Peasants on Plantations: Subaltern Strategies of Labor and Resistance in the Pisco Valley, Peru.

Vincent C. Peloso. Peasants on Plantations: Subaltern Strategies of Labor and Resistance in the Pisco Valley, Peru. Duke University Press, 1999. Paper, 207 pages, Glossary, Bibliography, Index. Photos and Maps Tables.

Peasants on Plantations, co-winner of the Whitaker Prize for best book by a member of the Middle Atlantic Council of Latin American Studies, is a valuable monograph for two reasons. First, it is a thorough study of the peasants on the plantation Hacienda Palto in the Pisco Valley of Southern Peru from the middle of the nineteenth until the middle of the twentieth century. Peloso shows how a "negotiation of power in the countryside of Peru seemed to have been a key to the successful growth of plantations" (xii). He makes extensive use of plantation "Letterbooks" that give insights into the thoughts and actions of plantation managers and owners. It is this attention to detail that allows Peloso to develop the other important aspect of his book: the nature of peasant resistance and subaltern interaction with plantation owners and managers. What Peloso finds is that "peasants as tenants took initiatives and made choices" (xvi). The study of these choices provides the reader with an intricate view of how subaltern groups negotiate and contest for power in ways that may not be visible when researchers focus on formal economic and political relationships implicit in peasant-landowner interaction. Peloso indicates that peasants desired their moral as well as economic rights be recognized. Peasants on Plantations successfully addresses this interaction between the begemonic control exercised by plantation owners and peasant desire for options regarding use of land and resources.

The key to understanding this interaction, according to Peloso, was the availability or scarcity of labor. In the nineteenth century Chinese coolies provided ...