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Oro Blanco: Cotton, Technology, and Family Labor in Nineteenth-Century Argentina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Donna J. Guy*
Affiliation:
University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona

Extract

Cotton growing and textile production in the northern regions of newly independent Argentina, as in many other parts of Latin America still relatively unaffected by the industrial revolution, were linked to the gender division of labor and the type of landholdings found in agrarian societies. As early as 1970 Ester Boserup pointed out the divergent roles that women and children would play in societies based upon extensive properties farmed or ranched by slave or hired help as compared with smaller, more intensive farms and ranches. She, like many others, however, presumed that wage labor, large scale agriculture, and ranching dominated the Latin American landscape, and she emphasized the role of women compared to other family members in rural production.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1993

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References

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2 In Stoner’s, K. Lynn edited volume Latinas of the Americas (New York; Garland Publishing, Inc., 1989),Google Scholar an entire chapter of the bibliography is devoted to Latin American rural development, but does not mention these issues. This bibliography focuses on works published since 1977. Esther Hermitte, an Argentine anthropologist, has explored the role of gender and family labor among weavers in Catamarca in her article: Ponchos, Weaving, and Patron-Client Relations in Northwest Argentina,” in Stricken, A. and Greenfield, S.M. eds., Structure and Process in Latin America: Patronage, Clientage and Power Systems (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972), pp. 159–77.Google Scholar From the perspective of historical analysis, Assadourian’s, Carlos Sampat, El sistema de la economía colonial; el merdado interior. Regiones y espacio económico (Mexico: Editorial Nueva Imagen, 1985)Google Scholar is still the most comprehensive study of the interaction of family production and patterns of trade in nineteenth-century Argentina. Chiaramonte, José Carlos in Mercaderes del Litoral. Economía y sociedad en la provincia de Corrientes, primera mitad del siglo xix (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1991), pp. 121–23,Google Scholar tried to identify patterns of family production, but the census data was incomplete. Sàbato, Hilda in Agrarian Capitalism and the World Market, Buenos Aires in the Pastoral Age, ¡840–1890 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), pp. 112–14,Google Scholar also points out that small ranches were operated by family labor. The preliminary unpublished study of Ana A. Teruel, “La fabricación de textiles y la participación de la mujer en la economía de las tierras altas de la provincia de Jujuy (noroeste argentino) siglo xix,” on family sheep ranches and textile production among residents of rural Jujuy in the nineteenth century, based upon census data, shows the potential for family labor analysis within rural wool production.

3 A 1926 study of cotton production throughout the world pointed out that the fiber had been produced in a variety of situations including subsistence farming. Johnson, W.H. in Cotton and Its Production (London: Macmillan and Co., 1926),Google Scholar chaps. 6, 10, specifically cited the situation in São Paulo where cotton was grown as a subsistence crop in soils that became too barren for coffee trees. Chile, Ecuador, and Paraguay are also mentioned as countries where limited amounts of the fiber were produced.

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25 Ibid.

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31 Ibid.

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