i Patrick W. Staib Anthropology This dissertation is approved, and it ...

employee dormitories. The large farms do not make hiring decisions on the basis of the
quality or personalities of the seasonal workers. Heavy-duty dump trucks loaded with
workers commonly drive through Las Grietas on the way to or from the large farms. A
Las Grietas community member and coffee coyote, Alcides Vilchez, explained as a
truckload of workers passed through Las Grietas:
Los recogen en Palacagüina o en Condega y los traen asi para cortar café.
Duermen en camarotes, sin colchones. Les dan basura de comer. Es un trato
horrible que reciben esos pobres mozos. Es por eso que pocos se prestan para
cortar en esos cafetales. El trato es pesimo y el San Juaneño bien lo sabe. (They
pick them up in Palacagüina or in Condega and bring them like that to pick
coffee. They sleep in bunks without mattresses. They give them junk to eat. It’s
horrible treatment that those workers get. That’s why so few decide to pick on
those coffee farms. The treatment is the worst and San Juaneños know it too
well).
Confianza is very important to small-scale, family operations such as Danilo’s,
especially since the workers interact closely with the family and the farmers’ children.
The trust built between farmer and employee takes time to establish, but it reduces the
need for employers to implement control mechanisms similar to Bentham’s panopticon,
which Foucault discusses in Discipline and Punish (1975). The following examples
indicate Danilo’s struggles to establish confianza on his farm. Since it is too large to be
managed singlehandedly, he tries to incorporate hardworking individuals into his family
farm setting.
Twice during my stay in Las Grietas, Danilo had to involve the local police in
issues involving his workers. The first case was of a stolen motor, a small, eight-
horsepower, gasoline-powered Honda motor that weighed about 25–30 lbs. Usually
Danilo locked it in his farmhouse. One weekend prior to the harvest in 2004, Danilo
discovered that has motor was missing. The following Monday, he went to the police
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