Of Roads and Revolutions: Peasants, Property, and the Politics of Development in La LIbertad, Chontales (1895-1995)

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the political-economy of agrarian social relations and uneven development in La Libertad, Chontales, Nicaragua. It locates the development of agrarian structures and municipal politics at the interstices of local level processes and supra-local political-economic projects, i.e., an expanding world market, Nicaraguan nation-state and class formation, and U.S. imperialism. The formation and expansion of private property in land and the contested placement of municipal borders forms the primary locus for this analysis of changing agrarian relations. Over the course of the century explored in this dissertation, the uneven development of class and state power did not foster capitalist relations of production (i.e., increasing productivity based on new investment, development of the forces of production, proletarianization) and did not entail the disappearance of peasant producers; rather, peasant producers proliferated. Neither emerging from a pre-capitalist past nor forging a (classically) capitalist present, classes and communities were shaped through constant movement (e.g., waves of migration and population movements, upward and downward mobility) and structured by forms of accumulation rooted in extractive economic practices and forms of dependent-commercial capitalism on the one hand, and the politics of state - including municipal - formative dynamics on the other. The proliferation of peasant producers, both constrained and made possible by these processes, depended upon patriarchal relations (through which family labor was mobilized and landownership and use framed) and an expansive frontier (through which land pressure was relieved and farm fragmentation mitigated), although larger ranchers and landlords depended upon and benefited from these as well, albeit in different ways. The social relations among different classes and strata were contradictory, entailing forms of dependence, subordination, and exploitation as well as identification and affinity. In the context of the Sandinista revolution, these ties created the basis for a widely shared counterrevolutionary political stance across classes and strata while these class and strata distinctions conditioned the specificities and experiences of opposition.