The Old Problem of Gauchos and Rural Society
Debate, although more often oblique than direct, more often expressed orally than committed to paper, is the stuff of scholarship. It clarifies the issues. It challenges scholars to brighten their imagery, reevaluate their evidence, and sharpen their analysis. Jorge Gelman's thoughtful objections to our article on rural workers promises such a controversy, and on unique terms. Unlike previous disagreements, Gelman and we have analyzed the very same primary documents-the account books of the Estancia de las Vacas in the late eighteenth-century Banda Oriental-and we reach different conclusions.' We differ over the capitalist nature of the estancia, over the factors conditioning the pattern of employment at the estate, and, above all, over the power of the workers to control their own labor. Gelman's critique calls on us to look again at the old problem of gauchos and rural society in the Rio de la Plata. Our article proposed that, during the late colonial period, peons possessed the power to influence the labor market of the Banda Oriental. At the time, the environment was characterized by fluctuating external demands for hides and tallow and by a limited control of the countryside by colonial authorities. The mulattos, Indians, and mestizos who formed the rural working class came and went according to their private needs, because they retained access to means of subsistence other than just work-