The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

Slave Religion and Rise of the Free Peasantry 53
Refractory Tenants: Idlers and Rebels
Although Sergio Arboleda repeatedly insisted that substantial
rents and labor could be wrought from his tenants, he was
forced to develop other means to secure labor and to maintain control.
He rented large areas of pastureland to well-to-do cattlemen,
many of whom were clergymen. The cattlemen could place their
own tenants, provided the owner gave permission. This measure improved
income and, perhaps more important, facilitated social control
of the vast estate. He also established a laboring elite of whites.
In his instructions to the estate manager in 1857 he said that the
blacks worked too slowly in the mill and ruined the animals; only
whites were to be employed there. Once proven, these whites were
to be contracted for three years on a regular salary, he instructed, and
to be given a plot to cultivate and on which to build a hut. They
were not to be charged a rent, but had to work when called. If they
did not, then they would be thrown off, and the hacienda would not
pay for any of the improvements they had made to the land. They
could not work for anyone else without Arboleda's permission.
Arboleda stressed that the working day of the blacks should be
organized by piecework rates, never by time, and that it was better
to leave work undone than to owe money. In the planting and harvesting
of readily edible crops, like rice, only male peons from far
outside the hacienda were to be hired, "but do this without people
understanding that you do it intentionally." And, he added, beat
down the wages of women.
There were two types of black tenants: those who paid rent by
working one day a week for the hacienda and another more privileged
group of 180 tenants who paid a pittance in cash annually—a
sum that could be earned from a mere five to eight days labor. It
would have been far more advantageous to the hacienda if these tenants
had also paid in labor, but the Arboledas lacked the necessary
power. This cash-paying group also provided the informants who
kept a check on the constant thefts that plagued the hacienda.
By planting perennials like cocoa where there had been dense forest
and by fencing in grasslands, Arboleda made further attempts to
hem in the restless peasants. Thus, the monolithic, tightly centered
slave hacienda gave way to a series of concentric spheres of authority,
with a great variety of distinct but overlapping relationships
to the central power. Large cattlemen who rented land, white peons,
free contract workers, cash-paying tenants, and labor-paying tenants
found themselves in a gridwork of oppositions to one another.