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

Slave Religion and Rise of the Free Peasantry 57
labor. Refractory tenants, the convulsion of incessant civil war, and
the restricted nature of the export market made large-scale commercialized
agriculture untenable. Caught between two modes of production,
the landlords tried to resort to a "neofeudalism" diluted by
free contract labor. But land was abundant, the culture of servility
had been transcended, and free contract labor proved too expensive
with the national and export markets blocked.
Time and again, eyewitnesses described the tantalizing promise
and general ruin of the valley; the problem lay in securing market
outlets to the Pacific and in overcoming the allegedly lazy and surly
disposition of the lower classes. In 1853, General T. C. Mosquera,
thrice president of the republic and one of Cauca's most prominent
sons, noted that the majority of the state of Cauca was black or mulatto.
But whereas the whites were "intelligent, active, laborious,
and moral," the blacks were "weak for labor, enduring, and suspicious"
(1853 '-77, 97}- Felipe Perez, a Colombian geographer, pointed
out that it was not merely laziness that was at issue but equality.
The astonishing fertility of the soil meant that "to eat one does not
have to work"; therefore, "people excuse themselves from serving
others, and this spirit of social equality that predominates among
the poor, drowns and tortures the aristocratic pretensions of the old
mining feudocracy" (1862:2,12-13). Perez insisted that "all that is
necessary is that the idle hands which exist today stop being idle,
and that social harmony, the best guarantee of work and business be
allowed to prevail" (Ibid.: 139).
But "all that is necessary" was far from possible. The characteristics
noted by Mosquera, that the blacks were "weak for labor, enduring,
and suspicious," and the spirit of social equality by which people
excused themselves from serving others, as described by Perez,
had a material basis in the newly formed black peasant mode of livelihood.
They sought refuge along the fertile river banks and in the
dank forests, planting their staples of plantain, some corn, and a few
commercial crops like cocoa and tobacco. Fishing and panning for
gold were supplementary activities. Perez, who pointedly refers to
the decadence of all forms of agriculture and livestock raising in the
valley, repeatedly singles out plantains and cocoa as the two crops of
outstanding importance around 1862. These were primarily peasant
crops, found along the wooded banks, swampy areas, and in the
densely wooded regions inhabited by black peasants "refractory to
the attacks of malaria" (Garcia, 1898:28-29). This type of area
abounded in wildlife, which the residents hunted and used as a
source of meat (Perez, 1862:140). E. Palau was of the opinion that
the "region privilegiada" for cocoa was around the Palo River, the