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

Owners and Fences 85
attention. The foreman demanded that he keep working. The
man asked for water, but the boss said he should get up and
work. He was still lying in the cane field when the truck came
to take the workers back to town, and they forgot him. He laid
there all weekend. When they came back on Monday he was
almost dead. They took him to hospital and gave him serum.
But he died a little later. The workers are so preoccupied with
getting enough money to live on that they just concentrate on
what they are doing. They don't have time to think about anybody
or anything but what they are doing.
Shortly afterwards, the man who recounted this left the plantation
and devoted himself full-time to his mother's plot. He reasoned that
although he made less money it was worthwhile because the intensity
of the work was so much less.
In the valley over the past fifteen years a fivefold to tenfold increase
has occurred in the large-scale cultivation of crops other than
sugarcane, and these crops are exclusively worked by the contractor
system—the difference with the cane being that a high proportion of
workers in these crops are local women and their children. The labor
contractors prefer to employ women and children. They say they are
"more tame," will work for less, and do as they are told. They have
to, because the burden of child care and feeding increasingly falls
on the women, who are painfully conscious of the hungry infants
awaiting their rice at nightfall. Life histories and genealogies indicate
that the two-generational single woman-headed household and
short-lived liaisons between women and men have become increasingly
common over the past thirty years. The marriage rate has
halved since 1938. These women and children laborers are often
known as iguazas in reference to the migratory ducks that pick the
seed lying in the fields. Some people derive most of their income
from such gleaning, eating or selling the grain they find loose in the
soil. But despite what the contractors say, these women do strike on
occasions and do so directly and spontaneously without organized
leadership, walking off the fields when the rate offered is insultingly
low.
The majority of the casual laborers are locals of peasant descent
and born in the area. To varying degrees they rely on their plots for
some of their livelihood. Many oscillate between peasant farming
and working for contractors, whereas others have their immediate
families supplying part of their subsistence from their plots. Around
three-quarters of the so-called permanent fraction of the wage-laboring
force are black immigrants from the relatively isolated jungles of