Machos and Machetes in Guatemala's Cane Fields
Oglesby, Elizabeth
Last year, at 24, Sebastian Tol was a "champion" cane cutter on the agro-export plantations of Guatemala's Pacific coast, averaging over ten tons a day.* At the end of the harvest season, however,...
...In 1980, cane workers were paid by the day and would cut between one and two tons per day...
...This expansion is due in large part to a modernization campaign designed to raise the productivity of cane cutters, most of whom are migrant workers from the indigenous highlands...
...Their bod- ies and productivity levels are monitored, and all of this information gets recorded in year-by-year data bases...
...Another worker elaborated...
...The absence of older male relatives in the camps creates a sense of heightened freedom, a sort of extended adolescence, for younger workers, especially in a region like the coast that abounds with bars and brothels...
...We're the ones who pay for it, with the money they steal from our pay...
...A young Guatemalan sugar cane cutter wields his machete...
...Even though you know you can't reach it, you have to try...
...Top cane cutters are awarded prizes ranging from T-shirts to tape recorders, bicycles and a grand prize of a motorcycle...
...It's like at a fair, when they put a prize on top of a greased pole...
...Many, like Sebastian Tol, pay a high price with broken bodies, but in general, workers' perceptions of the plantations appear to have changed little...
...tion to a labor regime that places increasingly severe demands on the bodies of workers...
...If you ask them," he said, "they'll probably tell you it's to get the wages, or maybe the prize...
...A cutters con month before the start of the har- each othe vest, Santiago began buying weekly vitamin injections for half a productive day's wage each, which he believes will increase his endurance in the cane fields...
...Last year, at 24, Sebastian Tol was a "champion" cane cutter on the agro-export plantations of Guatemala's Pacific coast, averaging over ten tons a day.* At the end of the harvest season, however, he returned home to the highlands with shoulder pain that made it difficult to do even routine chores...
...The new diets are supposed to provide 3,700 calories daily, and they include a careful balance of pro- teins and carbohydrates to ensure that workers don't lose weight during the harvest...
...Are cane workers "disciplined" by these practices...
...Long infamous for using extreme violence to quell worker unrest, the sugar plantations in Guatemala are now devising alternate means to achieve labor discipline, by combining new technologies with wage incentives, human capital investments and a refashioning of workers' identities...
...Productivity increases stem from a combination of technical changes and a social re-engineering of the harvest labor force...
...But I can tell you that a part of it has to do with the pure competition...
...The masculinization of harvest labor is not only about I recruiting men, it's also about reinforcing ideas of masculinity among cane cutters...
...I asked a crew foreman why he thought many cane cutters were working themselves sick...
...The "engineers," as workers call them, visit the housing camps regularly...
...Technical changes include heavier, curved machetes, mechanical Elizabeth Oglesby is a PhD candidate in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley...
...last year they were paid by the ton and the daily average among workers had risen to six tons...
...Indeed, productivity has soared across the sector...
...They give tape recorders, so what...
...Central to this strategy is the creation of a subset of "vanguard" cane cutters: young men generally between the ages of 18 and 25 who are pushed to compete with each other to reach productivity goals...
...The prizes and all that, it's a bunch of crap," protested one worker with five years experience...
...The promotion of masculine work identities on the plantations doesn't make workers dislike cutting cane any less, and it doesn't seem to replace class consciousness...
...Cane cutters complain about the heat, the grueling hours and the belief that the plantations constantly cheat them out of their fair pay...
...But plantation man- agers stress that, beyond these techuard" cane niques, a key component is the effort uar d cane to transform workers' attitudes pete with toward cane cutting...
...Many of the migrant camps have televisions and VCRs, and there are "entertainment nights" with Mexican vaquero films or Rambo movies...
...She has lived and worked in Guatemala since the mid 1980s...
...The Guatemalan sugar industry tripled its production over the last two decades, and Guatemala is now the third-largest sugar exporter in Latin America...
...They are weighed periodically, and their muscles are measured...
...This year, his place on the plantation work crew was taken by his 18-year-old Young "van brother, Santiago, who also has hopes of becoming a champion...
...But when drugs are used to dull the effects of exhaustion and dehydration, heatstroke becomes a serious danger for workers in the sweltering cane fields...
...On the one hand, the mills try to create camaraderie in the work camps and a sense that these are spaces where workers can be free from family pressures...
...One way this is done is through the masculinization of the harvest labor force...
...Exotic dancers are sometimes hired to perform at the camps, and at the end of the harvest, workers are taken "*Sebastijn and Santiago are the pseudonyms of two highlands brothers...
...Cane cutters get oral rehydration drinks and health exams...
...Industrial psychologists recruit and train the cane cutters, who are exclusively male and mostly young...
...On the other hand, management appeals to machismo in its attempt to foment competition around production quotas...
...Every week management distributes a computer print-out of the top individual cane cutters and their scores...
...The manipulation of masculinity to boost output doesn't erase workers' awareness of exploitation on the plantations, however...
...Only men are permitted to live in the migrant camps...
...The plantato reach tions' goal is to create new attitudes "that they hope will undercut opposity goals...
...cane loading and the Taylorization of cane cutting, that is, the use of time-and-motion studies to break down the labor process into precise, repeatable movements...
...on excursions to the beach or to a local cantina...
...In addition to the seemingly universal belief in the power of vitamin B injections, some cane cutters use amphetamines to extend their endurance...
...But temporary work stoppages are fairly common at many plantations, and worker turnover is high...
...If they would give out a little bit of land, now that would be worth working for...
...Tay- lorist methods control how a worker holds and swings the machete, and how many movements are used to cut and lay the cane...
...They tell us how great we are, and that we're ahead of all the other fronts," a 21year-old worker told me...
...We're macho here...
...But he had heard from other workers from the coast that in Alabama there were many jobs "cutting chickens," and that if his shoulder would just heal he was going to try his luck in el norte...
...Sebastian Tol told me that he wasn't thinking of cutting sugar cane anymore...
...There hasn't been a major labor strike in the sugar sector since 1980, at the height of the civil war, and the sugar unions that existed in the 1970s disappeared with the repression...
...Food is prepared in industrial kitchens by male cooks, many of whom learned to cook while serving in the army...
...But when this is cross-cut by an emphasis on the recruitment of youth, it does create a separate group of workers for whom labor migration to the coast is a sort of multi-year rite of passage and a stepping stone toward aspirations of future U.S.-bound migration...
Vol. 34 • March 2001 • No. 5
