"This volume does an exceptional job of bringing together in a single volume very substantial new research on working people and their history in the Hispanic Caribbean Basin."--Ralph Lee Woodward Jr., Tulane University

Aviva Chomsky is Professor of History at Salem State College and author of West Indian Workers and the United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, 1870–1940.

Aldo A. Lauria Santiago is Assistant Professor of History at the College of the Holy Cross.

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Identity and Struggle in the History of the Hispanic Caribbean and Central America / Aldo Lauria-Santiago and Aviva Chomsky 1
Central America
"That a Poor Man Be Industrious": Coffee, Community, and Agrarian Capitalism in the Transformation of El Salvador's Ladino Peasantry, 1850–1900 / Aldo Lauria-Santiago 25
"Vana Ilusión": The Highlands Indians and the Myth of Nicaragua Mestiza, 1880–1925 / Jeffrey L. Gould 52
At Their Own Risk / Coffee Farmers and Debt in Nicaragua, 1870–1930 / Julia A. Charlip 94
Auxiliary Forces in the Shaping of the Repressive System: El Salvador, 1880–1930 / Patricia Alvarenga 122
The Banana Enclave, Nationalism, and mestizaje in Honduras, 1910s–1930s / Darío A. Euraque 151
Laborers and Smallholders in Costa Rica's Mining Communities, 1900–1940 / Aviva Chomsky 169
Reforging National Revolution: Campesino Labor Struggles in Guatemala, 1944–1954 / Cindy Forster 196
The Hispanic Caribbean
Free Love and Domesticity: Sexuality and the Shaping of Working-Class Feminism in Puerto Rico, 1900–1917 / Eileen J. Findlay 229
"Omnipotent and Omnipresent"? Labor Shortages, Worker Mobility, and Employer Control in the Cuban Sugar Industry, 1910–1934 / Barry Carr 260
The Foundations of Despotism: Agrarian Reform, Rural Transformation, and Peasant-State Compromise in Trujillo's Dominican Republic, 1930–1944 / Richard L. Turits 292
Conclusion: Imagining the Future of the Subaltern Past—Fragments of Race, Class, and Gender in Central America and the Hispanic Caribbean, 1850–1950 / Lowell Gudmundson and Francisco A. Scarano 335
Selected Bibliography 365
Index 385
Contributors 403