Carribean History, Carribean Labour

Research Foundation of State University of New York
Caribbean History, Caribbean Labor

Author(s): Sidney W. Mintz
Source: Review (Fernand Braudel Center), Vol. 34, No. 4 (2011), pp. 407-419
Published by: Research Foundation of State University of New York for and on behalf of
the Fernand Braudel Center
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Caribbean History, Caribbean Labor"
Sidney W. Mintz
When itwriting to honor

may seem a friend,narcissistic
unpardonably teacher, andto fellow
employscholar,
an auto
biographical perspective.1 But the paper is about labor, particu
larly physical labor, and the relevance of its study for the social
historian or social scientist. Spittler has looked carefully at labor
among technically less advanced peoples; this is a paper mostly
about slaves and rural proletarians.
I take the liberty of beginning with some personal history,
because I want to touch on the relationship between labor and
personal fulfillment. I want to ask whether some aspect of that
relationship may be foreclosed to us intellectuals because we do
notin the particular sense in which I mean it herework. Hence I
must explain what I mean here by work. To address that question,
I think that honesty requires me to begin with myself
My own family background is approximately petit-bourgeois, rath
er than proletarian. Though my father was a cook and my mother
a labor organizer, both aspired to what they implicitly considered
better things for their children. To be sure, for them, manual la
bor was sacred. The world, including all of its finest objects of the
mindnot only its architecture, but also its Shakespeare and its
Beethovenwas understood to rest ultimately upon the toil of the
people. Physical labor was not only necessary; it was also morally
good. Mankind may have been doomed to live by the sweat of its
brow because of the primal sin; but that did not make physical
* This article was previously published in Blich nach vorn. Festgabe fr Gerd Spittler
zum 65. Geburtstag. Kurt Beck, Till Frster and Hans Peter Hahn, eds. Kln: Rdiger
Kppe, 136-44.
1 The author is grateful to Professor Till Frster for useful criticisms. Regrettably,
not all of the recommended changes could be made by the author. This paper was first
delivered at an event honoring Prof. Martin Schaffner of the Department of History,
University of Basel, in September, 2000. It has since appeared in that earlier form, in
Spanish, in a volume published in Cuba in 2003.
Review, xxxiv, 4, 2011, 407-19 407
408 Sidney W. Mintz
labor bad, or inferior

fort.
And yet my parents

life of the mindor, a
prestige, and an eas
hope: it will be clear t
ents when I say this
Despite their aspiratio
first on a farm, and
the fast-approaching
lived during a crushin
reason why I worked
from eastern Europe,
as adults, and heartil
meI now thinkI was not able to be an interne at the United Na
tions, an apprentice at the World Bank, or an assistant in my fam
ily's business. The jobs I had from age twelve to age nineteen were
real jobs, by which I mean to say that they consisted principally of
manual labor. I remember that work with pleasure now; mastery
is part of growing, and mastering a physical task can be part of
growing up. But of course I did not have to do any of those jobs for
more than a few months at a time. I was also an athlete, a wrestler,
who derived disproportionate pleasure from my sport. Because I
was male, small and Jewish, excelling in some physical activity in
the United States of the 1930s was nearly tantamount to making
political statement. The wrestling continued until I was in my late
thirties; but the work, manual work, "real work," stopped for me by
the time I was graduated from college.
I do not think I gave another thought to "real work" for a num
ber of years. But after college, military service and two years of
graduate school, I was sent to "the field," as we anthropologists are
fond of calling it. In my case, it was to a US corporate sugar plan
tation region of our colony Puerto Rico, where I remained from
January 1948 until August of 1949.
I will not discuss the larger anthropological project of which I
was a part, because it is not relevant to my subject here. But during
most of my time in the field that first year I lived in a small wooden
shack which I shared with a local agricultural laborer, whose jobs
included hoeing around the tender young cane plants, working
with the oxen, and doing other manual labor in the sugarcane
CARIBBEAN HISTORY, CARIBBEAN LABOR 409
fields. His sister cooked my dinner

friend and companion; and his uncle
in that village, indeed one of the be
The village consisted of three nucl
which I resided lay, Strssendorf fas
highway that passed through the e
coast. It was named Palmas Orillanas, and the land on which its
inhabitants lived had been purchased by the municipality, then
bestowed in tiny plots upon landless local workers, many of whom
before that had been squatting illegally in shacks along the shoul
der of the highway. That original purchase had been recent, and
it was, I am sure, a political move, a reward of a kind to politically
faithful local constituents.
The community was almost a mono-class isolate; all but a tiny

handful of peopletwo public car drivers, a policeman, a Pente
costal preacher, and four keepers of tiny stores and barsmad
their livings in the sugar cane. The cane grew up to the stoo
of the houses, and as far as the eye could see. People would hav
flowerpots on their front stoops, and grow a handful of cilantro or
oregano\ some had a chicken or two. One manfor reasons no on
ever figured outkept a mare, though he never rode it, or use
it for anything. Quite a few people on the margins had a goat
two. Everything people ateexcept for the chickens, the goats an
herbs, and occasional land crabs, or fish from the sea, only a hu
dred yards awaycame from the stores. People in that communi
produced what they did not consume, and consumed what they d
not produce. The diet was modest; rice or cornmeal and various
beans; a selection of tropical tubers such as yams, sweet potatoes
cassava and taro; coffee; occasional mangoes or guavas or bananas
nearly all from the interior of the island; and a rare treat of me
or dried or fresh fish. The breakfast I came to know best consisted
of a warm plate of softened salt cod mixed with onions, olives and
capers, served over hot white rice, and followed by a cup of sweet,
steaming black coffee. The dish, called serenata, was eaten quite
regularly if one was leaving at 6:00 or 7:00 am to cut sugarcane.
Lunch was carried to workers by their wives or children, in nesting
pots called fiambreras: rice, beans, tubers, coffee, and some chicken
or salt cod or corned beef or mortadella, if the budget allowed.
I speak at length of the food because everywhere I go, I observe
food carefullymy chef father always seems to be looking over my
410 Sidney W. Mintz
shoulder. But I ment

in that village never
they wanted for milk
other things. I won't
tic arrangements, or
about work in that pl
Everybody in Palma
with his or her hand
tasks. There were ker
mas present to frien
tors could be found
ity, but many did no
and were operated b
machine's work surf
There were radios; bu
than by being listened
Everybody worked.
to sell and took in lau
gal lottery tickets; g
icked their mothers' e
and for sale, ran errands and collected tinder and carried lunches
to the fields, hunted for the tiny bivalves called pichi pichi and for
the oysters that grew on the mangrove trees; old women sewed and
cooked, old men fished, fed chickens, swept up, gathered fodder
for goats, and tinder for those who still cooked on fogonesthree
stones to hold a pot over charcoal. The only idlers were drunkards,
and those branded as ne'er do wells; one such, nicknamed el manco
because of a crippled hand, was a gambler, and held in extremely
low regard. People showed quiet satisfaction when he was mur
dered in a gambling quarrel. In Palmas Orillanas, as in all of the
poor Caribbean villages in which I spent so much of my youth, the
feebleminded worked, the handicapped workedeveryone worked.
A young man so badly deformed that he walked crablike, stoop
ing close to the ground and propelling himself along partly with
his hands, was a car mechanic, and a good one. Work was not this
other thing one did; it was sewed into daily activity like the lining
of a coat. The distinction was not between work and recreation, so
much as between work and rest. The technology associated with
labor was of its time. Irons with which clothes were pressed, for
example, had a space at their backs in which lumps of burning
charcoal were inserted to heat the pressi

dangerous and clumsy to me; yet any eigh
to stoke them, and how to iron the pocke
loops and pants cuffs, with such an iron.
was carried long distances from the stand
in which lard had originally been shipped
dles now affixed to them. The same children who ironed carried
those cans, when they were well over half full of water. We can all
imagine what it is like for an undernourished eight year-old girl to
carry some forty pounds of water on her head, for a hundred me
ters or so, several times each day. Of course all of those girls could
also sew; and by the time they were fourteen or fifteen they were
often living in consensual unions, and occasionally also mothers
already.
But all of the sort of work I've been describing so far was in
tended to keep the system running, to keep the men working, and
able to work. The work they did was work; and sometimes women
did it. I hardly ever saw a woman cut cane, or seed, or do the work
of a ditcher or palero (of which more later); but I saw women, usu
ally very poor, solitary, and older, do nearly every other job in the
cane. Still, if the economic situation made it possible, women did
not work in the cane; men did.
Since I was there, I thought that I should work, too; and I did,
a little bit. But just as had been so when I was a young man, every
body, including me, knew that it didn't really count. I laid rails for
the narrow-gauge railway that went right into the canefieldsa job
called planchar hierro, or "laying iron." I filled the portable cars
with cane, armful by tired armfulllenar forgones, as it was called.
I tried cutting cane, picando cana, for nearly two weeks. It is dread
ful labor. But of course I was not paid for this work, and of course
it was not regarded as real work when I did itand of course it was
not real work when I did it. I was only playing at workI didn't have
to do it. The people who really did it had to do it. The joke was that
I would be paid at the end of each week if I went to the crumbling
chimney on the estate of Dn. Pastor Diaz, an infamous hacendado
of the last century, whose estate had disappeared long ago, though
the chimney of his hacienda still stood in the neighborhood.
What I did for a living, the people soon understood, I did with
my handsbut what I did was write with them. Children would gasp
in amazement at how fast I could write, even though I was lefthand
412 Sidney W. Mintz
ed. And an official i

Connecticut once told
his own name typed
ing me type, and I h
what I did "work," an
But my best friend,
task he had had in
memory, "And that w
("Y ese trabajo, ese tr
seemed to me that what I called "work" and what he called "work"
were very much not the same thing. Though he would ask me at the
end of the day how my work had gone, and I would answer soberly,
we both knew that his work and my work were only alike in the ef
fort we invested in doing it well. And though he certainly respected
me for my work, the way I regarded him was considerably more
respectful, since knowing him, I was acquiring with my own eyes
and ears, excellent evidence that he could do what I didwhereas I
had no evidence at all, really, that I could do what he did.
I mean this as more than a confession. I want to provide a plat
form from which to evaluate the other things I intend to say. The
region in which the people and things I am discussing are located
is the Caribbean, and it has had a contact history now more than
five centuries long, during which labor, especially massed rural
agrarian labor, runs like a red threadfrom almost the moment o
Columbian discovery through the rise of colonialism and planta
tion slavery, up into the very present.
But I wish to make two major points, both with reference to la
bor; and both points, I think, transcend in some way the historica
and the particular. Anthropologists do not dwell overmuch on the
supposedly universal or species-wide; we concentrate instead on the
historically and culturally specific. And so I feel unaccustomed to
argue that some aspect of our natureother than, say, how we dif
fer from animals in our linguistic or symbolling behaviorappears
to be universal. So what I wish to ponder here is supported with
culturally particular examples. But I aim to suggest something that
goes beyond those examples.
I say two major points, with reference to work. The first such
point is that our species cannot continue existing without mean
ing in lifeand to the extent that work provides such meaning,
humans do it in the way that they do in order to perpetuate and
enrich life's meaning for them. Of cou

work because they have to work; I d
labor. But the necessity of working d
second point is that work, expressing
linked by the worker to self-esteem.
between work and self-esteem may
to the worker than the very conditi
doneand indeed, may become even
ture of the economy and ideology wi
I will wish to develop these points i
do, let me call attention to what is, I b
fact about work in the modern wor
seen an astounding diminution of dir
effort to the completion of tasks, an
tion of what might be called prosthe
technology between the worker and
have in mind here the factory system,
er, or simply the use of electrical or f
instead to the multiplication of small
to reduce human caloric output in su
yards, preparing food, carrying and
even exercising; and to the social allo
cal tasks in modern society. That th
alienation of the individual from the
but it is not the point I mean to make
In the US and, I suppose, in the W
cal labor has become more and more
and, commonly, nonwhite populatio
panied, I think, by a growing sense
evance of physical labor itself. Wher
in particular, went through a period
that period is ending. I think that s
mainly in sport and in recreational c
ditch digging or hod carrying, is no
also involves perceptual and attitudi
ument them, only speculate about th
hardening of the perceived connectio
the social identity of those who do th
whom they are done. Migrant agricu
and service persons, dishwashers, g
414 Sidney W. Mintz
cleaners can take on

loses what little res
it. It is against the
count that I want to talk about Caribbean labor and Caribbean
history.
Permit me to turn back again to my fieldwork of more than
half a century ago, in order to talk some more about work. There
is one job in particular that I wish to look at, as supportive of my
general assertions. It involved the use of a long-handled shovel,
and the digging, building and cleaning of narrow ditches meant
to carry water. The shovel was called a pala, and one particularly
long-handled variety was called a botaln; they were used in prepar
ing and cleaning ditches. The ditches carried water to the cane,
or drained it away from the swamplands. In areas with high water
tables, drainage at one season was at least as important as irriga
tion in another. A man who did this work was called a palero, after
the shovel or pala he worked with.
There was a lot of talk about paleros. In the old days, people
would say, the paleros never went to work in their work clothes, and
never left work in them. The meaning of this has to be grasped
fully. Paleros are agricultural laborers; they dig with longhandled
shovels. But they would go to work in this tropical country wear
ing jackets and clean shirts. They would change in the fields, put
their clean clothes to one side, and after finishing the work, would
bathe in the irrigation canals, and return home wearing their clean
clothes. They also had special feelings about their shovels. They
would make the hafts of the shovels themselves, from a limber but
light Puerto Rican wood, then add a short butt made of the wood
called frescura, which was "easier on the palm of the hand." I would
still see in those years palas with copper rings embedded in their
hafts, or otherwise embellished. It was said of the paleros that in
the old days, they were members of the local casino. To be sure, the
local casino counted no plantation owners or professionals among
its members. Nonetheless the belief is a curious one. Who were
these aristocrats of labor with their special shovels? What made
them special?
Let me begin to sketch in their story with a long quotation from
a British observer, one of the so-called stipendiary magistrates
whose job it was to oversee the treatment of the newly freed and of
the Indian contract laborers in British Guiana, in the 1860s, after
Emancipation. Judge Joseph Beaum

work capacity of the Indian contra
man, and finds the freedman more
ing comparison is with the United
digging in the United Kingdom tha
ditcher must do in British Guiana,
ferential between the British digger
enormous they cannot really be com
... we have no excavating work so
in Demerara and if the reader wer
... sweltering under the blazing su
standing up to his knees and oft
ter, not only lifting (or more prope
5000 spits of dense clay ... throwin
feet clear on each sidenot with a
ing swing, but delivered straight f
of a seven foot shovel ... I venture to think he would not
only wonder at but admire ... the 'lazy nigger' (Beaumont

1871:82 ff.).
Beaumont's testimony rings true for me because, though

work of the palero in Puerto Rico was never so extremethe
less drainage canals needed to make possible cane cultivati
the coastal Guiana swamplands were not needed thereth
ture he gives us accords well with what I have seen with my
eyes. My Puerto Rican friend Taso Zayas, describing for me h
learned to be a palero, recounts his experience as follows:
My brother-in-law Cornelio was a palero, and he used t
work a lot here in the poyal of Colonia Pastor Diaz. At tha
time the poyales were plowed and furrowed in sections fo
cultivation, consisting of seedbeds for two or four pieces o
seed cane. That is, where the poyal was very wet, where ther
was a lot of ground water, we made hills to accommodate
two pieces, and where the terrain was dryer, four pieces. His
work at that time was that of ditcher, working with the pala
I used to go with my sister Tomasa to bring him lunch an
breakfast. Tomasa was a strong woman, and at that time
they used to make ditches as deep as two shovel (blade
lengths, and as wide as two shovel (blade) widths. And the
my sister would take the pala, and she would fold over he
416 Sidney W. Mintz
dress in front and c

and start to dig the
put myself to practic
a long-handled pala,
ditchthe fine eart
behind Cornelio seco
botaln, finishing up
left. Afterward my
the ditch on each si
and clean up this ear
or an hour when we
hour, because at breakfast we could do little since she had
to come back home in order to prepare lunch ...
When Taso was perhaps a year or two older, he learned new
tasks:
.. .my brother-in-law was put in charge of irrigation at Colonia

Pastor Dfaz; he was encabezado (foreman). And then I used
to have to go at night with a lantern to illuminate the work
of the irrigators during the night, sometimes half the night,
and sometimes the whole night through. I would go along
lighting the way for the irrigators as they went along doing
the work. And I used to see how they did the work, and
sometimes when they put their palas down I would grab one
and put'myself to doing their work. That's how I learned to
do irrigation. At that time I was a kidjust a kid. I was a few
years old, and already I used to lose whole nights lighting
the way for them (Mintz 1960:67 f.).
In Taso's words, one reads how learning to work was a part of

growing up. To acquire skills that could be exchanged for money,
that could mark the acquisition of maturity, and that could be ac
quired in the company of one's close relatives, must have seemed
both natural and agreeable to him, even though at the time he
was still a little boy, perhaps eight years old or so. The growth of
self-esteem in such a context transcends or bypasses the fact that
the system under which the work was done was cruelly exploitative
and, indeed, dangerous to health, as well as depriving children of
the opportunity to be educated, as was true in Taso's case.
It is exactly for these reasons that I want to underline my con
viction that pride in work can make the worker more vulnerable
and exploitablethat the work may pro

tion, fulfillment, even when the conditions
socially unjust. Those ditchers in Guiana
shovelsful of wet clay to either side of the
standing up to their thighs in water un
work to live; and the work was dreadful.
believe that they did not take pleasure in
My Puerto Rican friend spoke at length of
during his life. Almost all of them were
them had hernias; all knew that it was the
work that crippled them. Yet they compe
they took pride in their occupation, by d
put more meaning into their lives.
In some regards there is no doubt that
was prized, even by the exploiters. Unde
in Puerto Rico in 1943, the palero only w
normal eight-hour day; and his hourly rate
loaders, seeders, cutters, etc. But it was
labor, made more so by the custom, amo
at least, to make bets with each other on
done fastest, and to work overtime secret
money.
I have dwelled on this one sort of work here in order to illustrate
with particulars the two general points I wished to suggest: work
as a means of endowing life with meaning, and work as a source of
individual pride and self-esteem. I think these points have a very
wide, if not universal, validity when we speak of our species. But
their significance in the Caribbean region, where labor has for so
long been associated with coercion, colonialism and race hatred,
may be worth a moment's reflection.
I hope it will not be thought that I mean to glorify the effect on
the human spirit of exhausting physical toil under terrible condi
tions. No one should have to work the way these people worked
and in some part of the Caribbean region, must still work. I intend
rather to comment on how the human spirit survives and trans
forms such exactions, in remaining human. But I also want to call
attention to the decline of physical labor in the so-called developed
world, and what I think to be the concomitant decline of respect for
it. I have no idea what are the general implications of this change
for the future. Yet it seems to me more and more significant, as the
418 Sidney W. Mintz
world grows each day

inputs, except in such
For the historian, th
feel about their work
as more and more ne
think we know enou
physical work, is per
know that much wor
ply tedious drudgery
or more meaningful
make their lives emp
linguist, argued long
with his simple techn
rewarding than, say,
Sapir implies that th
the second, spurious.
But I do not believe
gests. People do extr
pleasure in their wor
and difficult. And the
they do is perceived b
Nothing in my Cari
think that any of my
Undernourished, und
by their desire for e
nonetheless and in ev
way they made sense
not make them any le
any less aware that s
am certain that this
to not only by the fr
but also by the narra
But I do not wish to
here. My purpose, ra
small case. Those who
gument, and what joy
Ed.] written here asp
he and others can make use of it to educate me.
REFERENCES
Beaumont, Joseph. 2011. The New Slavery (orig. 1871). London: Caribbean Press
Mintz, Sidney W. 1960. Worker in the Cane. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Sapir, Edward. 1956. "Culture, Genuine and Spurious," (orig. 1924). David G. Man
Culture, Language and Personality: Selected Essays. Berkeley: University of Califor
Terkel, Studs. 1972. Working. New York: The New Press.
Thomas, Keith, ed. 1999. The Oxford Book of Work. Oxford, UK: Oxford University

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Caribbean History, Caribbean Labor

When itwriting to honor

labor bad, or inferior

And yet my parents

fields. His sister cooked my dinner

The community was almost a mono-class isolate; all but a tiny

shoulder. But I ment

charcoal were inserted to heat the pressi

ed. And an official i

enrich life's meaning for them. Of cou

cleaners can take on

Emancipation. Judge Joseph Beaum

only wonder at but admire ... the 'lazy nigger' (Beaumont

Beaumont's testimony rings true for me because, though

dress in front and c

.. .my brother-in-law was put in charge of irrigation at Colonia

In Taso's words, one reads how learning to work was a part of

and exploitablethat the work may pro

world grows each day

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