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

The Pueblos de Indios stood in the way of progress in the post-independence
period. “The indigenous people were resisting full proletarianization.” They were
“unwilling to abandon their free life in their villages for the virtual slavery of the coffee
plantations.” They “took refuge in subsistence agriculture and avoided all trade with . . .
Ladinos because of the arrogant treatment they received” (Rocha 2001:2). Land
expropriations and intimidations would become commonplace in the mid-nineteenth
century (Roseberry, Gudmundson and Samper 1995, Gould 1997, Téllez 1999, Rocha
2001, Dore 2006).
According to Nicaraguan social scientist José Luis Rocha, there were two epochs
of Indian reductions, one during the conquest and another during the nineteenth-century
coffee boom. He writes, “the new ‘reduction’ – motivated by the coffee boom – was
presented as an indispensable disposition for propagating the ‘civilizing’ message that
would encourage them [the Indians] to abandon practices contrary to the needs of
dominant groups” (2001: 2). Rocha goes on to describe how the expansion of coffee
“involved the expropriation of communal land.” It was then accumulated “in the hands of
the big landowners for the creation of coffee plantations, leaving the expropriated
indigenous people available as labor. The first led to the second and together they led to
the coffee boom” (2001:3).
As mentioned, by 1856, the nation unified to expel William Walker, a U.S. soldier
of fortune who had been contracted by the Liberals to end the recurring civil wars.
Walker betrayed his hosts, named himself president, reinstituted slavery in an attempt to
court the approval and assistance of the southern United States. At the time Nicaragua
was an important transportation route between the Atlantic and the Pacific and was even
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