Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Edward F. Fischer is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Latin American and Iberian Studies at Vanderbilt University. His publications include Maya Cultural Activism in Guatemala (1996), Cultural Logics and Global Economies: Maya Identity in Thought and Practice (2001), and Tecpán Guatemala: A Modern Maya Town in Global and Local Context (2002). Peter Benson is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University.

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Broccoli and Desire

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Map.............................................................................................viiiGuatemala Index.................................................................................ixIntroduction....................................................................................1PART ONE. HOW THE MAYA WANT1. Something Better.............................................................................232. Discourses of Development: Maquilas, Cooperatives, Government Directives.....................523. Ultimatums, Moral Models, and the Limit Points of Hegemony...................................72PART TWO. VIOLENCE, VICTIMIZATION, AND RESISTANCE4. Social Suffering in the Postwar Era..........................................................915. June 10, September 11, and the Moral Understanding of Violence...............................1166. Beyond Victimization.........................................................................139Conclusion......................................................................................159Notes...........................................................................................173References......................................................................................189Index...........................................................................................207Acknowledgments.................................................................................211

Chapter One

On days when he works in his Welds of maize, beans, and broccoli, Felipe Xul wakes up before dawn, washes off with water cold from the night air, and wolfs down a fried egg or a leftover piece of meat along with a plate of black beans and a tall stack of tortillas. While he eats, his wife packs a lunch of maize dumplings in a large, handwoven napkin, which he will carry along with his machete and the other tools he needs that day (a hoe, perhaps, or a fertilizer pump). Along the three-kilometer walk to his Welds, Xul occasionally greets other farmers headed to their plots, but mostly he keeps to himself, planning out the day's tasks. He also spends time thinking about the future. He farms not simply to survive, he tells us, although the basic need to put food on the table is essential to his life and work.

Xul lives with his wife and six children in a small Maya hamlet precariously carved out of a mountainside overlooking one of Highland Guatemala's fecund valleys. The several-room cinder-block house is larger than average for the area, evidence of the little extra cash he has secured through export agriculture. More than simply a roof over his head, the house is a spot of repose that reflects the closeness of living in a place for decades, the closeness that makes a shelter into a home and a fuel source into a hearth. In the same way, his Welds are more than a site of basic survival-they embody a host of legacies from the past and possibilities for the future, some good and some bad. Xul speaks of his land in loving, anthropomorphic terms, and, in the abstract, he finds his work deeply meaningful.

Hearing Xul speak in his native Kaqchikel of the fertile Rajawal ("Spirit of the Earth") and his symbiotic relationship with Mother Nature, it would be easy to romanticize the life of a Maya farmer. But let us not forget that Xul's work is backbreaking labor. Xul is only forty-one, but his callus-covered hands and feet could belong to an eighty-year-old. He walks with the stoop of a much older man, a legacy of years of hauling bushels of maize back from his Welds. His poor posture also comes, he explains with a wry smile, from keeping his head down during the violence and terrorism of the 1980s.

Xul's sons help in the Welds after school, and he frequently reminds them that this land will one day be theirs. He consciously tries to instill in his children a love and respect for the land and a view that working it is part of a larger social context of meaning and planning. He tells them that working the land is important for the future. Part of the reason that he took up broccoli production is because he realizes that growing only milpa (subsistence plots of maize and bean) will not, in the future, afford the standard of living that he desires for his family. He wishes for greater worldly success for himself and for his children, and so he seeks fuller participation in a project of global capitalism that risks social alienation for the algo ms of consumptive dreams.

At times, these various desires converge, as with Xul's venture in nontraditional agriculture. At other points, they diverge, leaving Xul feeling both shortchanged about the less-than-ideal returns on the export crops and anxious about whether his children will indeed want to take up farming. The horizon of fecundity that motivates Xul to not simply work milpa but to grow export crops threatens as well as inspires, embodying all of the contradictions involved in anticipating, even desiring, a changing form of life. He grows broccoli because he wants something better for his children. And yet, he realizes, it is exactly by encouraging his children to pursue broader horizons and goals that he also risks pushing them away from the land on which he wants them to stay and prosper.

In growing broccoli, Xul's general desire for algo ms, his desire to take advantage of opportunities in the global marketplace, converges with the reality of local struggles, ambivalent outcomes, and transforming streams of social experience and collective identity. We might characterize such global connections as eroding local norms, threatening the very culture of Highland Guatemala. Yet, it is precisely because such practices become so deeply embedded in local forms of living that they are compelling, durable, and, for farmers like Xul, worth doing despite the many obstacles and risks.

The Commodity Chain

Broccoli is a cole crop (the same species as brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and cabbage) that was probably domesticated in the last centuries BCE in the cooler regions of northern Greece and Italy. Broccoli was reportedly first grown in the United States in Brooklyn in the 1890s, planted in backyard gardens by Italian immigrants and enmeshed in schemes of desire enjoining frugality and subsistence (the same historical juncture that conditioned the production of spaghetti, pasta e fagioli, and other "typically Italian" food items). By the 1920s, broccoli was being grown commercially in California and shipped back on trains to the large urban markets of Chicago and New York. However, it is only recently that broccoli has become a true staple in the American diet. California farming operations still supply the lion's share of the market during their "in" season, from May to October. But supermarkets stock broccoli year-round, and in the winter months an increasing portion of their supply comes from Guatemala. In 2000, Guatemala exported about 60 million pounds of cut broccoli to the United States, up more than 900 percent over the previous twenty years, and most of this was grown by smallholding Maya farmers in the region around Tecpn.

The production cycle for nontraditional crops grown around Tecpn is short-in the case of broccoli, less than ninety days from planting to harvest. At harvest, farmers, their families, and hired hands cut the broccoli stalks in the late morning and early afternoon, packing them into bushel-sized nylon bags or plastic boxes that look like milk crates. Packing plants and cooperatives send trucks to pick up broccoli produced under contract, but small farmers without contracts find themselves at the mercy of predatory intermediaries ("coyotes") who buy produce at a discount on the side of the road. One farmer complained: "Sometimes we don't get paid. This has happened a lot. Coyotes take the product and disappear, and we are left with a big debt. That's how the farmer loses.... It is work for nothing. We lose time, money, everything." Because produce such as broccoli spoils so quickly, and because it has virtually no value in the local subsistence market, farmers are compelled to sell their crop, giving buyers a clear advantage. Intermediaries play on the vulnerabilities of farmers, using their privileged access to market information and the farmers' need to sell to establish prices in a Weld of power where the rationality of choices always touches upon the anxiety of not really being able to choose.

Like Adam Smith's (1976) "forestallers" and "engrossers" of grain who were often the subject of witchcraft-like accusations, coyotes occupy a morally ambiguous position in Tecpn. Most farmers view them as pariahs, making money not through hard work but through the rather arbitrary good fortune of owning a pickup truck: "If you own a truck, you can make more money," one farmer said. "But it does not mean that you work more." This negative view is largely shared by development workers encouraging nontraditional production; one explained that "the problem is that intermediaries are the ones who earn the most. The producer takes on the risks but does not share equitably in the earnings."

In Tecpn, the nefarious means that individuals can employ to get rich quickly-Faustian pacts with extra-worldly demons-is a common subject of gossip. Such stories are told about coyotes and their dealings. These stories speak to the sense that nontraditional agriculture is something of an anxious pursuit, linked as much to emergent dangers and uncertainties as to the optimism of new opportunities. It is also clear that these anxieties are not just about broccoli: the production of nontraditional produce articulates, at least in such stories, with the licit and illicit production of other products. One man in Tecpn, a chronically underpaid schoolteacher who does not grow nontraditional crops, narrated a story he had heard about a friend of a friend, Marcos. "Some coyotes, acquaintances of Marcos," were hauling a load of bagged produce in their truck when they saw a police car down the road. They pulled in at Marcos's house and asked if they could leave their bags of broccoli until the morning. He agreed. At dawn the coyotes returned to retrieve their bags, giving Marcos 100 Quetzales [about $13]. He protested this was far too much money, but the coyotes urged him to just keep it, to not worry about the exchange, and they left." Looking at our clearly puzzled faces, our friend connected the dots: "It must have been marijuana. There are lots of drug dealers passing as vegetable traders. They fill their pickups with produce, but below that they put drugs, or sometimes they hollow out broccoli stems and hide the drugs inside. Because of this, they only do their business at night, when the police aren't around, and since they are posing as broccoli merchants the police don't suspect anything."

Whether such stories are "factual" or not is beyond the point, although it should be noted that in the late 1980s and early 1990s the Cali cartel shipped tons of cocaine through Guatemalan produce exporters in what the DEA dubbed "the broccoli routes." More important for us, however, these stories fold together not only the terror signified by economic exploitation and the threat of losing traditional culture but also the imaginings of translocal flows of opportunity and potential excess, where making "far too much money" is possible but consequential, risky, and morally ambiguous. Such stories reveal the persistence of a moral economy based on fairness, on corporate labor over individual gains, and on modesty (for more on this, see the results of Ultimatum Game, reported in Chapter 3). Such a perspective makes clear that the economic well-being of producers is affected not just by changing political economies, but by changing streams of social experience and moral understandings. In this case, the allure of economic well-being draws producers close to cultural anxieties and illicit behaviors that reflect on the character of those involved, even if they are innocent. This moral model intensifies at the margins of the global economy as local producers are brought into tense relations with the global marketplace, where they are not benefiting-as they are well aware-when compared to distributors and packers.

Once it reaches the export packing plants that line the Pan-American Highway between Guatemala City and Tecpn, the broccoli is weighed and classified according to size and aesthetic quality. Sanitized in warm chlorinated baths and rinsed in cool water for preservation, the produce is then packed in cartons already stamped with a U.S. distributor's brand logo. The packing plants truck boxes of broccoli to cool storage facilities at Guatemala City's international airport, where they arrive between 7 and 10 o'clock at night. Loaded onto early-morning cargo flights, the produce arrives in Miami before 6 a.m. and, if all goes smoothly, will clear customs within a few hours to be shipped to grocery distributors throughout North America. All in all, the produce usually arrives on supermarket shelves within forty-eight to seventy-two hours of the time it was cut in Guatemala. Broccoli can then last another fifteen or twenty days on the shelf and in the consumer's refrigerator.

Sipping coffee and eating apple strudel at Guatemala City's upscale Caf Wein, exporter Tom Heffron extols the virtues of globalization and explains Guatemala's logistical advantages: "Any point in Guatemala is closer to Washington or New York than any point in California, so Guatemala has an advantage in the Eastern Seaboard market. Going to Miami with product is still closer than it would be from Salinas or other points in California." Heffron passionately advocates free trade, arguing that open markets for broccoli benefit everyone involved, not only Guatemalan producers and U.S. consumers but the California competition as well:

The production we are doing [in Guatemala] is not competing with the U.S. There is a complementary relationship because most of the California production occurs from May to October. At that point, California bows out of the market, their weather not permitting year-round cultivation. Guatemala production begins at the end of October and bows out in May, at the onset of the rainy season. So we are sharing the same consumer in New York with our friends in California: they need us in the winter months to keep the product in front of the consumer's eyes, and we need them in the summer months to do the same thing. Hopefully, then, we are making sure that the same consumer is fed all year-round.

Heffron is not simply deploying an ideology of neoliberalism to cover over the crude self-interest of a businessman. He comes across as sincere, separating, at least in his own mind, the bad aspects of globalization from what he sees as its genuine benefits.

The reality is not so rosy, and the good and the bad are not so easily divided out. Packing and shipping plants in Guatemala work in close association with distributors and big retailers in the United States to predict demand and ensure the supply of broccoli. They then contract out most of the production to smallholding Maya farmers, buying the remainder of the produce needed to fill demand on the open market (which allows some leeway in the event that demand drops or in case more supply is needed). This is a crude but effective strategy: prices are minimized by strategically contracting for less than the anticipated demand, with the remainder purchased only as needed and at bottom-of-the-barrel prices. Farmers have little choice in this matter. They can sell whatever crops they have left over after the contract is fulfilled at prices set by the packing plants, or they can leave the leftover crop in the Welds to rot (the latter option is not a culturally viable alternative, however). There are no local markets for the leftover supply since broccoli is not part of the local diet and is distasteful to the Tecpaneco palate-and so once they have entered into export production farmers must play the global food game as it is structured from afar. Thus, Tecpaneco farmers are vulnerable to market fluctuations predicated on consumer events in the United States and Europe about which they have little information. As production has dramatically expanded in the last twenty years, and as demand has begun to flatten, packing plants have lowered prices while raising quality standards. In this way, the strategies packers use to insure themselves against oversupply transfers risk to smallholding farmers who are financially ill-prepared to bear it.

Increased quality standards have brought a related set of concerns to bear on Highland growers. Because broccoli and other export crops are destined for U.S. consumers-with their socially produced desires for visually attractive vegetables-cosmetic quality is of paramount importance. Broccoli stems must be of a uniform length with no bruising or other deformities, and packing plants go to great lengths to ensure that each piece of produce lives up to these demands. This also means that the contracts that Maya farmers have to ensure them a market are not firm contracts at all since their produce can easily be rejected at the packing plant with the vague explanation that it does not live up to quality standards. And the difference between a perfect broccoli grade and an inferior, unacceptable one is slim. Danis Romero, a government development specialist in Guatemala, reports that packing plants "reject about 15 percent of broccoli based on appearance. The color has to be green or blue-green, and if it's yellow it will likely be discarded, even if the taste and quality are the same. If there are holes in the stem, they reject it. And it has to be completely compact, including the flower."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Broccoli and Desireby EDWARD F. FISCHER PETER BENSON Copyright © 2006 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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