Journal Article

Foreign Workers, Debt peonage, and Frontier Culture in Lowland Guatemala, 1884-1900

Opie, Frederick Douglass

2004

Overview

This article addresses a call for historical work on African Hispanic Diasporas & cultural frontiers. It uses unpublished documents from U. S. & Guatemalan government archives, along with Guatemalan periodicals, to explore the role of foreign labor in the modernization of Guatemala in the late nineteenth century. More specifically it looks at how caudillo politics & neo-colonialism shaped the challenges foreign workers faced in the lowland departments of Izabal & Zacapa on Guatemala's Atlantic coast. Building on various bodies of scholarship, the article argues that conditions of peonage occurred on the Atlantic coast of Guatemala when poorly paid public officials collaborated with foreign contractors to restrict the freedom of foreign contract laborers. The central thesis is that due to these conditions, violence was a regular part of the frontier culture. Violence on Guatemala's Atlantic coast erupted most often when Black migrant workers openly challenged the legitimacy of the labor contracts, ambiguous vagrancy statutes, & unwritten frontier laws that shaped relations across lines of color & class in the late nineteenth century. References. Adapted from the source document.

• Publisher: Blackwell Publishing Ltd,The University of Chicago Press,University of Chicago Press
• Subject: Identity Politics / Indexing in process / National Identity / Panama / Political Participation / United States of America