Mary Quarterly, XXXIX (1982), pp. 563–599CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Task and Gang Systems: The Organization of Labor on New World Plantations”, in Inness, Stephen (ed.), Work and Labour in Early America (Chapel Hill, 1988), pp. 157–219Google Scholar.

⁷⁹ On the labour gangs of freedmen shortly after emancipation, see Mattei, Andrés Ramos, “El liberto en el régimen de trabajo azucarero en Puerto Rico, 1870–1880”, in Mattei, Ramos (ed.), Azúcar y esclavitud (Río Piedras, 1982)Google Scholar.

⁸⁰ Mintz, “Cañamelar”, p. 349.

⁸¹ Ibid.

⁸² Of course, this has large political implications; see Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City (New York, 1973)Google Scholar.

⁸³ “Less than thirty-five hours from standing cane to sugar in the sack is the aim at Central Canóvanas. Within twenty-four hours from the swing of the machete in the field, the cane is delivered to the unloader at the mill. In eight to ten hours from the time the cane reaches the revolving knives, sugar pours into the bag”. Uttley, “Land Utilization in the Canóvanas Sugar District”, p. 155.

⁸⁴ But see Morgan, David H., “The Place of Harvesters in Nineteenth-century Village Life”, in Samuel, Raphael, Village Life and Labour, (London, 1975), pp. 27–72Google Scholar, and others in that collection; idem, Harvesters and Harvesting: A Study of the Rural Proletariat (London, 1982).

⁸⁵ Thus there are “critical moments […] determined by the nature of the labour process, during which certain definite results must be obtained”: Marx, Karl, Capital, I (New York, 1976), p. 445Google Scholar. In a “combined working day”, shortness of time is compensated for by the large mass of labour thrown into the field of production at the decisive moment: ibid.

⁸⁶ Ibid., ch. 13.

⁸⁷ Ibid., p. 443. This was already present in the second form of co-operation, as Marx stressed.

⁸⁸ Ibid., p. 453. This view point meshed with Marx's “heroic” sense of the rural proletariat as a world-historical class, and clashed with the historical account that Marx offers of the “gypsy” labour gangs in England. But then that “tension” runs throughout Marx's writings on the rural proletariat. Giusti-Cordero, “Labour, Ecology and History”, ch. 2.

⁸⁹ Marx. Capital, I, p. 444.

⁹⁰ Ibid., p. 454. See also pp. 441–442 on two other forms of co-operation.

⁹¹ Already in the 1930s, Gayer and associates found that there was a “trend toward successively greater drops in employment during the slack months, particularly in field labour”: Gayer et al., The Sugar Economy of Puerto Rico, p. 180; Puerto Rico Minimum Wage Board, La industria de azúcar, pp. 76, 180; see also Mintz, Worker in the Cane, p. 272.

⁹² Ibid., p. 273. Total migration from Puerto Rico to the US shot up from 151,000 in 1940–1949 to 430,000 in 1950–1959, the greatest increase ever both in absolute and relative amounts. Calzada, José L. Vázquez, La población de Puerto Rico y su trayectoria histdrica (Río Piedras, 1978), p. 277Google Scholar.

⁹³ In the field of agrarian history, and particularly regarding agrarian capitalism, Marx and Weber are in any case quite close. In his study o f East Elbian agriculture, Weber considers “the transformation from the estate economy into a capitalistic economy on the basis of the underlying organization of labor”: Riesebrodt, Martin, “From Patriarchalism to Capitalism: The Theoretical Context of Max Weber's Agrarian Studies (1892–3)”, in Tribe, Kenneth (ed.), Reading Weber (London, 1989), p. 140Google Scholar. Riesebrodt adds: “In his analysis o f the proletarianization process [Weber] also underlines the same elements as Marx”: ibid.

⁹⁴ Scarano, “Las huellas esquivas de la memoria”, p. 37.

⁹⁵ Scarano, , “El colonato azucarero en Puerto Rico, 1873–1934: problemas para su estudio”, Historia y Sociedad, III (1990), p. 155Google Scholar.

⁹⁶ Scarano, “Las huellas esquivas de la memoria”, p. 13. masterly, Gordon Lewis'sPuerto Rico: Freedom and Power in the Caribbean (New York, 1963)Google Scholar further strengthened the authority of Mintz's analysis in Puerto Rico. Lewis argued that in the twentieth century Puerto Rican rural workers became propertyless and wage-earning workers “in the classical sense”, especially in the island's “locus classicus of economic change”, the sugar industry: Freedom and Power, pp. 89, 95.

⁹⁷ For example, Rivera, Quintero, “El capitalismo y el proletariado rural”, Revista de Ciencias Sociales, XIX (1974), pp. 61–103Google Scholar; Quintero Rivera and Garría, Breve historia.

⁹⁸ On several important issues, Quintero Rivera pushed Mintz's already bold conclusions even further. Three “new historians” offered dissenting voices: Gervasio Garrfa called attention to the strong “precapitalist” features of the Puerto Rican rural labour force, and political economy as a whole, into the twentieth century; the argument around “irregular labour discipline”, discussed above, is part of that analysis: Garrfa, “Economía y trabajo”. Andre's Ramos Mattei stressed the significance of sugar-central production prior to 1898, and thus raised vital questions about the real meanings of US penetration: Mattei, Ramos, La sociedad del azucar en Puerto Rico: 1870–1910 (San Juan, 1988)Google Scholar. And Fernando Picó has demonstrated the resilience of smallholders and the durability of black circum-cane labourer communities: Amargo café los pequñeos y mediados caficultores de Utuado a fines del sigh XIX (Río Piedras/Huracán, 1979); idem, Vivir en Caimito (Río Piedras, 1979).

⁹⁹ See Giusti-Cordero, “En búsqueda de la nación concreta”; idem, “Hacia otro 98: el ‘grupo espafiol’ en Puerto Rico”.

¹⁰⁰ Ortiz, Fernando, Cuban Counterpoint (New York, 1947)Google Scholar; see Mintz, “Foreword” to Guerra y Sánchez, Sugar and Society in the Caribbean.

¹⁰¹ Martínez Alier, Cuba: economía y sociedad.

¹⁰² González, José Luis, El pats de cuatro pisos (Río Piedras, 1980)Google Scholar.

¹⁰³ Rivera, Quintero, “Historia de unas clases sin historia. Comentarios críticos al País de cuatro pisos” (San Juan, 1983)Google Scholar; Taller de Formación Política, La cuestión national; Ferrao, Luis Angel, “Nacionalismo, élite intelectual e hispanismo en el Puerto Rico de Ios años treinta”, in Alvarez-Curbelo, Silvia and Castro, Maria Elena Rodríguez (eds), Del nacionalismo al populismo: cultura y política en Puerto Rico (Río Piedras, 1993), pp. 37–60Google Scholar; Ferrao, Luis, Pedro Albizu Campos y el nacionalismo puertorriqueño (Río Piedras, 1990)Google Scholar; Política, Taller de Formación, Pedro Albizu Campos: conservador, fascista o revolucionario (Río Piedras, 1991)Google Scholar; Carrion, Juan Manuel et al. , La nación puertorriqueña: ensayos en torno a Pedro Albizu Campos (Río Piedras, 1993)Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁴ Manners, “Tabard”, pp. 168–169 (emphasis added).

¹⁰⁵ Mintz, “Cafiamelar”, p. 397. For a contrasting interpretation of the CGT split, see Quintero Rivera and García, Desafío y solidaridad, pp. 124–125.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., p. 82; but see Scarano, Francisco, Puerto Rico: cinco siglos de historia (San Juan, 1993), pp. 722–726Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁷ Perhaps not trivially, the term “rural proletariat” is usually phrased as plural, while “jíbaro” appears as the singular.

¹⁰⁸ Rivera, Quintero, “Puerto Rican National Development: clas & Nation in a Colonial Context”, Marxist Perspectives, IX (1980), pp. 10–31Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁹ For a pathbreaking analysis of the “peasant” and “proletarian” dimensions of slave labour, see Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar, pp. 261–262. Tomich qualifies Mintz's concept of “proto-peasant” not by arguing, as some have done, for the formation of an independent peasantry, but “by examining the historical interrelation between the various types of laboring activities performed by the slave population”. At the same time, Tomich locates the “focal point” of the development of the slaves' autonomous production and marketing activities in “the struggle between master and slave over the conditions of labor and of social and material life within slavery”: ibid., p. 261.

¹¹⁰ See Warman, “El problema del proletariado agricola”.

¹¹¹ Of course, the cultural significance of those activities was a concern that Mintz the anthropologist could not elude and which in any case could not be measured only quantitatively.

¹¹² Mintz, “Cañamelar”, p. 401; emphasis added.

¹¹³ Ibid; emphasis added.