A Feast of Flowers: Race, Labor, and Postcolonial Capitalism in Ecuador 9780812298420

Citation preview

A Feast of Flowers

A FE A S T OF FLOWER S Race, Labor, and Postcolonial Capitalism in Ecuador

Christopher Krupa

U N I V E R S I T Y O F P E N N S Y LVA N I A P R E S S PHIL ADELPHIA

Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-­4112 www​.upenn​.edu​/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Krupa, Christopher, author. Title: A feast of flowers : race, labor, and postcolonial capitalism in Ecuador / Christopher Krupa. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021039351 | ISBN 9780812253818 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780812225129 (paperback) | ISBN 9780812298420 (eBook) Subjects: LCSH: Cut flower industry—Ecuador. | Floriculture—Economic aspects—Ecuador. | Capitalism— Ecuador. | Postcolonialism—Ecuador. | Indians of South America—Ecuador—Economic conditions. | Indians of South America—Ecuador—Social conditions. | Ecuador—Race relations—Economic aspects. Classification: LCC HD8039.F6782 E23 2022 | DDC 338.1/75909866—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021039351

CONTENTS

Introduction. Fields of Dreams

1

PART I. PLANTING MONEY

1. Origin Stories

23

2. The Rise of Imperial Finance: A Brief History

47

3. Speculative Blooms and Busts

56

PART II. PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATIONS

4. Of Suffering and Salvation: Primitive Accumulation as Capitalist Historicity

103

5. Accumulation by DisPossession: Reflections on Historical Failure

139

PART III. THRESHOLDS

6. The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion: Industrial Psychology and the Science of Interiority

167

7. Indigenous Interiors

217

vi Contents

PART IV. FARMS THAT GROW PEOPLE

8. Continuous Improvement: Investing in Human Potential

239

9. The Finca de Personas: Labor and the Art of Personal Transformation

276

Conclusion. Postcolonial Redemption

287

Notes 291 References 297 Index 309 Acknowledgments 315

INTRODUC TION

Fields of Dreams

It’s a lot to ask of a plant, that it take on the changing colors of human dreams, and this may explain why only a small handful of them have proven themselves supple and willing enough for the task. The rose, obviously, is one such flower. —Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire

In northern Ecuador, the small town of Cayambe is surrounded by a range of Andean mountains. While only eighty kilometers from the nation’s capital of Quito, Cayambe lies at the center of a rural agrarian region that looks nothing like the bustling metropolis to the south. For centuries, the green and brown squares of peasant plots and cattle pastures made the town’s rolling hills appear draped in a patchwork quilt of soft earth tones. Toward the end of the twentieth century, this panorama began to change. Shiny metallic-­looking rectangles began to appear in seemingly random locations as if dropped haphazardly from another planet. Watching these shimmery patches proliferate across the valley floor, Indigenous people living in high-­altitude communities guessed them to be water reservoirs or lagoons, maybe for ducks or geese to settle in. Only up close was it possible to tell that these silvery stretches were formed by the light-­reflecting plastic tarps of greenhouses, hundreds and hundreds of greenhouses, nestled together in clusters that have expanded and morphed into new shapes and arrangements every year. Under this plastic canopy, several thousand roses of countless varieties stretch up toward the hot equatorial sun, each plant intricately engineered to match the shape, length, and color preferences of consumers in North America and Europe, the destination of all but the worst of Ecuador’s roses.

2 Introduction

Figure 1. Cayambe valley.

To the Ecuadorian elites who rushed into flower growing in the 1980s and 1990s, these greenhouses glistened with opportunity. Exportable roses opened up a previously unimagined way of turning a profit in the midst of a major economic crisis in a country that had long ceased to offer any durable prospects for capital investment at home. Flowers changed this. Between 1985 and 1995, annual returns from cut-­flower exports increased by over 52,000 percent, from $526,000 to over $274 million, inspiring even midlevel professionals with no agrarian experience to scrape together whatever funds they could to participate in this economic miracle (Waters 2000: 298; Pacheco Toro 2001: 22). Other flowers followed—carnations, baby’s breath, alstroemerias—and by the turn of the twenty-­first century, barely a decade after the first rose plantation appeared in Ecuador, the country had become the third-­largest exporter of cut-­flowers in the world. In these early boom years, commercial flowers felt radically new in Ecuador. New because Ecuadorians do not traditionally grow, buy, or exchange flowers—only the most cosmopolitan of them had ever so much as held a rose before then. But new, too, in a more epic sort of way. Cayambe’s greenhouses



Fields of Dreams 3

suggested that “a new cycle of capitalist development” had begun in Latin America and that “a new model of globalized accumulation” had taken hold, one that could alleviate growing debt burdens and reinvigorate stalled national development programs across the continent (Robinson 2008: 57). At the center of this model of globalization were exports. And not just any exports. New exports, “nontraditional” ones that broke from previous models of primary product extraction and that could provide higher-­end and fully processed goods directly to consumers in northern countries. This was the dawn of export “diversification” campaigns in the Global South and the rise of what economists came to call “export-­led development,” or ELD, from which a host of new economic conditions was to arise: “As each country becomes integrated into the global economy, new structures of production, new lead economic activities, and new sets of social relations emerge. The supply of new commodities responds to new demands on the world market” (Robinson 2008: 54–55). Floriculture stood at the center of this surge of newness, and it became iconic of Latin America’s search for a nontraditional relationship with the world economy. By the end of the 1980s, Ecuador, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and Chile were exporting large quantities of fresh flowers from the continent. But so too were Kenya, Zimbabwe, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Malawi, Uganda, and virtually every other country of the southern hemisphere. By the early 1990s, the world flower trade had taken on a distinctly “South-­North pattern,” with an increasing assortment of blooms produced in the South sent to fulfill an expanding demand in the North (van Uffelen and de Groot 2003: 1). Marveling at this pattern, a team of international observers determined that southern countries were being pressured to supply the North’s bouquets as the only way of repaying debts. Under such conditions, they summarized, “it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the only path to redemption is through the rose garden” (Maharaj and Dorren 1995: 108). Redemption. What a weighty concept to insert into the structure of global capitalism emerging in the late twentieth century. And what could this mean? An atonement for past sins, a deliverance or salvation, the repossession of something lost, the buying of freedom? Redemption signals all of this, all recognizing submission to some sovereign power (a god, master, lord, creditor) and the struggle to undo the oppressive terms of that submission. Could there be a more poetic symbol for this bundle of hopes and dreams animating the Global South’s place in the world capitalist system at the dawn of the neoliberal age than flowers? Consider for a moment what a flower is. Not for bees or other pollinators, but for humans. “Flowers are harbingers of growth,” Steven

4 Introduction

Pinker (1997: 377) tells us, “marking the site of future fruit, nuts, or tubers for creatures smart enough to remember them.” So “if you pay attention to where the flowers are now, you can predict where the fruit will be several months from now” (Pinker 2012: 94). Flowers, we might say, entered the human world as mediums of anticipation, promises of a coming bounty or reward: “The flower is valued for its future rather than for its present, for what it will be rather than for what it is,” Jack Goody (1993: 23) asserts. Just wait, it will come. Here. Just wait. A promise, a forecast, a prediction. But also empty—their value is parasitic of the other thing they point to, derivatives of sorts. And that thing might come to be, but it just as well might not, making flowers also bets on a possible future, devices of risk and speculation. “Speculation itself sometimes seems part and parcel of what a flower is,” Michael Pollan (2001: 69) suggests. What better medium than flowers, then, for the hopeful wagers Ecuador and so many other poor, debt-­saturated countries made on the promise that a more bountiful future was to come from this new, export-­diversified relationship with global capitalism than all those that came before it? Just wait, it (redemption) will come. Here. You’ll see. But global capitalism itself underwent a series of dramatic changes at the end of the twentieth century, and it may be equally poetic to find speculation in the essence of a plant that became a massive global commodity at precisely the time when “speculative capital and the risk-­bearing derivative . . . [began] to displace [commodity] production as the leading edge of capitalism” (LiPuma and Lee 2004: 5–6). There is a contradiction at the heart of late twentieth-­century capitalist restructuring that flowers can teach us about. They can show us that right when the Global South commits to an economic model devoted to the expansion of export commodity production, global capital shifts the focus of its profit model from commodities to finance. If “flowers by their very nature traffic in a kind of metaphor” (Pollan 2001: 70), what metaphors are being trafficked through the global commodity chains that came to connect the rural outposts of the Global South with high-­end consumers in the Global North? How about a bouquet of metaphors? Flowers seem to make perfect allegories of late twentieth-­century finance capital, with its speculative drive, derivatives peddling, and trade in immaterial values. But they can also be seen as icons of the new economy of dreams attending to luxurious “nontraditional” commodity production in places like highland Ecuador, which, until flowers, were considered completely peripheral to the world capitalist system. Flowers help us connect the different stories we tell about millennial capitalism and provide a source for new ones to be told from the perspective of the Global South.



Fields of Dreams 5

This book approaches capitalism as an object of ethnographic inquiry, focusing specifically on the genesis, establishment, and expansionary work of Ecuador’s cut-­flower sector in the Cayambe highlands, from the mid-­1980s to the early twenty-­first century. The goal is at once to understand the historically specific processes attending to rural capitalization in the postcolonial context and to theorize from those processes a South-­centered understanding of late twentieth-­century capitalist globalization. Such an understanding begins by rethinking the institution of debt. Sovereign debt, as Part I argues, is the connective thread linking the late twentieth-­century transformations of finance capital and productive capital in the global economy, and it is out of this link that Ecuador’s cut-­flower sector was born in the mid-­1980s. An extremely capital-­intensive industry, flower production began as a node in the network of global finance that turned sovereign debt into domestic credit for productive ventures promising to fulfill the new high-­value, nontraditional, export-­oriented mandate imposed by foreign lenders. In the process, flower growers not only absorbed a significant chunk of the risk underlying global speculative lending practices but also integrated the financial art of speculation into their methods of commodity production, blurring what are conventionally considered oppositional models of accumulation. Ecuador’s cut-­flower industry offers a critical location from which to examine the new modes of capitalist integration linking the Global South with the world economy at the turn of the millennium. From Cayambe’s greenhouses, we can see how historically entrenched patterns of dependency and value extraction— which had long structured Latin America’s relationship with global capitalism—acquired new life with the supply-­chain, commodity-­driven logic of export diversification and expansion. Flowers, in other words, despite being newcomers to the Ecuadorian highlands, perpetuated historic structures of global disparity and submission. But this, too, is what flowers are all about, one of their core messages.

What Flowers Can Teach Us About Difference Consider again the meaning of flowers. Flowers circulate between people not only as expressions of social proximity and care but also as markers of social inequality and difference.1 This is what Jamaica Kincaid (1999: 114) asks us to reflect on when she notes that how “you think and feel about gardens and the things growing in them—flowers, vegetables—I can see must depend on

6 Introduction

where you come from.” This is not a matter of “difference in opinion and feeling between a person from Spain and a person from England,” for instance, but a radical difference of global proportions that she conveys by juxtaposing the appearance of flower gardens in two popular novels. The first comes from a passage in American writer Henry James’s 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady that describes, in meticulous detail, a leisurely late-­afternoon meal taken on the lawn of an English country house, the droopy trees and manicured floral gardens forming an image of a place “where the wealth of the world is like a skin, a natural part of the body, a right, assumed, like having two hands and on them five fingers each” (Kincaid 1999: 116). Against this she contrasts a scene from Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1998 novel Nervous Conditions, in which the narrator, a teenaged girl named Tambu, recalls her first visit to the mission house in colonial Rhodesia where she was sent to begin her education. Full of anticipation, Tambu pauses before the manor, arrested by the sight of the colorful flowers bursting from its gardens. “Bright and cheery,” she remarks, “they had been planted for joy. What a strange idea that was.” Strange was the thought of “planting things for merrier reasons than the chore of keeping breath in the body” (Dangarembga in Kincaid 1999: 115). In the homesteader world in which Tambu lived, Kincaid tells us, everywhere there “are the ingredients for a garden—a plot of land, a hoe, some seeds—but they do not lead to little feasts” of the sort James’s characters luxuriated in; instead, “they lead to nothing or they lead to work, and not work as an act of self-­definition, self-­acclaim, but work as torture, work as hell” (Kincaid 1999: 116). Kincaid reminds us that flowers are plants and that cultivated plants need certain productive resources—land, water, seeds, tools, human energy. She urges us to consider the conditions granting certain people the ability to devote such things to pleasure and joy and others to relate to them only as the means of subsistence or as devices of controlled labor. Flowers, whether growing in a garden or sitting in a vase, draw much of their cultural meaning and symbolic efficacy from this difference. They signal a triumph over base pursuits and the capacity to devote the raw materials of human survival to purely aesthetic ends. As Jack Goody (1993) has argued, ornamental flowers are a mark of distinction for those wealthy enough to enjoy disposable income, time, and land. Their cultivation appears alongside the emergence of a leisure class and tends to remain the exclusive passion of it. This is at the root of what he calls the “culture of flowers” as it appears everywhere in the world:



Fields of Dreams 7

The growth of the culture of flowers represents a growth of the standard of living of the rich. It begins as a matter of differentiation, of luxury, which involves the diversion of limited resources and human energies to producing goods and services for the minority. The contradictions of class-­restricted consumption in a society where so many are poor become particularly clear when the practices themselves are recent, regarded as of foreign origin, and where there is an awareness of land being shifted from essential to non-­essential uses, from the utilitarian to the “aesthetic.” (Goody 1993: 65) “People do not waste limited arable land on beautiful but needless luxuries (flowers) unless they are well fed at the moment and their granaries are full,” Stephen Buchmann (2015: 83) assures us. This may be true, but it is equally true that well-­fed people may have no problem allowing those who are not to waste land, water, and other precious resources producing needless luxuries for them. Examples of this phenomenon appear throughout history. As Emiko Ohnuki-­Tierney (2015: 63) notes, writing about expressions of royal power in medieval France, the lavish “use of roses by the elite meant that instead of raising food crops peasants were forced to produce flowers, a luxury predicated upon the vast social stratification in Europe.” And what, we would want to ask, became of these peasants whose lands were increasingly overtaken by imperial flower gardens and who would have to find other ways to subsist? The history of flower cultivation is a history of resource hoarding and dispossession, a lesson in the methods of impoverishment and subordination. Flowers mean what they do—beauty, luxury, wealth, love—not despite this history but because of it. Flowers’ rise to becoming a master cultural symbol of the rich and leisurely happened because they helped differentiate that class from the poor masses that wealth produced. And this was precisely Kincaid’s point. Her juxtaposition of James’s and Dangarembga’s texts was not a comparative exercise (flowers mean this here but that there) but an exposé of a relationship, one rooted in theft and loss. It’s not that Tambu and other colonized subjects are unable to appreciate the beauty of a flower. It’s that the resources allowing such expressions to flourish have been stolen from them, sent to England and other metropoles, hoarded there and supplying the leisurely afternoon lunches that James’s characters effortlessly enjoyed, leaving behind a system in which there can be no relationship to land and to plants other than through work. And work as torture, work as hell. “The climate of southern Africa is not one that has only recently

8 Introduction

become hospitable to flowering herbs,” Kincaid notes, “and so it is quite possible (most likely) that the ancestors of this girl Tambu would have noticed them and cultivated them, not only for their medicinal value, but also for the sheer joy of seeing them all by themselves in their loveliness, in afternoons that were waning, in light that had begun to ebb.” Her words here are precise, extracted (stolen) from James’s text as if to return the sentiment to its original owner. Then, the kicker: “At what moment was this idea lost? At what moment does such ordinary, everyday beauty become a luxury?” (Kincaid 1999: 116– 117). This is a biography of conquest. This is the colonial poetics of flowers. I want the tone of Kincaid’s critique to haunt this book. I want it to help us see something uncanny in the way an object so inextricably bound to the history of conquest, so emblematic of colonial domination, so celebratory of differences in wealth and possibility the world over became an icon of the postcolonial world’s efforts to improve its position in the global political economy at the end of the twentieth century. Uncanny, I mean, in the way the promises and hopes for a greater and more equitable form of “integration” into the world capitalist system came to rest on an object whose social value and cultural meaning derive from the global disparities and divisions that system created. How might today’s global flower trade reproduce and even celebrate these disparities? Let’s return to Rhodesia, which in 1980 formally gained independence from British rule and was reborn as Zimbabwe. Within a few years, massive loans from the European Community, the African Development Bank, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund helped turn Zimbabwe into one of Africa’s leading exporters of cut-­flowers. But in 1992, severe drought resulted in massive crop failures throughout the country. Widespread hunger ensued, provoking an outbreak of what the press termed “maize banditry”—to survive, the rural poor raided trains carrying sacks of grain and other food staples. To ward off mass starvation, the country borrowed $70 million from international banks to pay for food imports. The same year, it exported six million kilograms of “water guzzling” flowers to European consumers and was “applauded for its economic ‘progress’ by the international community” (Maharaj and Dorren 1995: 83). This book offers an anthropology of how such global contradictions have become generative of the present world capitalist system, giving rise to its current forms like the new productive complexes springing up across the Global South. Flowers—a colonial artifact whose production gets offloaded onto the postcolonial world, symbolic of both speculative fortune and radical inequality—are nothing if not contradictions. Anna Tsing (2012: 37)



Fields of Dreams 9

urges anthropologists to attend closely to how “the interplay of diversity and inequality [might] be central to contemporary capitalism—rather than a distraction.” The chapters ahead should be read as exercises for developing this attention. They show global and local forces interacting to insert difference into the heart of capitalist practice in the cut-­flower sector, pressing it into the micro-­textures of experience and perception among those whose lives have been overtaken by agro-­industrial expansion in the Cayambe highlands. Let me offer one example that foreshadows the ethnographic work ahead. Maria T. was one of the first workers in Cayambe’s flower plantations I came to know somewhat well. We caught the same bus at 5:15 a.m., which her employer, TerraNova Farms, sent up through the highlands. The bus stopped to pick up workers from Indigenous communities like Carrera, where Maria had lived her entire life and where I based myself for two years of fieldwork. Like most flower workers of the region, Maria lived in a household of comuneros (Indigenous community members) that holds a few hectares of arable land, grows market and subsistence crops (onions, potatoes, barley), and keeps a few members at all times working in the region’s flower plantations. At TerraNova, Maria allowed me to shadow her through her daily work routine. Working quickly, she’d accommodate short responses to any question I asked but never initiated conversation on her own. Until one day. This day she broke from a discussion of her brother’s work on the fumigation team to tell me something she described as “very important.” Speaking softly and with what I heard as concern in her voice, she addressed me not as a curious scholar of her expertise but as a representative of that elsewhere place she imagined the products of her labor ending up. This was a warning. “Please,” she said, “Señor Cristóbal, please, it’s very important, please tell your family and all those you love, for God’s sake, please tell them to not eat the roses. They’re full of chemicals and will cause harm.” Maria was the first plantation worker to draw on her insider’s knowledge of flower production to give me this warning, one that I would hear frequently throughout my research. It’s the message’s subtext that interests me here—despite working six days a week for several years in a rose plantation, Maria had no idea what the flowers she grew were for. Involved in agriculture her whole life and living in an agrarian-­based community, she certainly had a clear sense of what the end result of agricultural work normally is. But here, even after all these years, the pieces didn’t fully add up. What becomes of all these things? All she did know for certain was that the roses she spent her days growing were not meant for her or people like her. They were for people

10 Introduction

Figure 2. Don’t eat the roses.

like me who came from the sort of place that I came from and so, now being somewhat friends with one of these people, a bit of friendly advice is offered. Don’t eat the roses. Maria’s warning resembles Tambu’s reaction to the flowers surrounding the mission schoolhouse—a hesitation before an object that confronts the observer as strange and whose strangeness in fact explains that object’s presence there in the first place. As with their appearance in colonial Rhodesia, there is something odd about the sight of ornamental flowers in the Indigenous highlands of Ecuador. More than matter out of place, more than emblems of the unknown, roses here radiate alterity. They point to another world, a world that showcases its power to impose itself—its wants, desires, plans—on this one. Maria’s warning offers a sharp rebuttal to the hopeful promises guiding this new export-­led mode of capitalist integration, making the world’s flower boom seem like a cruel joke played on the Global South. The joke involves wealthy countries outsourcing to poor ones the mass production of one of its most frivolous commodities, one ostentatiously symbolic of what others have and people there do not, a thing expressing an economic model committed to serving the insatiable whims and desires of northern consumers and then wrapping it all up in the promise that devotion to this



Fields of Dreams 11

product’s production will bring with it improvement, growth, and development—the sort of things imagined to be in abundance in those faraway places where roses go. The joke is about the promise of export-­led capitalist integration, about commodity chains forging some kind of commonality between people and places linked through them and then constructing those chains around a commodity whose value depends on that not possibly being true. Every joke, even a cruel one, needs a punch line, and so let me offer one. In 2012, more than a decade after Maria first warned me about the dangers of eating flowers, the topic again came up in a discussion I was having with Mauricio Dávalos, widely regarded as Ecuador’s first export rose grower. Dávalos, trained in banking and law, was reflecting on how the industry he pioneered had “totally transformed the life of the people” in rural areas like Cayambe, all for the better. He was dismayed that this was not a universally held opinion. Indigenous activists and peasant unions of the region, struggling to secure irrigation water for the agrarian communities they represent, had been criticizing the cut-­flower sector’s efforts to control local water supplies. Their criticisms invoked the same agrarian distinction between utilitarian and aesthetic pursuits that Goody, Kincaid, and Maria made in their thinking about flowers, something Dávalos was quite prepared to dismiss. “When I hear Indigenous peasant leaders say stupidities like ‘you can’t eat flowers,’” he exclaimed, “and for that we shouldn’t give water or whatever to the flowers, I say ‘from what do the peasant families with people employed by the flower industry eat, if not the income that comes from flowers?’” The punch line is this: if massive flower cultivation is diverting land, water, and other resources away from food production, including the subsistence agriculture activities of people living around the expanding plantation zone, the poor and dispossessed should take comfort in knowing that flower growing is an extremely labor-­intensive activity and that they might be able to find a job in the industry responsible for making other options for getting by impossible. Anything but an anomaly, Dávalos’s rebuttal is fully consistent with new development objectives that approach the rural poor not as subsistence farmers needing support but as unemployed workers needing jobs. The expansion of flower plantations throughout the Ecuadorian highlands has promoted this vision of rurality to the point of rendering the viability of nonwaged options nearly unthinkable. Here is one expression of this unthinkability: in February 2003, the president of Ecuador’s largest consortium of flower growers wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Times responding to a cover story they published the day before Valentine’s Day about Cayambe’s flower workers. Titled

12 Introduction

“Behind Roses’ Beauty, Poor and Ill Workers,” the story was not a happy one, showcasing, instead, a labor force suffering from pesticide contamination, environmental toxicity, and palpable regret for having to work in the industry (Thompson 2003). Rather than debating the article’s empirical claims, the consortium’s president found it sufficient to note that “flower production has improved the living conditions of thousands of people in Ecuador and is the only activity in the highlands that offers an alternative to emigration” (Chiriboga Cordovéz 2003). Industry representatives implore us to recognize flower growers’ social beneficence. But doing so requires us to likewise see the rural highlands as a prospective capitalist might, as a system whose fitness is determined by the degree to which waged labor activities have supplanted all other means of subsistence for all but the capitalist class. Labor, in this vision, affords more than brute survival—it impels vitality, improvement, endurance. Outside of labor there is nothing. For this reason, places like Cayambe will either be overtaken by flower plantations, and thrive, or be abandoned. We might hear such statements as evidencing a certain brand of capitalist poetics, an ideological poetics that seeks to disguise the political work involved in opening up new sites for value extraction by naturalizing wage labor as the inevitable endpoint for rural populations. But we will also want to train our ears to identify, in the ostentatiously proselytizing voice that sings the praises of export-­oriented rural development, the haunting melody of a postcolonial logic that has long framed capitalist expansion into rural Ecuador as a humanitarian mission devoted to the improvement of highland peoples.

Postcolonial Primitive Accumulation If flowers are primarily message-­sending devices, in nature employing an elementary form of what Michael Pollan (2001: 63, 70) calls “tropism” to call attention to themselves, Cayambe’s cut-­flower sector is flush with messages imploring everyone involved—customers, visitors, investors, workers, potential workers—to recognize the industry’s deep commitment to regional uplift. Internet pages of flower companies proudly display smiling workers and the schoolhouses they’ve built for workers’ communities. Infrastructure projects glisten with signs advertising their support from local flower growers. Plantation uniforms are imprinted with motivational messages that fashion workers into harbingers of aspirational development, like the motto of “continual



Fields of Dreams 13

betterment” sewn right over the heart on TerraNova’s uniforms. This last image, directly branding workers with the mandate of dedicated improvement, conveys the essence of how flower growers describe their mission in the rural highlands. They and their managerial teams often told me that they were in the business of growing people as much as flowers and took pains to stress that they were trudging out to backwater spots like Cayambe more to hacer patria (build a nation or proper homeland) there than to make a profit (see Part IV). As Elena Terán, general manager of Florequisa Farms in southern Cayambe put it, flower growing is “not like traditional agriculture, the agriculture that we do is technified agriculture where, first, the worker enters to learn the oficio [job] of flowers, then to be a person in development.” While such statements display a proficiency in tropism rivaling any flower, it is less the sincerity of these claims that interests me than the historical lexicon of postcolonial desire they reproduce. This desire grows out of a century of debate among Ecuadorian intellectuals and politicians about what made the country’s Indigenous people so categorically different, universally poor, and politically marginalized from the national mainstream. This question, the heart of what came to be known as Ecuador’s “Indian problem,” generated a wide range of answers and prospective solutions. But by the late nineteenth century, under the expanding influence of liberal ideals, something of a consensus emerged. Refuting the bioessentializing narratives emanating from the global boom in scientific racism, novel forms of race-­thinking developed in Ecuador that attributed the destitution of the country’s so-­called “miserable race” (Guerrero 2003) not to any organic deficiencies of Indigenous people themselves but to their historic and ongoing subjection to the “repressive (im)moral economies of the haciendas” (Lucero 2003: 31), or agrarian estates, that expanded their control of the rural highlands and its people after national independence. Haciendas were crucial to the perpetuation of colonial structures of Indigenous alterity in the postcolonial era. They absorbed all the duties and obligations that had codified Indigenous people as particular kinds of colonial subjects, including their unique requirement to pay tribute to the Crown and receive “protection,” tutelage, and evangelization in return, bringing racialized domination into the heart of the new republic despite its claims to universal citizenship. In Cayambe, hacienda dominion was so complete that, by 1720, 86 percent of Indigenous migrants to the area wound up as indentured workers (conciertos) on them, and by 1830, over 75 percent of the entire Indigenous population of Cayambe was bound to them (Ramón Valarezo 2003: 27, 35, Krupa 2010: 328).2

14 Introduction

As the haciendas’ monopoly over the land, labor, and social worlds of highland Indigenous people intensified in the twentieth century, liberal critique came to view the haciendas as colonial anachronisms impeding all prospects for national development. Running on racialized systems of indentured labor and extending the brutal violence of conquest, haciendas and their indigenized workforce became proof that racial injustice—and race itself—was little more than a socioeconomic effect of radical and entrenched power imbalances. Correcting racialized forms of domination, then, seemed to demand economic solutions. It meant reforming the haciendas. As progressive as this critical approach was, it nevertheless confirmed a common slippage between the racial category “indio,” or Indian, and the economic category “concierto,” or debt-­bound hacienda worker, intertwining thinking about race and economy for decades to come. This equation found many expressions in popular culture, such as the fear among poor mestizos that working on a hacienda would transform them, irrespective of phenotype or prior identities, into Indians (Guerrero 2003) or the ways conciertos, doing temporary work on urban construction projects, were described as instantly de-­Indianizing themselves by performing waged labor (Franklin 1943). Such conflations of race and economy helped territorialize the country’s Indian Problem in the rural countryside. They also helped construct the rural highlands as a zone of interventionist desire for reform-­minded politicians and writers. This desire expressed itself in specific ways. Primarily, it meant working to modernize the ostensibly feudal modes of hacienda labor contracting and remuneration, all equated with colonial modes of racial slavery, and replacing them with ones that upheld liberal ideals of personal freedom, contractual autonomy, and an individualized wage system. It meant, in short, instilling a protocapitalist system of labor relations in the rural highlands, a program, not incidentally, that would free up highland labor for coastal exporters who were themselves prominent liberal politicians and supporters (Clark 1998). But beyond this nucleus of interested advocates, it became widely accepted that the cure for racial subjection and Indigenous destitution was not just economic. It was capitalism. Upstart flower growers arrived in the Cayambe highlands barely a decade after this long-­developing idea reached its apogee in a series of agrarian reforms that dismantled the hacienda system for good. Surveying the residual lands of old estates and the Indigenous peasant communities formed out of them, these urban, educated entrepreneurs encountered a countryside that appeared to be still suffering the lingering scars of hacienda dominion.



Fields of Dreams 15

To them, the reforms may have eliminated the cause of rural destitution but weren’t able to provide its solution. This was the promise of flower growing. It was good fortune, then, that roses and carnations, the most aggressively promoted commodities of Ecuador’s internationally backed export diversification programs of the 1980s, were not only best suited to production in the cool, northern equatorial Andes, where no major export had previously originated, but also agricultural goods, needing to be produced in agrarian (i.e., rural) places. The agrarian reforms had prepared the ground for this possibility by freeing up large amounts of ex-­hacienda land for commercial investment and creating a surplus army of potential workers in landed, but often land-­poor, communities around it. It was even more opportune that the mass production of commercial flowers not only demands an extremely large labor force, locally calculated at ten to fifteen people per hectare, but also saturates the production process with symbolic conventions of high modernity—­technocratic agrarianism, industrial capitalism, scientific expertise, global circulation, and a commodity that itself seems to project refinement, civilization, and excess. Ecuadorian flower plantations thus became rather strange spaces of combinatory assemblage and encounter, where the traditional and the nontraditional, peasant and capitalist, Indigenous and white, urban and rural, all confront one another under the disciplined guidance of a managerial team steeped in a historically entrenched pastoral sensibility equating rural capitalization with Indigenous salvation. This combination—of aggressive capitalist expansion and a racialized “humanitarian reason” (Fassin 2012)—forms the essence of what I will call, throughout this book, a specifically postcolonial mode of primitive accumulation operating in highland Ecuador. I follow the general use of the term “primitive accumulation” to indicate the compendium of forces giving rise to a capitalist mode of production in a specific time and place, especially those consolidating the basic class structure undergirding capitalist productive relations. This means, primarily, (a) the accumulation of money and productive resources in the hands of an emergent capitalist class and (b) the separation of an incipient working class from all productive resources other than its labor power (Perelman 2000; Federici 2014: 12–13). But I also follow Marx (1976) in his insistence that we recognize two other essential ingredients to this process. The first is the violence that lays at its core, everywhere and always. “As a matter of fact,” Marx famously notes (1976: 874), “the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic,” being, rather, ones in which “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the

16 Introduction

greatest part.” The second is the development of a new register of historical consciousness or mode of historicity more compatible with the progressivist teleologies of capitalist development. The notion of primitive accumulation is itself part of this. As a transition narrative, it not only centralizes capital as the determinate force of historical momentum, granting it alone the power to chart history’s course. But it also does funny things with the past, reorganizing it around the conditions rendered up to capital for this epochal transformation, as if this moment was lurking there as a potency in it from the start. As Sanyal (2007: 48) notes, although primitive accumulation is ostensibly concerned with the “history of how the preconditions of capitalist accumulation are created, that history is derived from the structural logic of capital in its state of being,” something I’ll come to call the retrospective teleology of capitalist historicity. What results from this are rather naturalistic analyses of capitalist development, granting it an inevitability that, if nothing else, conscripts history into the disavowal of its foundational and ongoing violence. It may even present capitalism as the heroic cure for greater violence uncovered in the past. Donald Donham describes exactly this use of history as a device of capitalist legitimacy in his writing about postapartheid gold mines in South Africa. Mine owners and managers disguised the exploitative relations of Black waged labor by contrasting them with slavery under the previous system. “The freedom contained in wage labor often gains its symbolic charge and allure precisely from such contrasts with bound labor,” Donham (2011: 114) argues. “Capital ‘frees.’” This same ideology has guided Ecuadorian thinking about wage labor for over a century. Always contrasted with the indentured labor systems of the neocolonial hacienda complex, capitalism can never be considered an entirely abstract force in the Ecuadorian highlands, even when arriving under the banner of a global export industry. Its professed power to liberate individuals from oppression afforded it a central place in a system of racial knowledge that has long targeted rural Indigenous people with transformative intervention. As a result, at least since Ecuador’s 1895 Liberal Revolution, the category “indio” has referred to a figure viewed less as a state of being than a state of becoming, a site of potentiality valued less for what it was than what it could become. Just wait, it (redemption) will come. Here. You’ll see. An entire national imaginary developed around this idea and infused postcolonial capitalism with the force of an ethical project. This book is a study of this promise’s reanimation under the expansive power of neoliberal globalization.



Fields of Dreams 17

Capitalism as an Object of Ethnographic Inquiry When you buy a flower, you think you are paying for a part of the natural world, an object that represents its unpredictability, mortality, spontaneous beauty. Today, though, what you actually get is an industrial product. —Niala Maharaj and Gaston Dorren, The Game of the Rose

A Feast of Flowers is based on over thirty-­three months of fieldwork conducted between 2001 and 2015 and on the regular contact I have had with Indigenous communities in the north and east corners of Cayambe since 1994. I lived in these communities throughout my research and spent my time, when not in the plantations, doing the things Indigenous families, communities, and political associations routinely do, including domestic agricultural work, attending meetings, and joining protests in the cities or roadways. While not the central topic of this book, my long-­term involvement with the region’s Indigenous communities, water councils, and political federations oriented my research and guided the choices I made about what to include and exclude from this text. It was they, in fact, who showed me that there was no way I could fulfill my original goal of studying Indigenous agricultural practices without also completing a thorough investigation of the plantation system encroaching upon it. Labor was key to this, I was told, both by extracting over half the adult population3 from domestic land relations and by returning people to it—when they did return—somewhat different from when they left. This was something I was encouraged to look into and so did. Plantation owners were surprisingly receptive to my pitch to follow comuneros from my home community to work each day. Unlike the negative press surrounding plantations’ extensive chemical use, their employment of local Indigenous people and its impact on the rural countryside was something they were proud of, a story they wanted told. Making the plantation system my primary field of research, I began by studying the internal labor processes in seven cut-­flower plantations before following the class relations created by them outward, to learn about flower production from everyone involved—owners, managers, administrative professionals, bankers, workers, and workers’ families. The chapters ahead shuffle continually between these perspectives. But they give special focus to the agents of capital themselves, whose mission in the Cayambe highlands and ways of advancing it became

18 Introduction

increasingly curious to me the further I got into their world. Seeing the plantation from their perspective brought a host of unexpected conundrums to the fore, raising questions about the racializing power of capital that guide the chapters ahead. Something unusual happened when I reoriented my ethnographic focus around capitalist practice. I found that the more I came to understand how Cayambe’s flower plantations functioned, the less I felt I could explain why. I had arrived at a problem of anthropological method. It seemed like the more adept I became at the techniques of participant observation, the more I bumped up against the limits of this method to account for things I was observing in the field. To put this another way, the more the plantation became my core object of anthropological attention, the more apparent it became that its determinate forces lay elsewhere. So I started viewing the plantation as an object constituted by relations with forces outside it and following these relations to a wide array of people and processes influencing the way flower production occurs in Cayambe. These include historical forces, temporally external to the cut-­flower economy, such as those sedimenting in the agrarian history of the land on which plantations currently sit, the history of sovereign debt in Latin America, and the racial systems that have structured agrarian labor, economic relations, and class systems in Ecuador for centuries. They include forces emanating from physical locations beyond the boundaries of the plantation sector, such as the global moneylenders that stimulated Ecuador’s debt crisis and pumped credit into its monetary system, the national banking community that circulated loans to upstart flower growers, and the Indigenous communities that provide the bulk of its labor supply. And they include the forces of knowledge and expertise, such as industrial psychology and the racial sciences, that intervene in the functioning of Cayambe’s plantations and inform the ways its productive relations unfold. I discovered that I could not fully make sense of the peculiar ways flower plantations operate in Cayambe without giving detailed attention to these seemingly “external” forces of influence. But I also realized that these forces are neither the “background” to the story of flower production nor its supporting cast; rather, they are part of the story itself, even if they do not appear in tangible form in the space of the plantation and thus present themselves as graspable through standard anthropological conventions of research. For this reason, the chapters ahead give equal attention to my core subjects of anthropological inquiry and the major forces acting on them. It is this expanded examination of agro-­industrial activity in highland Ecuador that



Fields of Dreams 19

leads me to posit capitalism itself, the systematic composition of these forces in the material space of Cayambe’s plantation complex (and not the plantation, a class, a commodity, a people, or a set of social relations), as this book’s main object of ethnographic inquiry. Viewing capitalism as a neither singular nor universally integrated system, the book’s analysis of capitalist globalization is grounded in the particular conditions affecting commodity-­producing industrial capital in the postcolonial world. My use of the term “postcolonial” throughout this book draws on a large body of writing about Latin America (Thurner and Guerrero 2003; Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui 2008) to signal neither the temporal end of the colonial period nor some conclusive triumph over its governing structures but the reproduction of core colonial logics in new forms after Spanish rule formally ends. To identify something as postcolonial in Latin America is to call for a discernment of the present as an assemblage of often dissimulated, often muddled, but still evident and impactful colonial traces (Salvatore 2010)—a haunting, of sorts. But it also draws attention to the ways various historical actors themselves weave such critical discernments of colonial residues into their own intellectual and political praxis. “Postcolonial capitalism” refers to a mode of capitalist economic and social production that folds both postcolonial conditions into its routine operations. It grows out of, reaps value from, and reproduces specific colonial legacies embedded in the places where it develops. And it ascribes to capital the historicist capacity to identify and cure these colonial traces as a condition of its expansion. In Cayambe’s plantation sector, the central axis of this powerful framework is an urban, mestizo imaginary codifying the rural highlands as both a genetic source of Indigenous alterity and a place of misery desperate for outside help. Indigenous responses to this paternalistic discourse punctuate this book but in ways primarily designed to help advance a critical investigation into contemporary capitalist practice, not highlight the creative force of Indigenous society. This is a choice arrived at through collaboration with highland communities and organizations. For instance, when asked by the directorate of Terra­ Nova Farms for a presentation giving a properly “anthropological account” of the communities I was living in, comuneros assured me it would be much better if I said nothing. Or just made stuff up; the more fanciful, the better. Information was neither neutral nor something they felt could be dissociated from its historic role in opening up Indigenous territories to land grabbing, labor contracting, and resource theft. The last thing that mattered to them was being deeply represented or having their voices heard through me, something

20 Introduction

they clearly felt better able to do for themselves. This was, after all, a particularly high point of Indigenous activism in Ecuador, when Cayambe’s organizations had recently helped oust one president (Jamil Mahuad), elect another (Lucio Gutiérrez), and vote the new pro-­Indigenous Pachakutik party into municipal office (cf. Becker 2008; Krupa 2009, 2010, 2012). Instead, local communities and regional organizations suggested I give them a presentation. What they wanted to know were the insiders’ secrets I’d learned from hobnobbing with the plantations’ top brass—where all the money came from, how much of it their owners made, why they seemed so duplicitous with Indigenous workers, and how the whole flower business functioned. Now this was useful information. It could help them protect their communities and workers from plantation abuses, leverage stronger demands, make better livelihood decisions, and find weak spots in the global market cycle to exploit if resource struggles erupted. What comuneros asked me to do, in other words, was to accept the ways I too was racialized within the regional economy and to disseminate the privileged access to powerful knowledge my embodied expression of whiteness, education, and North Americanness afforded me. The point, as I heard it, was not to speak for them, through them, or even so much about them but with them, as intellectual and political actors in their own right, each of us able to bring different contributions to a shared project. This book takes shape around that commitment. But this story of what is, in many ways, about the rise of new forms of racial capitalism in the global economy begins not, as I would have thought, with undervalued southern labor. It begins, rather, with a tale of overvalued northern money.

CHAPTER 1

Origin Stories

According to all accounts, modern commercial flower-­ growing is a particularly capital-­intensive sector. In other words, if you want to make money, what you plant is money. —Niala Maharaj and Gaston Doren, The Game of the Rose

My first clue that there was something unusual to the origin story of Ecuador’s cut-­flower sector came from an unsettling remark by TerraNova Farms’ labor manager Victor Sanchez during one of our regular walks through its greenhouses. It was October 2002, and I had been conducting research inside flower plantations and the Indigenous communities around them for nearly two years. And yet I had learned little about the foundational years of the industry, a period stretching roughly from the mid-­1980s to the end of the 1990s. Flower growers frequently mentioned these years to me in passing, as the time when I really should have come to Ecuador if I wanted to see anything interesting. Their recollections evoked a time of easy profit and opulent spending, a time when flowers seemed to be the only way to make money in the country, and when anyone who was anyone dropped whatever they were doing to quickly set up a flower farm and get into the game—a gold rush, of sorts, that took Cayambe by storm. But no one seemed concerned with explaining the reasons for the industry’s rapid and spectacular success or able to account for its origins at all, here on the recently ex-­hacienda lands of rural Cayambe. Conventional accounts credit the industry’s success to the region’s pristine location—right smack dab on the equator, it was always noted, unlike Colombia, Ecuador’s main competitor—and optimal climate, as if the plants themselves had led a campaign that people, only later, perfected through technical mastery. “Roses exploded here in the mid-­1980s after investors discovered the

24

Chapter 1

Cayambe Valley’s perfect growing conditions,” reported a cover story in the San Francisco Chronicle (Wehner 2003b). “Thanks to volcanic soils, an elevation of 9,200 feet and an equatorial sun, the flower can reach gargantuan proportions, with stems shooting up more than 3 feet and bulbs swelling to the size of tennis balls.” Ecuador’s “real advantage,” the Financial Times counters, “is that you get natural light all year round, so you can grow in winter and don’t have to use a lot of artificial illumination” (Conefrey 2015). Tiring of such naturalist accounts, I all but gave up on my quest to learn more about the start of the cut-­flower industry until Victor and I wandered onto the topic that day in the greenhouses and I pressed him more than usual for better answers. Suddenly, mid-­stride, he turned to me and, with more than a little annoyance in his voice, said, “Crís, the thing you have to realize is that this whole industry was founded on bank credit.” Of course, I said. Businesses the world over use startup funds to get off the ground. There’s nothing strange about that. “No, you don’t understand,” he continued, loudly. “What I mean is that people didn’t get into this to make money selling flowers. They got into it to get the credit. You know how much money it costs to start a flower farm?” I did. Lots. “Well, there you go,” he said. “All credit. Lots of money. That was it.” Our conversation ended there. A voice came through Victor’s radio, calling him to another part of the farm, leaving me alone, between rows of rose bushes, to half-­heartedly scribble down his words. I doubted Victor’s depiction of the industry’s origins as little more than a credit capture. Flower growers had made similar remarks to me before, describing the 1980s and 1990s as a time when “you could walk into a bank, say you were starting a flower farm, and a check would be written . . . the money just flowed.” This was golden-­ age nostalgia, I thought, hyperbolic assertions of a glorious past created to stress the difficulties growers were facing in the present. It would take a full decade for me to appreciate the truth in Victor’s admonition and to accept how radically it challenges everything I understood about the driving forces of capitalist expansion at the end of the twentieth century. The revelation came in June 2012, during one of my regular returns to the highlands, when I found myself speaking with Darwin Campoverde in the offices of his FlorSel farm in the Tabacundo valley, about ten miles west of the city of Cayambe. Campoverde was then in his early sixties and had been involved in Ecuador’s cut-­flower industry since its beginning. In 1983, he was hired to be the director of cultivation at Agroflora farms, the first rose plantation in the country, something Campoverde references proudly when



Origin Stories 25

crediting himself as “the first person to plant roses in Ecuador.” In 1995, Campoverde left his job at Agroflora to found FlorSel, an eleven-­hectare rose plantation selling to the North American market. I wanted to know what it was like to start a plantation in the middle of the country’s famous flower boom and asked Campoverde to flesh this out. He corrected me: it wasn’t really a flower boom, he said. It was a credit boom. Flowers were just an accident of that. I didn’t understand. “Look,” he emphasized, “in the 1990s, from about 1990 until ’95 or ’97, there was a boom in the credit supply. Cayambe’s central park, where my friends and I would get together, would be filled with bank managers, there offering money—five hundred thousand, eight hundred thousand, a million dollars. They’d just approach us in the park and say, ‘Hey, do you want to get involved in a flowers project?” And that was that, Campoverde stressed, the way he—and hundreds of others—became flower growers at the end of the last century and helped turn Ecuador, completely sui generis, into one of the largest exporters of cut-­flowers in the world. There is more to this story, which I return to below. But it is worth pausing on this remarkable image—bankers waving cash around in the central park of a small rural town, soliciting creditors, looking for takers, and directing huge sums of credit exclusively to the upstart flower industry, a completely new sort of venture just finding its legs in a region with virtually no history of export production or global market involvement at all. The image, like Victor’s comments a decade earlier, threw a wrench into my efforts to understand how Ecuador’s cut-­flower sector started, bringing an entirely new set of questions to the fore: Where did this money come from? How did banks come to have so much of it to offer? Why was flower growing the thing pushed on credit recipients? Who sought to gain from all this? Did they? And how? Taking these questions seriously meant my efforts to understand the sector’s origins would demand moving beyond that sector itself, indeed outside the sphere of productive capital entirely, and into the shadowy world of banks, credit, and the monetary system—into the world of finance. I started this new research program by reviewing the hundreds of conversations I’d had with flower growers and plantation administrators over the previous thirteen years. Comments I previously hadn’t attached much importance to suddenly appeared central to the story I was trying to understand. One such comment came from Jorge Castellano, Victor’s boss at TerraNova Farms. Castellano comes from a prosperous family in Quito that made its fortune in construction, first building roads in the highlands in the 1950s and then under the urban expansion projects of the 1970s. In 1987, Castellano bought six hundred

26

Chapter 1

hectares of land from the defunct and decaying hacienda Guanguilqui, turning a portion of it into the first of the three flower plantations he would eventually own in Cayambe. I came to know Castellano’s farms well—much of the ethnographic material in the following chapters comes from them. But Castellano, the man, I knew less well since he only rarely visited his farms. On one visit, over lunch in the small dining hall of Primavera Farms reserved for administrators and managers, I asked him why he got involved with flowers in the late-­1980s. “In this era,” he replied, “there was a great need for dollar currency in the country, and so there were projects promoting the development of exports. There was credit of whatever amount you wanted from the state. [President León] Febres Cordero had a lot of credit for the development of [export] businesses, especially flowers. And so we chose flowers.” Castellano’s response disappointed me. It seemed cynical and safe, devoid of any personal details about his decision-­making process and deflecting responsibility onto other people and times. But his origin story takes on new significance when coupled with others’ mentioned earlier. They signal two critical points about the start of Ecuador’s cut-­flower sector that will guide my inquiry in the coming pages. The first concerns the counterintuitive image of credit being not something sought by entrepreneurs looking to fund an existing business plan so much as something offered, aggressively and in ostentatious quantities, by banks and the state. Credit seems to precede and create entrepreneurial expansion here, not the other way around. Another important point concerns the complex path credit takes before arriving in the hands of upstart flower growers in the 1980s and 1990s. Castellano’s reconstruction of this path places primary, determinate emphasis not on export development itself but rather on the country’s “need for dollar currency,” for which state-­ supported “export promotion” emerges only as a strategy to achieve. Export promotion then finds material backing in the form of “credit of whatever amount you wanted” and channeled into particular industries best thought to achieve the original desired result (dollar currency)—industries including, and “especially, flowers.” And so, naturally, Castellano seems to say, he—and others like him—“chose flowers.” This is a most unusual origin story for a major industrial complex anywhere in the world, let alone late twentieth-­century Ecuador. It suggests that the sector’s growth, success, and even emergence might be tied much less to what we consider productive, commodity-­centered, logics—in which the goals of industrial performance, whatever they may be (profit, growth, development, etc.), inevitably intersect with the productive relations of enterprise (labor



Origin Stories 27

efficiency, output, product quality, etc.)—and more to what we might call a financial, money-­centered, logic: in all three industry insiders’ accounts, flowers seem to arise mostly as vectors for the circulation of monetary values. This inspires additional questions—why were U.S. dollars so urgently needed in the country at this time? How were exports meant to bring them in? Can export promotion serve this goal in ways other than simple trade balance adjustments (exports out, dollars in)? And how—to ask again—did flowers become the centerpiece of this broad political-­economic strategy? This chapter ponders these questions in its effort to understand the origins of Ecuador’s cut-­flower sector in the mid-­1980s and to account for its explosive growth through the 1990s. Drawing as near as possible to the people and institutions involved in setting up the first plantations in the highlands, it offers an ethnographic history of industrial emergence that renders concrete the foundational practices of capitalist expansion that most often appear to us in the abstract. By examining these local actors within the full matrix of global forces impinging on them, it reconsiders the process of capitalist restructuring that occurred in the last decades of the twentieth century. In this, it reverses the standard mode of inquiry characterizing anthropological studies of global political economy: rather than examining local processes as exemplifying or expressing, in perhaps culturally particular ways, the global capitalist forces acting on them, it treats the particularities of this local case as puzzles that might help us better understand the global dynamics of capitalist accumulation itself, at this especially transformative moment. In this, it aims to place the frontiers of capitalist expansion in the Global South at the center of inquiry. Doing this, this chapter argues, begins by rethinking the new intersections between productive and financial capital emerging at that time around the global movement of money.

Two Frameworks for Understanding Contemporary Capitalism This chapter’s attention to the intersections of productive and finance capital will complicate two of the most influential macro-­level frameworks for understanding transformations occurring in the global capitalist system at the end of the twentieth century. Both frameworks explain these transformations as responses to the capitalist crisis of the early 1970s, when profit generated from the industrial cores of North America and Europe took a sharp

28

Chapter 1

downturn and investors started to seek alternatives to the purported “rigidities” of Fordist mass-­production systems (Harvey 1990).

Framework One: Production and Labor

The first of these frameworks places productive, commodity-­producing capital at the forefront of these changes and identifies capital’s efforts to overcome its crisis of profitability by reducing the cost of its productive inputs, especially labor, as the primary factor shaping the new form of global capitalism that took shape in the 1980s. The results of this are by now well known—advanced mechanization of labor systems, increasingly flexibilized work routines, the dematerialization of labor’s product (in the commodification of services, affect, and information), and, most important for our purposes here, the large-­ scale relocation of labor-­intensive commodity-­producing industrial systems to places where labor was thought to be cheaper, less prone to unionization, and more easily flexibilized. Researchers focusing on the previous industrial cores of North America and Europe characterize this period of capitalist restructuring as one dominated by experiences of loss, horror, and corporate betrayal, as industrial relocation campaigns left behind mass unemployment, pockets of economic and social precarity, and few prospects for the future (Dudley 1994; Forrester 1999; Rifkin 1995). These experiences sit at the heart of what Jean and John Comaroff call “millennial capitalism.” “The factory and the shop,” they tell us, “are increasingly experienced by virtue of their erasure . . . their removal to an elsewhere—where labor is cheaper, less assertive, less taxed, more feminized, less protected by states and unions”—leaving behind “for ever more people, a legacy of . . . relatively insecure, transient, gainless occupation” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 295). Seen from the Global South, that nameless but easily identifiable “elsewhere” in the Comaroffs’ millennial portrait, the same process has been framed through the lens of primitive or original accumulation—the term nineteenth-­century political economists gave to the expansion of capitalist production routines and class relations into areas not fully dominated by them (Marx 1976: 873–876). Indeed, it is this history of living in social formations not fully subsumed under capitalist rationalities that made the labor power of certain populations in the Global South seem relatively undervalued and thus attractive to capital at this time (Hardt and Negri 2000).



Origin Stories 29

This is surely a global optic, in which primitive accumulation in the South and deindustrialization in the North explain each other through their internal relation, together arising as a therapeutic remediation of capital’s crisis of profitability. But it is also a thesis of historical momentum, one that locates the motor force of history in capital’s restless pursuit of expanded reproduction—a production cycle that ends with more capital than when it began. The barriers to capital’s ability to realize this drive in the early 1970s is what initiates the process of industrial expansion around the globe and the proliferation of export-­oriented manufacturing centers in the Global South. The Global South, for its part, shifts from being the world’s provider of primary products for industrial growth in the North to becoming its labor reserve. Labor in these neophyte industrial complexes thus expresses the core dynamics of contemporary capitalism. The success of Ecuador’s cut-­flower sector is frequently explained in these terms. William Robinson’s (2008: 57) analysis of the industry leads him to highlight it as exemplary of the “the face of global capitalism in the region,” showing how entrepreneurs “utilize the region’s comparative advantage in cheap labor as a basis for ‘competitive’ reinsertion into global markets.” Ecuador’s flower plantations, in other words, became successful and showcase the new place of Latin America in circuits of global capitalism because labor there is cheap (Korovkin 2003). Similarly, I began my research in Cayambe’s cut-­flower sector convinced that its origins could easily be explained by the cheap and abundant labor available in the recently posthacienda highlands. It became immediately apparent to me that the Indigenous communities I was living in, extending from the plantation boundaries up the Andean mountains, were populated by cash-­ poor peasants who relied on the cut-­flower sector for much of their household income. And, as coming chapters will show, the rose plantations I studied were all, in the years I was there, run like model Taylorist production regimes, designed to maximize worker output through highly regimented systems of labor control. Labor was in every way central to the profitability of the farms, and efficiency was the core principle guiding its use. Both sites of research, communities and plantations, seemed to confirm the centrality of labor to the reproduction and arrival there, in Cayambe, of this global export industry and to justify my inability to consider the validity of other explanations—such as Victor’s—for its emergence. This was a serious error. My readiness to transpose ethnographic analysis, gleaned through research in the present, into a

30

Chapter 1

causal force for the arrival of the flower sector itself—occurring nearly twenty years earlier—was entirely misguided. What I would realize was that the conditions I observed inside the plantations in the early twenty-­first century were entirely new, then no more than two or three years old. They were implemented by flower growers only when their original—and for over a decade quite successful—ways of running their plantations collapsed, spectacularly. Before this collapse, labor was considered so irrelevant to growers’ profit that little attention was given to its organization, efficiency, and use. Its ready availability and cheapness were presumed. But this was not the economic variable that led to the flower sector’s emergence in the 1980s. Nor was it the incentive that inspired members of virtually every elite family in Ecuador to scramble over themselves to set up a flower plantation in the rural highlands in the 1990s or that generated the image that flower growing was creating fortunes greater than anything previously imaginable in the country. If Ecuador’s cut-­flower sector was, following Robinson, to become “the face of global capitalism in the region” and to exemplify Latin America’s new role in emergent patterns of accumulation, it was not because of any “comparative advantage in cheap labor.” It was, as I would come to discover, an outcome of the ways Latin American countries and their emergent productive complexes were becoming involved in new global circuits of monetary circulation. As we will see, the massive amounts of credit that growers cite as the key factor responsible for the emergence of the cut-­flower sector did not come from domestic sources. The funds, rather, came from global lenders—foreign commercial banks and international agencies—representing the interests of investors in the United States and Europe. The credit that growers drew on to start their businesses was part of a wave of North-­to-­South financial movement during the last quarter of the twentieth century, movement that we have come to understand primarily around the institution of debt, including the debt crisis that overtook Latin America in the early 1980s, both of which—the credit spree and the debt crisis it caused—were foundational to a new arrangement of finance capital that would come to dominate the global economy by the turn of the century. Studying Ecuador’s cut-­flower sector through the funding that made it possible will show how deeply intertwined its origins are with the origins of contemporary finance capital. While this inquiry should confirm and specify the material processes through which emergent forms of productive capital in the Global South came to depend on foreign financial flows for their existence, it should also do the reverse, showing how necessary



Origin Stories 31

such productive ventures—and, with that, the economies of the former Third World—were to the ascent of finance capital at the end of the twentieth century. Simply put, once the supply of credit money—fictitious capital, money seeking to make money through its own circulation—became available and was ascribed this function, demand for it had to be created. This is what neophyte flower growers provided, as did, to be sure, hundreds of other industrial districts that sprang up ex nihilo throughout the Global South at this time.

Framework Two: Finance and Speculation

The financial crisis of 2008–2009 lent a sense of urgency to efforts to understand contemporary capitalism and inspired the sense that, rather than any changes in productive capital, it is “the ostensible dominion of finance capital, which . . . has centrally characterized our times” (Ho 2009: 3). According to economist Nasser Saber (1999: 99), by the 1980s, industrial capital in the United States had come to relate to its entire production system, and the commodities it produced, not as sources of profit on their own but as things produced mainly “to serve as a catalyst for the employment of other forms of finance capital.” Whereas the financial sphere had previously functioned in a subordinate relationship to productive capital, existing to prop it with injections of “fictitious capital” at moments of economic downturn or to support expansion, by the 1980s, these roles had been reversed. Finance found ways not only to separate itself and achieve autonomy from productive capital but also to exert a commanding force over it, displacing not only productive capital but also the logic of production itself from its place at the center of global capitalist accumulation (Mandel 1975: 454). As Fredric Jameson (1997: 265) argues, what is unique about new forms of finance capital is that they “can live on their own internal metabolisms and circulate without reference to an older type of content,” without ever touching down in the messy material world of commodity manufacture at all. LiPuma and Lee (2004: 5) agree, claiming that “since the early 1970s, the cultures of circulation, especially that defined by speculative capital and the risk-­based derivative, have unceremoniously begun to displace production as the leading edge of capitalism.” Similarly, Walden Bello (2005: 102) argues that “if there are three words that best describe the dynamics of global capitalism in the last twenty years, they are the ‘ascendency of finance.’ . . . Speculation drives the process, with the dynamics of global production and consumption increasingly subordinated to those of global finance.”

32

Chapter 1

What these statements of financial triumphalism all claim is that surplus-­ value capture, the engine of capitalist reproduction in a production-­based system, has been replaced by something loosely identified as “speculation”—a slippery term that Baker (2013: 48) defines as “trading that is based on anticipating the behavior of other actors in the market rather than trading that is based on the underlying features of the market.” So, trading, not making, is seen as the primary activity of today’s capitalist, thriving on speculation’s assemblage of a “diverse set of practices that configure uncertainty and contingency,” especially those seeking to exploit the perceived gap between an asset’s current and future values (Rao 2014: 20). Let’s pause on this rigid demarcation between speculative and productive activity. The contrast has become central to the epochalization of finance capital’s recent expansion and efforts to diagnose the particular worries accumulating around it. Speculation’s traffic in seemingly immaterial values, its capacity to extract profit from thin air, divorced from the tangible and phenomenal world of things, is frequently identified as the root cause of the anxieties and crises of the present age of capitalist restructuring. Caitlin Zaloom (2006: 2–3) argues that Andreas Gursky’s 1999 photographs of the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) unsettle us because they so effectively capture “the unease and amazement of economic life in an age of global markets. The postindustrial logic of speculation is partly responsible for this disquiet. In financial markets like the CBOT, there are no goods to trade. No grain or currency changes hands. . . . Here, capitalism is a pure search for profit, without any clear connection to commodities that people make or use. Unencumbered, the whirling of capital is alluring,” she stresses. And, reflecting on the 2008–2009 financial crisis, Hall, Massey, and Rustin (2013: 1) write that the world economic “system’s vastly inflated financial sectors, which speculate in assets largely unrelated to the real economy of goods and services, precipitated an economic crisis whose catastrophic consequences are still unfolding.” Such summations of contemporary capitalism betray an awkward sentimentality about productive capital. Though rarely discussed in contemporary studies of financialization, critiques of finance that locate its propensity for crisis in its dematerialization of profit’s source, its abstraction from a supposed “real economy of goods and services,” its severance of any “clear connection to commodities,” and so on not only suggest a nostalgic longing for a kind of objectivist world order symbolized by the seemingly more tangible operations of industrial production systems but also grant to such



Origin Stories 33

modes of capitalist accumulation an almost organic social function, rooted in their material dispensation of things and in the mystical significance of production-­as-­creation. This is a structure of economic feeling rooted in the commodity form and its attendant class relations, the contractual exchange of human labor for wages in the production of marketable goods, which seems to arise in tandem with financial bubbles throughout history (Mitchell 2007; Staheli 2013). While I discuss the affective economy of this speculation/­ production divide below, we should first consider the type of anthropological project it inspires. By foregrounding speculation as the master logic of contemporary capitalism, anthropologists attempting to use ethnography to understand its micro-­ textures have understandably concentrated their attention on those people and places considered most central to the shaping of global financial markets and to moving money through them—a focus that has resulted, with few exceptions (cf. Peterson 2014), in studies of people and institutions located in major urban centers of North America and Europe and of the ways the cultural dispositions of these elite actors intersect with the financial rationalities driving the current economy (Ho 2009; Tett 2009; Zaloom 2006). As rich and informative as these studies are, they should inspire a longing to look outside these master centers of financial decision making and to trace their implications in the rest of the world. How might we write the Global South into the history of finance’s ascent over the past thirty years? Or, to put this question another way, what would the recent history of finance capital look like if written from the Global South? And in what ways might this history articulate with the other grand narrative of capitalist transformation, running parallel to this one, which centers on the movement of productive capital around the globe in search of cheap and docile labor, touching down here and there in poorer countries and stimulating processes of primitive accumulation along the way? How might these competing frameworks for understanding the capitalist present and its origin story be reconciled? One answer might be that we are simply bearing witness to a geospatial division of capitalist logics and objectives, with northern capitalism offshoring its archaic but still burning need for commodity production to the former Third World, trapping its inhabitants again in a compromised structural location, now as the world’s reserve army of labor and subject to the laws of surplus capture, while the North, freed from all that, pursues a more aggressive and less materially compromised process of value creation and profit

34

Chapter 1

maximization in the form of speculative investment, risk management, and derivatives trading. Finance for the North, production for the South. The history I present of Ecuador’s cut-­flower sector challenges such an assessment. It shows how deeply imbricated this one labor-­intensive system of agricultural commodity production in a small Latin American country was with the processes that allowed finance capital to grow at the end of the twentieth century. It suggests that these two large-­scale frameworks for understanding capitalist restructuring over the past thirty years are, in fact, describing a single process that can best be understood by looking at how changes in the global structure of commodity production articulated with changes in the role of finance in the world economy. The clue to understanding these articulations comes from the Global South. And that clue is debt, which needs to be understood as a generative force giving rise to particular patterns of capitalist accumulation, including those I examine here. To explain this, I first return to the initial moments of entrepreneurial experimentation that led to Ecuador’s flower boom and the changes in the national agrarian structure that precipitated it.

The Flower as Negation: Preconditions for Industrial Emergence Certain things had to happen before Ecuador’s cut-­flower sector could catch the eye of commercial bankers and become a target for national and global credit merchants. For one, proof had to exist that flower growing was not only profitable but that it was even possible in the rural highlands. Before flowers, no major agrarian export had ever come from the highlands and nothing like a plantation system had ever been tried there before. The entire Andean section of the country was, for centuries, considered hacienda territory, its socioeconomic profile opposing that of the coastal region with all the characteristics Wolf and Mintz (1957) outlined in their classic comparison of hacienda and plantation systems in Latin America: haciendas produce for domestic markets, use nonwaged systems of labor, develop extensive and not intensive production methods, transfer ownership through aristocratic familial methods, employ paternalistic rather than contractual forms of discipline, and are, essentially, noncapitalist and to some degree feudal systems of agrarian domination. Plantations are the opposite. And all of Ecuador’s agrarian exports—bananas, cacao, shrimp, and so on—came from the coast.



Origin Stories 35

So, echoing Wolf and Mintz’s (1957: 381) point that their hacienda versus plantation typology was meant as an outline of “two kinds of social systems,” more than simply two different production methods, proof had to exist that highland social systems could in fact accommodate not only its first export-­ driven plantation system but one producing such specialized and First World commodities as flowers. Proof had to exist, in other words, that the hacienda system was completely a thing of the past and that a fully capitalist order, amenable to a new form of globalization, could be implanted in highland territories. With this, a new archetype of the highland elite landowner had to emerge, one completely distinct from the figure of the hacendado, whose image continues to haunt the agrarian imagination as a figure of broadly colonial abuse and unearned status, a monopolist of inherited privilege and bearer of personal responsibility for the poverty and underdevelopment of highland territories and peoples. The new archetype had to break as strongly as possible from this historic image of the rural economy as one devoted to agrarian production only for personal wealth extraction and aristocratic status accumulation, for which the image of the entrepreneurial outsider—urban, professional, business focused—would come to dominate. Ironically, the growth of the cut-­flower sector would come to valorize a new class profile of the upstart landowning elite as one bearing as little experience in rural Ecuador—and with agriculture—as possible. This shift in class profile coincides with an equally pronounced change in agriculture’s perceived national contribution or “social function” throughout Latin America at this time, moving from being a source of domestic food security, hunger alleviation, urban population sustainability, and reduced import dependence to something no different from any exportable commodity, whose value to the national economy comes from its links to externally derived values. More than any other export-­oriented agrarian crop, flowers—inedible, unnecessary, and agrarian only by accident—symbolize the reconfiguration of national agriculture programs around such intangible objectives, a shift we will see fully realized in the transformation of flowers into devices for financial circulation. What the cut-­flower sector seemed compelled to prove, in other words, was that it was truly something new, a sign of and force for the total transformation of rural societies and of their contribution to Ecuador’s entry into the new world of neoliberal capitalism. And this claim to millennial transformation was premised on an act of radical negation of the hacienda system and its legacy.

36

Chapter 1

Indeed, one of the most important clues to understanding the rise of Ecuador’s cut-­flower sector comes from the place and time of its emergence: Cayambe in the early 1980s. For Ecuador’s entire postcolonial history, Cayambe was known as the most densely packed region of hacienda dominion in the country. As Marc Becker (1997: 117, 102), notes, “Land and wealth was much more concentrated in Cayambe than in Ecuador in general,” a situation dating back to the late seventeenth century, when “nine large landowners owned ninety percent of the land in Cayambe.” After the agrarian reforms dismantled the hacienda system in the 1960s and 1970s, large landowners in Cayambe turned their lands over to pasture for dairy production, then touted as the route to agrarian modernization in the countryside. The northern highlands became especially dairy centric in these years: Nestlé chose Cayambe as the site of its national milk processing plant in 1972, and artificial insemination techniques were pioneered in the neighboring canton of Machachi in 1960. From 1972 to 1977, Nestlé increased its providers of fresh milk from 95 to 265, almost half of which (14,000 of 29,000 liters) came from Cayambe farmers, most of whom owned farms in the 20-­to 500-­hectare range (Barsky et al. 1980: 216). As the guiding force behind the agrarian reforms’ promise to restructure the monopolistic and noncapitalist character of highland agriculture, dairy failed on every count. Dairy production in fact intensified the concentration of wealth structuring the hacienda system. In 1974, an agrarian census showed that 94 percent of arable land was held by proprietors of twenty hectares or more and that 73.9 percent of the region’s livestock was held by the same landowners (Barsky et al. 1980: 120). And yet despite this, former members of the hacienda class found the returns from dairy farming to be less lucrative than promised, leading to depreciated land values, vacant properties, and the search for more profitable uses of rural land. This, then, was the historical conjuncture that gave rise to Ecuador’s cut-­ flower sector—large sections of relatively idle rural land owned by children of hacendados in the immediately posthacienda age. The discourses that had stimulated the dissolution of the hacienda complex—agrarian modernization, capitalization, technification, and so on—and guided the agrarian practices of this new generation of landowners were premised on the development of a production system (dairy) that could in no way fulfill them. The entire way of life for this class segment was, after all, destroyed on the promise that a better one lay ahead. Enter the search for alternative uses of their inherited land that could fulfill this promise. Enter flowers.



Origin Stories 37

The Pioneers It may simply be more evidence of flowers’ symbolic excess that the first Ecuadorian to plant commercial flowers for export was Neptalí Bonifaz—descendent of the largest landowning family in Ecuadorian history and inheritor of the remains of the country’s most iconic hacienda, the magisterial Guachalá in the heart of the Cayambe valley. Owned by presidents and other major figures of national history, reportedly reaching 42,000 hectares at its height, the hacienda long served as the master symbol of agrarian largesse and landed class power in the country, so much so that it inspired people across Ecuador to say, “I didn’t ask you for Guachalá” when denied a simple request (Bonifaz Andrade 1995; Krupa 2011). In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Guachalá and the Bonifaz family became famous for their seemingly contradictory responses to the looming agrarian reforms. Sensing the imminence of these reforms, the Bonifazes divided the estate among four siblings, modernized its agricultural bases with imported Holstein cows and eucalyptus seedlings, and sloughed off its more unproductive extremities to workers. For this they were given medals of recognition from the state. But unlike other major hacienda owners of the era, whose preemptive distributions of land to workers were made under the pretense of liberal property discourses, equity principles, and shades of procapitalist contract law, the Bonifazes’ project was guided by a more conservative and defensive agenda. They aimed to reduce the monopolistic appearance of the landed class, prove the superior productive capacity of large estates over peasant smallholdings, and diminish the possibility of worker uprisings and land seizures—many of which had already started to occur on Guachalá lands. This was a strategy guided by the attempt, against mounting opposition, to “save the haciendas for the hacendados,” as Osvaldo Barsky (1988: 107) has put it. In fact, Neptalí’s uncle Emilio Bonifaz, who came to own a sizable section of Guachalá territory in 1947, was by the 1960s the most outspoken figurehead of a group of conservative hacendados who sought to block the reform process in its entirety. He argued tirelessly in the press and produced voluminous writings outlining the dangers facing Ecuador— dangers of food availability and political insecurity—should the haciendas be expropriated and their lands be turned over to Indigenous workers. Agrarian reforms, of course, did occur, further solidifying Guachalá’s legacy as the central axis of hacendado conservatism and its owners’ association with the relentless defense of aristocratic privilege. It was this legacy that Neptalí Bonifaz inherited along with 120 hectares of land in 1970 and

38

Chapter 1

that would infuse his early experiments with cut-­flower growing a decade later with the kind of epochal significance I outlined earlier, as a final negation of the hacienda system by a child of its most esteemed bloodline. Bonifaz seems, in many ways, to have been primed for this role. After spending much of his early adult life in the United States, he returned to Ecuador in 1958 with a mathematics degree from Johns Hopkins, an engineering degree from MIT, and two years of professional employment under his belt. His choice, unlike several of his siblings, to hang on to his inherited land and to try to make agrarian living profitable, despite the low returns from his dairy farming and his training in other fields, is curious, though reflective, his widow affectionately told me, of her husband’s mix of unshakable optimism and lack of what she called “realism”: “His brain was always geared toward progress, and doing something and getting it done somehow,” she told me over coffee in their family’s Quito home in 2012, leading Neptalí to get involved in any plan or project proposed to him, however far-­fetched: “He wanted to can food, thinking that the chauffeurs and people who went from Quito to Guayaquil would need canned food.” But people of the country “were not used to eating canned food. And so that didn’t work and so he used the cans for trying to export to the States naranjilla juice,” a deal he worked out with Campbell’s soup company. “And in the end that actually went broke. OK, next step. He started the first mushroom factory in Ecuador . . . that was really uphill because you need to start teaching Ecuadorians to eat something they’d never eaten before. Well, that factory’s been there since the ’70s and they’re just barely making it.” Sometime in 1982, Bonifaz would stumble across the business venture he’d been looking for. It was an Israeli ex-­colonel named Joseph Levy who first introduced the idea of cut-­flower production to Bonifaz. Retired Israeli military officers were in Ecuador throughout the 1980s offering military-­style private security training to Guayaquil-­based banks Filanbanco and Banco del Pacifico under the aegis of the “International Security and Defense Systems” business. Banco del Pacifico maintained close ties with the leader of the Guayaquil Chamber of Commerce, León Febres Cordero, whose aggressively promarket term as the country’s president from 1984 to 1988 would earn him a reputation as the founding father of Ecuadorian neoliberalism (Montúfar 2000; Krupa 2013), a position he notoriously defended against opposition with the help of a secret police force trained in counterinsurgency measures by this same Israeli private security company (Comisión de la Verdad 2010; Zambrano Pasquel 1990).



Origin Stories 39

I know little about the circumstances under which Bonifaz and Levy met, though the former’s widow recalls her husband, a close personal friend of Febres Cordero’s, being completely mesmerized by Levy’s tales of using advanced drip irrigation systems to grow bountiful crops of carnations and mini-­carnations in the Israeli desert. A few months later, the two were planting carnations and mini-­carnations on a small five-­hectare corner of Bonifaz’s land in Cayambe, using Levy’s imported irrigation systems and drawing workers from the neighboring Indigenous communities created out of Guachalá’s dissolution a decade earlier. The following year, lacking any refrigerated shipping systems, the two men and their wives crammed their suitcases full of carnations and boarded a plane to Miami. “People came from all around,” Bonifaz told me proudly in 2002, “because nobody knew that flowers were being grown in Ecuador.” After earning a reported $500,000 in profits that first year alone, word spread. “This was the first attempt,” Bonifaz told me, at “industrial” flower growing in Ecuador. “After that, a number of my friends copied me and now this is an industry that produces around $300 million a year and gives work to some 500,000 people, if we count all the families who work in flowers. This, this really,” he stressed, “has been my contribution to the development of Cayambe.” Bonifaz’s emphasis on the twin components of this contribution— unimaginable profits for the entrepreneurial class, on the one hand, and the mass absorption of rural families into the industry as laborers, on the other— will be important to understanding the figuration of cut-­flower growing as a redemptive project, for rural territories, the highland elite, and the Indigenous peasantry whose historic impoverishment and destitution come in no small part from the centuries of hacienda dominion over their lives. Redemption is a responsibility running through the bloodline of the hacienda system’s inheritors. I explore this redemptive mission of cut-­flower growing in Chapter 4. But two qualifications to Bonifaz’s self-­congratulations are here required. For one, as he himself noted to me, others before him had tried to grow and export fresh flowers from Ecuador. The most famous attempt was undertaken by American flower wholesaler Claymore Sieck, who set up a three-­ hectare carnation-­growing operation in 1966 on lands just south of Quito. Sieck apparently came to Ecuador on the advice of a friend who, while vacationing in the country, thought it might have the right conditions for year-­round flower growing, something impossible in Sieck’s home town of Baltimore. Inspired by his friend’s insights, Sieck quickly assembled business partners, including an American-­owned Ecuadorian beer company, and

40

Chapter 1

agrarian technicians, including Robert Longhans from Cornell University. He managed to keep the farm running until 1975, when pressures from the farm’s three hundred employees to unionize led its owners to dissolve the enterprise (Hernández et al. 2010). This farm, which Sieck called Jardines del Ecuador (Gardens of Ecuador), while a small and singular affair, in many ways exemplifies the position of Latin American countries in the global structure of agrarian capitalism at this time. It was essentially an American outpost on Ecuadorian soil, taking advantage of the latter’s “comparative advantages” to expand the profits of a foreign company. A lot changed in the nearly two decades that passed between the start of Sieck’s business and Bonifaz’s first carnation-­growing experiment. For one, the agrarian reforms had come and gone, opening up hacienda lands and the hacendado class to new sorts of capitalist production ventures, particularly those expressing the reforms’ professed modernizing project. Conditions necessary for the formation of a local agrarian bourgeoisie, in other words, had emerged in the highlands, encouraging investors within Ecuador to fund productive ventures that could restructure rural social relations around the remains of the previous system of domination. Local discourses emphasizing agrarian renovation and economic transformation met up with global changes in the structure and ideology of world capitalism. Countries of the Global South were urged to develop more extensive export-­oriented production systems, ones capable of sending more specialized and processed commodities into circulation and returning higher trade values to their domestic economies than previous forms of primary product extraction ever could (Robinson 2008). Local class and global market changes simultaneously led to “nontraditional export” promotion, a core tenet guiding the Global South’s place in neoliberal globalization, but here achieving an expanded meaning as the end to the hacienda system and of foreigners’ capacity to envision highland territories as theirs for the taking, able to become active contributors to capitalist globalization only through American occupation. The structures of Cold War agriculture had been replaced by their neoliberal successors. Capitalist expansion, it was imagined, would liberate regions like Ecuador’s highlands from traditional forms of local and global domination. Bonifaz’s emphasis on pioneering not the commodity per se but the production method—the first industrial system of flower production, bringing, as he put it to me, “the first system of drip irrigation there was in Ecuador, the first importation of carnation plants, which we brought from Israel, the first system of intensive work, with fifteen or twenty people per hectare”—references



Origin Stories 41

precisely this shift in political economy and the entrepreneurial spirit of the new posthacendado class. And yet, contrary to Bonifaz’s claims, the people he calls “friends” who witnessed his successes and followed his lead into cut-­flower exporting didn’t exactly copy him. Most of Bonifaz’s successors planted roses, not carnations, and grew them under greenhouses, not in the open air as he had done. In this they more directly replicated the model constructed by the industry’s other major pioneer, lawyer and economist Mauricio Dávalos, who in 1983, one year after Bonifaz’s entry into carnation growing, started the country’s first rose plantation in the Tabacundo valley about ten kilometers west of the city of Cayambe. Unlike Bonifaz, Dávalos did not come from the traditional landowning class that had for centuries monopolized political and economic power in the highlands. In fact, Dávalos holds nothing but scorn for this system, telling me, in 2014, that his “father lost almost his entire fortune and that of [Dávalos’s] mother in traditional agriculture,” leading him to an academic career in the highland city of Riobamba. This experience of class decline and ruin begins Dávalos’s self-­portrayal as a truly self-­made man, someone who entered the ranks of the elite not by family privilege or property inheritance but by the sweat of his brow. He tells the story of his route to flowers as one of an urban professional using his business smarts and character to build a profitable business. That story begins with the military coup in 1963. Dávalos was then studying law in Quito’s Central University, and his involvement in the student movement against the dictatorship led to his expulsion from the university, a brief stint in prison, and six months of exile in Venezuela. There he was exposed to the doctrine of Christian Democracy, a center-­right political movement sweeping through Latin America touting principles of individual liberty, anticommunism, and social and economic conservatism. When Dávalos’s exile was lifted, he returned to Ecuador to help form the Christian Democracy Party before departing in 1966 for Chicago to complete a bachelor’s degree in economics at Northwestern University, funded by a national scholarship (Latin American Scholarship Program for American Universities, partly funded by the Mexican government’s Benito Juarez program). He followed that with a master’s degree and PhD in economics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville before returning to Ecuador in 1973, where he found a fit teaching economics at the traditionally conservative and upper-­class Catholic University. The low pay of this position led him to pursue a job at Citibank, where he worked as an analyst from 1975 to 1979, the last years of a second

42

Chapter 1

military dictatorship. While working for Citibank, Dávalos reunited with his acquaintances in the Christian Democracy Party, which eventually won the election in 1979 in alliance with the Concentration of Popular Forces Party, bringing Dávalos into the government as minister of natural resources and energy. By 1980, Dávalos had left his ministerial post to become the director of Ecuador’s Central Bank—an institution, not incidentally, whose first president was Neptalí Bonifaz, the first Bonifaz to acquire the hacienda Guachalá in 1929 and great uncle to the flower grower of the same name. In 1981, Dávalos left his position at the Central Bank due to an experience he described to me as “a fierce confrontation with León Febres Cordero,” the future president and “main opposition to the [Concentration of Popular Forces Party] government of Roldós and Hurtado,” which would reemerge, Dávalos believes, in the form of intense personal persecution of Dávalos throughout Febres Cordero’s term in office. Sensing the political tide shifting under Febres Cordero’s growing national power, Dávalos thought it best to remove himself entirely from politics and the banking sector, a major source of Febres Cordero’s support. So he decided to open a business. At the time, he says, neighboring Colombia was in the middle of a major rose boom, and so he traveled there to see it firsthand. In Colombia, he met a successful flower grower, who showed Dávalos around his farm, explained the operation, and agreed to come to Ecuador to help set up the country’s first rose plantation. This was now 1982, the same year Neptalí Bonifaz decided (also through contact with a successful foreign flower grower) to plant carnations, something Dávalos says he (perhaps because of the opposing political worlds they traveled in) was completely unaware of. Dávalos, again, lacking any experience in agriculture or the land and connections of the ex-­hacendado class, had to assemble his resources through different means. For this he made the bold move of approaching the National Financing Corporation, a state bank supporting industrial entrepreneurs, for funding, a decision that, as I outline below, would prove decisive to the future of the cut-­flower industry. By April 1983, Dávalos had secured funding, acquired land in the Tabacundo valley, and was readying greenhouses to hold 1.5 hectares of roses for the American market. His farm, called Agroflora, the first rose plantation in the country, would become the most influential model for the industry’s future growth. Dávalos, as mentioned, was an urban professional with no connection to the hacienda system or to the landed aristocracy of the highlands. He was also the one who first employed a young Darwin Campoverde, who we met earlier, as his farm’s cultivation manager, someone who was born and



Origin Stories 43

raised in Quito and who also had zero experience in agriculture or living in the rural highlands when Dávalos hired him for this job. Dávalos tells me he hired Campoverde for his potential more than his experience and sent him to Colombia and Israel to shadow experienced flower growers to learn the basics of a production system he was meant to design and run. In 2014, Dávalos joked with me about Campoverde finding life in the small town of Tabacundo so difficult and unfamiliar, of being so lost and terrified in it that, after only two months of living there, he approached Dávalos with the request to be moved to the slightly larger city of Cayambe, where at least he might be able to buy milk and bread for his breakfasts. The two men, plantation owner and cultivation director, were in no uncertain terms complete outsiders not only to the agrarian economy but also to the rural, Indigenous highlands that they had landed in and from which they hoped to generate a profitable export business. The outsider status of the industry’s pioneers will become central to the image of the flower industry as both a force of the emancipation of local inhabitants, scarred from centuries of hacienda dominion, and of profit, of making the rural highlands a terra nullius, ripe for primitive accumulation, figuring capitalist development as a salvation mission and the flower sector as a project of social improvement. As we will see in coming chapters, labor will sit at the heart of this social mission. “The fact is,” Dávalos reflected in 2014, “that we hired the very first workers there and this is where, I can tell you, I feel a big, big satisfaction and pride with floriculture in general, because Tabacundo was a place where there was nothing. Only two little stores, wooden shacks . . . people lived in misery and the houses, all the houses around the plantation were chozas [straw huts] with straw down to the floor, without even so much as adobe walls.” The entry into flower growing of people like Neptalí Bonifaz, children of the hacienda system responsible for this immiseration, is an important step. It marks the dawning of a new generation of landed class power that has outgrown the old hacienda order but acknowledges its contributions to making something like flower growing possible in the highlands by the early 1980s. It was the hacienda system that made productive land inaccessible to market forces until this time, kept it devalued and available for investment of this scale, and also created an only recently freed labor reserve of peasant communities desperate for sources of income. But the new economy, to truly embody this epochal shift, would have to cut its ties entirely with the old system, something that would need to build a class profile detached from the hacendado bloodline, investing in a set of dispositions formed entirely

44

Chapter 1

outside the rural world, and in the kind of person who, like Darwin Campoverde, would need to gravitate to even the proto-­urban space of Cayambe to find a small taste of familiarity. This, indeed, is critical to understanding the attraction of the country’s banking sector to the emergent cut-­flower economy and its targeting of it for unprecedented investment. Campoverde alerts us to this financial optic in his description of how he came to leave his job at Dávalos’s Agroflora farm and start his own business. His decision, it will be recalled, was sealed by the allure of bankers waving cash around in Cayambe’s central park and offering untold sums of credit to people who might want to “get involved in a flowers project.” This was the decisive factor influencing his decision, and that of many others he knows, to open flower plantations around Cayambe in the 1990s. But he qualified this statement in an important way, adding the next line of the pitch. After offering the money, bankers would say to prospective clients, “‘You put in the land, buy the hacienda, mortgage the hacienda, and we’ll give you the money.’ This is how it went,” he stressed. But with one catch: “Obviously [they would offer this] not to anybody, pero si a los conocidos,” but yes for those who were known. The requirement of land ownership and its immediate entry into mortgage status is something I discuss below. Here it is the next part of Campoverde’s description that demands comment—that to be approached with credit offers of this sort, one had to be “known,” be conocido. I can only guess what it took to be knowable to bank managers and employees in early 1990s Cayambe, but I assume it would mean looking like someone able to buy a hacienda, secure a mortgage, and start a flower farm. And in a place like Cayambe—a small rural town in an overwhelmingly Indigenous region, bustling with peasant markets and poor mestizo vendors—it most likely meant looking like you were not from Cayambe. None of the Indigenous families I have lived with at length during my stays in Cayambe, or members of the Indigenous and peasant communities on all sides of the city who have hosted my visits to the region since the mid-­1990s, or, for that matter, any urban shopkeepers or taxi drivers or public servants or their children who I came to know well in the city have ever mentioned being approached by bankers trying to get them to invest in a flower farm. Most have told me about their experiences working in one. The bodily traces of race and class that must have helped bank managers pick out the conocidos and identify potentially worthy subjects of credit condense into an image of familiarity matching the bankers themselves—urban,



Origin Stories 45

white, professional, enterprising, and definitely new to Cayambe, calling somewhere else home. This externality—not technical abilities, a proven understanding of agriculture, or experience in Cayambe’s unique environment—is what marks the transition of Ecuador’s cut-­flower sector from an experiment tried out by the children of hacienda owners and curious newcomers into a patterned and strategically configured agro-­industrial complex guiding the national economy in its millennial aspirations at the dawn of the neoliberal order. This pattern, started by Dávalos and Campoverde in 1983, recognized and invested in by the banks by 1990, and turned into the general structure of the industry by mid-­decade, was of urban, non-­Indigenous professionals with no experience in agriculture or living or working in the rural highlands, buying up ex-­hacienda land in Cayambe and starting cut-­flower plantations. As Ramiro Peñaherrera, part-­owner of the Latinflor plantation and the Flortec marketing consortium, put it to me in 2002, by the 1990s, “you’d see investors’ groups forming, lawyers and doctors getting into it, and some of them getting into it seriously. I mean, they give up their law practices, they give up their medical practice and do it, really do it.” The profiles of growers and industry pioneers highlighted throughout this chapter show the cut-­flower industry to be, in short, agrarian by accident, not intention, started by entrepreneurs, not agriculturalists, who approached flowers as units of investment, not plants. The popular ecocentric origin story for the industry gets things wrong when it credits growers with knowledge of Cayambe’s particular climate and growing conditions. This is the crucial point with which to begin our study of the origins of Ecuador’s cut-­flower industry because it helps us appreciate the lexicon of familiarity bankers drew on when they sought out specific types of clients to push credit on in the early 1990s and in whose faces they chose to wave their wads of cash. These were the faces, the demographic, that could best promise something new for the rural highlands and import a progress-­oriented, enterprising, and moneymaking spirit into those parts of the country long seen as isolated, backward, and unprofitable, for centuries locked away, separate from the rest of the country, held by idle hands of privilege and inheritance, perpetuating the poverty of the rural masses, and offering nothing to national development or its economic growth. This was a vision for a new sort of colonization, an urban-­to-­rural takeover of the local or regional by the national, promising to finally end the hacienda’s dominion and overturn its legacy. Picture the scene—urban bankers driving up to Cayambe from Quito to find investors, there scanning the central park and seeing, occasionally poking above the crowd, a familiar-­looking face, a person who had followed the same

46

Chapter 1

path as they and for the same purpose, two bits of like matter out of place, drawn by gravitational pull to one another—two conocidos. This is the way an externality was brought into capitalist interiority (or is it the reverse?). This is the story of primitive accumulation. The question now is how this class profile starts to intersect with changes in the national and global political economy in such a way as to provide bank managers with the massive quantities of credit money they brought with them to places like Cayambe to push on neophyte growers in the 1990s. How, in other words, does a credit boom occur in a place like rural Ecuador in the late twentieth century? The next chapter maps out these global transformations before outlining the intimate connections between Ecuador’s financial sector and its cut-­flower growers—and their consequences—in the leadup to the twenty-­first century.

CHAPTER 2

The Rise of Imperial Finance: A Brief History

Chapter 3 will show that the large sums of bank credit Ecuadorian flower growers used to start their enterprises in the 1980s and 1990s came to them through a global financial chain that began to consolidate itself in the 1970s. This chapter outlines how this chain was formed and how it became the basis for finance capital’s massive growth at the end of the twentieth century. The perspective I offer on these processes comes from the Global South. It exposes how a set of new financial dependencies imposed upon southern economies became foundational for the expansion of global finance and the profit it continues to extract.

The Business of Debt Central to this story is the mounting sovereign debt of the so-­called Less-­ Developed Countries (LDCs), which grew astronomically in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. That year, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) launched an embargo against Western importers, driving the price of oil up from $3/barrel to over $12/barrel. Two consequences followed. The first was a massive surge in the transportation costs of productive inputs Latin American countries relied on for their Import Substitution Industrialization models of national development. Unable to meet the increased costs of manufacturing projects, they looked to foreign moneylenders for help. National debts throughout the developing world skyrocketed. The second consequence was a massive increase in profits for oil-­producing countries, which were deposited in American and European banks. To make

48

Chapter 2

money, these funds had to circulate, and so channels had to be found through which they could move. Here, the LDCs and their weakened capacity to sustain national improvement commitments (see consequence 1 of the oil crisis) provided the solution, in the form of “assistance” loans. This movement of oil money through northern money-­center banks into poorer countries came to be known as “petrodollar recycling,” a strategy first implemented in 1974 (see Oweiss 1974). Richard Peet (2003: 71) shows how “the deficits faced by Third World countries” at this time became “an opportunity for private financial institutions, especially commercial and investment banks, to step in.” Beginning with the New York–based Citicorp in the 1960s, targeted “lending greatly increased in the mid-­1970s when the banks began recycling their ‘petro-­dollars,’ deposited in New York and London banks, as loans to Third World governments.” As Devlin and Ffrench-­Davis (1995: 121) have shown, Latin America became the focal point of this new lending rush: “Latin America was the most sought after market, owing to its relatively greater development and its situation as a natural market for United States banks, which, at the time, were spearheading the international banking boom.” Devlin (1989: 40) reports that over two-­thirds of foreign lending went to Latin America between 1975 and 1981, leading him to conclude that “Latin America carried the overwhelming share of overall obligations” throughout the major growth period of Third World debt. To repeat: this surge in sovereign debt was at the same time an “international banking boom.” While the International Monetary Fund (IMF) established a division called the Oil Facility to transfer $8.3 billion in loans from oil-­exporting countries to importing ones, “most of the lending to the developing countries was done through private capital flows” by banks, often forming “syndicates of twenty or more banks to pool their funds” (Joyce 2013: 44).1 As S. C. Gwynne (1986: 104) describes in his banker’s memoir, Selling Money, “Syndicates . . . accounted for almost all of the sovereign lending from 1969 onward,” with the six biggest U.S. syndicators2 alone dispensing “$175 billion in foreign loans between 1977 and 1982.” Syndicated lending meant that even the smallest regional banks in the United States, like Gwynne’s employer, Cleveland Trust, were thoroughly invested in the global debt sale. Coordinated strategies such as these show how central the sale of credit to the Global South was to the U.S. economy at this time. Such observations have led global political economists like Peter Gowan (1999) to argue that the OAPEC embargo was actually crafted by the Nixon administration to



The Rise of Imperial Finance 49

capture petrodollars in U.S. banks and “to give a new role . . . to the US private banks in international financial relations” (Gowan 1999: 21). This new role, Gowan argues, was premised on a much larger political agenda: to use the new dominion of U.S. banks in an accelerated international finance market as the basis for strengthening the global power of the U.S. state. Panitch and Gindin (2005: 47) agree, claiming that “the deepening and extension of financial markets has become more than ever fundamental to the reproduction and universalization of American power.” Finance, specifically the petrodollar recycling project, was, these authors argue, the foundation on which late twentieth-­century American imperialism was erected. Whether imperialist by design or outcome, what the 1970s witnessed was the institutionalization of debt at the center of North-­South economic relations and the rising control of foreign banks over these relations. Banks didn’t merely supply credit to existing financial networks but worked hard to expand these networks. As Devlin and Ffrench-­Davis (1995: 117, emphasis added) summarize, “For the Latin American countries to incur debt, lenders . . . actively sought to transform the abundant financial resources they were attracting from oil producing countries into LDC loans. Indeed, breaking the norms of traditional banking, they aggressively marketed themselves in the region in search of borrowers.” This is a critical observation, confirmed by insiders’ reports like Gwynne’s memoir that describe U.S. bankers fighting among themselves for foreign credit recipients in “the golden age of international lending” (Gwynne 1986: 31), a time, Devlin (1989: 27) adds, when there was “intense competition among the lenders for customers. In this environment,” he continues, “the image of a successful loan officer changed; he now became a salesman at heart, aggressively soliciting clients.” This image of the global lender will meet up, as an extension of this network, with the one described earlier of Ecuadorian bankers soliciting creditors in Cayambe’s central park and with the image of the Ecuadorian state as itself acting like a credit “salesman” in its dispensation of loans to targeted export industries. Connecting these global and local phenomena will be crucial to explaining the centrality of global finance to the rise of new productive ventures like Ecuador’s cut-­flower sector. These structures of credit peddling expanded significantly in the early 1980s by a second oil crisis. As the foreign debt of southern countries increased, so did the investment of northern banks in them. Sims and Romero (n.d.: 1) have calculated that “by 1982, the nine largest US money-­center banks held Latin American debt amounting to 176 percent of their capital,” with their

50

Chapter 2

total holdings of LDC debt being almost 290 percent of their capital—a figure calculated at $362.7 billion by the end of that year (Joyce 2013: 46). It was then, in 1982, that everything changed. In August, Mexico announced that it was no longer able to meet its debt-­servicing obligations, sparking a wave of loan defaulting across the continent and marking what is commonly cited as the origin of Latin America’s debt crisis. New loans started to be insufficient to cover even the interest on existing loans, “resulting in severely negative net financial transfers” for borrowing countries (Devlin and Ffrench-­Davis 1985: 127). Banks pulled back, limiting new lending to bailout packages, and devised creative measures to protect themselves against the inevitable inability of borrowing countries to pay what they owed. One such measure, pioneered by Citicorp in 1987, involved the sale of risky LDC debts on secondary markets at reduced rates. Lower earnings were covered up with increased loan loss reserves, creating illusory profits at the height of loan defaults (Sachs and Huizinga 1987). A second strategy involved pressuring governments in debtor countries to buy out private-­sector debt with new public-­sector loans, a strategy reported to be the main contributor to new loan agreements made by private commercial banks in the United States at this time and sparking inflationary trends in borrower nations (Sachs and Huizinga 1987: 561, 565). A final strategy was to turn to international organizations for help. It was at this time, in the mid-­1980s, that the IMF and private commercial banks, once fierce competitors in Third World loan markets, started to work together. According to Peet (2003: 75), since both were interested in “ensuring that loans were repaid, the IMF and the commercial banks developed an uneasy relationship of mutual support. The commercial banks needed the IMF to ensure loan repayment, and the IMF could do this with stabilization and structural adjustment measures as conditions for loans ensured by the state.” As Patricia Adams (1991: 76) notes, “The IMF functions primarily to ensure that its members pay their international debts.” If the IMF’s role is simply to act as the enforcer of payment obligations when those obligations become strained, then Latin America’s “Lost Decade” shows the IMF at the peak of its performance. Its total loans to Third World countries jumped from $8 billion in 1979 to $39 billion in 1985, a nearly 500 percent increase in just six years (Adams 1991). All of this, it bears stressing, was money put to the service of meeting debt payments demanded by existing creditors, enabling the continued functionality of the financial machinery created the decade before, despite signs of its complete failure, and increasing the debt burdens of the Global South.



The Rise of Imperial Finance 51

What concerns us here are the “economic reforms” and “financial programming” that accompanied these new loans (Adams 1991: 76). Because the IMF addresses a borrowing country’s debt crisis, Adams indicates, as “a balance of payments problem”—what Saber (1999: 90) calls “the fundamental problem of international finance”—its reform packages center on changing that. For Saber (1999: 91), this always means either reducing imports or “manipulate[ing] the exchange rate by devaluing the currency.” In the 1980s, the first of these measures was antithetical to the IMF’s job of preventing losses to influential lending nations, whose own trade balances would be negatively affected by such measures. In fact, the IMF’s financial and fiscal reform packages generally demand the “abolition or liberalization of foreign exchange and import controls” (Peet 2003: 73). Currency devaluations were universally imposed throughout Latin America during this period and will be shown below to become a central cause of Ecuador’s cut-­flower boom. As several authors note, these devaluations initiated a surge in currency speculation, “which essentially turned Third World debt into a market opportunity” for global finance and launched an entirely new branch of finance, what Saber (1999: 73) calls “speculative capital,” a division of modern finance devoted entirely to the “short-­term engagement of capital in arbitrage trades” (Peet 2003: 76). Also important is a third adjustment, central to all debt-­led economic restructuring measures imposed on the continent during these years, which is the reconfiguration of national development models around export expansion. The core idea was that “these reforms would enable LDCs to increase exports and generate the trade surpluses and dollars necessary to pay down their external debt” (Sims and Romero n.d.). The export-­led development (ELD) models that sprang up across Latin America during this period were neither, in other words, domestic inventions nor development focused. They were imposed by the policing agents of global finance to improve finance’s chances of profiting from its investment in the Third World debt market. I want to insist on this as a critical part of the history of finance capital’s rise to dominion at the end of the twentieth century. We need to see this rise as rooted in the progressive structuration of global networks facilitating the movement of credit money from North to South and the anticipated extraction, through interest and attendant debt obligations, of profit from southern economies to northern investors. The history of finance’s centralization in the global capitalist system is thus at the same time the history of the Third World’s debt crisis and the immiseration it produced. The crisis “transformed the role of banking” around the world, “and it was out of this

52

Chapter 2

that, in turn, the revolution in derivatives and hedge funds so crucial to the globalization of finance eventually emerged” (Panitch and Gindin 2005: 57). It is no accident that the central financial instruments, institutions, professionals, and cultural dispositions central to contemporary finance emerged in the 1970s and 1980s—they all relied on the same political interventions into global economic activity (the dismantling of the gold standard in 1971, the Volcker shock of 1981, etc.) that created and intensified global sovereign debt and the financial infrastructure it created. Resting on a new mode of northern dominion over southern economies in the ostensibly global capitalist system, backed by a political force substituting for the cold war militarization of global security relations, ensuring the extraction of financial resources from already cash-­strapped societies through new forms of dependency . . . all of this underwrites the rise of the form of finance capital operating in the global capitalist system today. The Global South’s turn to export expansion is not a separate condition of this imperial formation. I am here positioning the Third World’s late twentieth-­century industrialization boom in general and export promotion strategies in particular as effects of this financial structuration, not simply global capital’s search for low-­wage settings for industrial relocation. Export-­ oriented industrialization arises, we know, as part of the adjustment packages imposed on debtor nations by the IMF and World Bank in their mandate to protect northern banks’ financial investments—this is the standard balance of payments vision of export promotion at the heart of neoliberal planning. But it also, I argue, emerges through these financial networks in another, less obvious way, one that becomes clear when we follow the money trail further and ask where it all went. Whether negotiated by agents of government or domestic banks in receiving countries, foreign loans generally made their way into the local banking system, charging its bankers and loan officers with carrying out the distributive agendas on which the loan was initially arranged. The question, then, if we want to understand the finance boom from a global perspective, is what the banking systems in loan-­receiving countries of the Global South did with all this foreign credit money suddenly flowing into them. Where did all that money go? What we will see is how select export industries came, under the conditions of global capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, to appear to domestic banks as the most profitable sites for them to invest the inflated volume of credit they were entrusted with handling. The Ecuadorian case provides an especially clear window into these processes, one that will lead us back to the



The Rise of Imperial Finance 53

foundations of Ecuador’s cut-­flower industry. Mapping these domestic links in the global finance chain begins, as our larger story did, with oil.

Ecuador’s Oil-­Saturated Entry into Debt Ecuador is an oil-­producing country and so, like all other petroleum-­exporting countries, it benefited enormously from the price increases occasioned by the 1973 crisis. These benefits were heightened by the oil boom that began the year before, which caused gross domestic product (GDP) contributions from oil to jump to 50 percent and occasioned a massive increase in the amount of money circulating through the state and national banks. The banking system, in turn, experienced explosive growth in the 1970s, with the number of private banks operating in the country increasing by 45 to 50 percent in just ten years and for the number of independent financial institutions jumping from one at the start of the decade to one hundred by its end (Miño Grijalva 2008: 200; De la Torre Friere 2000: 73). Several of these new banks were international ones, which saw Ecuador’s oil boom as a rare opportunity in the developing world, otherwise hit by massive liquidity crunches (Chiriboga Moncayo 1978: 58). But if, as Alberto Acosta (1990: 273) argues, this period marked the start of a “euphoria, without precedent, for international finance,” in which “petroleum profits changed the financial situation of Ecuador” forever, much of this change centered, similar to other Latin American countries at the time, on the management of debt. The surge in petrodollars flowing through Ecuador created a sense of limitless financial expansion in the country, fueling grand oil-­funded developmental projects and a sharp increase in the country’s ability to attract foreign credit. Paradoxically, Ecuador’s foreign debt grew at the same time as its domestic revenue bases grew, leading to what Alberto Acosta calls a “vicious circle” starting to engulf the Ecuadorian economy: “oil, which allowed the country to improve its financial image in international markets and which, definitely, was attractive for the concession of credit, couldn’t even pay the interest on the debt, in spite of reaching the highest market prices ever recorded” (Acosta 1990: 300–301). The solution was equally circular, based on changing hydrocarbon legislation to allow for increased oil exploration, just to finance the debt—debt which grew 96.6 percent between 1971 and 1975, a time when an average of $110 million in foreign credit was coming in per year (Acosta 1990: 275, 302–303). The domestic banking sector then, whose dramatic “expansion responded to the desires

54

Chapter 2

of financial capital to achieve a greater participation in the appropriation of petroleum rent and in the flow of foreign capital, which came massively in the form of credit” (Acosta 1990: 277), found that its moment of “financial flourishing inevitably produced a brutal dependency [on] the emitting institute” (De la Torre Friere 2000: 74) that was channeling credit its way—tying Ecuador snugly into the pattern of finance capital’s debt-­led expansion throughout Latin America in the early to mid-­1970s. This twin pattern—a rapidly expanding banking sector amid accelerated financial dependency—intensified in the latter half of the 1970s, when Ecuador entered into a long period of “aggressive indebtedness,” which came to demand, for debt repayment, three of every four dollars earned from exports, totaling more than $5 billion in debt servicing between 1979 and 1981 (Acosta 1990: 281–283, 295). This surplus of credit offers flowing in (over 70 percent of which was coming from foreign private banks), the ease with which it was obtained, and the inflated national banking sector equipped to dispense it generated what Alberto Acosta (1990: 288–299) calls an enduring “mentality of speculation” among the country’s political and economic elite. This mentality endured through the shift in lending policies resulting from Mexico’s suspension of debt payments in 1982, when most incoming loans were arranged by the IMF, not commercial banks, in renegotiation arrangements designed to guarantee repayment to IMF clients. Throughout the 1980s, Ecuador renegotiated its foreign debt through IMF intermediation five times. One of the first conditions of new loans, Acosta (1990: 305, 315) reports, written into the Program of Socio-­Economic Stabilization of 1982 and again in the Program of Economic Stabilization of 1983, involved the “privileging of export activities,” including “certain lines of agroindustry and manufacture, especially those producing immediate consumption goods.” Export promotion was, Acosta (1990: 315) summarizes, the only economic platform considered able to “confront the growing balance of payments deficit and establish austerity measures to reduce fiscal imbalances.” It was in this context, the same year that Mexico inaugurated Latin America’s debt crisis and the international banking community invited the IMF to restructure the terms of international lending, that Ecuador’s cut-­flower industry was born. This conjuncture is critical to understanding the rapid growth of the cut-­flower sector over the next decade—if the global lending spree and petroleum boom of the 1970s produced an inflated domestic banking sector in Ecuador, the crisis and austerity measures of the 1980s oriented that credit around export promotion activities under the auspices of trade



The Rise of Imperial Finance 55

balance correction and debt remediation. The 1990s, in turn, would add a new surge of funds to this initiative when another “rapid monetization of the economy brought in [another] sizable credit boom” facilitated by financial liberalization policies that deregulated banking activities and expanded the country’s banking sector even further (Quispe-­Agnoli and Whistler 2006: 64). We can now bring the pieces of this story together, showing how global finance, domestic banks, and the cut-­flower sector intersected in the genesis of this new agro-­export complex.

CHAPTER 3

Speculative Blooms and Busts

The previous chapter showed how a new mode of global finance capital emerged in the 1970s and 1980s through the consolidation of sovereign debt in the former Third World. This chapter documents how this new reality of global finance effected major changes in Ecuador’s banking infrastructure, which, in turn, gave birth to its cut-­flower sector. Industry insiders will show us how the speculative logic governing debt-­based financial extraction overtook the entire business of flower production in its early years, generating unimaginable profits for everyone involved. Until, that is, the whole system fell in on itself. Let’s begin this story by following debt/credit through the infrastructure it created.

Linking Finance and Flowers The critical link in the chain connecting global moneylenders, domestic banks, and upstart flower growers was a then-­relatively minor credit division of the Central Bank of Ecuador called the National Financing Corporation (CFN). Founded in 1964 by the first military junta that ruled Ecuador from 1963 to 1966, the CFN was intended to be the state’s primary “development” bank, providing credit to businesses in sectors prioritized by current government policy. In the mid-­1960s, these priorities reflected the continental Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) orthodoxy about economic development, focused on reducing national dependence on foreign manufactured goods through domestic industrial expansion. For two decades, state credit was given exclusively to industry creation, most of which occurred in urban areas (Miño 2008: 167–168). By 1982, economic priorities in Ecuador had shifted, centering on concerns about its mounting foreign debt and ways to reduce the country’s



Speculative Blooms and Busts 57

dependence on oil. Responding to both concerns, the Monetary Board that year assigned a line of funding to the CFN’s new Export Promotions Fund (FOPEX), which specifically sought to stimulate the production of “nontraditional” export goods. Its long list of products eligible for state-­supported export elaboration is surprising in two ways: for one, all products identified are agricultural goods—avocado, watermelon, garlic, cardamom, cilantro, and so on are mentioned as products deserving support—itself signaling a radical break from the ISI years. Notable too is that “for the first time ever, some products from the highlands” are identified as having major export potential (Velastegui Rodriguez 1989: 71). Recall how hacienda dominion over the highlands made exporting a uniquely coastal endeavor. Figuring highland agricultural products as at once “nontraditional” and potential ambassadors for Ecuador’s entry into a globalized export-­centered capitalist economy signaled a major historical rupture: the hacienda system was over. And all of Ecuador was now open for business. It was at precisely this time—October 1982—that Mauricio Dávalos approached the CFN for a loan to start the country’s very first export rose plantation. His solicitation was successful—but not immediately. Three decades later, Dávalos was still baffled by the fact that it took the CFN until April 1983 to approve his credit request. His explanation for the delay is notable. The money he received, he stressed to me, was “the first credit that the National Financing Corporation gave to agriculture, the first. Before this they had never given any. So we had to struggle hard to convince them, to explain it to them and everything—more so because this was something completely new, completely new. They had absolutely no idea [about cut-­flowers]. But finally they approved [our loan].” The CFN loaned Dávalos 13 million sucres (around U.S.$150,000) on a five-­year repayment plan. He soon discovered how insignificant this amount was to the startup costs of a flower plantation, having to add 7 million sucres (around U.S.$82,000) of personal funds and 11 million sucres (around U.S.$130,000) from a private lending house just to get the plantation going. There is a remarkable overlap here between Dávalos’s credit request—the first loan the CFN gives to an agricultural project and for the country’s first nationally owned flower plantation—and the state’s economic policy shift toward export-­led development—one, moreover, that prioritizes both agrarian and highlands-­based enterprises. But the convergence is greater still. Topping the CFN’s 1982 short list of exportable products, those designated as high priorities for funding, are flowers. Flowers. Something no one had even thought to grow and export from Ecuador before Dávalos (excepting Neptalí

58

Chapter 3

Bonifaz who, to my knowledge, did not solicit credit from the CFN in these years). The relationship between flower growers and the CFN would soon become so intimate that it became common, by at least the end of the twentieth century, to hear industry pioneers saying that “without the National Financing Corporation there would be no floriculture at all in Ecuador.” Dávalos told me this in 2014. So too did the senior director of the CFN in Quito, citing the corporation’s 1983 loan to Dávalos as the precise beginning of Ecuador’s cut-­flower industry. This, too, is how Miguel Moscero, owner of the Arbusta plantation group and recipient of a $300,000 loan from the CFN in 1985, summarized the industry’s origins in a comprehensive study of Ecuador’s export history—“without the CFN, the flowers business would not exist,” Moscero emphasized (Hernández et al. 2010: 63). But if the CFN provided necessary startup funds for flower growers, what did the flower industry offer the CFN and, with that, the state it represented? In a study of the CFN’s vision during the 1980s, Velastegui Rodriguez (1989: 72) identifies the 1982 CFN-­FOPEX accord as the exact moment when economic policy in Ecuador shifted from its old ISI-­based agenda to a fully export-­led development model. This is also, we noted, the moment when agriculture returns to the forefront of state interest, the highlands region for the first time becomes identified as a site of export potential, and flowers get singled out for dedicated funding. To Velastegui Rodriguez (1989: 72, emphasis added), the point of this was simple: “After elaborating this primary list” of prioritized export products, the CFN “proceeded to select projects to execute immediately, since the country needed foreign currency urgently.” This is an important point. It helps us begin to see the unique ways that commodities are valued when they are conceptualized in the first instance as export products. Here the returns are measured, generally, in strictly financial terms (as opposed to, say, reducing the reproduction costs for domestic labor or supporting urban growth) and, specifically, as vehicles for capturing “foreign currency.” But what does “foreign currency” mean here? This vocabulary enters state priorities, remember, at the very moment when foreign debt in Ecuador and throughout Latin America shifts from being conceptualized as a temporary problem to being identified as a “crisis.” Ecuador’s initial response to debt-­ as-­crisis was, it will be recalled, to borrow more money ostensibly to expand petroleum production but actually uses it to pay interest on the existing debt. Petroleum, as a state-­owned resource whose exploitation is sold in concessions to private companies, promises direct contributions to government coffers. Other exports, privately owned, bring in more indirect contributions



Speculative Blooms and Busts 59

through trade-­balance adjustments, export tariffs, and liquidity circulating in national banks. “Foreign currency,” as the objective of export promotion, has to be understood as referring to more than simply the earnings produced from export sales. Beyond this “generative” capacity (making money) of exports, they also seem to be developing a “magnetic” capacity, in their ability to attract foreign currency in the form of investments from potential creditors. What I mean is that as international creditors became more careful about giving loans to countries unable to repay what they already owed, and as structural adjustment packages imposed export elaboration on debtor countries as a condition of future loans, redirecting existing state funds to export expansion demonstrates commitment to playing by the rules, thereby fulfilling the conditions for new loans. It also opens up new independent avenues for direct foreign investment under the banner of “development assistance.” For instance, in 1985, the government of Ecuador signed an agreement with USAID to support nontraditional export development in the country, specifically “to fund select agro-­industrial activities oriented towards exporting” (quoted in Velastegui Rodriguez 1989: 73). These funds were dispensed through the very same CFN-­FOPEX program following the priorities identified in 1982, diverting a large share into the growing cut-­flower industry. In other words, loans earmarked for supporting export elaboration now come in not under the banner of “credit” but “development” and, moreover, promise to reduce, not expand, the national debt.

Banks with Two Floors This wave of CFN funding stimulated the first phase of nationally owned flower growing in Ecuador and highlights the CFN’s formative role in that. But the already close relationship between the CFN and flowers became even closer in the next decade, when the CFN created an entirely new credit arrangement that became directly responsible for this sector’s surge in the 1990s—the wave Darwin Campoverde was swept up in when he accepted credit from bankers in Cayambe’s central park. At the start of the decade, financial policy was governed by a spirit of deregulation and centered on efforts to stimulate the private, commercial banking sector. One of the key policy changes promoting this was the April 1990 Organic Law of Financial Administration and Control—an awkward name for a law abolishing most devices used to administer or control financial transactions in the country.

60

Chapter 3

The law eliminated the CFN’s capacity to dispense funds directly to clients (what Ecuadorians call a “first floor bank”), making it, instead, channel credit to other financial institutions, especially private banks, to distribute and administer (making it into what Ecuadorians call a “second floor bank”). This new arrangement led the CFN to devise a program called the Global Multi-­Sectoral Credit Program (PGCM). The PGCM, which lasted from 1992 to 1998, was designed explicitly to make the CFN and, with that, the state a nexus between foreign banks and Ecuador’s private business sector. Its aim was to “channel its resources and those coming in from national and international financial institutions [to projects that] would stimulate capital markets . . . [and] stimulate the market in financial products, promote the [national] export sector, and facilitate lines of credit from foreign banks” (Barreno Carranza 2000: 32–33). Notice how many different but intertwined objectives find expression in this program. Notice too the route through which this financial support is to come—the corporation is to use its position within the state to encourage international financial institutions and foreign banks to loan money to it, money that it then would loan to domestic banks, which would be expected to carry out the above objectives. So, once the PGCM got started, where did its funds actually come from? And where did they go? Data from the Central Bank and CFN reveal three main sources of funding for the PGCM. The first is the Washington-­based Inter-­American Development Bank, which gave $100 million to the program in 1992, followed by another $2,270,200 in technical support. This loan was secured directly by the government of Ecuador, channeled through the CFN, and came from “capital supplied by member countries [and] resources obtained in financial markets” (Barreno Carranza 2000: 49). The only condition imposed on these funds was that they be used to support “export development.” The second source of funding was the World Bank, which gave $75 million to the program in 1993 to “partially finance projects intended to develop the private sector” (Banco Central del Ecuador in Barreno Carranza 2000: 51). The third contributor was the Andean Promotional Corporation (Corporación Andina de Fomento, or CAF), a business development and investment bank whose main goal is to act as an intermediary between international finance markets and the Andean region, marketing the investment opportunities of its member states to private commercial lenders. In 1996, CAF contributed $140 million to the PGCM program under the rubric of “reactivating the productive sector and strengthening the financial sector” in Ecuador (CAF 1996: 31; Barreno Carranza 2000: 52). In 1997, CAF contributed another $628 million to the



Speculative Blooms and Busts 61

project, $100 million of which was earmarked for “financing loans destined to creating, expanding, and modernizing productive activities in the private sector” (Barreno Carranza 2000: 52). The PGCM exemplifies precisely what I earlier called the “magnetic” properties attributed to exports, in the way they are able to draw foreign currency into the national economy in the form of credit. But where, then, did all this money go? Using 1996 as a sample year reveals that funds from this program were distributed through ten different financial institutions—seven private banks, two banking cooperatives, and one independent financing house. From there, the largest single share of all loans (around 38 percent) was given to the agricultural sector—primarily cut-­flower growers and, to a lesser extent, tuna producers: “International financial organisms have significantly supported both the economic growth and development of the agro-­export sector in the country, by way of the preferential granting of credit to this sector by the National Financing Corporation” (Barreno Carranza 2000: 9). Comparing data on credit dispensation with growth in these sectors between 1993 and 1998 (the years of the PGCM program) shows a close correlation: “In the cases of flowers and tuna, we see a notable increase in the last years, which we can positively attribute to the concession of credit by the CFN, particularly the multi-­sectoral credits,” or PGCM (Barreno Carranza 2000: 73). Flowers, in particular, show an increase from $39 million FOB in 1993 to nearly $162 million FOB in 1998, increasing flowers’ contributions to export sales (including oil) from 1.3 percent in 1993 to 3.9 percent in 1998. For the CFN, the PGCM involved consolidating a labyrinthine approach to financial administration. Soliciting funds from foreign sources, it used the Central Bank as its guarantor, then sold these funds to private banks or lending houses, which then set the terms for their dispensation. The CFN, now little more than a buyer and seller of credit, was thereby entrusted with meeting all the accumulated obligations (terms of repayment, gains from interest rates, collecting returns from banks, etc.) from each institution through which the funds flowed. New here, in comparison with the ISI years, is the CFN’s relationship with both the state and individual creditors. Neither it nor the state it represents is the actual “source” of these funds—these come from the ballooning world of international finance and the multilateral credit agencies that draw in those funds. Neither the CFN/state nor international finance/multilateral creditors have to deal with the messiness of individual client negotiations (that is for domestic banks to worry about), though both can claim to be stimulating financial sector growth and supporting local

62

Chapter 3

development initiatives in poorer countries. Let’s now follow this money trail one step further as it moves through Ecuador’s commercial banks and into the hands of flower growers.

How Credit Was Dispensed to Flower Growers: A Look Inside the Banks If the CFN’s Global Multi-­Sectoral Credit Program functioned as a crucial point of coordination between global finance capital and local productive capital in the 1990s, it was Ecuador’s private banks that were most transformed in the process. These private institutions were entrusted with dispensing PGCM funds to clients and were thus able to set the terms of credit to their advantage, leading to the aggressive competition among banks for loan takers that Darwin Campoverde witnessed in Cayambe’s central park. This sudden flow of foreign currency into the domestic banking system and the newly “flexible and permissible” banking culture caused a massively inflated financial “bubble,” signaled by an eruption of new banks in Ecuador (Herrera Román 2012: 26). There were nineteen banks operating in Ecuador at the start of 1990 and thirty-­one by the end of 1993 (Herrera Román 2012; Rodriguez Torres 1999: 93). But even older banks changed considerably during these years, reorienting their business models and service priorities around the opportunities opening up under this credit boom. One of the banks most important to consolidating the cut-­flower sector as a primary space for realizing profit from credit sales was the Guayaquil-­based Banco del Pacífico, which, by 1994, had built itself into the second largest bank in Ecuador (Herrera Román 2012: 28). The bank was founded in 1972 by coastal banana grower Marcel J. Laniado de Wind, a graduate of the Zamorano agricultural training institute in Honduras who later served as the minister of agriculture during the presidency of León Febres Cordero (1984–1988)—the very president who, as mentioned earlier, developed several preferential credit schemes for flower growers and who likely played a role in Neptalí Bonifaz’s influential meeting with Israeli carnation grower/security contractor Joseph Levy. Alex Bustos, owner of the Rosa Montt group of plantations in Cayambe, almost understates the bank’s influence when he tells me that “the Banco del Pacífico was very important to the development of floriculture in Ecuador.” Bustos started Rosa Montt with credit obtained from this bank in 1995, right in the middle of the National Financing Corporation’s PCGM program. He describes the ease with



Speculative Blooms and Busts 63

which credit was given out in these years: “We obtained credit from the Banco del Pacífico with only a phone call. In other words, I picked up the phone and they gave the company one hundred thousand dollars, with just a telephone call. Right into the account. I was twenty-­five years old.” Bustos was, admittedly, an atypical exemplar of the neophyte flower grower. He had by then graduated from the same Zamorano agrarian school in Honduras that the bank’s founder had. It was common in that era, Bustos told me, for flower growers to get lists of Zamorano graduates and reach out to them with job offers. After graduation in 1991, he was headhunted by a flower company called Flor America (eventually bought out by Dole, before collapsing), where he, despite having a degree in agricultural economics, was put in charge of rose and carnation cultivation for the entire plantation. At the time, “I didn’t even know what flowers were,” he told me. At Flor America, Bustos was to oversee an emerging propagation wing of the farm, where the owners were trying to cultivate flower bush seedlings (patrones) to skip the high costs of purchasing patented varieties from Europe, the single greatest production cost growers faced in that era.1 Learning this valuable skill led Bustos to be lured away to a competing plantation consortium, Grupo Arbusta (owned by Miguel Moscero, mentioned above), with the offer of owning shares in the company and becoming its general manager. Bustos accepted the job but also, in 1995, bought an eight-­hectare section of an old hacienda (named Anchola) in Cayambe to start his own flower plantation. This became Rosa Montt, the plantation that Bustos set up and ran while continuing to work for Arbusta for another four years. Thus, by the time Bustos sought out credit to open his own plantation, he already had land, experience, an agricultural degree (from Zamorano, no less), and a name for himself—much more of a guarantee on investments than most growers of the period could claim when seeking loans in the 1980s and 1990s. But how did banks actually function in the midst of this credit boom? Bustos’s business partner and financial officer in Rosa Montt, Paúl Piedra, gives us a unique insider’s view into the banking culture of the PGCM years. Between 1994 and 1998, Piedra worked in the Banco del Pacífico’s central office in Quito as one of five agronomists hired as agrarian credit analysts to evaluate, exclusively, the credit solicitations of flower growers. This fact alone—that a private bank would have a team of analysts devoted entirely to managing the credit of a single industry—should tell us how important, voluminous, and profitable credit lines to flower growers were for banks at this time. It also signals the tight convergences emerging between these two sectors and

64

Chapter 3

foreshadows something of their shared fates. I asked Piedra to describe for me the kind of person who would walk through his doors looking for credit and how the solicitation process played out. “Initially,” he told me, “flower growers were people born into rich families of the highlands, families who didn’t need to do much work to ask for credit. I remember many people with names, people from known lineages from the capital, would simply arrive [at my office], and say ‘look, I need money for flowers, where do I sign?’ The family name mattered,” he asserted, “since it made them known [conocido], and it linked them to other industries, often very successful ones in the lineage of the Bank. And thus it could more or less be considered collateral credit: ‘now give them this for the flowers, so they can diversify.’ ‘When they need a million dollars, give it, approve it, no problem.’ In other words, in this era, credit for flowers was pretty much preapproved.” This outpouring of credit generated new entrepreneurial desires among the professional employees of the traditional propertied class. By the mid-­ 1990s, Piedra notes, he’d be approached by people “who by then had worked two or three years in flowers,” as agronomists or technical officers and who, like Bustos and Campoverde, sought to “liberate themselves and wanted to open their own flower plantation.” Extending credit to this group of urban professionals expanded the profile of the capitalist class. It tied entry into this class, long closed to those not born into families with names, not simply to participation in the new export-­led economy but specifically to participation in the cut-­flower business. Soon, Piedra says, “every son of your neighbor wanted his own flower farm.” This is the era Ramiro Peñaherrera was referencing when he told me (quoted earlier) that, by the early 1990s, doctors, lawyers, and urban professionals of all sorts would abandon their practices to get credit and start their flower farms: “They’d give up their practices and do it, really do it.” The profile of the “conocido” expanded from merely reflecting people with important family names and membership in the country’s elite to include more modest sectors of the urban middle class who, either by work experience in existing flower farms or lured by the promise of easy money, found themselves venturing up to the highlands in search of their fortune. This is the moment when the country’s flower boom and credit boom most directly coincide. The number of flower plantations in the country increased dramatically in the early to mid-­1990s, from 286 hectares of land producing flowers in 1990 to 1,167 hectares in 1995 (Yépez Urbano 1997: 39; Vega 2009: 4). Data like these can be misleading. They can naturalize the process of economic growth and make it seem like success simply breeds expansion. Our



Speculative Blooms and Busts 65

efforts to unearth the occulted forces behind this growth shows, instead, that Ecuador’s flower sector began and boomed only because of a massive global drive to move large sums of money through debt, credit, and development schemas from the Global North to places where it could—through force, promise, and enterprise—generate more money. As we have seen, the massive influx of urban professionals into Ecuador’s flower sector, as well as the hyperexpansion of new plantations, was entirely conditioned by the seemingly limitless availability of credit for anyone wanting to start a flower farm. “The thing is,” Piedra told me, “it was extremely easy for floriculturalists [to get credit] because there were lots of lines of credit. There was liquidity in the banks in this era and there were external funds coming in for flower growers.” He confirmed the impression that credit was given out to nearly anyone seeking it, and among banks, there was intense competition to attract new recipients. This was possible, Piedra told me, “because we had a lot of range in our [financial] products. So if you didn’t want FLAR credit [see below], fine!, there was [the CFN’s] multisectoral credit, or it was financed through credit cards, or from funds taken directly from import tariffs . . . in other words, everything was done to lower the costs to the flower grower and to get this account for ourselves.” This competition among banks inspired them to fabricate novel forms of credit and recycle PGCM funds internally, using it as collateral for negotiating funds directly from the very international creditors that were providing money to the CFN’s PGCM program. For instance, he said, “we in the bank created a direct line [of credit] under the mortgage line of the Banco del Pacífico. There was [also] a thing called the FLAR [Latin American Reserve Funds], a line of credit from CAF [Andean Promotional Corporation], a line of credit they created. The World Bank put in funds, the Inter-­American Development Bank put in funds.” By the mid-­ 1990s, in other words, credit had become big business, for local banks and international financial institutions alike, each of which aggressively sought out sites to offload it. For supranational financial institutions, it was domestic banks that played this role. For the banks, prospective flower growers played this role, each targeted as a link in a chain of money’s movement and profit’s intended return through interest. Ecuador’s emergence as a major global site of cut-­flower production and export happened as a result of this. International creditors made it as easy as possible for Ecuador’s banks to mediate these financial flows. They made the deregulation of Ecuador’s financial sector a condition of their continued willingness to loan money to the state or to discuss the terms of the loans it already carried. For instance,

66

Chapter 3

the October 1994 Renegotiation of the External Debt Program included the imposition of a series of new national laws, including the General Law of Financial Institutions (Yépez Urbano 1997: 4), that “eliminated entrance barriers and administrative controls and simplified the legal oversight of the financial sector,” leading both to a “massive amplification of the already inflated” finance system and the height of the “credit boom” (Miño 2008: 250–251). Arosemena (1999: 57) describes the banking system that emerged from this law as a “credit supermarket”2 that “converted banks into money tables,” as in dinner tables, flaunting their credit offers as if to beggars arriving at a feast. “Credit soared” at this time, Jacome (2004: 15) reports, “by 40 percent in 1993 and 50 percent in 1994.” While critics of this financial deregulation process accuse it for undoing the historic developmentalist pact underlying national credit systems, dispensing funds “without any interest in the country’s development through credit,” the targeted emphasis on dispensing funds to the flower sector might show, instead, the ways that older productivist discourses surrounding development’s mission were absorbed by the speculative political economy of global finance. In this context, Piedra says, his role as an agrarian credit analyst was not so much to evaluate the fitness of the project seeking funding or the applicant’s capacity to manage the loan. It was, rather, to analyze the credit (super)market and to find the most appropriate source of funding for the client, becoming akin to a personal shopper for them. “This was our role in the project,” he explained, to find “the appropriate type of financing, whether it be CFN, or FLAR, or the World Bank. Everyone wanted to get involved.” “But did these external funds come in specifically earmarked for the flower sector?” I asked. “Yes, there were direct lines,” he confirmed, though “not necessarily saying ‘loan these to flower growers,’ but saying ‘loan this to agriculture.’ But in the highlands, most of it went to flower growers.” For instance, he continued, “CAF deposited let’s say a line for ten million dollars to the agricultural sector, for what’s earning [a profit].” And, as discussed above, flowers had already shown themselves, since the time of Neptalí Bonifaz and Mauricio Dávalos, to be the only thing under the category of agriculture proving to generate not only some profit but also lucrative profits. “Agriculture” enters this discussion as a category of developmental attention and intervention, codified as socially beneficial by its link to food production and sustenance, though subverted from this link to such an extent by the export orientation of current development models that cut-­flowers, promising none of this, can still fulfill the mandate to support national development through agricultural investment.



Speculative Blooms and Busts 67

Profitability emerges as the mark of sound investment, seemingly a guarantee that large sums of money could be quickly and freely pumped in, turned into capital, and paid back. This led to the almost unimaginable amounts of loans offered to upstart growers in these days, the extremely liberal conditions of these loans, and the precarious location this would put national banks in as mediators of these transactions. As Piedra explained, drawing on his experience inside the Banco del Pacifico, “Loans were given out in long terms, without restrictions. There were credits of a million [dollars], a million and a half [dollars], two million [dollars], without restrictions and obviously with good [interest] rates. But the bank provides the guarantee. In other words, if the client doesn’t pay, the bank pays.” That, he emphasized “was the contingency.” This contingency will come to occupy the center of a national crisis that unfolded in the late 1990s.

The Unusual Role of Land The image of this credit boom being a complete free-­for-­all, devoid of any guarantees placed on loan dispensation, needs to be slightly tempered. There was one thing that all banks required clients to possess before applying for funds: land. “The conditions were the same everywhere,” Piedra told me. “You had to have land or acquire land” to get credit. This single condition seems straightforward: land appears to be the guarantee on the loan, collateral that the bank can seize should the creditor become unable to pay. As we shall see, land did come to fulfill this role at the end of the 1990s, when conditions in the financial sector started to change and growers’ abilities to pay back their loans became severely constrained. But in the early 1990s, when funding seemed limitless, land played a much more complicated role in Ecuador’s credit complex than simply acting as collateral. For one thing, requiring loan applicants to already own land before soliciting funds shows the banks’ role in establishing a degree of class continuity between the emergent export economy and the recently dismantled hacienda economy. As mentioned, the agrarian reforms of the 1960s and 1970s had left hacendado families with greatly reduced but still sizable quantities of land as well as hopes for agrarian modernization and expanded profits through dairy production. Dairy failed to realize these hopes, greatly limiting the economic value of land, which ex-­hacienda-­owning families tended to hold on to, if only for weekend country homes, since no money was to be made by their

68

Chapter 3

sale. This made ex-­hacendados and their children, by the 1980s and 1990s, those most immediately ready to take advantage of the burgeoning cut-­flower economy and the bank loans offered to upstart growers. As Ramiro Peñaherrera, co-­owner of Latinflor told me, the first flower growers were “generally from Quito. They’re hacendados, have money . . . ex-­hacendados, who have money, and can mortgage off their land. To get bank loans, you know, they have friends in the banks . . . there’s all this intermingling, and so you get a loan from the bank officer, who happens to be a good friend of yours or whatever, and I’m not saying this out of hearsay, I’ve done it, I know it myself, first hand. It’s all very cozy. It’s all very interrelated.” Peñaherrera is here outlining, with his nudge-­and-­wink insider’s commentary, the first stage of what I have described here and in Chapter 1 as the conocido structure of intimacy between bankers and flower growers, the already established familiarity between the landed elite and the country’s money managers. But he slips a critical point into this narration of the landed elite’s path to obtaining credit— the land, however owned, must first be converted into a mortgage to access credit. This point was included in Darwin Campoverde’s summary of how bank managers spoke to prospective credit recipients in Cayambe’s central park, which he repeated for me in a mock conversation between a bank official and a credit solicitor. The banks would say, “‘You’re going to start a flower project, eh? OK, you have the land?’ So you buy a hacienda. ‘Now mortgage the hacienda and we’ll give you the money.’ And really, it was that easy. The bankers, all they required for this, to guarantee these loans, was land, nothing more. And so it was really easy to get credit.” Key here, in the view of already owned land becoming a mortgage base, is the movement away from land being simply collateral for a loan to becoming itself the source of the money that arrives through the loan. This is a step toward a major transformation occurring at this time in the ways value gets attached to land, from being a primarily productive resource to becoming a primarily financial resource. As collateral, it is land’s potential productivity that ascribes value to it. Mortgaging land to receive credit is different. It ascribes value and provides returns on the spot and subjects future production from the land (the money made from flower sales) to the conditions of that initial transaction (i.e., how much of the loan can be repaid each month from profits earned). I will come back to the significance of this shortly. What’s important to note at this point is that while the banks’ conditioning of loans upon land ownership gave hacienda-­owning families an advantage in their ability to access credit, it in no way cut others off from their



Speculative Blooms and Busts 69

ability to get it. In fact, the very same conditions that encouraged hacendado families to retain their lands through the post-­agrarian reform years—that is, there being no lucrative use for land, thus devaluing land’s price, making it not profitable to sell—made it attractive as an entry condition into flower growing for those with no history of land ownership or rural living at all. Land, in other words, was cheap, and if that was all banks needed to finance all remaining startup costs for a wildly profitable export business, then others, with only a small amount of money saved up, could get involved. This combination of cheap land and abundant credit seems to have made flower growers even out of people with no entrepreneurial ambitions at all. Here is Ana Luz de Bueno, owner of the Sisapamba rose plantation in southern Cayambe, describing how she got into the cut-­flower business. Her story describes the desire of the urban professional classes to emulate the highland elite lifestyle, if not during their productive lives, at least during their retirement years. Things change, though, when the countryside transforms from being valued only as a site of leisure for such a class into the epicenter of a new economic model. “When we bought this hacienda [in 1992], it was supposedly to rest,” de Bueno told me. “And yet my husband bought something very big. I told him to get something small, to have a horse, a pool, and that I didn’t want to work anymore, since I’ve worked a lot.3 My husband assured me that never in his life would he put up a greenhouse [for flower growing], since it seemed to him to a tremendous affront to nature. But, well, since we’d helped set up the plantation of a friend, my husband thought it looked precious and, completely ignorantly, we got involved.” “Well why did you get involved?” I asked. She attributed it to the stories growers told of the almost miraculous nature of their fortunes, beginning with the price of land. “If you ask them how they’re doing, they say things are marvelous, that they never owe anything to anybody, since here they sell you land at one dollar per hectare, or whatever such thing. And me, in the beginning, I was going crazy, but I think it was because of this that we got involved, since it seemed like such a marvelous thing.” De Bueno’s account isn’t that unusual. In fact, with the exception of Neptalí Bonifaz, none of the pioneers of this industry I have so far quoted as telling me that the first flower growers came from hacienda-­owning families actually came from one themselves. Campoverde, as we saw above, was a young urbanite who had to be sent to Colombia and Israel to learn basic agricultural techniques and found rural living difficult. Mauricio Dávalos, Campoverde’s first employer and one of the industry’s founding fathers, was likewise not in any way connected to the old landed elite and came to own the

70

Chapter 3

land he used for his Agroflora plantation by buying it. In fact, he described for me in 2014 how he had to subvert, clandestinely, the land requirement for his loan with the CFN by signing a promise-­to-­purchase note with its owner, then using his loan money to pay for the land, which only then became the guarantee on that very loan. This wasn’t too tricky, he added, because the land at that time was “baratísima”—really, really cheap. Peñaherrera’s entry into flower growing evidences a mixture of these two paths, one deriving from the hacienda economy, the other not, while also highlighting the political stakes involved in land ownership at this time. Since the early 1900s, Peñaherrera’s family had owned a large hacienda named Santana just south of Quito’s city limits. In the late 1980s, the land seemed to have become both dormant and victim to the pressures of urban sprawl, with new migrants to the city settling closer and closer to Santana’s territory. Then, during the presidential elections of 1988, which pitted León Febres Cordero against the Democratic Left candidate Rodrigo Borja, squatters took over the land and built small houses and grew subsistence crops on it. Borja won the election and, according to Peñaherrera, because his uncle was a right-­wing candidate in Febres Cordero’s party, the new president not only refused to evict the squatters but championed their invasion as a legitimate “struggle of the poor.” Despite being told by everyone that he’d neither get the land back nor get any money for it, Peñaherrera was able to manipulate his basic knowledge of Marxist politics (learned while away at school in California) and portray himself as equally struggling against his corrupt father (who worked for Merrill Lynch in London), convincing the squatters to pay around U.S.$650,000 for title to land they had already taken. Peñaherrera got a third of the profit and, with Americans he knew from the Quito Tennis Club, used it to start his flower plantation, Latinflor. Ironically, the original land is now a barrio in south Quito called “Lucha de los Pobres”—The Struggle of the Poor.4 The moral that Peñaherrera draws from his own story is that anyone with a bit of money, even him—trained in “nothing, absolutely nothing” (his words)—could enter the flower business at this time. The abundance of credit is what made this possible, but what made credit widely accessible was the cheapness of land—this was the basic condition allowing credit to trigger the flower sector’s explosive growth. Once acquired, however, land becomes something different than what it was. Its cheapness and basis for credit calculations encouraged land hoarding well in excess of production objectives. Of the forty hectares of land that de Bueno, for instance, owns, only seven were under production when we met in April 2002. Campoverde bought



Speculative Blooms and Busts 71

twenty-­two hectares of land in 1994 but has since only put eleven into production. And Jorge Castellano purchased the entire six hundred hectares of hacienda Guangulqui (from, incidentally, Neptalí Bonifaz’s sister, Theresa) in 1987 for an equivalent of $98,446 (or $164/hectare) but turned only sixteen of it over to flower growing. Much of the reason for this gap between land owned and land under production has to do with the intensive nature of flower production. Roses, for instance, depending on the variety, altitude, and other factors, produce somewhere between fifty and eighty flowers per square meter per year. The gap also reflects the enormous costs involved in setting up and running a flower farm, estimated at $280,000 per hectare in 2001 (Proyecto Andino de Competitividad 2001: 87). I knew one grower who had to buy and mortgage sixty hectares of land just to get enough of a loan to set up eight hectares of land in rose production. But we also need to consider this pattern of land hoarding as evidencing growers’ entry into the art of speculation itself. The essence of this art, I argue, is an approach to land that treats it as a source of value independent of its productive capacity, as something that can generate financial returns on its own, not through production, but through circulation, in markets trafficking not in commodities but in financial assets, betting on future returns. This is how land first arrives on the scene in the credit cycle on which flower growing is based, valued as a financial asset long before becoming a productive one, as the baseline for credit (via the logic of mortgaging). What’s especially interesting is how land’s circuitous route to becoming productive gets recycled through the production process itself. A profitable farm and profitable sector increase the “value” of land, thus increasing the amount of credit that landowners can claim from banks and the impression of their industry’s guaranteed ability to pay back new and inflated lines of credit.5 In other words, once flowers start generating export profits, the value of land in flower-­producing areas goes up. The land itself—including that withheld from production—is now worth more and can generate profits simply by selling it off. As Paul Piedra put this, “In Cayambe, imagine, before, according to the bank registers, a hectare of land in Cayambe, speaking in dollars, even though it was in sucres at this time, you would buy for $1,000, $1,200. Because of floriculture, this has gone up to thirty, forty thousand dollars, in 1994, 1995. In other words, this was something abrupt, something unheard of, way out of the ordinary. People sold land here and became millionaires. Shhhh, imagine, everyone wanted to get into flowers, everyone.” And, to continue Piedra’s thought, such people could get “into flowers” by not actually growing

72

Chapter 3

flowers or getting only slightly involved in the trade, since the productive successes of flowers were simultaneously stimulating speculative forces of profit in land and credit, each feeding off one another and generating profits for all involved. However, there is one final component in this story of growers’ profits that still needs to be considered. This final ingredient underscores not only the strange mixture of productive and financial capital in the development of Ecuador’s cut-­flower sector but also the way that speculation became the glue holding them—and the flower industry—together.

Profit’s Currencies As we have seen, the cut-­flower sector was strategically targeted by banks as an especially attractive arena in which to dump the suddenly inflated amount of credit money they were receiving from international financial institutions. This targeted attention had to do partly with the ways that the flower industry seemed to exemplify, better than any other emergent industry, Ecuador’s national economic development priorities in the 1980s and 1990s and, at the same time, to fulfill the orthodox economic adjustment paradigms promoted by global financers—it is export oriented, producing a nontraditional commodity; offers waged labor opportunities in rural areas; and promotes technological advancement in the agrarian sector. However, more important than any of these factors—at least to domestic banks, for whom new creditors represented investment opportunities—was that flower growers were making money. And apparently, lots of money. Ultimately, the “credit boom” that accompanied Ecuador’s flower boom rested on a sense of this industry’s capacity to generate lucrative profits with ease (Yépez Urbano 1997: 98). But what was the source of this profit? This is a tricky question, especially for anthropologists. Putting people at the center of our research means that much of our data flow through them, not published texts. This is especially true of data that are by nature somewhat clandestine and strategically hidden from official records. Profit calculations, in an industry such as this, tend to be secreted away from documents. However, asking someone to reveal their methods for making it is equally suspect. People making money generally don’t readily reveal their strategies, particularly to someone living and identified, as I was, with the very people employed to produce it. In fact, the flower growers who I came to know best, people owning plantations where I conducted long-­term ethnographic research, universally denied making any



Speculative Blooms and Busts 73

real profit at all. As I discuss in coming chapters, flower growers tended to deflect my questions about their enterprise’s profits into statements about the social and economic benefits they were providing to the country, the region in which they were located and, especially, the Indigenous people who live there. It was only many years after I concluded my ethnographic research and was able to pose the question of profit as a historical question, one looking to these early years of the industry, distanced from and thus not implicating anyone in the present, that growers started to open their ledgers and speak to me about the ways money was made then. Unanimously, these conversations would conclude with claims that everything had changed and that they were no longer making any money at all. None of these statements, those addressing the past or the present, can be taken at face value as entirely accurate statements of the way things are or were. But because of this distancing effect that historical consciousness provides, and precisely because of the past’s ability to be constructed and used as critical commentary on the present (see Chapter 4), there is reason, I believe, to follow growers in their reflections on the historically specific conditions that made this industry so profitable in the 1990s. The actual amounts earned are not the issue so much as the broad political-­economic conditions enabling profit at this time. The first of these conditions, unanimously identified as a fundamental basis for profit in the flower industry, was the impressive difference between the production costs and sale prices for flowers throughout the 1980s and 1990s. As Alex Bustos summarizes, “It was tremendously easy to be a flower grower [back then]. It was a very lucrative industry in those years. In 1995, it cost 10 cents per stem to produce a rose and you’d sell it, on average, for 30 cents. In other words, you’d earn 20 cents per stem . . . and for a million stems? You’d be getting back two million dollars per hectare every year.” Paul Piedra echoes this calculation from the banks’ perspective. “The production costs we used in our assessments were calculated at 11 cents [per stem] and the sale price was at 30 cents, or sometimes even between 45 and 55 cents. In other words, a very large margin . . . completely beyond [anything else in the country]. So, imagine, under these parameters, loaning money wasn’t difficult.” This profit margin is what oriented the banks’ focus toward the flower sector: “So all this just grew. Almost 40 percent of the Banco del Pacífico’s portfolio in the highlands was in flowers. And so, imagine, 40 percent is a monstrosity . . . and we’re talking about profit margins of over 35 percent. In other words, it was a dream of a business in those years.”

74

Chapter 3

The sentimental nostalgia is here in full bloom. But this explanation of profit’s source is still incomplete. The simple formula of sale price minus production costs rested entirely on a second, and infinitely more important, variable, one that converted it from being a static calculation of expected returns into a dynamic recipe for limitless profitability. This second variable was currency exchange rates—specifically, the difference in value between the Ecuadorian sucre and the U.S. dollar. Exchange rates mattered in two ways. The first has to do with the cost to growers of bank credit. The circuit through which money arrived in growers’ hands involved several conversions between dollar and sucre values. Dispensations from global lenders were calculated in dollar amounts. Their transfer through the domestic banking system was in sucres. These banks spoke to potential clients in dollar amounts but generally calculated their loans in sucres, the currency of national banking ledgers. As Darwin Campoverde explained to me, speaking of the CFN’s PGCM program, “In those days there was a segment of credit called Fondos Financieros [Financing Funds]. Credit was given in dollars, but calculated in sucres, which was marvelous. And I remember, the production cost for roses was nine cents per stem.” Marvelous, indeed, but only because of a second way in which the currency differentials mattered. The costs of production we are referring to here—labor, land, greenhouse plastics, fertilizers, chemical inputs, irrigation tubes, and so on—were all bought in sucres, the local currency used in all domestic economic market transactions. Flowers, however, bought in primarily U.S. markets, were sold in dollars. Production costs and product sales, therefore, were transacted in different currencies. This is certainly generally true of many global export industries. But here’s why this mattered in Ecuador at this time—it was exactly during the years of the flower sector’s booming growth that Ecuador officially loosened its currency exchange rates (from being fixed at around 25 sucres to the U.S. dollar throughout the 1970s), sending the sucre into a rapid spiral of devaluation. Devaluations began slowly under the administration of Osvaldo Hurtado (1981–1984), but it was during the years of Febres Cordero’s presidency (the first to introduce stimulus plans for flower growers and the nontraditional export sector, 1984–1988) that the decline in the sucre’s value started to accelerate, dropping from 83 sucres to the dollar in 1984 to 435 in 1988. The subsequent administration of Rodrigo Borja (1988–1992) accelerated the sucre’s decline by introducing “a system of weekly mini-­devaluations and large devaluations to achieve an evolution of the currency exchange markets and to stimulate the competitiveness of the export sector,” dropping its value to 1,100



Speculative Blooms and Busts 75

sucres to the dollar in 1991 (Yépez Urbano 1997: 3). By the time the National Financing Corporation introduced its PGCM program and passed the General Law of Financial Administration in 1994, exchange rates had fallen to 2,197 sucres per U.S. dollar, beginning a rapid downward trend that would reach 18,287 sucres per U.S. dollar by 1999 (Banco Central del Ecuador). The sucre’s decline wreaked havoc on the country’s poor and working classes. Inflation skyrocketed, real wages declined, and produce brought to market dropped in value by the day. But for exporters like the flower growers, devaluations were a good thing. Steady devaluations of the sucre meant that, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, without any effort on their part, production costs were always decreasing, profits were always increasing, and even in the midst of a growing national debt crisis, credit was being thrown at them faster than they could accept it. Though he couldn’t remember the exact year this occurred, Carlos Ponce, part owner and manager of Rosas de los Andes, recalls a time when the government announced a 30 percent wage increase to offset the effects of inflation. And yet, calculated in terms of the sucre’s devaluation, Ponce admits, “We had actually reduced workers’ wages by 60 percent that year! This difference was one we profited from ourselves. Clearly, this was a terrible situation for the workers, and this is why we lived through manifestations, protests, and strikes, because they saw, without having to do a study, they just felt in their pockets every single day . . . [that] every day we were making more and every day they were making less.”

On Speculation, Production, and Profit: A Moral Cartography of Capitalism in Crisis Currency manipulations like these were widespread among Ecuador’s political and economic elite throughout the 1980s and 1990s. They became a standard way for businesses, banks, and even the state to survive mounting debt burdens and to magically convert debt into profit. In May 1980, for instance, Ecuador’s Monetary Board started allowing private debts to be held in dollars, inspiring banks to engage in a practice commonly known as the bicicleta financiera (financial bicycle): clients granted credit are told that the bank has run out of sucres and so must dispense and calculate their loan in U.S. dollars; the client, needing usable currency, immediately uses their dollars to buy sucres (which the bank suddenly finds); the bank earns profit through transaction costs, exchange differentials, interest rates, and the increasing

76

Chapter 3

cost in (ever devaluating) sucres of loans fixed at U.S. dollar amounts (De la Torre Friere 2000: 86–87). Similar tactics followed, the most notorious of which became known as the sucretization affair, undertaken by the Oswaldo Hurtado and Febres Cordero administrations in 1983–1984. Justified as a program of “stabilization credit” to the faltering private sector, sucretization absorbed into the state approximately U.S. $1.3 billion of dollar-­denominated foreign debt incurred by private companies between 1976 and 1982—a period in which, “as a result of the lending spree by Western commercial banks,” Ecuador’s national debt increased eighteen times and private debt grew by over twenty-­eight-­fold (Wong 2012: 91). This was a debt buyout for big business, purportedly motivated by the government’s “concern over the rapid devaluation of the sucre” and the potential losses faced by the business class, given their “growing inability to service their dollar-­denominated obligations” (Wong 2012: 91). It was also part of a systematic policy of private-­ sector debt buyout pushed on borrowing countries by northern banks after Mexico’s loan default in 1982 (Sachs and Huizinga 1987: 561–565). Debtors exchanged their dollar-­denominated debts to foreign banks for fixed-­rate sucre-­denominated debts with the state, the state now bearing the cost of all future currency devaluations and interest rate hikes, reportedly resulting in government losses of U.S.$1.557 billion and U.S.$662 million, respectively (Wong 2012: 91). Alberto Acosta (1990: 307) has called this “the biggest and most focused subsidy [of the private sector] in the history of the republic!” De la Torre Friere (2000: 88) goes further, adding that it was with the “sucretization that [Ecuador’s] attachment to international finance reached its maximum splendor.” Citibank, itself a principal creditor of Ecuador’s foreign debt, was also the largest recipient of debt absorption benefits under the sucretization program, receiving a buyout of U.S.$50 million (De la Torre Friere 2000: 92). Tactics like these provoked strong critiques from the Ecuadorian public. To see such blatant evidence of currency devaluations—the most ­tangible force behind the rampant inflation and declining real wages that were pushing popular sectors deeper into poverty—becoming sources of profit for banks, government, and international creditors suggested to many Ecuadorians a complete breakdown in the moral structure of the national economy. Curiously, this moral outrage came to find its most vehement expression in critiques of small-­ scale experiments with financial manipulation among members of the lower classes. Newspaper articles and editorials throughout the 1980s show increasing public concern over a variety of new forms of profit making coming to be grouped together under the derisive banner of “speculation.” In June and July



Speculative Blooms and Busts 77

1986, for instance, the national newspaper Hoy ran regular columns exposing small merchants who hoarded consumer goods, including basic foodstuffs, through acute periods of devaluation to capitalize on later price adjustments. Product distributors and middlemen were scorned and had their vehicles seized when caught delaying delivery of products to merchants for the same reasons. Vendors were fined or arrested for arbitrarily raising prices on price-­ controlled goods like milk, eggs, and flour. Modified scales used to manipulate the weight of bulk goods were routinely confiscated from shop owners accused of trying to cheat consumers. Manufacturers of cooking oil and margarine were fined for simultaneously receiving subsidies from the Central Bank and price gauging on their products (Hoy, June 24, 1986, 8A). The problem—and incentive to engage in such practices—seemed to run throughout the product line, from producers to retailers. Police forces across the country seemed lost about how to respond to such not-­exactly-­illegal-­but-­not-­at-­all-­favorable acts of profiteering, arresting both reported “speculators” and people protesting against the effects of “speculation” (see Hoy, June 24, 1986, 8A; Hoy, June 18, 1986, 8A). For instance, after sanctioning “eight imprisoned speculators” with seven days in prison and another five people for protesting “the high cost of living” in June 1986, the superintendent of police for Guayas province called off his mission, claiming that “speculation [has become] uncontrollable in Guayas” (Hoy, June 24, 1986, 8A). Late efforts by the Febres Cordero regime to mount a “campaign against speculation”—essentially price fixing on select consumer goods—were mocked in the press as inauthentic spectacles designed to deflect attention from the state’s complicity in creating the conditions for such activities to flourish (see Hoy, June 15, 1986, 1A; Hoy, June 13, 1986, 1A; Hoy, July 17, 1986, 12B). And topping off the confusion, an editorialist advised people to fight their own “war against speculation” by drinking homemade fruit juice rather than store-­bought soft drinks—“there is speculation,” the writer argued, “because there are consumers who accept it” (Hoy, June 13, 1986, 4A). What these press reports make clear is that by 1986, “speculation” had become integrated into the Ecuadorian lexicon as an important, yet somewhat vague, folk term. The term seems intended to identify the manifold ways people might try to profit from currency devaluations and their inflationary effects during a period of economic instability. It is conceptually loose and never, in my searches, defined. And yet the term is absolutely clear in its moral stance. To accuse someone of speculation at this time is to accuse them of engaging in deviant economic practices. More than this, it suggests that

78

Chapter 3

the profits derived from such practices come at the expense of the general public and that people who engage in them bear some responsibility for the hardships the public faces. Speculation evidences, as an editorial in one Ecuadorian newspaper put it, an “economic situation” characterized by “abuse, the lack of respect for others, and an exaggerated lust for profit,” leading in this case to “price increases” in basic consumer goods for everyone (“Speculation,” Hoy, June 13, 1986, 4A). Speculation is parasitic; it produces victims. What is the basis of this accusation? In his study of popular critiques of stock speculators in early twentieth-­ century England and the United States, Urs Staheli (2013) found these critiques to center on a perceived violation of a principle he calls “economic equivalence.” The crux of this principle is the notion that anything taken from the market must be matched by something put in: in trade, one gives money or labor and gets a product or a wage; in production, one invests time and energy and gets a marketable commodity; profit is fair if it is somehow earned—equivalence is formal, not substantive (i.e., the amounts invested and extracted need not be of equal value). Such understandings have long undergirded popular views of capitalist morality, the idea being that capitalism is inherently just when this pact of equivalence is observed. Stock speculators of the early twentieth century were thought to violate this pact by extracting profit from, but failing to contribute to, the economy. As Staheli writes, because “the speculator neither produced nor traded goods, he was considered a frivolous parasite who accomplished nothing for the community”—he was “an idler who lived at society’s expense” and who “profited from the economic well-­being of others” (Staheli 2013: 37). Theirs is not simply unearned profit. It is also a rapacious form of profiteering that has detrimental effects on those economic actors and institutions playing by the rules. As one anonymous contributor to the New York quarterly the Century wrote in 1884, “it is plain to see that honest industry and honest commerce are suffering from a parasitic growth which is sapping both their physical strength and moral energy” (in Staheli 2013: 37). Similar principles underlie the criticism erupting in Ecuador one hundred years later, forming an important bridge between condemnations of governmental and lay forms of speculation. For instance, the government’s sucretization campaign was derided not only for suggesting total state subservience to the international banking community but also for having “over-­inflated financial-­speculative activities while impairing productive activities, given the



Speculative Blooms and Busts 79

instability of prices, interest rates, and other economic parameters” it caused (Pierro Carrión in De la Torre Friere 2000: 91, emphasis added). And in an article meant to assure the public that even “industrialists condemn speculation,” the newspaper Hoy argued that the “unjustified elevation of prices caused by certain unscrupulous intermediaries” had “distorted the rules of supply and demand and created obstacles to the development of industry” (Hoy, July 1, 1986, 3A). What we witness in these critiques, like those occurring earlier in England and the United States, is the emergence of a popular taxonomy of capitalist morality. They point to a belief that there are, on the one hand, forms of profit making that are opportunistic, deceitful, unearned, and detrimental to the public good. These can be shorthanded as speculation. On the other hand, there are those that are legitimate, honest, and beneficial to the public. These we might shorthand as productive—they produce tangible results in the form of things, jobs, and growth. Economic equivalence is observed— labor is invested and wages are paid. Its material effects can be seen. Gains come because energies are put in. And these gains are not hoarded but are distributed. Recall the critique of the “credit supermarket” resulting from the 1990s banking boom in Ecuador. The problem was not that such funds were unwanted or unnecessary. The problem, rather, was that this sudden and massive outpouring of money suggested a new tendency for funds to be dispensed to clients “without any interest in the country’s development through credit” (Arosemena 1999: 57)—a heightened capacity, in other words, for violating the principle of economic equivalence on a national scale. Again, profit is just if it is earned (through the investment of energy), if it produces (has material effects), and if it expands (i.e., distributes its contributions). In Ecuador, just as in Staheli’s cases, this taxonomy is the product of an acute economic crisis and the efforts of those most affected by it to figure out who to blame. In both cases, the culprit is found in the abstract world of finance and those who have learned to manipulate its forces, just as it would again in the critical post-­2008 literature on speculation, where the “immaterial” and “fictitious” nature of contemporary capitalism is credited with enabling a highly destructive, greed-­focused, and unearned form of profit making to emerge. As Epstein and Habbard (2013: 331) write, reflecting on the 2008 crisis, “Speculation encompasses all activities for which the social utility to the real economy is close to zero.” These critiques are not without merit. They show an astute awareness among popular sectors and analysts of the increasingly abstract

80

Chapter 3

relationship between profit and inequality in the age of capitalist globalization. But the moral cartography of capitalist practice established through the critique of speculation also positions productive enterprise in a new conceptual space. It not only allows labor-­intensive, commodity-­producing enterprises to escape critical scrutiny but also opens up an expansive rhetorical world around them as providers of service, benevolence, equitability, and generalized contribution. This is neither a natural nor a stable framework but the product of a specific historical conjuncture. Its emergence in Ecuador marked the deepening penetration of global finance into the country’s economy and the debt bondage and “credit euphoria” that followed (Acosta 1990: 286). But it also occurred at precisely the moment when cut-­flower growing was coming to be seen as the country’s most promising example of a new form of production that could not only stimulate local growth but also generate export earnings, thereby countering the negative effects of debt on the country’s trade balance. This overlap was good fortune for flower growers. As we will see in coming chapters, the opposition created at this time between speculative and productive forms of profit making allowed upstart flower growers—clearly on the side of production—to frame their enterprises as projects more committed to national development than personal profit. This is evidenced by their approach to land. By buying up the old, decaying haciendas and stagnating dairy farms in the Cayambe basin, they weren’t speculating on undervalued land but carrying out a mission to turn unproductive resources into productive ones. It would also find support from their approach to labor. By employing the region’s impoverished rural inhabitants on their plantations, growers weren’t seeking to profit from globally devalued labor power but distributing the benefits of their success and bringing economic sustainability to the poor. Wage earning could even help develop an entrepreneurial and forward-­looking attitude among people previously denied such cultural competencies. And by doing all of this through participation in a global export industry, they were funding growth in the most marginal zones of an already marginalized Third World country with funds drawn from First World clients, enlisting global capitalism to the service of national development, not (as the critique of speculation and debt went) servicing foreign powers by undermining local economies. Such claims will forge the basis for growers’ insistence (see Introduction and Part IV) that they came to Cayambe not so much to make a profit as to “hacer patria”—to make a proper nation or homeland of it, incorporate it into national territory in broadly beneficial ways.



Speculative Blooms and Busts 81

And yet, for flower growers who started their enterprises in the 1980s and 1990s, this distinction between productive and speculative activity is entirely false. As this chapter has shown, the cut-­flower sector entirely depended on, was made possible through, and profitably supported the very circulatory process of global finance that critics of speculation were deriding. Our inquiry into the origins of this sector has shown it to be a largely instrumental invention of international finance rings, created to serve as the necessary endpoint in the global flow of credit. It was designed to be a site into which large sums of money, starting from northern investors and moving through a ballooning domestic banking complex, could be strategically dumped into willing hands. Recall the words of several industry founders—without the National Financing Corporation, a state bank channeling foreign credit through the local economy, there would be no flowers in Ecuador. The boundaries between these sectors become blurrier still when we consider that growers themselves increasingly came to relate to the production of flowers as a largely speculative activity, thought to generate profit more in the realm of financial circulation than in commodity production. As shown, profit in this industry was, throughout its boom period, understood to be an effect not of advances in labor organization or productive technologies but of differences in currency values between the Ecuadorian sucre and the U.S. dollar. Flowers’ value increased when the sucre’s value decreased. Profit went up when the local currency was devalued, putting growers’ interests completely at odds with those of their workers and the general population. In fact, in this respect, growers’ interests were identical to those of the price speculators, whose apparent opposition to productive forms of economic practice gave growers their claim to moral purpose. For growers, flowers were unique sorts of commodities. They were certainly material goods, produced through a complex manufacturing processes in a physical location. Yet they were produced and sold entirely as bets on the continual devaluation of the Ecuadorian sucre relative to the U.S. dollar—they were, in other words, financial assets traded as monetary proxies in the global currency market. This unusual approach to profit by productive capital presents a major challenge to conventional ways of theorizing capitalist accumulation in the age of globalization. Following Marx’s brilliant and famous contributions to the labor theory of value, scholars have understood profit, particularly in industrial settings, to be based on capital’s capture of surplus-­value from labor—that is, the difference between the value a worker produces in a day’s work and the value he or she takes home in the form of a wage. We noted how this understanding

82

Chapter 3

of profit has informed theories about why manufacturing industries moved en masse from their traditional bases in North America and Europe to new locations in the Global South during the 1970s and 1980s—labor-­intensive production complexes were relocated to places where wage rates were lower. Such transhistorical reckonings with capital flight may accurately describe the ways certain industrial complexes were restructured at this time. But they also rest upon the assumption that capital relates to its own profit as not only a condition of arrangements worked out in the sphere of production but also as something that ultimately rests on the capture of surplus-­value from its workers in the labor process. Such an awareness of the class dynamics underlying profit would make capitalist thought, if not Marxist, then at least compatible with the labor theory of value on which the Marxist critique of labor exploitation rests. Marx was well aware of the lengths capital will go to avoid such thinking. His discussions of profit that punctuate the Grundrisse frame it as a source of deep mystification: “Capital has no awareness whatever of the nature of its process of realization, and has an interest in having an awareness of it only in times of crisis” (Marx 1973: 374). Conditions such as “awareness” and “interest” tease the category of profit out of the purely economic realm of abstract, disembodied calculation and place it in the field of human perception. As a social product, human perception is conditioned by dynamic forces suggesting plausibility and best conduct. It was very much this phenomenological approach to profit that led Marx to suggest why it was that circulation and not production generally appears to capital as the sphere of its emergence—commodities go out into the market and, if sold, return as money. The laws of supply and demand seem confirmed by empirical reality. Such perceptions, irrespective of their economic accuracy, provide important windows into the historical conditions informing capitalist practice. They determine why certain actions are taken and not others. In the 1980s and 1990s, no pressures existed for Ecuadorian flower growers to orient their plantations around maximizing labor’s output. Cheap labor and productive inputs certainly set a baseline for profitability in this industry but weren’t seen as the sites of modification for increasing profit itself. Ongoing depreciations of the national currency took care of that. The same variable seemed to dominate the realm of circulation—returns from flower sales increased as the sucre plummeted in value. But, as Marx might have predicted, crisis changed all of this.



Speculative Blooms and Busts 83

Bursting the Bubble: Crisis Hits By the mid-­1990s, Ecuador’s cut-­flower industry was widely regarded as a get-­rich-­quick scheme for urban elites and the rising commercial banking sector, an image fueled as much by talk of the lavish amounts of credit thrown at anyone claiming to want to start a flower farm as by the opulent displays of wealth among growers. Rumors of marble-­tiled postharvest flower packaging stations in some plantations and of their young owners careening through highland Indigenous villages in imported luxury SUVs still circulate among residents of Cayambe when they reflect on this period. Carlos Ponce, whose plantation Rosas de los Andes went bust in 2004, seized by the Banco de Pichincha for being in arrears, described the late 1990s as a time of “easy money” and “excessive spending,” all with looming consequences: At the start of floriculture, bank credit was easy to get. The banks were completely dazzled by the flower business . . . the first flower growers here made easy money. Flower growers considered themselves grandes empresarios [big, important, businesspeople] and so bought expensive cars, expensive houses, eating lunch not in the plantation but at restaurants like the Casa de Fernando [an upscale restaurant in Cayambe that emerged under the flower boom]. They’d lead big lives, going to the flower expos, spending three days at the expo then fifteen days living the good life in Holland, Spain, Miami. This was one of the reasons for its failure. Such are the impressions left by a boom among those picking up the pieces of its bust. They direct blame as much at the short-­sighted greed of the nouveau riche plantation owners, lacking any agrarian expertise or concern for their enterprise’s sustainability, as at the observable effects of financial opportunism resulting from the credit pushers who created this model of export expansionism in the first place. Such accusations of blame are critiques of the profit model undergirding the region’s capitalist transformation since the mid-­1980s—the germinal form of a new moral outrage against speculation, tentatively expressed by even the class that once benefited from it. The fragility of this system started to become apparent by at least 1997. A global economic downturn, precipitated by the Asian financial crisis that year and its spillover into flower-­importing countries like Russia, showed

84

Chapter 3

Ecuadorian growers that luxury goods like flowers are always the first casualties of recession. As the global demand for roses and other cut-­flowers dropped, their supply increased dramatically. Inspired in part by the rapid success of Ecuador’s cut-­flower industry, countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, and India entered the business, producing even cheaper flowers than their Ecuadorian competitors and driving down the price of flowers worldwide. It was then, in the late 1990s, that bank analysts started to sense that a crisis was looming for the flower industry and the banks involved with it. The only hope for survival of the banks seemed to involve cutting all ties to the flower sector, as a kind of last-­gasp act of triage. Paul Piedra walked me through how he witnessed this decision in the Banco del Pacifico: We had a meeting where, well obviously it wasn’t me who said this, being just an analyst, but the president, the director of the bank, the managers of the bank, the director of agriculture for the bank, all said, “Listen, stop financing every asshole who walks through the door. This is damaging agriculture, with everybody wanting to get involved, putting their noses where they don’t belong, and it’s ruined everything.” So the credits started to drop off in 1997. In 1996 we studied the flower sector, right in the middle of all this, and realized that everything was about to crash, since there was too much product and not much of it was of good quality. We knew the market was going to drop. And so Banco del Pacífico started to put the brakes on its credit and started to pull away [from the flower sector]. And so the games began. [We’d say to someone asking for credit,] “Look, the risk is too high, we have too big a portfolio already with you, it’d be good if you open something with another bank” [laughs], knowing there’s nothing available at the other banks either. Sure, there were a few banks that still gave out credit to flower growers then, but they all fell hard. And fall hard they did. As Pablo Dávalos (2001: 9) argues, by “1998, the situation became unsustainable, and the real economy couldn’t sustain the financial bubble it had created.” Economic historian Wilson Miño Grijalva (2008: 257) calls the ensuing years the “greatest banking and financial crisis in the economic history of Ecuador.” Signs of crisis first appeared in April 1998 when a small domestic bank called Solbanco folded, followed by the Banco de Prestamos, one of the country’s largest banks, setting off a chain of deposit withdrawals and liquidity crunches throughout the banking system. Several



Speculative Blooms and Busts 85

major banks—including three of the country’s largest, Banco de Prestamos, Banco del Pacífico, and Filanbanco—suffered runs, turning to the Central Bank for bailout funds, including $1.2 billion for Filanbanco alone (Montiel 2014: 209; Dávalos 2001: 9). State funds had already been severely reduced that year by a drastic drop in global oil prices and by El Niño floods that destroyed the agricultural assets of creditors to coastal banks (Jacome 2004: 16; Beckerman 2001: 18). So President Jamil Mahuad did what state officials were accustomed to doing at such times—he solicited funds from the IMF to bail out the private banks. Then-­first deputy managing director of the IMF, Stanley Fischer, later recalled the lecture given to President Mahuad during this meeting, in which the agency “expressed serious concerns about the health of the banking system, noting a rise in non-­performing loans, the drying up of external credit lines, and too much lending in U.S. dollars to sucre-­ based borrowers” (Fischer 2000: 3)—essentially identifying, as nationwide problems, the very factors responsible for the cut-­flower sector’s existence. The situation worsened in 1999. Banks’ portfolios were now saturated with loans considered “irrecoverable,” dropping their own returns on credit investments to less than 4 percent. To try to recover their losses, “banks and financial institutions . . . immediately speculated against the sucre . . . effecting a devaluation of 300 percent in barely one week. For many banks, this was a golden opportunity” (Dávalos 2001: 9). But the resulting decline in the sucre’s value “hit banks’ unhedged foreign currency debtors hard, thereby eroding banks’ equity, and, hence, further impairing their solvency” (Jacome 2004: 20). Losses suffered by banks were covered, with state approval, by funds held in depositors’ accounts, during a period known as a “bankers’ holiday”: in March 1999, the government closed all banks for five days, then froze all deposits (over $500) and loans for one year. A gradual unlocking of frozen deposits in the middle of 1999 spurned a new wave of withdrawals and a heightened demand for dollars, further depreciating the sucre and weakening the already fragile banking sector. By the end of the year, thirty national banks had folded, inflation had reached over 60 percent, and the sucre had plummeted to 25,000 units to the dollar. In desperation, on January 9, 2000, President Mahuad announced his intention to adopt the U.S. dollar as Ecuador’s official currency, which became law on March 13 as part of the IMF-­negotiated Law of Economic Transformation.6 In many ways, Mahuad’s decision merely continued a pattern of “de facto” or “partial” dollarization that had been increasing since at least 1994. Former director of the World Bank in Ecuador, Andrés Solimano (2002: 14),

86

Chapter 3

estimates that by December 1999, 66 percent of all bank deposits and 90 percent of credit accounts in Ecuadorian banks were already held in dollars. And by 1998, 91 percent of the Ecuadorian government’s internal debt was dollar denominated, up from 0 percent denominated in 1992 (Nazmi 2001: 732). The difference, however, between de facto and de jure dollarization is key. As economic analyst Paul Beckerman (2002: 46) writes, “Partial dollarization meant that the economy was operating internally with two different units of account, subject to an unstable—that is, volatile and uncertain—exchange rate.” The “banking system’s partial dollarization was probably the main reason for the predollarization crisis,” he concludes (Beckerman 2002: 49). And yet it was this very system—the ability to operate with two different financial accounting units, the invitation to profit from unstable exchange rates between them, the vision promoting uncertainty as opportunity—that flower growers depended on for their operations, which explains their overwhelming success in the last decade of the twentieth century and accounts in large part for the sector’s very existence. To be clear, flower growers did not cause Ecuador’s financial crisis of 1999– 2000. But they did play a crucial role in it. As this chapter has shown, the cut-­flower sector operated as the final destination of a finance chain stretching from global investment banks and portfolio managers to international multilateral lending institutions, through state agencies and private banks, reaching, finally, on-­the-­ground recipients of funds in the form of bank credit. Perhaps a finance ring is a better image, since it was with these ground-­level recipients that the movement of funds was to be reversed, returned back through the chain with value magically created (and siphoned off) at every stage. The cut-­ flower sector emerged alongside the establishment of this network in Ecuador in the mid-­1980s. As the movement of these funds intensified, particularly in the early to mid-­1990s, flower growers were strategically targeted as ideal recipients, skyrocketing the amount of credit pumped into the system. And most analysts of the crisis identify the extreme liberalization of the financial sector at this time—particularly the 1994 Law of Financial Institutions—as the origins of the problem. As Pablo Dávalos (2001: 8) has argued, “The Law approved in 1994 enabled, guaranteed, and incentivized financial speculation and validated the monopolistic character of the Ecuadorian economy and the management of this economy by powerful financial groups.” Economist Nader Nazmi (2001: 732) is of the same opinion—“these reforms,” he writes, referring to the 1994 law, “led to a clear repositioning of [bank] portfolios away from the domestic currency and into foreign currencies.” This allowed “domestic



Speculative Blooms and Busts 87

economic agents to easily and freely restructure their portfolio holdings” to speculate on currency differentials, which completely “undermined the government’s exchange rate and monetary policies” and “set the stage for the collapse of the currency.” Mauricio Dávalos offered a similar analysis when I spoke with him in 2014, citing the evolution of the CFN—the very institution responsible for his pioneering loan in 1983—as part of the problem. “In the 1990s, the government of Sixto Durán [1992–1996] eliminated the capacity for the Corporation to give out credit directly,” forcing funds to flow through the private banking system. “But the crisis of ’99 was generated precisely by the total deregulation of the financial system. It’s what allowed everyone to do with it whatever they wanted.”7 And what many people wanted to do with credit was not only start a flower farm to capture its spoils but also use their farm’s products to speculate on credit’s effects. This total investment in the financial system’s endurance meant that that system’s collapse threatened the flower sector with the same fate. After all, its profit model had become entirely dependent on currency rate differentials. Dollarization eliminated this overnight. As Campaña Apolo (2004: 3) puts it, “The constant devaluations in the years leading up to dollarization increased the returns to the [cut-­flower] sector, distorting the relationship between returns and production costs, given that all payments for inputs and labor were realized in the local currency.” With dollarization, Campaña Apolo notes, growers experienced a constant increase in production costs and their bank loans converted into fixed dollar amounts, resulting in a marked increase in their debt. Her 2004 analysis of the flower sector notes that the majority of bank clients who are flower growers are now being maintained by the Recuperation of Default sections of banks. Clients managed by this sector of the bank are those classified as “at risk” by the Superintendent of Banks, resulting from their inability to meet their financial obligations. This situation has caused the sector to become the object of extreme caution in the banks. Lines of credit are practically closed for this sector, which has made financing difficult, which is why various enterprises have been abandoned or declared collapsed. (Campaña Apolo 2004: 43) Darwin Campoverde spoke with me about this in 2012. After describing the credit boom of the 1990s, he turned to saying that “things have changed a lot since then. Now, if you go to the bank they say to the floricultor that there’s

88

Chapter 3

no credit for you. . . . You ask why. [They tell you it’s] because you are in the floriculture sector, which is high risk.” In fact, by 1999, Ecuador’s floriculture industry as a whole was hit with a Moody’s risk classification rating of C+, branding it as a “sector very indebted to the North American currency, which meant they had used currency differentials as their means of profit, which implied they [now] owed huge sums of money for debts held in dollars” (Andrade and Enriquez 2000: 165). Viera Salazar (2002) calculated that, in 2000, 61 percent of flower growers were in arrears with their debts, with the average amount of debt, in 1999, calculated at $376,908.74 per hectare, nearly eight times the national average debt for agricultural exporters. And, for the first time in this industry’s history, the total area under cultivation dropped dramatically, declining from 3,775 hectares under production in 1999 to 2,977 in 2000 (Viera Salazar 2002: 148). Some growers simply reduced the size of their farms. Others watched them get expropriated by banks as collateral for unrecoverable loans. Many of those were transferred from failed banks to others, including state banks, which absorbed their assets and credit lines. The crisis was sectoral, but it affected growers differently. Take the example of Alex Bustos, the owner of Rosa Montt who we met earlier. Bustos owed $1.5 million in credit to Banco La Previsora at the time of that bank’s collapse in 2000. Debt owed to La Previsora was absorbed by Ecuador’s Central Bank, which transferred it to state agencies that had lost their deposits in La Previsora when it collapsed. In Bustos’s case, it was the Civil Aviation Directorate who came to “own” his debt and who had to negotiate its repayment with Bustos to recuperate funds equivalent to their lost deposits. Other flower growers in his situation, Bustos reports, “settled their debts at half price. But we didn’t have reserve funds for that. Instead, we said [to the Directorate], don’t reduce the cost of the debt, but let us pay the principle only, with no interest. And they accepted. And so the crisis helped us,” he told me. “It helped us to pay our debt.” Then, in 2007, something else happened. The flower plantation neighboring that of Bustos was seized by the Banco Internacional for defaulting on its loan with them. This enterprise, Bustos says, had “the typical history [of the flower industry] here—the father has a hacienda, the children put up a flower plantation,” and then the children take their first earnings and the credit and spend most of each year in the United States. After the expropriation, the bank asked Bustos to assess the current value of the plantation and adjoining lands and to protect it from thieves. “The bank had taken control of something it had no idea about. It had kicked out the owner and then approached



Speculative Blooms and Busts 89

us, and we were then put in charge of it in the name of the bank.” A few months later, the bank offered to sell Bustos the part of the land devoted to flower growing (21 hectares of a 1,500-­hectare expanse), with all equipment included, for $3.5 million at 6 percent interest over a ten-­year period, which he accepted. “They practically gave it away to us, since we didn’t have to put any money down. But in 2008,” one year after buying the farm and expanding Rosa Montt’s overall operation from eight hectares under production to twenty-­nine, “the global crisis began, remember? Right when the whole debacle started, the economic debacle, which hit us hard, cost us dearly.” So, at present, Bustos told me in 2012, there was no way to calculate his profits because he wasn’t making any. Despite the unfortunate timing of Bustos’s expansion, the deep involvement of the banking sector in the cut-­flower industry, and the intertwining of their respective crises, things worked out rather well for him. The same cannot be said for other growers who suffered through this period. Carlos Ponce lost his business, Rosas de los Andes, to the Banco de Pichincha in 2004. He blames the loss on technology. In 2003, he and his business partners were talked into upgrading their irrigation system to a high-­tech drip system promoted by an Israeli firm. The system was expensive and only irrigated plants at a superficial level, not reaching the deeper roots of their mature plants— which apparently had been producing very well until then. They lost 75 percent of their product and what survived was of poor quality, causing them to lose all their standing orders and future contracts. Unable to pay their loans, they saw their farm expropriated by the bank, which sold it immediately to a buyer who, apparently, reversed the irrigation system but was still unable to revive the plants, causing it to be taken back by the bank and sold to a neighboring farm for expansion. I see this less as a technical problem than as an effect of the boom mentality circulating in the cut-­flower sector, for which the banks bear considerable responsibility. Ponce’s partners were all businessmen from Quito—car distributors and construction tycoons—drawn into flowers by the allure of cheap credit and easy profits. Among them, only Ponce had any agrarian experience—he managed his father’s dairy farm on the outskirts of Cayambe, the remains of hacienda Granobles, which had been in his family for generations. Ponce’s role in the enterprise was limited—he was brought on board simply to provide the land. This land, a full thirty-­four hectares, was instantly mortgaged to secure a loan from the Banco de Pichincha, which had long-­term business relations with his Quito-­based partners. No one knew the first thing about flower growing when they started in 1997, and only Ponce

90

Chapter 3

Figure 3. Capitalist ruin.

had agrarian experience—though not the sort, it seems, that would provide the foresight needed to avoid this disaster. When Rosas de los Andes collapsed in 2004, Ponce lost his thirty-­four hectares, despite having only put eight into flower production, and was forced to move to a small apartment in Quito, losing his father’s land and all ties to rural Cayambe. When I spoke with him a decade later, Ponce, then sixty-­nine years old and in poor health, expressed deep regrets over his decision to turn a perfectly good dairy farm into a flower plantation. The real cause of his loss, he told me, wasn’t the error they’d committed with the irrigation systems. Such pitfalls are common in the unstable world of agriculture. Rather, the problem was something unique to the cut-­flower business that doesn’t allow such errors to be recoverable. Flower growers are especially crisis prone, Ponce explained, because, on the one hand, there is an extremely high per-­hectare investment required and because, on the other, nothing but the land retains value. Unlike a ranching or dairy business, which, if failing, has value stored in the cattle themselves, the costly equipment needed for growing flowers is unredeemable: “imagine, one hectare of flowers is worth let’s say $150,000, of which $20,000 is the



Speculative Blooms and Busts 91

land and $130,000 is the equipment, the irrigation system, the degradable plastic greenhouses. In other words, if you fail, you’re left with $20,000 of your $150,000 because the other 130,000 have gone up in smoke. In other words, you lose everything.” In this, Ponce was speaking from experience, an experience not unlike the unfortunate case of Neptalí Bonifaz, Ecuador’s self-­ professed first industrial flower grower. Bonifaz’s first attempt at flower growing left him bankrupt a few years after he had generated the massive returns—“$500,000 profit in the first year alone”—that would set the whole cut-­flower sector in motion. According to his widow, Serena, Bonifaz had been too trusting of Joseph Levy, his business partner, not noticing that he had been swindling her husband for several years. It took a chance encounter on a bus to realize what Levy was up to. So one day I’m on a bus and another woman gets into the bus with a bunch of mini-­carnations in her hands. And the person that worked for me [her maid] was sort of, “Huh, isn’t that strange, where did you get them from?” And they started talking to each other. And this lady said, “Yeah yeah yeah, the man I work for has a flower plantation.” And she proceeded to say something that was key: “And you know what, he’s so smart, he sells all these flowers in New York. And they are estafando al dueño Ecuatoriano [cheating the Ecuadorian owner].” What was happening?! He was a colonel, I think, from the Israelite army, retired, because he was sort of oldish. And what was happening [was that] he had contacts in the place that received the flowers, close to Kennedy airport, uh, state owned, and somehow they were tricking Neptalí, with the price of course, and also with the number of boxes that they felt had arrived in bad shape. So Neptalí sent me to New York. And I’m even more belligerent than he is! And we walk into this office one day with my son that was fifteen by then. And I say “I come from Ecuador and I want to know what’s going on here because we’re selling produce . . . and somehow something seems to be very wrong.” And I never got a word back and they all talked in Hebrew and I never found anything out. . . . So of course that really annoyed Neptalí. It took him a while to figure out everything, but he called, he had them expelled in the end, declared personas non grata. But by then we were broke, of course! We were broke! And I mean the debt was tremendous. The debt was all of Neptalí’s inheritance. So that was the beginning of the catastrophe.

92

Chapter 3

And the catastrophe only intensified. Hoping to open another flower farm in the mid-­1990s, this time devoted to roses, Bonifaz sought out credit but found his history of bankruptcy was the one condition banks considered too high a risk to involve themselves with. I imagine, too, that as an ex-­ hacendado, inheritor of a part of the greatest hacienda complex in all of Ecuador, Bonifaz did not fit the profile of the upstart, urban, go-­getter nouveau entrepreneur that banks were looking to throw money at in those days—he wasn’t the right sort of conocido. So Bonifaz found business partners among his connections and extended family in the Guayaquil banking community who put up the money, while Bonifaz put up the land—thirty-­six hectares of prime land in the heart of Cayambe’s plantation sector. Serena says that these bankers were all working on what she calls “prestamos vinculados,” or insider credit, loaning money to themselves at better rates under the table, while formally charging the business a higher interest rate and using Bonifaz’s land as collateral. “There were four of them. One was a second cousin. And the other three . . . [pause] well, one of them fled to Uruguay,” Serena told me. Beyond that, she knows little about this arrangement and finds it too painful to dwell on for long, blaming it for her and her husband’s financial ruin. In 2001, Neptalí’s brother Diego, then mayor of the city of Cayambe, explained the disastrous outcome of this partnership to me, citing it as an example of how the bankers, once the greatest allies of cut-­flower growers had, after the crisis turned against them, leaving in ruin the region he was then meant to govern: “He lost everything, that Neptalí. Now he has in his name seven hectares of land and owns 25 percent of a business that owes two million dollars. And the bankers who are now the partners, sent him packing. . . . This is a very typical case.” If this was the case in 2001, it wasn’t something Bonifaz shared with his immediate family. “Neptalí spoke very little of what he did,” Serena told me. “He was a very private man. I have very little information of his financial doings. As a matter of fact, I have none. So much so that when he died [I found out that] the next plantation he started had also gone broke. And I had no idea.” I had no idea either, which is notable only because Neptalí, in fact, had told me this, explicitly. After my first meeting with Serena, a three-­hour conversation in her Quito home in June 2012, I immediately poured over my old recorded interviews with her husband and found him making repeated attempts to share information with me about his financial troubles. I, however, entered these conversations with such little sympathy for the landed elite that I was completely blocked in my ability to hear what he was trying



Speculative Blooms and Busts 93

to tell me. For instance, in my last discussion with him, less than a month before his death, I asked Neptalí about the history of relations between flower growers and the state. I knew about Neptalí’s experience mediating these relations—he acted as the private sector’s representative in meetings leading to the 1994 Agrarian Law, effectively ending the possibilities for further land reform and sparking massive protests from the Indigenous movement, whose proposals at that meeting were completely overrun. I expected a fairly simple iteration of the neoliberal script, endorsing business’s leadership in agrarian governance and so on, the kind of thing his private-­sector agrarian think tank IDEA was peddling in its literature. Instead, this was his response: “The way in which the state has supported us is by giving credit, no? They gave credit easily and quickly, and this served for development. What they didn’t give is enough time [to repay it]. At the moment we are . . . [pause], I believe . . . not exactly collapsed, but we’re in a terrible economic situation because we haven’t been able to pay.” In a classic case of ethnographic hubris, I took Neptalí’s “we” to mean “the cut-­flower sector,” not himself, and brushed his comments aside as a disingenuous diversion away from talk of profit and state collusion, given my known residence in workers’ communities and affiliation with their political associations. But Neptalí continued, answering every question I asked about the state with a statement about the banks and how they’ve undermined his business. Neptalí: In the rose business, we aim to pay back our credits in three or four years. But it’s now been seven years and we still haven’t been able to pay back even 50 percent. Me: And the relation between flower growers and the state in recent years? Neptalí: [interrupting] No, look, nothing of support, instead they hate us, the bankers hate us. Me: But why? Only Neptalí: [interrupting] Because we haven’t been able to pay! Because we haven’t been able to pay them back on time, and so we’ve asked the state to refinance our loans. The state, from time to time, involves itself in these activities, but more than anything . . . [breaks]. Ahhh, look, the main reason [for our difficulty] is that the international prices [for roses] has dropped. In my first year I was selling each flower on average for thirty-­two cents each. Now if I get twenty cents I’m lucky.

94

Chapter 3

He continued, in a single breath listing a host of things bearing blame for the crisis—U.S. buyers, global overproduction, transport costs, export taxes, import fees, interest rates. I originally heard Bonifaz’s orthogonal response to my questions about profit and the state as a politically strategic avoidance. I now see it as a very personal and deeply emotional effort of a man in a terrible bind trying to narrate the experience of freefall. My ethnographic research on labor issues and years spent living with Indigenous workers around Bonifaz’s plantation prompted me to treat him as simply a disembodied representative of capital. My time spent with Serena, plus years of background research on the financial processes involved in the making and unmaking of Cayambe’s cut-­flower sector, allowed a more humanized and sympathetic portrait of Bonifaz to emerge—clearly, in sharing such intimate details of his business failures, details kept even from his family, Bonifaz had offered me as much. I imagine Bonifaz’s pride and perhaps shame kept him from discussing his situation with Serena, as well as perhaps his optimist’s hope that things would find a way to resolve themselves. “He was very, very proud and I do think, without being attached to money,” Serena told me, “he did want to be able to prove to the world that he made money, that he was a success.” It was the stress of this, of not being a success, in an industry he more or less founded, Serena maintains, that killed him, that caused his heart attack and put his family in a situation he surely would deeply regret. When Bonifaz died in January 2003, his plantation’s lands were seized by the bank, as partial payment for his outstanding credit, before being handed over to the state collection agency, the Agency for Deposit Guarantees. Serena was left not only with the remainder of his debt to the bank but also with outstanding bills from unpaid product providers and deep sadness over the loss of her and her children’s connection to the famous Guachalá lands that they had grown up on. “The lands were the assets. [His partners] never paid any of that to Neptalí. So we lost his land. We lost what he had invested. He lost all his work. That’s what I’m trying to say.” Left destitute, Serena refuses to even pass through the Cayambe region: “I’ve never been back, since Neptalí died,” she told me. “No no no, to the whole area, because it’s too painful. I don’t even want to see it.” When I last spoke with her in the summer of 2014, Serena was still trying to recoup some earnings from land Neptalí owned in the Puembo valley, which, also remortgaged to finance the plantation, was seized by the Banco de Rumiñahui and likewise transferred to the Agency for Deposit Guarantees. Rumor had it that the land was gifted to the bank’s lawyer as a bonus for his services and thus was unredeemable.



Speculative Blooms and Busts 95

What these cases indicate is that Ecuador’s “triple crisis”—banking, fiscal, and currency—of 1998–2000 gave flower growers a number of options regarding how their businesses might fail (Montiel 2014; Jacome 2004: 4). Some failed because the banks they depended on for regular credit installments collapsed. Others failed because banks were no longer able to support poorly run businesses through the episodic or cyclical hardships they faced. Others seem to have almost intentionally failed because they were formed as little more than fronts for bankers to move money around to their advantage—often without full knowledge of everyone involved, as might be true of Neptalí Bonifaz. All of these options for failure were borne of the cut-­flower industry’s complete imbrication with the domestic banking sector and with global finance. The crisis of 1999–2000 marked a total realignment of the relations between these three players, though its most dire effects were borne locally. The move that officially ended the crisis—dollarization—exposed those plantation owners who survived to a new sort of dilemma—how to make profit in this industry without relying on currency devaluations? How, in other words, to behave like a capitalist and not a speculator? This is the subject of coming chapters.

Conclusion Our quest to reconstruct the origin story of Ecuador’s cut-­flower sector began with a surprising discovery—that it was a massive surge in available bank credit flooding the country, not any organically arising entrepreneurial initiative or locally generated storehouse of capital—that turned a few small posthacienda experiments in flower growing into a massive agro-­industrial complex at the end of the twentieth century. Ecuador’s flower boom, as many industry pioneers told me, was in many ways just a side effect of its credit boom. The timing of this boom was critical. It came just one generation after the end of the agrarian reforms, when thousands of hectares of productive lands were newly opened to market circulation and capitalist investment, owned by the generally foreign-­educated, professionally minded children of hacendados who had been promised a profitable use for their lands with dairy production but who had yet to see those profits, or the modernization platform undergirding it, materialize. Seen from the perspective of this emergent agrarian bourgeoisie, the rural highlands were perfectly poised to carry out the transformations that flower production promised to bring.

96

Chapter 3

But the larger question addressed in this chapter was how this one industry’s emergence and growth relate to and help us better understand the major transformations then occurring in the global capitalist system. The most critical link between Ecuador’s cut-­flower growers and the neoliberal political economy was not labor but credit or, put another way, debt. Following the path credit took to reach upstart flower growers in the 1980s and 1990s revealed it to be an outgrowth of the ballooning sovereign debt accrued by Latin American countries in the late twentieth century, all of it part of the work undertaken by American and European banks at this time to control an increasing quantity of financial values circulating worldwide and generating returns through processes of financial investment and extraction. The inflated domestic banking system that grew up in Ecuador to handle this influx of credit came to target the cut-­flower industry as a site into which it could most readily and receptively be dumped, similar to how foreign banks and the multilateral credit agencies acting on their behalf viewed cash-­strapped countries of the Global South in these post-­ISI years. Indeed, this was in many ways the same “money,” just appearing at different moments in its circulatory process. And why was flower growing the most heavily targeted industry for this credit peddling? We outlined three reasons: (1) early experiments by ­people like Neptalí Bonifaz had already shown commercial flower growing to be possible in highland Ecuador, with its newly discovered ideal climatic conditions, and extremely profitable, generating profit margins beyond any known commodity in Ecuador; (2) the startup costs for cut-­flower growing are higher than any other agricultural activity, thus demanding a higher volume of credit than other initiatives; and (3) flower growing best expressed the new era’s emphasis on developing export-­oriented, nontraditional, commodity-­ focused initiatives that could resonate with the kinds of “development” ideas being generated by funding agencies looking to better debtor countries’ capacities to pay back the loans they owed to foreign commercial banks. That flower growing is labor intensive, technologically driven, and shrouded in pretenses of scientifically managed industrial agrarian practice all contributed to its appeal as a force for transforming the posthacienda highlands into a vector for the kind of capitalist globalization countries like Ecuador were to be embarking on in their moment of debt-­saturated neoliberal transition. From this, a key point to emerge from Part I’s inquiry is the need to investigate the imbrications between finance capital and productive capital in the Global South and to use these points of articulation as springboards for reconsidering the role played by southern countries in the making of the



Speculative Blooms and Busts 97

contemporary global economy. While the growth of Ecuador’s cut-­flower sector responded to several transformations in global capitalism occurring at the end of the twentieth century, among the most critical responses was its role in absorbing credit money that, at the other end of the global finance chain, was giving birth to the form of finance capital that came to dominate North American and European capitalism at this time. The story we tell of finance capital’s rise to dominion in these years must include attention to its circulation into the Global South in the form of sovereign debt and its transformation into the new productive complexes emerging to placate the northern world’s increasing desire for commodities that it itself refuses to produce—this is the cycle of imperial finance outlined above but also part of the story of how industrial capitalism relocates itself to the former Third World at this time. The final part of this story asks how these emergent industrial complexes were affected by the investment of global finance in their generation, something we were able to partly answer by tracking the speculative approach to profit making adopted by flower growers in the 1990s, who sent flowers out into the global market as units seeking profit less through commodity-­derived calculations of surplus-­value differentials than as bets on local currency devaluations, themselves conditioned by the very same financial network of debt and repayment pressures instituted by foreign banks and their multilateral enforcers. Through this inquiry, we arrived at an understanding of finance or the “financialization” of capitalism less compatible with American celebrations of financial triumphalism than those proposed by political theorists like Sandro Mezzadra (2010: 11–12), who argues that “when we talk about a radical transformation in the modes of capitalist production, of a capitalism that is no longer ‘industrial,’ we are far from negating the importance (that is, in a certain sense, ever-­growing) that industrial production and labor continue to have on both a global level and in our own territories. Instead, we are insisting that this production and this labor are progressively ‘articulated’ in (and commanded by) valorization and accumulation processes of capital that function according to a logic that differs from ‘industrial’ logic.” According to Mezzadra’s colleague Christian Marazzi (2010: 41), this new logic “no longer consists, like during the Fordist era, in investing in constant capital and variable capital (wages), but instead investing in the devices of the production and subsumption of value produced outside directly productive processes.” Finance capital, in this way of thinking, is less a distinct sector of capitalism than an approach taken up by any capitalist who seeks an “increase in profits without accumulation,” that is, without investments designed to capture

98

Chapter 3

surplus-­value from workers at the point of production (Marazzi 2010: 36). This certainly seems to explain the process I have described here. And yet . . . continuing our study of this one Ecuadorian case through time, into the twenty-­first century, will give us reason to reject the determinist teleology inherent in even critical and inventive portraits of contemporary capitalism like these, which propose a unidirectional movement in capitalist valuation away from “Fordist-­era” forms of production-­focused surplus reckoning and toward forms of finance-­era extra-­production reckoning, as if capital has universally discovered a total escape from the limits of the system it designed. As coming chapters will show, flower growers’ capacity to act as currency speculators only tangentially involved in industrial production was temporary, dependent on a system that collapsed with the banking crisis at the end of the twentieth century. What we will see is an unexpected reversal of the transformation in dominant capitalist logics, one moving from a financialist-­ speculative approach in the late twentieth century into a very much Fordist and productivist one in the twenty-­first and not the other way around. Labor, as we will soon see, will again come to the forefront of everything.

* * * In 2000, two economics students at Quito’s Catholic University conducted a survey asking flower growers what they believed to have caused the previous year’s crisis (Andrade and Enriquez 2000: 160). Nearly half of all respondents (46 percent) said the crisis was caused by “political corruption”—meaning, in the authors’ interpretation, that personal deals made by politicians “provoked capital flight and the loosening of control by monetary authorities.” Corruption, especially political corruption, is an effectively vague causal force, offering little room for growers to absorb blame for the crisis themselves or identify their involvement in it. Tellingly, only 7 percent attributed the crisis to “financial speculation,” a phrase commonly used among economic analysts to explain the causes of the crisis but perhaps still too self-­implicating for growers to find fault in during such a transitional moment. As interesting are growers’ responses to the students’ question about what they planned to do in the long term to counteract the effects of the crisis. Responses to this question varied, but the most common one (36 percent) was “optimize resources.” Only a small number (4 percent) identified “government credits” on the horizon, showing a complete reversal of how flower plantations were run previously. If blame is ascribed to external agents,



Speculative Blooms and Busts 99

recovery is inward looking, reflecting the “self-­made” entrepreneurial spirit that Sawers (2005) encountered among flower growers around this time. This would soon find elaboration in the language of “efficiency” that started to dominate flower growers’ business plans immediately after dollarization. In 2014, I spoke with Daniel Yépez, then-­managing director of the National Financing Corporation in Quito. He surprised me by claiming that dollarization had actually benefited the flower industry—something he felt qualified to comment on, having written his university thesis in economics on the cut-­flower sector (Yépez Urbano 1997). I asked him how. He told me that “when we dealt in sucres, lots of people got into the business with no idea how to run one, and ran them very inefficiently, since they didn’t have to worry about it.” “It seems most were making their money from currency differentials,” I said. “Exactly,” he responded. “But with dollarization,” Yépez continued, “all these people with no business sense went bankrupt, and the remaining plantations had to become more efficient. Before, if you compared a flower plantation in Ecuador with one in Holland in terms of competitiveness, Holland would be up here [raises hand above head] and Ecuador would be down here [lowers hand to waist level]. If you made the same comparison now, the Ecuadorian one is way more efficient, more competitive, and this is because of dollarization.” I found Yépez’s analysis to be somewhat generalizing—this wasn’t necessarily true for individual farmers, I said, many of whom suffered devastating losses with dollarization. “True,” he responded, “but the most inefficient ones were also the most heavily in debt and weren’t able to recoup profits to pay back their loans. So they went under.” What impressed me most in Yépez’s analysis was the breezy, almost natural, flow with which “inefficiency”—clearly an anachronism in the predollarization era—is narrated as if a preexisting, if dormant, condition that suddenly becomes a determinate force at the moment of crisis—the most indebted and unprofitable businesses were so, really, because they were also the most “inefficient” ones. What, then, reveals itself as the source of revenue to confront debt and determine profit? Efficiency. Recall Marx’s maxim about profit—only in crisis does capital become interested in identifying the nature of its profit and in trying to do something about it. But what exactly is the nature of postdollarization efficiency? What are the “resources” growers now plan to “optimize” to confront the effects of the crisis? Some found ways to reduce the costs of inputs, like the patrones Bustos managed to grow without paying lucrative patent fees. But there are limits to the number of inputs whose costs can be so manipulated. Then there’s land:

100

Chapter 3

already pushed to high levels of production by the intensive farming methods of flower growing, land’s return from being a primarily financial resource to a primarily material one could not bring many new opportunities for increasing its yield. Growers’ calculations of per-­hectare production volumes have not changed much over the years being, they tell me, entirely determined by the variety of roses grown and universal patterns of pruning and harvesting (outlined in Part IV). The one variable that has changed dramatically over the years, in terms of both cost and amount of manipulation, is labor. Before dollarization, labor accounted for somewhere between 6 and 9 percent of production costs, Darwin Campoverde tells me. In 2012, he was calculating it at 65 percent. Labor’s emergence as the critical site of profit will guide a much broader shift of attention among flower growers toward their laboring populations. Growers will take considerable interest in knowing workers, their inner psychic determinants and their extra-­laboring lives, looking to the whole composition of their worlds and not just their time spent working in the plantations, as sites for generating the kind of efficiency needed to optimize their relationship to their (human) resources. In fact, as the next chapter shows, labor—as a kind of gift offered to purportedly destitute populations—will come to take center stage in a new historical imaginary surrounding the rise of the plantation sector, figured as the main reason flower growers came to Cayambe to invest in this industry in the first place.

CHAPTER 4

Of Suffering and Salvation: Primitive Accumulation as Capitalist Historicity

People Must Be Optimized I wasn’t sure I had heard The Manager correctly, and so put the question to him differently. “So, you’re saying that the production of flowers today is no different than it was, say, twelve years ago?” This was early in 2001, barely a year after Ecuador’s most devastating economic crisis since national independence shook the country to its core, causing seventeen national banks to close and pushing over 300,000 people to flee the country.1 Economists feared the crisis would decimate the cut-­flower industry, the same industry that a few years earlier was heralded as the most profitable investment opportunity in the country and celebrated as the vanguard force of its “nontraditional export” sector’s promise to overtake petroleum as the main contributor to GDP in the new millennium (Campaña Apolo 2004: 1). Instead, the twenty-­ first century began on a sour note for exporters. The credit bonanza responsible for the previous decade’s flower boom had gone belly-­up, bankrupting Ecuador’s banking system and taking a large number of upstart flower plantations down with it. Those flower growers who weathered the storm saw the main source of their profits—currency devaluations—get eliminated overnight by President Mahuad’s adoption of the U.S. dollar as the national currency and were being run out of every bank in the country they might turn to for help transitioning to the new economic reality. Surely this collapse had effected a total restructuring of the flower industry, from its profit structure to the ways flowers were grown. No, The Manager told me, everything was pretty

104

Chapter 4

much the same now as it always had been. With one caveat: “The only thing that we have done,” he noted, “is optimize, a little, the people. They do things better now. The thing is,” he emphasized, “flowers can’t be mechanized. What we have done is optimized our human resources. Every day they have more experience and do things better. Everyone here is searching for efficiency. . . . Here there is no way to mechanize [production], like using a tractor or whatever. Here, everything is manual. It needs people.” I ended the previous chapter by demonstrating how the language of industrial “efficiency,” if not entirely absent from flower growers’ productive vocabularies before the crisis, certainly only became the centerpiece of industrial planning after it. To say, as The Manager does, that “everyone here is searching for efficiency” is to locate his speech in history, to position it after the period when lavish amounts of easily accessible credit and currency depreciations all but prevented producers from structuring their farms around productive efficiency or from giving much thought to such matters at all. As previous chapters show, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, profit was considered an externally captured, not internally produced, matter. The stress on efficiency, contrary to The Manager’s objections, in itself points to a major shift in the practice of flower production. It is a language borne of crisis, marking the collapse of a speculative mode of profit making that drove industrial expansion in the previous decade and signals growers’ search for a new source of profit, something now considered necessarily internal to the production process itself. And here the options for profitability bump up against the limitations of this particular commodity: “Flowers can’t be mechanized,” The Manager asserts, a restriction perhaps as true in the previous millennium as this one, but now carrying great consequence, determining the route this era’s search for efficiency will take and locating its object of intervention elsewhere. And that object has been found—people must do things better. They must be optimized. As coming chapters will show, optimizing workers to the demands of flower production is rather tricky. It involves shaping labor practices and work routines around the continually shifting demands of highly specialized markets in North America, Europe, and Russia and in relation to ever-­ changing economic and political pressures in Ecuador. Getting workers to continually “do things better” will also require them to relate to themselves as subjects of learning and to the workplace as a pedagogical arena. The proposition that workers bear the weight of the efficiency mandate on which the survival of this already labor-­intensive, insistently manual, industrial complex depends rests on the attendant pitch that personal and industrial betterment



Of Suffering and Salvation 105

are not only intertwined goals but also desirable ones worth investing in. This too will require work by management and the teams of experts employed on plantations, who must not only design labor routines for maximizing productivity but also guide workers’ appreciation of paid work itself, under conditions demanding increased output, as investments in themselves, as part of a journey of self-­improvement from a prior state to a new state, from a lesser condition to an improved one. Labor, in other words, will be ascribed a transformative capacity, a central role in a historical mission that unites each worker and the company, beyond wages or profits, in a project of social uplift. Such a goal, future oriented as it is, requires a past amenable to its mission. My focus in this chapter is on the making of that past. This past finds its clearest expression in the transition narratives plantation owners and managers tell about how the region of Cayambe and its inhabitants have changed since the start of the cut-­flower industry. Spoken in the aftermath of the financial crisis by agro-­industrialists scrambling to reorganize profit around labor’s productivity, these are situated narratives, part of the discovery of a need to invest in the management of workers and in techniques to increase their efficiency. By organizing time into two distinct p ­ eriods—before the arrival of the plantations and after—the past they construct is not so much a historical past as a state of beforeness, the Location A that sets up teleological passage into Location B. As we will see below, beforeness exceeds its temporal state of “past condition” to become part of a moral commentary on the present, similar to how a state of illness might be described after medical intervention or drowning after being saved. In these examples, a doctor’s personal narratives of curing a patient or a lifeguard’s story of rescue would be hard to strip of the validation each affords its respective vocation. Medical science and water safety save lives. We know this because the cured was once sick, and the saved was once drowning. The interview clips I examine below work in similar ways to validate capitalist beneficence. They ascribe social good to specific features of capitalist practice and frame the plantation manager or owner in ways akin to a doctor or lifeguard—vectors of an interventionist discipline that is responsive to human suffering. But these are more than mere commentaries on regional change. They are transition narratives, each one affirming the end of the hacienda system’s legacy and the rise, in its place, of an export plantation sector. In a general way, they are all retrospective descriptions of a localized instance of capitalist arising and, with that, of the formation of the classes brought into relation by it—what I am calling “narratives of primitive accumulation.” My analysis of these narratives

106

Chapter 4

and choice to tell the story of capitalist emergence through the stories its agents themselves tell of it follows closely on Marx’s methodology. One of the most remarkable features of Marx’s writing on primitive accumulation is his attention to the dialectic between material reality and the narratives powerful agents of that reality draw on to naturalize history’s unfolding in their favor. Marx’s chapter in Capital on “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation” could be read for this point alone, as a demonstration of how narrative might organize historical coherence and thereby become a social force in its own right. Here, Marx famously compared the question of how capitalism began to the one Christians might ask about the doctrine of original sin. In both cases, he argued, the quest for origins tends to lead us more into the terrain of myth than history. In place of “Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race” (Marx 1976: 873), in political economy, we find “nursery tales” that explain capital’s emergence as the natural unfolding of social divisions that are, in fact, its products—a “diligent, intelligent and above all frugal élite” who, through hard work, sacrifice, and saving, earn the right to live from the labor of those “lazy rascals, spending their subsistence, and more, in riotous living.” If “so-­called primitive accumulation . . . is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production”—that is, depriving masses of people from any survival options besides the sale of their labor power—such mythical renderings of these conditions as timeless and natural play a major role in disguising the “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force” that in fact “play the greatest part” in the emergence of a capitalist society (Marx 1976: 874–875). Stripping primitive accumulation of its violence, these narratives construct an image of labor’s beforeness that justifies the radical inequalities created by capitalist production systems and endorses the image of wage labor being a socially transformative project devoted to human improvement. They encourage us to see capitalist class relations as an effect of preexisting social differences, not economic exploitation, and leading toward universal betterment, not widening differentiation. Perelman (2000) argues that the dominant social ideology informing depictions of proto-­laboring populations in Marx’s day was one that equated poverty with lethargy and indolence. He shows how the British political economists who Marx scorned in his retheorization of primitive accumulation partook of a widespread opinion of poverty as a personal moral failing that could only be remedied through harsh work routines. As Adam Smith’s teacher Francis Hutchinson (in Perelman 2000: 16) wrote in 1755, “If a people have not acquired an habit of industry, the cheapness of all the necessities



Of Suffering and Salvation 107

of life encourages sloth. . . . Sloth should be punished by temporary servitude at least.” While liberal notions of contract law and human freedom would soon temper appeals to outright slavery, what remained was a view of sloth as at once the defining characteristic of a people and a problem demanding remedy, a remedy that could only come in the form of controlled and supervised work. Many of the laws that contributed to destroying subsistence economies and pushing agrarian populations into new wage labor systems were enveloped with commitments to combatting the “natural” idleness of the peasantry and to developing among them a more productive relationship with time. Even such things as the “enclosure [laws] and agricultural improvement [acts] were both, in some sense, concerned with the efficient husbandry of the time of the labor-­force,” E. P. Thompson (1967: 78) reminds us. So too were the Game Laws, the elimination of traditional festivals and holidays, and expanded vagrancy prohibitions (Perelman 2000). And Thompson’s famous study of how the imposition of “time thrift” habits among the English poor intersected with the rise of industrial labor discipline returns continually to popular impressions of poverty being little more than a consequence of laziness. Reverend J. Clayton’s Friendly Advice to the Poor, published in 1755, exemplifies this view by arguing that “if the sluggard hides his hands in his bosom, rather than applies them to work; if he spends his Time in Sauntering, impairs his Constitution by Laziness, and dulls his Spirit by Indolence,” then, as Thompson (1967: 83) adds, “he can expect only poverty as his reward.” Invoking such opinions of the British poor, capitalist expansion came to frame itself as but one component in a general “war on sloth” (Perelman 2000: 16). What becomes clear when we insert these admonitions into the narrative structure of primitive accumulation is that the story they tell is not about an event but a process. This process is plotted on a temporal scale as a transition (to capitalism) but is matched on a social scale by something that might broadly be considered transformation—people who were once engaged in certain livelihood practices become people engaged in others. With that, the ways of life and cultural patterns thought to attend to the former are altered as people transform into the latter. This social transformation is ascribed value—it is part of the progress claimed to come about through capitalist expansion. Social progress evidences systemic progress, with transformation performing transition on a smaller, more human, scale. This doubly procedural dimension of primitive accumulation’s plot structure demands attention. It is the temporal logic of this overlap that connects its retrospective narrative posture with the actually existing and future demands of capital,

108

Chapter 4

that links, we can say, the story of labor’s emergence with strategies for its continual optimization. Attending to such narratives allows us to see how historicity itself becomes politicized as a technology of labor discipline.

The Time of Primitive Accumulation Specifying the temporal logic underlying primitive accumulation narratives might begin by pointing out their recourse to a view of chronology as progressive transformation, an example of that form of historical thought Foucault (1977: 160) termed “evolutive historicity”—“a social time of a serial, orientated, cumulative type” based on “the discovery of an evolution in terms of ‘progress.’” This is a sense of history as a “dynamic” rather than “dynastic” force, in which time can be conceptualized around perpetual and “continuous evolutions” rather than periodic “solemn events” (Foucault 1977: 161) or the predestination of Christian End Times (Koselleck 2002: 225). Foucault traces the emergence of this form of modernity’s historical consciousness to the mid-­ 1600s around institutions such as the school and the military, though it is likely that it only became dominant, even in the urban centers of Europe, sometime in the late 1800s (Koselleck 2002: 219). What concerned Foucault was how such forms of time reckoning became “correlative with the new techniques of power, and more specifically, with a new way of administering time and making it useful,” giving rise to the question he sees as central to all disciplinary institutions: “How can one capitalize the time of individuals, accumulate it in each of them, in their bodies, in their forces or in their abilities, in a way that is susceptible of use and control?” (Foucault 1977: 160, 157). The point, for Foucault, was to understand how a macro-­temporal model of progressive evolution allowed a course to be charted for micro-­temporal interventions upon individuals, one that could ascribe potentialities and organize their distribution in an economic formation of useful parts. This deployment of historicity as a social force was, he would suggest, one of the central problems framing the emergence of European capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The overlap between England’s industrial revolution and its general “war on sloth” illustrates this aspect of capital’s social-­transformative project perfectly. What else does the accusation of “sloth” name but a way of inhabiting time, of embodying it, in ways that denies use and control, refusing capitalization by even its bearer? What more perfectly sets up labor discipline’s reconstitution of the body’s rhythms around “clock time” and the temporal



Of Suffering and Salvation 109

unitization of value than the social denigration of sloth? Progress, in the sense of continual betterment or striving toward improvement, overlaps with the other sense of progress as the movement of an object through linear time, the latter being a precondition for the former. Evolutive historicity provides a framework for certain institutions (such as the school, the military, and the factory) not only to adopt the task of historical transformation, of inscribing in individuals the disciplinary procedures necessary for their own progress, but also to identify those populations targeted with inscription into these institutions as occupants of a certain temporal location, one we might call, following Fabian (1983), allochronic. Fabian uses the term “allochronic” to identify representational devices that institute a “denial of coevalness” between a subject and object of discourse, marking the latter not merely as “primitive,” as step one in an evolutionary scale, but as existing completely outside the temporal framework of the subject (Fabian 1983: 32). Bringing so-­marked populations into socially transformative processes begins with their subjection to forms of temporal consciousness consistent with the mandate of evolutive historicity—their route to transformation can be plotted on a progressive chronology. This is part of the social function of these institutions, what gives them value beyond the exacting skills they teach. And this will be the starting point of the narratives of primitive accumulation we examine below. Laboring populations must be brought out of their atemporal condition of beforeness and into the time of progress, so they may, well, progress or, we could say, be optimized. This overlap between capitalist genesis and ideologies of human optimization was something Foucault took great interest in, particularly in his early writing on the mode of government he termed “biopower”—the “mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power” (Foucault 2009: 1). His genealogy of the emergence of biopower in fact begins at the point when processes of primitive accumulation in Western Europe latched onto the budding idea of life’s perfectibility and a new arsenal of techniques for administering and fostering its potentialities. Industrial labor complexes opened up social and economic productivity as fields of enhancement both by machines themselves and a view of the “body as a machine”: “its disciplining, the optimization of its capacities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls” (Foucault 1978: 139). This is a professed mastery of time itself, a fusion of the body with its vital force. But while

110

Chapter 4

biopower speaks a language of universality, of addressing “life itself ” as a field of perfectability, it is in fact the proto-­working-­class body and life that (as Foucault himself shows) are first targeted for “optimization,” in the factories and attendant institutional complexes assembled around the rise of European capitalism. Biopower begins its life as a class project. Once we connect the class specificity of this form of power with the conditions of its emergence, we begin to see that, in contexts of primitive accumulation, what an idiom like “optimization” comes to name is the unending end of an imaginary trajectory of social transformation and economic transition patterned on evolutive historicity. For it to mark the present, as an existing goal of capital (as The Manager did at the start of this chapter) and marker of social progress for laboring populations (as we will see ahead), the retroactive teleology organizing primitive accumulation narratives must regularly invoke a description of labor’s beforeness and invest it with a value that is at once negative and open to correction. Beforeness—the problematic temporal Location A that sets up resolution in temporal Location B—is thus a condensation of the whole social ideology informing capital’s claim to advancing some sort of progressive transformation. It is there that anthropological analyses of primitive accumulation narratives must focus. So, to return to twenty-­first-­century Ecuador, the question becomes: what there informs this location? Or, to put this question another way—how do these transition narratives construct their object?

The Lottery I could hear the yelling from the bottom of the stairs. Still, up I went, knowing full well that my scheduled interview with The Manager would again be postponed. The Manager was a man of few subtleties. I had known him for only a month or so and in that time had come to regard him as someone who seemed to truly believe that with only a little more volume and a little more assertiveness, the world could be his. Not all plantation managers, owners, or professional workers were of this temperament. Many were mild-­mannered, thoughtful types who routinely swapped books with me and genuinely seemed to puzzle over the fate of their workers. Not The Manager. He fit the stereotype people outside the plantation sector had of people in his position—a boss who never let you forget it. The words blasting from his office in TerraNova’s administrative building



Of Suffering and Salvation 111

suggested that this was more a time for volume and assertiveness than an interview. I never learned what the problem was or what the five or six greenhouse administrators assembled in his office had done to merit the tone, but whatever it was took precedence over our chat. I would have to come another day, The Manager told me, with a brush of his hand. But then, a question—“Hey, how are things up in Carrera?” I was caught off guard by the shift of registers and his reference to the Indigenous community where I was living, about an hour’s bus ride up the mountains, home to many of his plantation’s workers. I realized quickly that this was not a question I was meant to answer. It was a hook to draw me into the show. “I’ll tell you,” he continued. “Things are much better up there now than they were before,” meaning before the plantations arrived. This before/after binary was not simply the way historical time was being arranged; it also shaped how the future could be imagined: “The best thing we could do for people up there,” he stressed, “would be to put plantations all the way up the mountains,” overrunning the communities and “giving work to everybody.” “You mean, like the haciendas did?” I thought to myself. Back to the past. “Ooof, before,” he went on, “life was la miseria”—total misery. To back this up, The Manager called on his expert witness, a young man in his early twenties named Luís who was, in fact, originally from Carrera but had gone to technical college in the city of Otavalo and was now the plantation’s main persona de sistemas or computer guy, designing their webpages and online ordering programs. Luís, who had recently left the community to live in a rented room in town, was the only Indigenous person besides cleaners who worked in the plantation’s offices. “Tell him, Luís, tell him what your father did,” The Manager prodded, also not an invitation to answer. The Manager continued. “His father lived off the land, struggling day and night, and was probably illiterate, right? But,” to drive home the transition, “young people like you go to university.” Luís, for his part, managed to get a few words in—60 percent of young people in Carrera, he estimated, work in flower plantations. And some have managed to build their own house as a result. They’re “future oriented” now, he stressed. A word had still not escaped my lips. The Manager, who had a rough idea of my research interests, closed down the show with an analogy meant to wrap it all up for me—of course things have changed up there, he said. “Just like there would be changes if you won a million dollars. You’d buy a Ferrari and your life would be different.” A few eggs might get broken, but somebody’s getting an omelet. In 2001, when this incident occurred, the plantation sector was new enough for the topic of rural transformation to still merit discussion but old enough for

112

Chapter 4

that transformation to feel decisive. Older men and women who had grown up on haciendas were still living and active members of highland communities; many even worked on flower plantations, earning wages on the same lands they were once bound to as huasipungueros. They seemed to give social form to the history of the hacienda system’s total dominion over the people and lands of Cayambe, a past coming in and out of view as these chronotopic figures moved about the plantation, as if to showcase for everyone the dramatic transition under way. My conversations with the urban professionals who felt this transition was theirs to guide gave me the sense that historical time seemed to them to be moving at an accelerated pace, unevenly carrying different generations’ past lives along in a single force of destiny. If managing a flower farm could give one a god’s-­eye view of history’s beginning and end, then the whole history of Cayambe could be summarized by captioning an imaginary photograph of a twenty-­something-­year-­old Indigenous man and his father. Between them stands the lottery these poor souls had won—the plantations came here. Their Ferraris are waiting. The youth are future oriented now. And yet, for such an analogy to make its mark, the illiterate father must continue to haunt the picture. Its whole weight rests on his image. In other words, for the story of primitive accumulation and of capitalist class formation to be framed as one of human uplift, a past must continually be invoked that not only highlights the region’s debased social condition but also roots this debasement in a preexisting lack of those specific things given value and demanded of a workforce in a (fully formed, idealized) capitalist economy— like how the English poor can only be scorned as lazy and slothful once time thrift becomes a requirement of an industrial working class, or how purported illiteracy can only mark the primitive condition of Luís’s father once his son’s education is highlighted as responsible for opening the gilded gates of urban professionalism to him. This is the retrospective teleology I identified earlier as central to the temporal location of beforeness. More elaborate examples of this mode of historicism would emerge throughout my research, the first coming from The Manager himself.

Of Suffering and Salvation When the 2001 Mother’s Day production boom ended, I took advantage of the slower pace of work in the greenhouses to shadow workers through their tasks and ask them questions along the way. One day, an out-­of-­breath



Of Suffering and Salvation 113

supervisor appeared between the rows of flowers, calling my name. I was to report immediately to The Manager’s office—he would take his interview now. I had by then given up on this request. The constant postponements convinced me the interview would never happen, while being strategically ignored gave me freedom to move anywhere I pleased. The armed and professionally surly entrance guards had even made me an employee identification card that was so confusing in its job title—“anthropologist”—that no one bothered to report my arrivals or departures. Better not rock the boat, I thought. The Manager, thankfully, had zero interest in my research. He took the interview as a chance to tell his personal story and provide me with what he considered the definitive analysis of Cayambe’s transformation. The Manager was one of the few professional employees of a cut-­flower business who could genuinely consider himself involved with the industry since its inception. In 1985, he was hired to oversee production on a rose plantation in Tabacundo. This job came three years after graduating from the Zamorano agricultural training school in Honduras, making him one of the first, if not the first, links in a transnational chain connecting this school, its Goethian-­inspired raise-­yourself-­up-­by-­your-­bootstraps ideology of agrarian transformation, and Ecuador’s cut-­flower industry (Malo 1999). In 1991, The Manager took a new job as general manager of a rose plantation neighboring TerraNova, also formed out of the dissolution of hacienda Guachalá, but which went bankrupt in the financial crash of the late 1990s. Apparently, the farm suffered its fatal blow at the end of the decade when a bout of terrible winds destroyed the plantation’s greenhouses and windbreaks. Already severely in debt to the banks, the plantation’s owners were denied the emergency financing needed to repair their structures and had to declare bankruptcy, turning their lands and equipment over to the bank. The Manager was then hired by Castellano to run TerraNova and a smaller farm called Santi he was just setting up in Cayambe’s northern parish of Ayora. It was this long history of involvement in Ecuador’s flower business, the decade spent in the micro-­region of Guachalá, and a few years previously working as a hacienda agronomist that The Manager referenced when claiming the authority to describe the region’s changes since the arrival of the flower plantations. He also noted that his understanding of rural life was enhanced by his lifelong passion for hunting, fishing, and exploring. He’d apparently spent considerable time, recently and in his youth, wandering around the upper mountains looking for sport, and so his interpretations, he reminded me, were grounded in firsthand observation, the kind of thing an

114

Chapter 4

anthropologist might appreciate. Here is how The Manager summarized the region’s transformation, starting with a portrait of the before: What I’ve seen here, after all this time in flowers, is a great change, at the social level, of improvement for the people. I’ll tell you how these farms have improved the quality of life for the people of the countryside, the rural people. Before, there were no sources of work here, since there were only haciendas. Men left for the cities to work in construction, as masons or peons, occasional work in the city. And there were two problems with this. The man left and divided the family. In other words, the family was left behind, broken. He worked in the city and saw them once a month. And women stayed here, with many children, in very difficult conditions of poverty and hunger, without access to doctors, without access to education. Women stayed on a very unproductive piece of land, with many children, without much to eat, tending an agriculture of subsistence, a basic agriculture . . . corn, grains, basically. And also, at times, what would happen is that with this break in the nuclear family, the man in the city would get another woman and abandon his family. This was a very hard reality. Many people here—our female workers— earlier would have had eight, ten children, and three or four would die. They’d die of a cold, of very simple things. But why did they die? Because they didn’t have access to basic services . . . and they couldn’t pay for a doctor anyway. And the state didn’t do anything for anyone, it was useless. . . . And the women, in contrast, only had one option, which was to go to the city as well at a very young age, to work as a domestic servant. And this would break the family up again, leaving her children here with the grandparents. This contrasts with the present: Since these flower farms started, they’ve had a great advantage: they’re close to the communities, very close to the communities. . . . And they started giving work, equally to men and women, right? This means that men no longer have to go off to the cities, they stay here. In other words, the family has recomposed itself. . . . This means the household is again united, man and woman. They have, they can have, an income. Because the two of them can work in the flower



Of Suffering and Salvation 115

farms, right? To have a better family income means access to basic services, such as doctors, access to better education. Now they can send their children to school. They are better nourished, right? Better nourished children from infancy makes better generations. Better food, with better schooling opportunities, with better health . . . this is progress, see? This is something very real. The government makes a ton of programs, they say they’re going to generate employment, or [whatever] . . . all lies! These flower farms, which are from private capital, are a reality. And these rural areas pass from . . . what’d I say? from less than [does calculation] 0.2 people per hectare employed [on ranches]. Today we have, in these farms, fifteen people per hectare that can have work, fifteen! With everything, according to what the law says, with access to social security, with overtime pay, with benefits, with medical services, with access to educational programs. The Manager’s account of regional transformation mirrors that of another industry pioneer, Mauricio Dávalos, the lawyer and banker whose route to setting up Ecuador’s first export rose plantation was recounted in Chapter 1. We ended that discussion with Dávalos explaining the pride he felt in how the industry he helped found had improved the lives of people in Tabacundo, a canton neighboring and now very much connected with Cayambe: “The fact is that we hired the very first workers there and this is where, I can tell you, I feel a big, big satisfaction and pride with floriculture in general, because Tabacundo was a place where there was nothing.” Let’s continue to follow Dávalos in his recollections on regional transformations and his role in it, starting again with his portrait of “the before.” We did an analysis of the blood of the first workers we contracted [in 1983]. Eight-­four percent had anemia. They wore rags. Literally, rags. It’s that people lived in misery, and the houses, all the houses around the plantation were chozas [straw huts] with straw down to the floor, without even so much as adobe walls. . . . I’m telling you the truth. Very few children went to school. Most of them were pasturing sheep and all that, helping their parents. And so what did we achieve? When I started, I stared by giving them something to eat. But what did we achieve? What we accomplished was, in the first place, paying people in the countryside a salary that was the same as in the city. That was the start. Later, we contracted women, since women weren’t

116

Chapter 4

usually employed, just the men, and this greatly liberated women from the condition of dependency, and brutal dependency in many cases, on her husband, or the men they lived with. Later, with this dignified work, with the man and woman working, which is now common, they achieved an income that, for the countryside [is very high] because the cost of living in the countryside is lower [than in the city]. An income similar to that of the city becomes a very good income and this has truly transformed life in the countryside. From the start we protected people. In this time there was no social security for the workers. There was what was called “agrarian security,” and we affiliated with this. You can see everywhere everything that has been the development brought on by floriculture. You see progress. And you see social progress, more than anything. It’s economic, but you see social progress. Today, for example, every year we do a blood analysis [of our workers]. Anemia almost doesn’t exist anymore. What there are now are venereal diseases, which is a satisfaction, since this is now a disease of civilization. And kids are going to school. People dress decently. They live decently. They have their houses with all their gadgets inside. And so this has transformed the life of the people here. Totally. . . . When I started, it was true that the majority of people who wanted to work here were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old, and this is how some people started. But obviously these people didn’t have the opportunity to study. Now they have the opportunity to study from the time they are children. And so this is something completely new. We were the first to insist that parents send their children to school! And after that to college. This, truly, has been the result of flowers. Floriculture has brought a total transformation to everywhere it has grown up. The cantons of Pedro Moncayo and Cayambe today are the only cantons in the country that have no unemployment. It doesn’t exist! What exists is a shortage of workers. . . . And so truthfully I do believe that we, all the flower growers, have accomplished an enormous advance in the country. And no government, of any ideology, or with any amount of money has achieved what the flower industry has achieved, in terms of social and economic development. Dávalos and The Manager speak from similar positions. Both men were part of the first wave of urban professionals who went to the northern highlands



Of Suffering and Salvation 117

to open and run flower farms in the early 1980s. They became pioneers not only of the industry but also of the impression, key to the way credit was dispensed in the 1990s, that outsiders—people without any personal or familial connection to the traditional landowning classes of the highlands—were best equipped to run flower farms and make them profitable. As discussed in Chapter 1, this disaggregation from the rural landed class helped the flower industry frame itself from the start as a force of radical change for the rural highlands, a break from everything previously associated with agrarian life in the Andes. At the center of this shift was a negation of the hacienda and all it had by then come to represent. It is no surprise, then, that the transition narratives offered by Dávalos and The Manager both rest on an image of beforeness that describes a population suffering from the lingering effects of hacienda immiseration—it is against this image that their claims about the flower industry’s progressive achievements work. Most remarkable in these descriptions of beforeness is the affective posture they take. Note the deep sympathy both speakers express for the hardships endured by the people they encountered when they first entered the region. This is radically different from the narratives accompanying England’s industrial revolution, which root the rural poor’s suffering in its own moral failings, particularly its flawed relationship with time. Here no blame or critique is leveled upon the people themselves. They are objects of sympathy, not accusation, more akin to victims than delinquents. This sympathy allows for suffering to emerge as the master trope of the state of beforeness, a suffering that both speakers dwell on in their narratives, guiding their descriptions across and even into the bodies of rural men, women, and children, through their domestic lives, houses, clothing, marital relations, and sexual habits, all condensing into a portrait of before-­flowers rural society as a zone of death, decay, and abandonment. Children die, families fall apart, people wear rags, and everyone lives in total misery. This is what the hacienda produced and what it left in its wake. But what about those children of hacienda owners who themselves became cut-­flower growers? How do they describe the capitalist transformation of a region they and their families are blamed for leaving destitute? I once asked Neptalí Bonifaz about the people who worked on his first carnation plantation, the one often credited with founding the cut-­flower industry in 1982. I wanted to know if those workers came from communities formed out of the dissolution of Guachalá, the hacienda that his family had owned since the early twentieth century. Can the social relations structuring one economic system

118

Chapter 4

be transferred to another, even decades apart? Yes, apparently. It’s not that his workers were from ex-­Guachalá communities, Bonifaz stressed, correcting me: his workers “are from these communities” still, referring not just to his 1982 venture but also to the rose plantation he came to own shortly before his death. There was unmistakable pride in this assertion, pride I hear as not only reflecting an equation between employment and welfare but also showcasing an enduring commitment to the well-­being of a given population through time. It’s as if his family’s continuity, across generations and into and out of different forms of productive land use, there on that same spot, could all be summarized, now and in the past, as a kind of social commitment, the kind one could feel pride in. This is a very different image of the past and of what might linger on in the present as the legacy of the hacienda system than that offered by outsiders, one summarized here, by that system’s greatest heir, not as neglect and devastation but as a form of patronal care that waged labor doesn’t correct for but actually continues.2 And yet this pride, this sense of commitment, still rests on the same social image as other growers’ discourses do—a figuration of the rural Indian as an embodiment of absolute poverty, misery, and need. The difference is that other growers, those coming from the urban professional class, can blame the hacienda owners for actually causing this mass destitution and thereby pitch their expanding plantations and intensive labor systems as curative of a socially produced problem, something the children of hacienda owners like Bonifaz cannot do. The misery has to still exist, as a problem marking the current labor pool’s state of beforeness, but in ways that admits no responsibility for causing it. Here is how Bonifaz’s widow Serena quite brilliantly managed this dilemma in her husband’s historical memory. “Well, the Bonfazes,” she told me, “really went a step ahead,” did more and better things for their workers than most hacendado families did, “because they were all, in a sense, progressive, that’s one fact.” To explain this, she invoked an image that drives home the destitution of the huasipungueros living on their lands. “I remember on Sundays, all the people from the highlands, the tribe [sic] with red ponchos, way up high, from Cangahua, would come down for mass [in the hacienda’s church]. And it was a different world. . . . It was amazing, the population, the amount of people. And the poverty. I mean, shocking poverty. And I’ve never seen a community, an entire community, practically, of people that were totally retarded. Very small, very uh. . . . Yeah, it was sad to see. They could hardly speak.” It would be unfair to hear in Serena’s description the full pejorative weight we now associate with the word “retarded”—at her choice, this conversation was held in English, not her first



Of Suffering and Salvation 119

language. It’s the broad impression, physical and social, left on her by this memory that interests me, as well as how it sets up the image she wants to convey of her husband and his legacy as a flower grower with a social mission. That mission rests on this image of the before-­flowers state of the very people Bonifaz felt proud employing on his plantations, whose poverty, “shocking poverty,” is reflected equally in their bodies as their intellectual development and is the kind of thing that inspires sadness, not guilt, and that impels a compassionate drive to act. This expression of sympathy and care was part of what frames the distinct legacy of the Bonifaz family, Serena suggests, and which was part of Neptalí’s personal constitution well before he discovered flower growing as a means to express that. This scene she described was, she said, “before the time, something that Neptalí also worked on, of putting iodine in the salt. He worked very hard on that project until they introduced nationally, the iodine in the salt. So I had no idea what happened to these people, or whether . . . a community of retarded people has disappeared.” Two trajectories overlap here, one involving highland Indians, in their endemic poverty, coming into view in moments of sympathetic contact, the other involving landowners trying to save the former’s souls and bodies from extinction. And where did those people go? Have they disappeared? I think Neptalí himself answered that question ten years earlier. After exuding pride in offering employment to people whose families were once bound to his family’s hacienda as huasipungueros, Bonifaz told me that they, like everyone else in the rural highlands, “started to improve their economic condition when [the flower industry] started paying better salaries, when competition increased, and which started to bring progress to the zone. Look, twenty years ago Cayambe was a dead town, Tabacundo worse. It’s been revived and now Cayambe is a wellspring of prosperity! This is all because of the cut-­flower industry.” He paused to let the weight of his assertion linger, then turned to offer evidence for it. “My brother [then-­mayor of Cayambe, Diego Bonifaz] calculated that the plantations have invested a hundred million dollars just in Cayambe, another hundred million in Tabacundo. This is a massive investment that has produced a lot of wealth. The people of Cayambe now all have electricity. Before there was none. They have potable water. All the campesinos have houses, land, potable water, and even cell phones, almost all, you must have seen this, right? Look, you can see how the economic condition has improved here, and what an industry that is profitable, that is export oriented, can do. This is productive for the workers, and it has eliminated all the problems of emigration, of drugs, and so on.”

120

Chapter 4

If we attend closely to the portrait of suffering that frames labor’s beforeness in all of these accounts, we see that it does more than provide a basis for sympathy. It also sets up a temporal script that puts this sympathy into action, framing the cut-­flower industry’s arrival in Cayambe-­Tabacundo, and the entire process of primitive accumulation itself, as a moral project as much as an economic one, something akin to a humanitarian intervention. This compassionate drive produces descriptions of the present overlain with images not just of “progress” but of what might be more properly called salvation. Note the evidence our first speakers draw on to prove their contributions to human welfare. First, we have the health and bodily security of workers and their families. Bodies are saved from premature death and decline. People don’t die from colds or hunger. Even Neptalí Bonifaz worked to add iodine to salt. Next is the stability of the heterosexual family. Families are saved from disintegration, and the domestic unit is no longer an impossibility. Both speakers underline an image of the normative household based on notions of gender equity and give specific emphasis to women’s release from brutal masculine dependency. These three objects of salvation—bodies, families, women—converge in the reanimation of social reproduction, itself owned as an achievement of the cut-­flower industry. It is not surprising, then, that the figure of the child comes to occupy such a prominent role in both speakers’ assertions of having given the people of Cayambe and Tabacundo nothing short of a future. As the dead child figured beforeness as a period of social morbidity, so the educated, fed, and doctor-­monitored child figures the present as a period of vitality and prosperity, indeed, a period for the flourishing of life itself. From this, “education” comes to stand in for the region’s capacity for a future and its entry into modern notions of futurity, something, Dávalos insists, flower growers are singlehandedly responsible for. If it’s true, as Luís says—the token Indigenous man involved in the management of TerraNova plantation, the synecdoche of the educated and progressive youth (present) versus illiterate and miserable fathers (past) distinction—that the young people of Carrera are “future oriented now,” then we know exactly how their purported desire for education and their work on flower farms connect, even if it’s not clear how one could do both at the same time. Flower growers “were the first to insist that parents send their children to school,” Dávalos tells us, making sure it’s clear just who should take credit for this gift. And on this, make no mistake, both speakers remind us—this is not the work of state.3 What makes these narratives not simply statements of social change but transition narratives, narratives of primitive accumulation, is the centrality of



Of Suffering and Salvation 121

waged labor to the story they tell. It is the purported lack of waged employment in the Cayambe-­Tabacundo region that lies behind the misery of its inhabitants in their life before the flower industry began, and the salvation it brings to the region comes in the form of a wage. Families fell apart because at least one member left in search of work. People couldn’t care for their children because they lacked an income. This gift of work, and on a pay scale that dissolves rurality’s difference from urban-­national space, was, Dávalos says, the very first act of social welfare he performed on his plantation and tops the list of his and his industry’s achievements. Quality of life before flowers and in the present can be easily compared, in The Manager’s assessment, with only a rough calculation of workers per hectare required on dairy farms and flower plantations. The story these narratives tell, thus, is about the making of a working class and with that of a capitalist class system. This is their central point. And what waged labor brings to the class it creates, in the first instance, is an income, itself initiating a wave of life improvements for previously unwaged peoples—income leads to social services, to doctors, to better food, to schooling, to life, The Manager tells us. It also brings people into domains of intervention that exceed the monetary returns provided—new forms of social security open up. New laws for worker protection start to cover their economic lives. Anemia somehow disappears and diseases of civilization (not those of poverty) creep in. And yet this marking of the preflowers period with a misery rooted in unemployment is a historical anachronism. It reads the current reality of waged income backward to find a prior lack and treats that lack as a dynamic force in people’s lives. Unemployment kills children, breaks up families, makes people anemic, and prevents them from going to school or seeing doctors. This is—again—the retroactive teleology underlying the salvation narrative referenced earlier, a key part of the mythic structure Marx identified in the “nursery tale” style of anecdote that substitutes for history when primitive accumulation is the topic. Reading them in this way brings two somewhat subtle points to the fore. The first subtlety is perhaps not so unusual but no less important for that. It concerns the identification of salvation with an external agent and the purported inability of local people to do anything to escape their miserable condition on their own. Their efforts at agency—leaving to find work, for instance—are futile and fatal, at best short-­sighted attempts to find individual relief from the destitution they suffer but becoming further sources of stress and ruination. Something must be done. Someone must come along to stop

122

Chapter 4

the suffering. This can’t be found in situ, in the social field composing the Cayambe-­Tabacundo region, for it has become dysfunctional. This not only adds to the image of outsiders being considered the ideal flower growers for the change they bring to the region; it also acts on workers themselves, prefiguring their malleability, their need for crafting by others’ hands, that will be so essential to their submission to intense forms of labor discipline, to regimes of optimization, and to the framing of the new goals of accumulation—productivity and efficiency—as investments in workers’ personal betterment. This much is clear. Less obvious in the narratives is a second feature that plays a major role in the primitive accumulation process itself, namely, the association of rural progress with a general movement away from subsistence agriculture. All notions of progress and improvement in these narratives rely on this. The land, in The Manager’s account, that women were left alone to tend is imagined to be “very unproductive,” giving rise to a “very basic” type of agriculture that in many ways is responsible for the “very hard reality” rural people endured. This land and the livelihoods to which it gives rise appear to be a major source of their misery. Rural life improves when all adults of the household are working for wages on the plantation, not tending their own fields. Children’s work pasturing sheep and helping parents with household duties is what keeps them from attending school and entering a trajectory of personal development. We might read Dávalos’s pride-­filled assertion that it was the flower growers who “were the first to insist” that parents send their children to school as an insistence that the next generation of rural community members break their ties to the land, do not develop the skills necessary to reproduce a subsistence-­based agrarian economy, allow for the inculcation of desires and dispositions fitting of an urban working class, and become more prone to choosing a life based on waged labor than household or community-­based agriculture. They will become, in other words, Luís, who had by 2001 left the community, his father’s land, and the household economy behind. He was “future oriented” now, like the 60 percent of Carrera’s youth working in flower farms, and educated, a totally different person from his father, the latter characterized not only as illiterate but also as living off the land. Lack of education and a commitment to domestic agriculture reflect one another, each evidencing a life of “total misery,” each an emblem of the past, not the future. The subsistence-­based and nonwaged agrarian lifestyle of past generations is a major device in the allochronic representation of families and communities still committed to practicing it or fighting to retain their land.



Of Suffering and Salvation 123

If we follow Marx in summarizing primitive accumulation as “nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” but as also, again following Marx, generating narrative forms that legitimize concrete acts of dispossession as progressive interventions into social reality, then we can see the work such transition narratives do within the complex set of forces creating a capitalist class system around cut-­flower production. Narratives and imaginaries, of course, can’t dispossess people of anything. What they can do is help naturalize a certain vision of the world that becomes convincing to people faced with a choice of how to make the kind of lives they want for themselves. This vision, we will see in Part IV, has become woven into the labor process itself, in the organization of work and the forms of discipline used, all explicitly designed as interventions into workers’ conceptions of the self and their aspirations for the future. This, in the postcrisis discovery of labor’s value, is, I am arguing, the key site in struggles around dispossession in highland Ecuador today, an investment into the making of a population that offers itself up to capital as a resource, itself striving toward eternal optimization. The narratives discussed above render this socially transformative project, working at the subjective, aspirational level of workers’ consciousness, explicit, a project expressed as the underlying mission flower growers set for themselves from the start and the true marker of their achievements in the region. Such retroactive assessments that frame class formation as a project of human improvement have a formal quality to them; their form, that is, is consistent with the narrative structure imposed upon memory by the speaker’s existing class project. Their content, however, draws itself from local reality and, for that, has deep roots in the ways powerful interventions upon that reality have been conceptualized and carried out in the Ecuadorian highlands. It is by unpacking this that the “secret of primitive accumulation” in Cayambe, to borrow Marx’s phrasing, is revealed, a secret having everything to do with the historic links between ideas of economy and those of race.

A Political Economy of Perception: Capitalism as Eugenics Close scrutiny of the social-­transformative script embedded in primitive accumulation narratives reveals that it outlines something more than simply the making of a working class. Folded within the narrative of class formation

124

Chapter 4

is the story of an encounter with human difference that is progressively overcome through capitalist expansion. This may be a generic feature of this form of narrative, part of how the story of capitalist arising and dispossession gets retroactively told by those for whom the ensuing world has come to appear natural and right. However, a key question facing scholars of primitive accumulation in postcolonial contexts is how such economistic forms of historicism generated around capitalist expansion come to overlap with other, locally entrenched, ways of reckoning and addressing difference in the domestic political imaginary—how the story of capitalism’s transformative capacity attaches to existing rhetorics explaining categorical marginality and propositions for acting upon it. This section attends to this task. It shows how the claims to regional salvation running through flower growers’ narratives of their work in Cayambe draw upon and reproduce a set of discourses that have long constituted Ecuador’s rural highlands and its Indigenous inhabitants as targets of transformative intervention. These discourses have their roots in the late 1800s, around the time of the Liberal Revolution, when longstanding theological questions about how to best advance the “spiritual transformation” (Arcos 1986: 300) of Ecuador’s Indians became secularized as not only nationalist questions, concerning Indians’ potential for full and equal citizenship in the nation, but also economic questions, concerning Indians’ capacity to enjoy contractual freedom as wage workers under conditions of capitalist expansion. The problem is a distinctly postcolonial one, born of the Republican political aspiration to legislate on behalf of a universal citizenry but which, under the new nation’s homogeneous juridical code, had to continually wrestle with social relations of alterity carried over from colonial rule. It is worth recalling that the colonial administration constituted the “Indian” as primarily a fiscal category, marking that population, which, by nature of autochthonous birth, uniquely owed tribute to the Crown but also, in a return of sorts, was guaranteed “protection” under an apparatus of tutelage and care. In dispensing (slowly) with such official distinctions, the lingering and de facto identity of “indio” or “Indian” came to designate those “people subject to a private and everyday administrative power,” a population to which the “state tacitly delegates its sovereignty to local forms of ethnic domination” (Guerrero 1997: 569). These “private and everyday” powers to which the state delegated its authority were largely haciendas, which, whether run by the Church or wealthy Creole families, took advantage of the post-­Independence period’s



Of Suffering and Salvation 125

liberalized property laws to expand their holdings and monopolize arable land throughout the countryside, absorbing the Indigenous inhabitants of them. So expansionary was this land-­based system of domination that, by the end of the nineteenth century, to be Indian in the highlands was considered, almost by definition, to be the subject of hacienda rule just as to work for and live in subordinate relation to a hacienda made one, by definition, an Indian (see Guerrero 2003). This equation between a racialized category—Indian—and an economic system—the hacienda—produced important effects. For one, it meant that any effort by Ecuador’s urban, political class to understand Indigenous culture or to pronounce on the racial “character” of Indians, let alone explain the determinants of their seemingly universal impoverishment and marginality, would have to also understand the conditions of life and work on haciendas. This is no small twist on race thinking in the period, for it would open up the possibility that the misery suffered by the so-­called miserable race was not, in fact, a reflection of Indians’ natural inferiority but was rather, to some extent, an effect of submission to the forces of hacienda subjection. To take this a step further, it implied the possibility for thinking that race itself, as a system of differentiation, might be nothing more than an expression of structural, systemic conditions, a totalizing but very much malleable force over life and thus open to change. Such was the position, explicitly put, by the liberal sociologist and politician Agustín Cueva Sanz in his 1926 address to the Pan American Congress in Panama, where he argued, in a sophisticated refutation of the biological basis of race, that all racial “inferiority is due to psychic causes and social prejudices and, for this, transitory, not permanent” (Cueva 1926: 394). From this, a second possibility would emerge, namely, that any effort to improve the life of Indians, be this economic or political, would have to imply some kind of reform of the hacienda apparatus, that system deemed responsible for such perversions in the first place. It is this overlap between racial knowledge and economic engineering that matters most here and will come to shape a consensus among the country’s elite by the mid-­twentieth century that any form of capitalist penetration into the spaces of Indigenous sociality and, especially, work (overdetermined as it was by hacienda dominion) could be considered a major investment into national “progress” and, at the same time, Indigenous salvation. This is, I believe, the genealogy of thought informing flower growers’ sense of purpose in twenty-­first-­century Cayambe, of which I summarize a few high points below.

126

Chapter 4

Of Debt and Bondage Knowing the character, the condition, the ignorance in which unfortunately that unhappy class is still immersed, the Law wishes to leave to indigenes the freedom to cancel their contracts . . . can humanity and reason oblige the indigene to be a victim of his lack of foresight, his lack of discernment? —The Honorable Bustamante of the National House of Representatives 1855 (in Guerrero 1997: 565)

We might begin this genealogy with the public discussions and parliamentary debates that occurred from the late 1800s to the early 1900s about concertaje, or debt peonage, the primary way in which haciendas secured and reproduced their labor force in these years. Like other debt-­driven labor systems around the world, concertaje relations generally began with the hacendado offering potential workers cash advances on future labor, initiating a cycle of debt and lifelong attachment to the hacienda for many workers and their families. Concern about this practice among the urban political class followed closely on haciendas’ rapid expansion in the post-­Independence years. These concerns came from multiple quarters and were contaminated by competing political ambitions, making the concertaje debate “the most arduous polemic of the period” (Prieto 2004: 45). At the center of it stood the figure of the concierto, the “attached” worker, on whose behalf all critiques of, possible modifications to, and justifications of hacienda practice were pitched. What made this figure so significant for political discussion at the time was its racialization—as hacienda workers, conciertos were universally understood to be “indios,”4 the two terms “concierto” and “indio” more or less implying one another. In this way, inquiry into concertaje came to function as a technology of “Indian depth psychology” for urban elites, a window into the character and psychic composure of the indio and, with that, the centerpiece of an emerging postcolonial system of racial knowledge and practice (Guerrero 1997: 565). The key question about concertaje was this: how was it that a people, an entire people apparently, could fall so totally into debt as to surrender their and their families’ lives, forever, to another’s whims? Here is how early historian, senator, and provincial deputy Pedro Fermín Cevallos answered this question in 1887: “Being hungry and naked, and having no way to satisfy these needs, [el indio] is drawn to attaching [concertar] himself to the owners



Of Suffering and Salvation 127

of the haciendas; and by way of the small advances they give, no more than 10, 20, or 40 cents, according to custom in each province or parish, the arms of los indios remain bound forever . . . and the slavery only ends at death” (in Guerrero 1991: 50–51). This passage from misery, “hungry and naked,” to slavery and death seems to provide all one needs to know to grasp the essence of the indio, to know his composition and character.5 The indio, Cevallos continues, “almost has no sense of good and bad, nor of honor, nor beauty, nor, perhaps, love; and perhaps doesn’t even know what we call curiosity. . . . So great is his abjection, his conviction of the misery in which he lives, that he never resists as he should the mandates and whims of other men” (in Guerrero 1991: 52–53). To know el indio is to know misery; the two are synonymous. Misery is a determinate force here. It gives rise to a “conviction” of its own totality, to resignation, to an underdeveloped emotional and intellectual state. It compels unfortunate livelihood decisions and determines one’s dominion by others. These features outline a racial profile and define the condition of indigeneity. Misery encapsulates this condition, holds it together as a system, and guides behavior. It explains concertaje as concertaje explains the indio. We need to see such assessments as more than simply archives of racial dominion or confirmations of one population’s sense of moral superiority and natural right to rule; they are certainly this but are also much more. Akin to how Cayambe’s flower growers would view the rural highlands a century later, these are descriptions of the country’s agrarian system and of its rural workforce by proximate outsiders who intended to create sympathetic prologues to intervention. These are calls to action. Something must be done. But what? The congressional debates about concertaje sought remedy by imposing legal restrictions on hacienda practice. Their primary focus was the contract, with debt being understood as one sort of contract, albeit one wrapped in slavery, the free contract another, one considered the impetus for a more general juridical freedom to emerge. Juridical freedom was, in turn, considered the necessary foundation of any progressive and indeed modern rural society. As Guerrero notes, turn-­of-­the-­century discussions about concertaje became interlaced with debates about how to modernize the rural highlands, the argument being that “free market circulation (the ‘free’ contracting of a workforce) would be the principal parameter of social justice and progress” for the rural economy. Without this change, “the indigenous population is a brake upon social and economic progress and the construction of the Ecuadorian nation, of the white-­mestizo project. They have to be transformed” (Guerrero 1991: 54).

128

Chapter 4

The “free contract” is thus construed as an interventionist device. Although it figures the hacienda as an object of regulation, its central focus of change was the indio, whose transformation was considered an effect of this one shift in economic legislation. As liberal writer and politician Abelardo Moncayo advocated in 1895, “Down with concertaje! The most radical and simple solution would be, in effect, freedom of contract, between those who demand and those who supply their services. . . . In this way the indio will learn what his work is worth, what money is, and its use; and he will keep himself free to provide for his necessities where and how he chooses” (in Guerrero 1991: 55). Contractual freedom of labor was, in other words, understood to be the starting point for a much grander change expected to take hold in Indigenous society and personhood, the impetus for regularizing the indio’s capacities with those of the general citizenry. This modification in Indians’ economic arrangement was intended to act as a “civilizing” force on Indians (Guerrero 1991: 52–56; Prieto 2004: chap. 1). But the reverse may also be said—the “civilization” of Indians could only be stimulated through a reform of the hacienda complex. The two objects, hacienda and indio, were products of a single system. The new laws that resulted from these discussions are curious. They fold the legislation of hacienda contracts into national labor laws but add an unusual justification for their existence. As Articles Two and Four of the new decree, written in 1899, state, “The Constitution imposes on the Public Powers the obligation to protect the Indian race, charged with their improvement in social life.” And why? “Because of the abuses of some property owners, contracts for the renting of services, or concertaje, has been converted into a virtual slavery” (in Guerrero 1991: 80). All the pieces composing postcolonial indigeneity are assembled in this legislation’s motive—as in the colony and first years of Independence, Indians are again marked as a population by their need for protection6 and concern, but breaking with that tradition, this need is now delinked from ideas of essential inferiority and instead reframed as an effect of hacienda subjection. The obligation that the state here claims for itself is borne of the command not only to break the chains of slavery, as a liberating force, but also to create the conditions necessary for Indigenous “improvement,” as a generative force. The movement from strategies of protection to techniques of improvement entered political policy through the liberal humanist intellectuals who occupied positions in the constitutional assembly after the Liberal Revolution and their passionate rejection of ideas of racial essence and Indians’ natural inferiority. Among them was José Peralta, who argued in the National Convention of 1896–1897 that any



Of Suffering and Salvation 129

suggestion that Indigenous people’s purported “ignorance” or “degeneration” was part of their racial composure would amount to a “negation of the idea of human perfectibility and progress”—a cornerstone of liberal thinking the world over (Prieto 2004: 45). The indio is now starting to take shape as a secular target of intervention, demanding not spiritual tutelage but economic regulation on its road to perfectability. This economic regulation took shape around an opposition not simply between different forms of contract but also an emerging sense of the broader socioeconomic formation in which each type of contract functions. The core opposition that will develop from this discussion is between feudalism and capitalism, the latter coming to be seen, through the example of racialized bondage on haciendas, as a necessary condition of Indigenous liberation. The seeds of this view are planted here in the way that all of the legal changes proposed as remedies to concertaje—freedom of contract and the free mobility of labor—are also the key juridical preconditions for the emergence of a capitalist system. This is not coincidental. Debates about concertaje occurred in a political context marked by the leadup to Ecuador’s Liberal Revolution and the early years of Liberal Party rule (1895–1925). The birth of Ecuadorian liberalism and the Liberal Party is widely credited to coastal cacao exporters who, however dependent domestically on noncapitalist methods of production (Guerrero 1994), were perhaps the first group of national elites to develop strong ties with global capitalist markets, on which the sale of their product depended. These ties enabled the cacao boom of the early twentieth century (Striffler 2002) and fueled a strong procapitalist, promodernization version of liberal ideology among the coastal elites in their attempts to wrest state power from their Conservative rivals of the highlands— the hacendados and the Church. The debates about concertaje and critiques of hacienda practice occurred in this context. The enduring regionalist mythos associating notions of progress, modernity, and capitalism with coastal Liberals and tradition, feudalism, and conservatism with the highlands is a product of this period (cf. Cueva 1973: 11–12). The other of this period’s great products, the postcolonial indio, emerged from these debates as not only a target of beneficent intervention but also, at the same time, a “valuable symbolic piece on a political chessboard” when contending groups of elites went to bat (Guerrero 1997: 568). In this way, Indians’ salvation and improvement, their transformation from subjects of misery to indexes of progress, became open to wider investment by groups seeking to prove their commitment to national causes— even, as the case would be, highland hacienda owners.

130

Chapter 4

The National Society of Agriculture: A “Spirit of Progress” Takes Root in the Highlands

By the early twentieth century, the hacienda had come to appear to urban intellectual and political elites as an icon of seigniorial exploitation and an object demanding reform. And yet, the actual hacienda economy was starting to become internally differentiated. New postconcertaje work arrangements were being tried out, many combining elements of wage-­based day labor with more sedentary forms of land-­based rent (Guerrero 1975). Class fragmentation was also starting to occur among hacendados, including the emergence of a progressive, modernizing, and politically ambitious faction that sought to rupture itself from traditional hacienda practice of the previous century and to make the highland region a contributor to national economic growth, not the excuse for its stagnation. As Carlos Arcos (1986: 281) has written, the “most prominent members of this [highland] elite had a contradictory cultural experience” under the early years of Liberal rule: “they were inheritors of an old, aristocratic and conservative class of colonial origins and at the same time unconditional admirers of European and American capitalism.” Their way of managing this contradiction was to form a professional association, the National Society of Agriculture (SNA), in 1913 that would come to exert great influence not only over agrarian policy in the years ahead but also on the shape of national culture and notions of progress up to the present day (Arcos 1986: 312). The SNA’s national influence can be explained partly by the composition of its membership. Its directors included not only owners of the country’s largest and most lucrative haciendas but men who were also, at the same time, ministers, diplomats, members of the supreme court, secretaries of state, bank directors, and ex-­presidents (such as Leonidas Plaza) and future president-­ elect Neptalí Bonifaz (Sr.), then owner of hacienda Guachalá and great uncle to the future cut-­flower pioneer of the same name (see Arcos 1986: 283–284). Equally important was the SNA’s ability to combine two seemingly contradictory ideologies in its program, progressive Catholic catechism and Ecuadorian liberalism, the core ideological force behind state policy. The glue uniting these ideologies was an “economic ethic” that Arcos (1986: 311) calls a “spirit of progress,” meaning a rational asceticism founded on the belief that capitalist development and entry into networks of global modernity were desirable goals for the nation, that they demanded the inculcation of a disciplined work ethic among all sectors of society, and that technological advancement



Of Suffering and Salvation 131

and rational state planning were essential to bring this about. Most interesting, however, is how these objectives outlined not only technical and political adjustments but a specific social one as well: “From the point of view of the hacendados of the SNA, technical modernization has to simultaneously be the transformation of el indio into an efficient proletariat” (Arcos 1986: 295). It is with the SNA, around 1918, that the need to transform el indio, once the rallying cry of demands to reform the hacienda system, entered the highlands as part of its own, locally induced project. In adapting this latter objective to its own purposes, the hacendados of the SNA drew as much from the postconcertaje Liberal consensus about the need to civilize the Indian as from Catholic evangelizing instruction, particularly the pastoral teaching of Federico González Suárez, archbishop of Quito and former senator in the National Assembly. González Suárez was a vocal critic of both the Liberal state, whose secular agenda he opposed, and the traditional hacendado class. He campaigned for a “regularization of the [hacienda] work process” and for the development of a broad education program that would replace certain Indigenous cultural practices—primarily the celebration of customary fiestas and the use of Indigenous languages—with “national” ones, such as an ethic of continual productivity and the mandatory use of the Spanish language. The association of Spanish-­language education (as a vehicle for cultural conversion) with increased worker productivity had long been proposed by various catechist congresses as the true path of Indigenous “spiritual” transformation (Arcos 1986: 307). By adopting this platform as their own, the SNA saw rural schooling as deeply “connected with problems concerning the productivity of agrarian workers”: the “conviction . . . to make el indio into an efficient worker, through agrarian education, constituted the ideological substratum of the organization of this group,” Arcos (1986: 281) notes. A similar blend of Catholic and secular-­liberal orientations arises in the SNA’s campaign to eradicate “alcoholism” in Indigenous communities. The SNA’s attack on alcohol use, while framed in an idiom of Catholic morality and Indigenous protection, was rather, according to Arcos, a roundabout way of eliminating all unproductive customs that inhibited the formation of a rational and efficient workforce on the haciendas: “Drunkenness was associated with the fiesta, the fiesta was the antithesis of work, thus the fiesta was anti-­economical; it is necessary to suppress the fiesta, and because the fiesta is Indian, it is necessary to reform el indio, inculcate an ethic of work. . . . Behind the struggle against alcoholism, behind the sour face of the hacendado,

132

Chapter 4

preoccupied with the broken morality shown by drunken indios, was hidden a spirit of capital and profit” (Arcos 1986: 296). Key here is how all concerns about Indigenous morality and practice are continuously folded into the customs and habits of hacienda relations. There was no way of distinguishing Indigenous custom and comportment from this relationship, even in matters of vice and its transcendence. The interior space of “character” and the exterior sphere of economic enclosure had become inseparable. Writer and SNA member Luis Filipe Borja expressed this view well in 1924 when noting that while the “indio . . . works less than half of what he could,” his underproductivity in work leading him to “worsen his moral condition, simply facilitating the development of his vices,” he can “evolve himself, acquire aspirations to change his situation and eliminate the abyss separating the indio from the blanco, [only] by modifying his external aspects, those which enclose him in an impassable sphere” (in Arcos 1986: 310–311). But if Indigenous improvement required their separation from this “impassable sphere” of hacienda influence, intervention, Borja realized, hit an impasse: “The only way to truly protect the indio is to oblige him to stop being one” (Arcos 1986: 311). With the birth of the SNA, a consensus emerged in Ecuador about the cause and solution for national underdevelopment: “independent of their ideological vocation, everyone knew that the cure was capital investment and the civilization of the indios” (Arcos 1986: 299). Now even the most powerful hacendados of the highlands agreed that whoever could bring capitalism to the rural highlands and save the miserable Indian race would be the hero of national progress. “This is,” Arcos (1986: 301, 308) concludes, “without doubt, the substance of the ideology of the epoch,” and which would become the defining mission of “all the cultural, political, and economic elite who formed the basis of what we call Ecuador.”

The Rise of Indigenismo

If all progress-­minded elites of Ecuador now agreed that the indio was a “miserable [and] exploited” being who “had to be redeemed” (Arcos 1986: 314) through capitalist expansion, the 1920s and 1930s showed lingering doubt about the role highland elites could play in that. The literary and cultural indigenista movement that grew up in the wake of SNA activity recentralized the hacienda complex, and the hacendado, as the central cause of Indigenous



Of Suffering and Salvation 133

exploitation and needing to be reformed, if not eliminated, for Indigenous “redemption” to be possible. This was no longer simply an Indian problem. In his pioneering 1922 book El Indio Ecuatoriano (The Ecuadorian Indio), Pio Jaramillo Alvarado radically reframed the image of the suffering, hacienda-­bound Indian from being a localized problem of the rural highlands to being a truly national one, the latifundism undergirding it cited as the root cause of Ecuador’s political instability and low level of economic development. “In ethical and psychological aspects,” Jaramillo (Jaramillo Alvarado 1997 [1922]: 129) writes, “the servitude of el indio has saturated national life with an environment resistant to progress, and of hatred; the misery of the countryside has projected itself over the cities.” That the (Indigenous) countryside could be defined in the first instance as a space of “misery” is by now well established. New here is both a rejection of all reforms carried out in previous decades and a diagnosis of the problem as much deeper, going back to the initial monopolization of land by the haciendas in the post-­Independence era. Land disparity—“ten thousand latifundios and more than two million people without land!” he cries (Jaramillo Alvarado 1997 [1922]: 129)—is the necessary starting point for understanding all that becomes of el indio, for it is this that forces Indigenous people to submit themselves to the hacendado and his political-­juridical allies in the first place. “Without bread, without refuge, without affects, deprived of their lands, their freedom, their personality . . . and with all this the irony of the law having declared their equality among citizens in the exercise of their rights, el indio has been destroyed in its racial element, has degenerated as a man” (Jaramillo Alvarado 1997 [1922]: 138–139). What we see happening, with Jaramillo and future indigenista writers, is a deeper economization of racial thought, one that subsumes even its critique of liberal humanist notions of equality and republican forms of constitutionalism under the causality of hacienda expansion and land theft. Ecuador’s “Indian problem” and, with that, the poverty of its national existence, can more or less be reduced to a property relation: “Ecuador supports a regime of servile labor, by way of a feudal organization of property. The latifundio has enslaved man and the land. The survival of the conceirto peon and the ‘huasipungo’ demonstrates that servitude continues to be the substrate of national life, which corrodes the spirit and kills all initiative toward progress” (Jaramillo Alvarado 1997 [1922]: 140). His proposed remedy reverses the liberal trend toward the universalization of rights, instead calling for a new “Law of Indios” to address their unique and particular situation in the country. Modeled on a similar proposal drafted by José Antonio Encinas for Peru, the proposed set of laws

134

Chapter 4

is less a political charter than “the basis for a new work regime for the indios,” a hacienda labor code of sorts, stipulating such requirements as written and ministry-­authorized contracts, a minimum wage, limited workdays, and mandated rest periods (Jaramillo Alvarado 1997 [1922]). If the economism underlying this era’s race thinking is, if anything, deepening with each new generation of critics, so too is the claim that it is the hacienda that explains not only Indigenous suffering and subordination but also the continued existence of this racialized figure, el indio, in its entirety. There is simply no getting around this. Also becoming more entrenched in dominant thinking is the idea that any resolution to this issue, for Indians and the nation, will require external intervention, an agency often appearing in the idiom of a juridical state but always incorporating those forces that can effect change in the immediate relations of work. The goal is to crack the code that allows a shift from whatever bonds tie hacendado and worker together (debt, rent, etc.) to the free contract, fully wage-­based employment, and the individual freedom thought to open up around that. This is without a doubt the crux of Ecuadorian indigenismo and the legacy it left in its wake.

Midcentury Moderns: Foreign Confirmations of a Domestic Consensus

By the time foreign anthropologists and adventure writers started frequenting Ecuador regularly in the mid-­twentieth century, the quest to bring salvation to the poor and miserable Indians had become a veritable crusade among the country’s intellectual and political elite. A major stimulus for this was the formation of the Ecuadorian Indigenist Institute (IIE) in 1943, the outcome of Ecuador’s participation in Mexican president Lazaros Cárdenas’s Patzcuaro Congress of indigenistas in 1940. As an institution headed by none other than Pio Jaramillo and comprising “a prominent group of urban physicians, economists, sociologists, and lawyers,” the “IIE sought to establish a governmental Department of Indigenous Affairs to study Indigenous life and customs with the goal of using state structures to reform their lifestyle” (Becker 2008: 85). Like their predecessors, this group of Indigenous sympathizers continued to imagine their ideal object of intervention—“el indio”— as a prototypical hacienda worker and thus fold proposals for Indigenous and agrarian improvement together into one. American anthropologist Beate Salz (1955: 36) remarked on this tendency’s endurance into the mid-­1950s, noting



Of Suffering and Salvation 135

that in Ecuador, “latifundism is discussed whenever the Indian is discussed. It constitutes the heart of the ‘agrarian problem’ which, in turn, is held to be the base of the ‘Indian problem.’” Pio Jaramillo’s 1940 address to the Patzcuaro Congress7—the definitive statement of midcentury indigenist thought—makes this tendency perfectly clear (Jaramillo Alvarado 1993). It continues his 1922 book’s focus on land— its disparity again framed as the primary effect of the hacienda system and thus the root cause of Indigenous suffering—but shows an important elevation in conceptual scale. This is a problem no longer attributed simply to the hacienda, as a singular production complex, but to the lingering “feudalism,” as a total socioeconomic system, it exemplifies. The hacienda’s endurance in Ecuador, Jaramillo (Jaramillo Alvarado 1993: 459) writes, shows “agrarian feudalism . . . still hasn’t concluded in America.” And again: “The political emancipation of America from the Spanish colonial regime has to have as its logical consequence the liberation of the indio from feudal servitude. . . . The new regime, logically,” must mandate “the liquidation of the latifundio” (Jaramillo Alvarado 1993: 486). What this folding of the hacienda complex into a more systematic concept like “feudalism” helps do is to plot its existence on a temporal plane, give it a spot on an evolutionary typology, and thereby, as if an exercise in natural history, link it with a particular historical moment, a moment Jaramillo squarely identifies with the colonial past. Continued existence beyond that moment is anachronistic, a perversion of, or brake on, the flow of history itself. What Fabian (1983) called allochrony—the denial of coevalness—is here converted into political rhetoric, an attempt to show the hacienda system as a residue of the past, something terrible for being completely out of synch with time—this is what its designation, in the 1940s, as “feudal” is intended to highlight. Remember, though, that what is said about the hacienda applies equally to the indio—not only are the two terms inseparable, but the whole discursive weight of hacienda critique, for Jaramillo and those who came before him, rests on the effort to know el indio and to understand the basis of Indigenous suffering so that it might be cured. As a hacienda product through and through, el indio too becomes a feudal relic, becomes, in essence, an anachronism. Foreign writers of the period offer important confirmations of this twist in the codetermination of racial and economic thought. The richest example of this comes from American writer Albert Franklin’s account of his Ecuadorian travels in the early 1940s, the exact period when the IIE’s mission was in

136

Chapter 4

full swing. Franklin was appalled by the hacienda system. His observations of Indigenous people in different parts of the highlands solidified his impression that the hacienda was the primary determinant not only of Indigenous ­people’s misery but also of their comportment and character. So strong was the hacienda system’s influence over Indigenous people, Franklin believed, that their degree of entrapment in it could be gleaned by simply watching them walk or hearing them talk. “The feudalism of Cayambe is palpable,” Franklin (1943: 260) writes. “The attitude of each individual defines at a glance his place in the crystallized, rigid class system. The Indian of Cayambe . . . is a churl. It is in his gait and his address.” Franklin’s impressions change markedly when he comes upon a group of Indigenous wage workers recruited to work on a foreign-­owned mine. His encounter with these men, temporarily released by their hacendado, leaves him “particularly impressed with the fact that the sudden appearance of their boss did not cause them to cringe and grin in obeisance as they would have been accustomed to on the land from which they had come . . . they did not stand by, watching, the foolish smile of praise on their faces, as they would have done in the presence of an overseer, or the lord of the hacienda, before their contact with the mine” (Franklin 1943: 70). Overt expressions of deference and hierarchy offend Franklin. They evidence a lingering feudal comportment that compares unfavorably to the modern form of universal personhood he is accustomed to witnessing back home in the United States. What pleases him most are those scenes where such behaviors might appear but don’t, such as his encounter with railroad and factory workers in an industrial district on the outskirts of Quito: “Happy, grimy industrial workers, they have a devil-­may-­care grace about them, a literate, sophisticated sense of humor, and a metropolitan habit of conversation. They do not cringe. Their words are not punctuated by the apologetic ‘siñurr.’ They are like industrial workers everywhere” (Franklin 1943: 107). So entranced by this glimpse of universal grace in Ecuador, Franklin follows these workers into their dining rooms and dance halls, where he is surprised—as surely he must be—to find that the men there do not require chaperones to patrol their relations with women. They “have somehow forgotten their heritage of morbid skepticism with regard to womankind and treat her with obvious honor, honesty, and respect”—they perform an “equality between the sexes” (Franklin 1943: 108, emphasis added) and are a true “anachronism” in this country, inhabitants not of a different place so much as of a different time. They have become different sorts of beings entirely.



Of Suffering and Salvation 137

And this inspires the question, the only question really, that seems to come to mind every time Franklin encounters people working for wages, which is always a comparative sort of event, between the hacienda and the factory, the feudal and the capitalist, the Indian anejo and the industrial worker, the past and the present, in this moment when glimpses of a transition from the former to the latter can be found: “Have the engines and the machines of the factories brought some spirit of North America with them?” he wonders, with not the slightest hint of reflection on what sort of spirit possesses him to ask this sort of question in the first place. “Or is it merely that,” Franklin continues, “working and earning a living, one conceives a deeper respect for his fellows than he would if he were trying to maintain a fiction of aristocracy on an inadequate, unearned salary?” (Franklin 1943: 108). The question appears to be probing the gap between the particular (is this North American value system the ghost in the machine?) and the universal (is this a systemic effect, replicable anywhere?). But the difference between the two options is moot. North America, the factory, the wage—these are already expressions of the universal to Franklin and, with that, already imbued with the positive qualities he (and generations of the sort of Ecuadorians—industrious “progressives,” all—he cohorts with) ascribes to them. Echoing the views of Ecuador’s urban intelligentsia and political elite, particularly those shaped by the liberal tradition growing among them since national independence, Franklin provides more of a summary of dominant domestic ideologies than a recasting of them. These ideologies center on the basic notion that feudalism (or hacienda bondage) and capitalism (or free waged labor) produce fundamentally different sorts of people. The former entrenches social hierarchy, the other respectful equality, both economic systems being the most determinate force shaping the social, cultural, and ideational structure of personhood in the country. Race, while confirmed as a malleable rather than an essential trait, belongs to the world of the hacienda. It is its product, an effect of the caste-­like system reproducing the “fiction of aristocracy” and the subordinate, unequal, and unpaid workforce, from which it reaps its unearned spoils. Character and modes of social comportment attached to this condition merely express the totality of this fiction. Indian-­ ness, we might say, is little more than a remnant of an archaic economic system designed to immiserate people. It disappears once people escape its grasp. The argument to come of this is clear. For equality to exist in Ecuador, and for Indians to escape the poverty and prejudice in which they live, the hacienda system must end. And not only that. In its place, another economic

138

Chapter 4

system must emerge that contains, within its productive logic, mechanisms promoting different forms of personal comportment and interhuman relation, which will instill in workers a respect for themselves, others, and the value of their labor. And that system has been found. It is one premised on wage labor and free contract. It is capitalism, but capitalism prepared by nearly a century of investment in its fundamental conditions to be construed as a socially transformative project, the only thing that can truly improve the lives of people (the indios) suffering from the forces that hold them in bondage, impoverish them, and reproduce their misery. Freedom of labor is freedom of being, an idea that is anything but an abstraction here in the hacienda-­ dominated and Indigenous-­populated highlands. Franklin has proof. He has met ex-­hacienda workers who instantly “forget their heritage” at the slightest “contact” with mines and industries. As the only total system premised on the notion of human freedom, capitalism is the antidote to centuries of Indigenous suffering. Whoever might bring it to Indigenous territories will be responsible for finally bringing salvation to the indio. Its reach must be expanded.

Conclusion The claim I am making here is that Cayambe’s flower growers are direct inheritors of this tradition of thought and ideology of salvationist intervention. I hear their stories of how the flower industry started in Ecuador—narratives of primitive accumulation—as claims to having finally realized that until-­ then impossible project, a century in the making and holding a central place in elite thought, of bringing capitalism and, with that, salvation to the highlands and its people, the indios. They are, in essence, claiming to have finally solved the Indian problem—to have cured Indians of the misery that defines them through free labor and a remunerative wage system. This is what their narratives of primitive accumulation celebrate. This is the history we need to know to understand them.

CHAPTER 5

Accumulation by DisPossession: Reflections on Historical Failure

The Star Thrower She was kneeling on the ground outside the cafeteria at Santi, hurriedly wrapping about twenty small buns in her shawl. “Pardon me señora, are you Transito? Transito Andrango?” I asked even though I knew she was. The plantation manager, Wilfrido Casagrande, had just pointed her out to me. “She comes here every morning to collect leftover bread from the worker’s breakfast service,” he said. Transito was old and her husband had been sick for many years. They had a little land, but she has to take care of her husband and feels unable to work, even though the plantation is only steps from their home and he’d offered her every job he felt she could manage. All offers rejected, Casagrande agreed to turn a blind eye to Transito’s daily scavenging of bread, which he knew she was selling out of her house in the neighboring community of San Esteban. He even confessed to increasing the plantation’s morning bread order to much more than his staff could ever possibly eat. He justified that with a paraphrased version of the Star Thrower parable (Eiseley 1969). A man, watching hundreds of starfish wash up on a beach, throws one back into the ocean. You maybe can’t save everybody, Casagrande summarized, but you can do your part to save one. Informal economic relations like these were not unheard of in Cayambe’s cut-­flower sector, though such a direct extension of the capitalist gift economy to an individual nonwaged comunero was a bit unusual. But Santi is a rather unusual plantation. It sits higher up the mountains and farther away from the Pan-­American highway than most of its competitors, making it fully engulfed by Indigenous communities and reachable only by one imperfectly constructed

140

Chapter 5

cobblestone road. It is also a relatively young plantation, erected at the start of the economic crisis that would cause many other plantations to fold, and a fairly small operation at that. In the early 2000s, only five of Santi’s eighty-­ seven-­hectare extension was under production, employing a total workforce of sixty-­five people, most of whom came from the surrounding communities. Santi was the last addition to Jorge Castellano’s three-­farm Sierraflor consortium and seems to have been bought for its unique productive capacities. The plantation’s higher elevation and colder temperatures mean it produces fewer plants per square meter that also take longer to reach maturity, but the roses it does grow end up having thicker, longer stems and larger flower heads1 than any produced on the valley floor. These are precisely the things sought out by high-­end Russian consumers (“Russians like their flowers like they like their women,” was the adage), a secondary market aggressively targeted for export diversification during the crisis. While intended to help avert crisis at one end, Santi found conflict at the other. In 1997, the comuneros of San Esteban banded together with the Federation of Popular Organizations of Ayora-­ Cayambe (UNOPAC) to block the plantation’s completion and oppose flower growing in their vicinity (see Krupa 2010: 344–346). If I wanted to know more about this conflict and how local people experienced the transition from a hacienda to plantation system, I should speak with Transito, Casagrande told me—she’d lived through it all. The previous chapter proposed a method for studying primitive accumulation ethnographically. It did so by following Marx in treating primitive accumulation as a genre of elite historicity and trying to unpack, in a concrete instance, the ways “capital . . . itself, on the basis of its own reality, posits the condition for its realization” (Marx 1973: 459). Because primitive accumulation points to a “past” of capital’s becoming that “is not simply the calendrical or chronological past that precedes capital but the past that the category [capital] retrospectively posits” (Chakrabarty 2000: 62), a “past that flows from the reality of the present” (Sanyal 2007: 49), it is also one whose manufacture can be directly observed in those moments when agents of capital, in the present, “posit” the circumstances through which their industry came into being—moments like the “transition narratives” we examined in the previous chapter. By unpacking the form and content of these narratives, we were able to see how their core features—the doubled temporality equating economic transition with social transformation, the proletarianization-­ as-­salvation script running through them, the positing of a world-­changing



Accumulation by DisPossession 141

rupture between a fully capitalist present and its precapitalist state of “beforeness”—outlined not only a retrospective teleology of capital’s rise in the area but also a blueprint for its strategies of labor optimization in the present. Not history but “history’s double” (Moreiras 2000: 345), primitive accumulation marks a space outside history to claim authorship of it. What would it mean, then, to follow Casagrande’s suggestion to learn about the plantation’s prehistory and arrival not from him but from Andrango, or to listen to how people of a region targeted for compassionate capitalization talk about experiences already framed by powerful discourses of systemic transition and rural improvement? How are we to approach such stories in ways that don’t force them to serve as natural counternarratives of primitive accumulation (which assumes a capital-­centric authorial position) or as (true, experiential) history’s correction of (mythic) historicity? And how does someone like Transito come to be a subject of capitalist welfare, living on the fringes of an expansive economic system whose invitations are refused? These questions haunt this chapter, which centers on my efforts to speak with Indigenous communeros about the start of the cut-­flower economy in Cayambe. What comes to the fore in those discussions is less an alternative historical consciousness that might contest the triumphalist narratives of capital examined in the previous chapter than a disruption of the coherences— narrative, historical, theoretical—that seem to assemble around discussions of primitive accumulation, here and elsewhere. By amplifying those disruptions, this chapter offers a reflection on the political role of ambivalence in capitalist expansion and its attendant modes of historicity. By ambivalence, I mean to indicate those frames of historical inquiry and narration that, like Transito herself, can be located neither entirely inside nor outside the domain of capital but that haunt capitalist teleologies with the power of disruption. In what follows, I examine the implications of one such historical frame, one that, following Ranajit Guha (1988: 43), might be called “historic failure.” The failures to which Guha’s original concept referred were those of the various forces vying to develop a truly nationalist project, bourgeois or revolutionary, on the eve of national independence in India. Alberto Moreiras (2000: 349–350) has pushed us to consider the wider value of Guha’s concept, calling it “the single most important operational device for an understanding of subaltern history.” I take up Moreiras’s call but only because Transito herself comes to frame history’s unfolding in compatible terms. Her theorization of the present as the product of failure achieves its most

142

Chapter 5

disruptive power not by countering capital’s tendency to fold historical momentum into a teleology of success but by denying capital the power of historical agency necessary to make such claims in the first place. Capital is not the force of history or its failure, only one result. Such a recasting of the framework through which history is apprehended depends entirely on the position from which Transito speaks as a historical subject. Most significant is her identity as an Indigenous comunero, that is, someone subjected to multiple waves of hacienda bondage, granted the rights of property only through her inscription into a rural community, and addressed repeatedly as a subject requiring welfare, capitalist or otherwise, as a condition of achieving national membership. For these reasons, I conclude this chapter with a reflection on the challenges of theorizing the intersections of indigeneity and primitive accumulation today.

Things That Look Like Water but, on Closer Inspection, Aren’t Not knowing. That’s the dominant framework through which Transito remembers the time of transition. Things are happening, big things, but there’s no way to know exactly what. “Just like that, they sold the hacienda, they did. And so we stayed here, the workers of the hacienda, with everything we needed, but we didn’t . . . nobody told us anything about what was going on. El señor just left.” Not knowing but also not wanting, the space of the hacienda provided her and other workers with stability and security in the midst of flux. This too is how Transito remembers her life on the hacienda, even before its end was imminent, a life flush with feelings of care and belonging.

Part One: The Before

Transito and her husband lived on Hacienda San José in a small hut adjacent to the cattle pen. She and other women milked cows while her husband and other men pastured them. The hacendado, Doctor Rufo González, was, by her account, “a very good man. He let us stay here with everything we needed” even when her husband became ill. “‘Mi hijito [my little child],’ he told her husband, ‘I’m going to send you up to your home, so you can have peace and rest. When you are feeling better, then you can come back to work.’” The



Accumulation by DisPossession 143

sentiment of care is pronounced and opens into a way of remembering hacienda life as a life of security and care, a life in which every need is met. The doctor’s death ruptured this stability, impelled movement, incited departures. Workers watch his wife clear out the hacienda manor—“she left with everything, more stuff than even a millionaire would have”—and so Transito too, weakened from an operation, leaves, moving to Quito to sell clothes as an ambulant vendor. After several years, a man she affectionately calls “Don Fernandito” apparently traveled to Quito to find her and her husband—“since we were good workers”—to invite them to return to the hacienda to work for him. “Come,” he said, “come Transito to work with me here. It’s not going to go badly, we have potatoes, everything you could want, he said.” Transito’s return led Don Fernandito to invite her husband to work for him too, to tend to the cattle he must have absorbed with the land’s purchase, and alludes to why she tried to deflect those invitations. “No,” she told him. “My husband drinks a lot. People will talk and the work will turn out badly.” But Don Fernandito insisted—“no, mi hijita, bring him anyway,” he said, and so, soon enough, Transito and her husband found themselves again employed on their old hacienda. An offering of some sort was made to the couple—“we received all sorts of things from the señor. He came and gave us everything. And then he left and never came back again.” That’s when they found out the hacienda had been sold and when everything started to change. This much of Transito’s remembrance corresponds directly with the period plantation owners and managers identified as “the before” (see Chapter 4), the years before flower plantations and capitalist wage relations came to dominate the regional economy. This correspondence is a narrative-­ structural one, not a historical one. No dates are given, though it likely points to years when the valley below was already flush with plantations, showing something of the micro-­regional isolation of this location—neither the plantations nor the opportunities for labor nearby enter Transito’s discussion. It is also, like the narratives we examined in the previous chapter, reconstructed from the present and delivered from within the walls of the new plantation economy itself, the “then” emerging as a flash of distinction against the “now.” “I lived here,” Transito stressed. “Here where the plantation is?” I asked. “Yes, here. I managed these quarters, there were milk quarters and over there, where those people [plantation workers] are is where I lived.” The past can be located in the present, but looking back, life then doesn’t appear entirely unbearable. Unlike capital’s retrospective reconstructions of this period, it is not hardship that receives emphasis in Transito’s account so much as the

144

Chapter 5

economy of care and well-­being, an economy that transacts itself through the structure of work, even as that structure produces notable differences in wealth and status. The goods flowing out of the hacienda at the owner’s death are so opulent as to remain lodged in memory as a mark of distinction—more than even a millionaire could possess. And yet, as Transito says again and again, they were always given everything they could need. And beyond material needs, hacienda life seemed to generate a recognition that she and other hacienda workers mattered, had worth, as biophysical entities who need to rest when sick and as embodiments of productive capacity who are solicited qua workers with individual merit. These unique qualities reside in the hacienda’s memory even as its owners come and go. Something of a structural continuity reproduces these arrangements as normative, even into her first interactions with people who would turn out to be the agents of its dissolution. Signs of that dissolution arrive in the form of the not known.

Part Two: The Transition

“They all came in cars belonging to a señor who was bringing the engineer Franco here. He had a red truck and he lived here for a month, in the pasture, building some, some, um, lagunas [pools of water]. ‘What are they doing?’ everybody wondered. ‘Is this for ducks? For geese? How are we to know they’re building a plantation?’ And so some time went by and we took care of the engineer, like this, selling him corn, saying ‘buy corn,’ ‘take some corn,’ my husband said, ‘some cheese, like this, to cook.’ And the engineer, who was a very good man, came and brought us bread, whatever we wanted, he said. How good he was.” Care again comes in the form of mutual exchange, of ­people looking out for one another, her and her husband providing and receiving substance from this very good man. But this exchange is punctuated with realizations that something else was afoot, something that returns to the present in the form of a gap in knowability, an unknown. What are those lagunas? “We never did find out that these were plantations. And here we were looking right at these things [the greenhouses]. They’re like water, see?” I confirm—from even a short distance away, I suppose they do look like water, the way their plastic sheets reflect light and ripple in the wind. “So you didn’t know what they were?” I ask. “No!” Transito replies, resting in this space of not knowing as it overtakes the old exchange economy.



Accumulation by DisPossession 145

“Now we are going to work here,” an engineer told her husband. “Tell us what you need, you won’t go without anything, everything will be covered while the work is completed.” They started plowing with tractors, making some [irrigation] ditches, like this. And how would we know they were going to put up plastics [for greenhouses]? They did a ton of things, and after they filled everything in I thought they were going to plant some grain . . . they said “we’re going to plant corn, we’re going to plant everything you have [planted],” they said. And so how are we to know? A while later, the cars started to come up [and] a tremendous amount of wood was brought here. And after the wood, others came with what people call “el sarán” [from Saran Wrap, rolls of plastic], completely full of it here. Then after a while came the powders [agro-­chemicals], and what a lot of them! And then we couldn’t take it anymore. . . . What a stench it has, and me, it made me feel bad, gave me a fever. And this, then, is when the maestros [master carpenters], the builders, came and said that they are building greenhouses. Many gente bueno [“good people,” referring to people of high status or position] came, and we didn’t know anything. They quietly took possession, without us knowing anything. “Without talking with you [plural]?” I asked. “No,” Transito replied, “they said nothing to us. Since we’re not the owners, we’re nothing. It’s that the owners had already [bought] it and had given their consent.” Property is now changing its social force. Land ownership has become unmoored from previous conditions that allowed its mobilization as a productive resource, conditions that sedimented in land’s essence, reproducing themselves through different iterations of the hacienda, shaping relations between people differently positioned in the property nexus. Owners were required to comport themselves in ways that included performances of their responsibility to protect and provide for the well-­being of others who inhabited the space even as the productivity of that space demanded work and returned rewards in grossly unequal measure. The paternalistic dispensation of care foregrounded in the property model of the hacienda gets replaced with a condition of decidability and a radical pronouncement of difference in the looming plantation model. “Since we’re not the owners, we’re nothing,” Transito recounts, a subtle awakening to conditions that, while as legally true

146

Chapter 5

then as now, would be a violation of everything property meant in the previous model. She tells me this story of awakening from another angle, her repositioned repetition of it seeming to serve as an insistence of its importance. After a long time passed, one morning very early, we all went outside, over there, where we were just sitting, when some tractors came up over the hill. The señores who had bought the hacienda had returned and at this moment I knew things were bad. So I said to señor Romulo, “Señor Romulo, why are all the tractors in here?” and he said they’re opening up a road to go to [neighboring canton] Olmedo. “But how come?” I said. They’re trampling all the grasses for the cattle. And so I said, “No, I say! And now the irrigation ditch is blocked, where we walk.” And so I got all angry, right? And he said, “No, mi hija [my child], don’t behave like that, things aren’t like that. This doesn’t concern you [plural], this [land] has been sold to some señores.” And so I said, “Fine, but you had better leave the road open for us, and at least warn us,” I said. And tell us, “On this side of the road, you will have to go with the cattle, and pass on this side.” [He said], “It’s fine, nothing will go wrong.” Right, nothing will go wrong, OK. And so a ton of people started coming, coming from other communities to force the tractors to leave, or I don’t know what, a lot of things. Transito repeats the narrative sequence she used earlier to mark the transitional moment, a sequence in which not knowing leads to inquisition, then obfuscation, then realization, but she now achieves a protagonist’s posture, sensing not just change but danger and pressing back against it. Again, she notes the force of private property being marshalled as a restriction excluding her from participating in the design of the future—“this doesn’t concern you,” the land has been sold—but offers only conditional acquiescence to it, instructing capital on its violation of the proper comportment attending to land ownership in the region. Existing conditions of livelihood for local populations must be allowed to function (leave a path open for our cattle). People deserve the respect of knowing what is going on and how to navigate any disruptions (warn us when you’re coming, tell us where to pasture). But then, a force greater than her starts to swell and arrives with stronger demands—the tractors have got to go.



Accumulation by DisPossession 147

Part Three: The Protest

For Transito, the new road was one of the first signs that things were changing. And it was the road that stands out to her as the first weapon in comuneros’ struggle to influence that change. She tells me how an around-­the-­clock roadblock, or what she calls a “control,” was set up to prevent vehicles from entering the site, the name adopted from the police checkpoints set up at interprovincial highway crossings or toll stations. Comuneros dug up the cobblestones that the plantation owners had paid their own workers to lay down, building barricades with them. Eventually, though, the milk that the hacienda workers were still collecting from its cows and were accustomed to selling to daily milk collectors started piling up—“we had all the milk from the hacienda,” Transito tells me, “I, husband and wife, our little room full with milk”—so accommodations were made to let the milk truck pass. There is poetic appeal in this action and Transito’s mention of it to me—the new landowners have shown an irreverent disregard for the livelihood patterns and economic infrastructures sustaining people who have long lived here, destroying pasture and blocking grazing paths, as if whatever they are imposing on the landscape should override everything that existed before. Part of arresting that transformation means allowing those preexisting patterns of movement to continue. There was life here before you showed up. It will continue. I ask Transito to tell me more about the roadblocks and what went on at them. “My god, what a story this is to tell,” she said. A massive rain fell, and there we sat down, one by one saying we were not in favor of where this is going. We wanted to know if there was work for everybody in the plantation. But we didn’t even know what a plantation was. We said if there isn’t work for everybody then there isn’t work for anybody. And so el señor said he’ll give us plots of land, of what’s left over, he said. And in the space up above he said he’d put a high school, that they’re going to give us a school. That they’d give us a machine [tractor], a car, and . . . some millions of sucres. But the community wanted nothing to do with it. Lodged in Transito’s memory are the negotiating tactics employed by el señor, presumably a representative of Casagrande’s, to try to convince the comuneros to end their blockade and allow the plantation’s completion. The tactic seems

148

Chapter 5

designed to invoke and reestablish the sort of reciprocal exchanges between a landowner and his workers that Transito highlighted as central to life on the hacienda, in which property ownership comes with the obligation to provide for the broader well-­being of the people whose labor was needed to make it productive. Her repeated emphasis on the goodness of her exchange partners and the total fulfillment of her and other workers’ needs, as well as a complete absence of any mention of hardship or abuse suffered on the hacienda, is curious when compared with oral histories of hacienda life collected from Indigenous people throughout the highlands (cf. Yanez del Pozo 1988). But seeing Transito’s descriptions of that past as a product of a present that unfolds from this scene—a chance to stop it all, gift offerings scrambling awkwardly to invest new relations with the force of established ones, a moment when comuneros seemed able to control their own destiny—makes those earlier portraits less confusing. They are, even more than her description of the defiance occurring at this historical pivot, where a rabid critique of the present is located. It is the past needed to frame the present in the idiom of failure. Let me explain by stepping momentarily outside Transito’s narrative space.

* * * The roadblock wasn’t actually the first moment of conflict or negotiation to occur around Santi’s completion. And flower plantations weren’t as unknown to people of the region as Transito remembers. Documents held in UNOPAC’s archives indicate that in August 1997, two months after Castellano bought hacienda San José, members of Transito’s community brought representatives of the Municipality of Cayambe’s Office of the Environment to the site to show them that the proposed plantation would sit right in the center of their community and to express their concerns. A news circular later prepared by UNOPAC summarizes these concerns: “The members of the Community [of San Estaban] assert that they are not in agreement with the installation of a new flower enterprise in their medio [environment], given that they have experience with the Floriculture [enterprise] Produnorte2 [sic] with other nearby enterprises that contaminate the environment.”3 A young UNOPAC staff member named Clemencia, from the neighboring community of Santa Rosa, explained this reference to me, saying that years prior, when this other plantation (Produnorte) was being constructed, “the plantation started by telling us that they were going to do organic cultivation, or whatever. . . . [They] said that they were going to put in tomatoes, or fruit trees and all that, and when they



Accumulation by DisPossession 149

started working it wasn’t anything of the sort. Rather, they had already started to cultivate flowers.” This inaugurated a series of problems. People from all over the country started coming to their area looking for work. Comuneros feared for their safety, especially at night, and worried that their homes would be robbed if they left them vacant while working at the plantation. They also found this work to be highly unstable, with community members often being replaced by these new arrivals. And everyone worried about environmental contamination, noticing that production chemicals were entering the river whose waters people use to drink, irrigate their crops, wash their clothes, and fill their animals’ troughs. With experiences of deception, insecurity, contamination, and labor precarity fresh in their minds, Clemencia stressed, “we made certain reflections and said it’s not advisable for us to have [another] plantation here.” Opposition to Santi’s completion, in this version of the story, was decisive well before its construction began. Archival evidence shows that in September 1997, the municipality decided to withhold Santi’s business permit until Castellano and community members could come to some agreement. In October, plantation representatives attended a community meeting in San Esteban and promised the community a number of things—a daycare center, a soccer field, and a medical center if they would allow the plantation to be built.4 Clemencia remembers this time well. “First, they offered us everything, right? They offered everything, like, they’re going to give us a daycare, they’re going to give us sports fields, they’re going to give everything . . . going to repair [the road], and everything, solve everything. But in reality, this isn’t what would solve the problem,” which seemed to center on comuneros’ association of cut-­flower production with ecological and social disruption. In an attempt to assuage those fears, the company finally submitted to the municipality a detailed environmental impact assessment that, in addition to identifying specific ways that production chemicals would be handled and their risks contained, outlined the plantation’s “socioeconomic” impact: “as a generator of work, [the plantation] will benefit 180 families who will improve their station in life and thus the economic development of the country through the entry of foreign currency.”5 This is a remarkable pitch, coming right when the country’s economic crisis is looming but has yet to fully hit. The land, as mentioned, seems to be worth fighting for precisely because its unusual productive conditions promise the unique products needed to grant Sierraflor access to a niche market (Russia) that will help the company weather the impending crisis. Its contribution to national economic development—as if it should be a top concern for comuneros—is framed in

150

Chapter 5

precrisis terms that equate floriculture’s profits with foreign currency capture (see Chapter 3). Labor is related to that and yet distinct from it. On one hand, it is a small-­scale equivalent to national development in that it promises to raise the economic conditions of families in ways akin to how foreign currency is thought to raise those of the national community. A household is like a plantation—income arrives by inserting oneself into its networks of circulation. On the other hand, labor is equivalent to a daycare center or a soccer field, a unit like all others trafficked in the gift economy, set in motion by plantation representatives but invoking the ideology of exchange that previously structured life and work on the hacienda. Economic time appears to be open to strategic manipulation. And yet, we see something entirely new arising in the method of capitalist expansion here. While land is the central object of dispute in this conflict—who decides its use, what should and should not be grown on it, who controls access to it—it is not land at all but people who stand out as the central resource capital is targeting for dispossession. To put this another way, if what we are tracking here is the step-­by-­step, on-­the-­ground, micro-­ movements involved in a concrete case of capitalist expansion, we could say that here, in late twentieth-­century highland Ecuador, expansion is happening less by capital increasing its control over land than over people. People are not only the subjects of dispossession, brought into capital’s orbit and proletarianized as an effect of capital’s hoarding of their productive resources; they are also its objects, the resource itself directly targeted for internalization and apprehended in ways seemingly designed to make that an expression of compassion and care. This becomes clear in the next stages of the conflict. At first, nothing happened. Neither the gift-­ saturated meetings with comuneros nor the environmental study led to resolution, and the site sat idle until one night in April 1998, when tractors showed up and started chopping up the ground. These are the tractors that made a notable appearance in Transito’s remembrances, sparking her angry discussions with a member of the work crew. And this was the event—the unannounced and unauthorized entry of heavy machinery onto disputed land—that inspired comuneros to build their roadblock and, according to Clemencia, paralyzed work on the plantation for nearly three months. A flurry of documents seems to have been born of this moment, including a formal declaration of community opposition to the plantation and an electronic petition that amassed 350 signatures from North Americans in support of comuneros’ protest. Despite Castellano’s possession of legal title to the land, the level of state responsible for enforcing rights of ownership, the Municipality of Cayambe, did nothing but offer its halls to the



Accumulation by DisPossession 151

disputing parties to try to work things out. Attending this meeting on behalf of the plantation was none other than Wilfrido Casagrande, the man who would become its general manager and facilitate Transito A ­ ndrango’s daily collection of bread. Casagrande’s speech at this meeting, recorded and transcribed by members of UNOPAC, is a marvel of capitalist poetics, a synthetic expression of late twentieth-­century expansionary techniques that thrive on opposition with the verve of a missionary chancing upon a community of infidels.

Conversational Capitalism: Accumulation by Possession

“We have come, I say, to converse with you all,” Casagrande says in his opening address, reminding everyone that to converse means to engage in “civilized dialogue, a dialogue with respect, an ethical and fraternal dialogue,” the kind of thing that might happen between friends, partners, equals. Conversation means not just talking but also listening, and listening means recognizing contending viewpoints. Sierraflor, this “company, has always understood that the fight between contraries, the struggle of contraries, the struggle of ideas is extremely important for the development of progress.” And who doesn’t want progress? Casagrande knows what people from the two communities went through with Produnorte. He knows they felt tricked, lied to, and rolled over and that that this past experience, haunting them now, is the basis for their current opposition, “an upstanding [recta], intelligent, brilliant opposition,” which he claims to fully understand and endorse. This validation is productive. It sets up Casagrande’s presentation of Sierraflor as different, better, and even “the best in the country, in the floricultural sector,” a “dignified” and “honest” company led by an owner who is both a “humanist” and a “serious businessman.” This is the late 1990s, remember, a time when rabid inflation was plunging the country into recession and the cut-­flower sector was coming to be seen by many as a decadent get-­rich-­quick scheme for spoiled urbanites with no long-­term vision, business sense, or interest in local or national development. But this is no run-­of-­the-­mill operation, Casagrande insists, and invites them all to visit Castellano’s other two flower plantations—Primavera and TerraNova—to see for themselves the high-­tech, ecologically sound production systems they have set up there and the benefits accruing to the 900 people working on the two farms. But more than anything else, Casagrande wants comuneros to truly feel the opportunity they have in front of them, to

152

Chapter 5

believe that this plantation’s arrival on their doorstep means that massive, life-­ changing events are within their reach. They just have to get on board. I say to you, señores, while in this world divine providence upholds in our hearts a beam of love, a beam of affection, one of the best forms for expressing this love, this caring, for your girlfriend or mother, your parents or your friend, is to be involved in making the immortal rose. This is production that will live perennially, eternally. And so you will see eternal employment and, what is more, Terra­ Nova Flowers will have eternal life. I say this because TerraNova, by way of its flower distributing business, by way of its sales department, by way of its external commerce, has, as its objective for 2002, to become the number one [flower company] in Ecuador. What we want is for TerraNova Flowers, from this country located in Latin America, to be known in Europe, Asia, Africa, which will allow you to say that here, in San Esteban, belonging to this humble and hardworking pueblo of Cayambe, you have realized this with your production, which will activate the country, as we become the number one [seller] of roses not just in Ecuador but in the world. If roses are an expression of the divine, producing them is akin to doing godly work. And what better confirms entrepreneurialism’s theo-­poesis than immortality? The rose—highly perishable as matter—is a conduit for the eternal because it transacts the highest expressions of human sentiment and foments intimate relations. It does soul work, its flesh but a vessel for the sacred, as Christ might say. It is already bound up in the work of salvation. Several months earlier, the governing body of San Esteban produced a document outlining a number of “resolutions” formulated by the community in response to the visit of municipal councilmen to the proposed plantation site. In it, comuneros not only affirmed their total opposition to the construction of flower plantations in their immediate environment (meaning, for the moment, Santi)—“the community resolves to ratify the decision made by previous Assemblies, which is to not permit the installation of flower plantations within or close to the community”6—but also took pains to stress the commodity-­specific nature of their opposition. It was flower production they rejected, not production in general. Other products were fine, and the document kindly helps landowners and government officials along by offering some suggestions: “The community suggests that, on this property,



Accumulation by DisPossession 153

agricultural products of the zone be produced, those which serve as human food or, in turn, introduce cattle for the production of milk, for which the land is excellent.” Casagrande flips this argument on its head. What a lowly pursuit to strive only for nourishment, he seems to say, when you can be a part of something greater, something providential, something that contributes to the world’s spiritual growth and carries just rewards, as all saintly work should— immortality arrives in the form of eternal life for the company, which is to say eternal employment, which is to say a future that binds you and your children, generation after generation, to a life of waged labor on the plantation, the irony of which—in mimicking the history of debt bondage on haciendas, the very thing that stimulated a century-­plus of “capitalism-­brings-­salvation” thinking in the Ecuadorian highlands—seems lost on Casagrande, blinded by faith or hyperbole. Comuneros had already offered something of a response to this image of capitalist futurity by including their own visionary prognosis of historical debt in their sheet of resolutions: “It is the obligation of those who have forever lived on these lands to defend the environment, thinking of the future of our children and eliminating the continual contamination of the air, water, soil, and subsoil” that is known to come with flower production. But it is just this sort of dialogue, this chance to construct a debate, orchestrate a battle of contrary opinions, join in a moment of conversation that advances the method of capitalist expansion occurring throughout Ecuador at this time. This is a method that works less through land grabs or hoarding productive resources than by working into and on people, “particularly those who have the most to lose from such expansions . . . engaging them as rational desiring subjects and fusing their individual and collective desires with those of enterprise” (Krupa 2010: 345). As a technology of dispossession that obfuscates itself as such, this is a method of capitalist expansion we might call “accumulation by possession,” one that advances like a spirit might enter a body, suggesting to it the movements that will help it reach, as if on its own accord, ends once considered antithetical to its own but now hard to classify in terms of authenticity, the lines between spirit and host being muddled by the pragmatics of resolution. And to speed that along, Casagrande concluded his speech by unveiling a series of proposals, all later itemized in a notarized document submitted to Cayambe’s Municipal Council.7 In addition to ones already part of the gift bundle now circulating between plantation, community, and state was the promise to “build the farm exclusively with labor from the community of San Esteban and neighboring communities, since such noble pueblos require

154

Chapter 5

progress, require development.” “We want to work exclusively with you!” Casagrande emphasized. Labor, to drive home the point, is the real gift here, for it is the vehicle for personal and collective transformation, the way of progress, the medium for development. Labor is the path to salvation for highland populations.

* * * But not for Transito. Whether by choice or some other limiting factor—I regret not asking her about this—she has steadfastly refused inscription into the plantation’s wage nexus, rejected the gift of labor, and remained outside the sphere of capital except by following a trail of breadcrumbs leading her every morning to the plantation to scavenge its (intentionally inflated) remains. We might think of Transito as herself, like the bread, part of the leftovers of capitalist expansion, its redundancy or excess, but one that is nonetheless welfarized in the reproductive cycle of accumulation—a beached starfish thrown daily back into the sea. This is the position from which Transito’s recollections of the past—from hacienda life to the rise of the plantation—are produced and the key to their interpretation. We followed these recollections up to her discussion of the blockade comuneros erected to stop the plantation’s completion, the spot where a “we” she includes herself in emphatically expressed opposition to any flower company operating so close to the community. And yet she and I know full well the punchline to this story. The protest, somehow, will fail. The plantation will be built, and in the process, she would become, for the first time in a life lived almost entirely on the same patch of land, completely peripheral to the big story of the economy of this place, a triumphant story of roses and global exports and labor and capitalist development. This is the outcome of everything she is telling me and the basic condition of our meeting in the first place. Like capital’s primitive accumulation narratives, there is a present that impinges on narrative engagements with the past, subverts their claims upon history, conscripts them into providing a retrospective accounting for how the present, this present, came to be. The difference, of course, is that the master idiom organizing this historical present is not success or salvation, those driving chronology in capital’s narratives, but something more akin to failure or destitution. This is what I hear flowing throughout Transito’s reconstructions of past experience, an explanation for how failure happens. This is a failure that seems both personal and collective, happening not despite capitalist



Accumulation by DisPossession 155

expansion but through it, something poetically expressed by Transito’s fate of becoming a scavenger of economic waste. In what follows, we see how failure starts to emerge as an overarching plot of historicity and dynamic of historical momentum in Transito’s discussions of the past. More than simply a counterpoint to the self-­congratulatory heroics of primitive accumulation narratives, Transito’s discussions reveal a total destabilization of the structure of historical time that primitive accumulation emplots. This is especially evident in the ways they undermine the temporality of rupture central to capitalist historicity, the claim, that is, that history radically changed its course at the moment capitalist industry penetrated the Indigenous highlands. Instead, what we see here is an altogether different point of historical transformation, one that denies capital the credit or blame for creating the present in which Transito and fellow comuneros live, that suggests that, even in failure, the source of radical historical change lies outside the time of capital.

The Inheritance, or Land and the Historicity of Failure If the roadblock was where the comuneros of San Esteban and Santa Rosa expressed their most defiant opposition to Santi’s completion, it is also where that opposition started breaking down. To amplify their political mass, protesters solicited support from other communities in the broader Cayambe region, particularly those affiliated, like them, with UNOPAC. This was an appeal to solidarity, designed to flesh out their ranks. Things didn’t go as planned. “They [members of San Esteban and Santa Rosa] went around everywhere,” Transito recalls, “to other communities, and they all came here, but no one could do anything, nothing, because the plantation is another law, another judge. To win the land, it’s another judgment, another law.” Land, suddenly and cryptically introduced here, will be the decisive factor in a rift created between members of local communities and their intended allies, especially those from the north Cayambe region of Cajas. People from Cajas, it seems, had a hard time seeing the conflict as anything but a land dispute that could be resolved simply by forcing Casagrande to sell them the property or as something people of the region should have seen coming and so bought the land before Casagrande could, avoiding this whole problem in the first place. Apparently, this opinion brought with it some rather harsh critiques of local political practice—“they called us bitches, they said that we’re shunshas

156

Chapter 5

[idiots, people of low intelligence],” Transito says, remorsefully. But, as she astutely adds, things were never that simple. What people from other communities never understood is the political-­legal force of capital, of the plantation, which operates like a sovereign entity, a law unto itself, and not the sort of thing you just take to court and expect to defeat. And their inability to understand this, she would infer, comes from the different histories of Indigenous land acquisition underpinning each community’s existence. The secret to this dispute, and their present predicament, will be found in the history of Ecuador’s agrarian reforms. Indigenous communities throughout Cayambe and across the Ecuadorian highlands were all, with few exceptions (see Becker 1999), formed out of the dissolution of the haciendas during the agrarian reforms of 1964 and 1973. But not all haciendas were the same. Some were owned by the state, becoming public property after their expropriation from religious orders under the 1918 Ley de Beneficia, and rented out to a class of temporary hacendados on short-­term, often renewable, contracts. The reforms opened the entirety of these lands up for sale to former huasipungueros and their families. Other haciendas, like Guachalá, were privately owned and transferred between generations of large landowning families. These lands were only partly divided up and sold to ex-­huasipungueros during the reforms, which allowed private owners to retain up to 1,000 hectares of their original land, leaving considerably less for members of the new communities to claim as their own. Communities of Cajas were formed from the first type of hacienda. They “won their land,” as Transito puts it, and comuneros there ended up having complete control over the land in their vicinity with no large landowners, new or old, to contend with. Transito’s community, San Esteban, like its neighbor Santa Rosa, was formed out of the second type of hacienda, a private one, and thus received less land at the time of redistribution. They were also left with a large chunk of privately owned land sitting next to them, the very thing that, as we saw in the history of Guachalá, was generally converted to dairy ranches and then, later, flower farms. As Chapter 1 showed, this legacy of the agrarian reforms, a scattering of privately owned and relatively unproductive remnants of the hacienda era, was one of the necessary preconditions for the cut-­flower industry’s emergence in Cayambe. Seeing this history from the vantage point of capital showed how ex-­hacienda lands remaining in the hands of ex-­hacendado families (or sold off by them) provided a site of land-­based profit-­seeking experimentation that stimulated interest in the emerging promise of flower exports. This interest was enabled by a depressed



Accumulation by DisPossession 157

land market that allowed urban professionals to enter the flower trade relatively easily and contributed to the sense that flower growing could turn dormant and unproductive lands into major contributors to national growth and regional development. Looking at this same process from the perspective of Indigenous communities, products of the same reforms, shows how it generated, around these now-­reduced-­but-­still-­sizable land holdings, a new landholding peasantry that nevertheless remained relatively land poor, requiring income from other sources to get by. This was the demand the flower industry’s labor market capitalized on by approaching communities as reserve armies of labor calling out for economic salvation. People from Cajas, Transito suggests, can’t understand her and fellow comuneros’ predicament because their history of land acquisition and community formation prevented such a thing from occurring to them—they could neither be as land poor as she nor face the threat of having a plantation pop up in their midst. And, she might add, their total faith in the juridical power of property transfers reflects a nostalgic gratitude to the process birthing their particular livelihoods thirty years ago but is completely ignorant of the way property law—absorbed by capital, something nonpresent in those days—now works. “Like we said in an assembly,” Transito continued, “all right compañeros from Cajas, you all won your lands. We aren’t pursuing legal procedures for the lands. What’s happening here is that the señores are making a plantation, right? And so if you want, go ahead and mount a legal challenge to buy the land. We are working on another agreement. . . . And so, since the señores from Cajas won their lands, they’re saying why couldn’t we do the same here?” “So you never mounted a legal case to buy the land?” I asked. “No,” Transito replied. “No, no, no, we never made one legal appeal for the land, no, no. And why would the señores want to sell this? . . . And so all these opportunities were lost to the community.” This is a rumination on political possibility, on lost opportunities suffered no less for their impossibility, an impossibility that links back to an alternate reality of the previous century, of ex-­huasipunguero communities forged out of different paths and propelled into different presents. “So, before the agrarian reforms,” I asked Transito, “the people of San Esteban were all workers, right? Of the hacienda?” “All were workers, all huasipungueros,” she confirmed. And just to clarify that I had the story straight, I asked whether hacienda San José was run by owners or renters (i.e., whether it was a private or a public hacienda). “Owners,” she confirmed, “owners, heh. Because if they’d

158

Chapter 5

have been renters, we would have had good lands pes, and this never would have been a plantation. It’s because they were owners that things have turned out like this.” She lists the names of public haciendas of the region she knows, adding that here, in her region, “all these were [run by private] owners, and for that, inherited by their children, and to their children we are left too when they inherit these things. And us, the inheritance for us, just these little tiny plots of land is what we have, nothing more.” Consider what land means here when seen through this lens of historical failure. As a productive resource, land’s differential distribution explains the rural class structure and its changes through time. As an idiom of historicity, land becomes a framework through which to track the progression of differentiation and to connect this present to its meaningful past. Bridging these two concepts of land is the notion of inheritance, an expression of the spot where property’s extra-­historical force finds and overtakes history. Private hacienda lands get inherited by children. We, as property of the hacienda, like land or cattle also get inherited by the children. Inheritance means systemic reproduction, generation after generation, until the whole thing is overturned by the reforms. And what is our inheritance from these reforms? Absolutely nothing. A reproduction of the prior conditions, only worse. Land, those tiny plots granted them by the reforms, summarizes the failure of those reforms to effect its promised change or bring improvement. Land, the big plot of private land still sitting next to the community, showcases the force that property exerts over her and fellow comuneros, a force that awakens to become the condition of possibility for the plantation and all that comes with it. “If they’d have been renters. . . this never would have been a plantation,” Transito asserts, naming everything she and I are looking at and sitting on and wrapped up in her shawl as a historical accident, a contingency that could have just as easily taken a different course. And, as a series of points flowing from our discussion of the protests against the plantation, this offers retrospective clarification that their protests were doomed to fail because the conditions allowing their success had been denied to comuneros of her region thirty years prior. The reforms were the critical turning point, the moment when change could have happened, was promised—it made them independent property owners and collective political subjects for the first time in history—but failed. The arrival of people from Cajas and their antagonistic incomprehension of local reality showcases the other direction history could have taken for everyone here. Maybe, Transito added, speculatively, “when the bosses were handing out the inheritance to their children was when we



Accumulation by DisPossession 159

should have held a strike to make them give us the lands.” Maybe we should have forced history to take a different course. What if? If, as I am suggesting, the present connects to the past through the idea of failure, what most comes to the fore is neither simply the failure of Transito’s community to stop capital’s encroachment upon their space nor her own failure to find a place within the new reality created around that. It is, rather, the failure of a prior campaign for national agrarian transformation to live up to its promise and to have prevented such a reality from unfolding around them in the first place. The arbiter of this process is land, specifically the differential amounts of land withheld from distribution to former huasipungueros at the time of the agrarian reforms. Those reforms could have been what prevented the cut-­flower industry from expanding throughout the Cayambe highlands at the end of the twentieth century. Instead, they became its precondition.

The History 2 of Highland Capitalism The historian who is on the side of the victor is prone to interpret short-­term successes from the perspective of a continuous, long-­term teleology ex post facto. This does not apply to the vanquished. Their first primary experience is that everything happened differently from how it was planned or hoped. If they reflect methodologically at all, they face a greater burden of proof to explain why something happened in this and not the anticipated way. . . . If history is made in the short run by the victors, historical gains in knowledge stem in the long run from the vanquished. —Reinhardt Koselleck (2002: 76)

For Koselleck, what distinguishes subaltern and elite perspectives on history is the different relationship members of each group can claim between their own personal experiences and the general tropes summarizing the path of historical momentum. These tropes are authored by the “victors,” who tend to transpose the conditions responsible for their success into universal patterns and logics. For a conquered people, the “vanquished,” no such correspondence is possible—their own historical experiences sit at odds with these narrative forms, externalizing them not only from the power of historical

160

Chapter 5

production but also, it would seem, from history itself. But this outsider’s relationship to dominant historiography has a certain advantage, Koselleck asserts. Not being the subjects of such teleological reconstructions of the past, subalterns can observe history from a longer perspective and identify the larger (and more “objective,” Koselleck claims) patterns expressing their historical experience. The position from which such larger-­scale orientations to history tend to emerge, Koselleck suggests, is failure—things turned out differently from what was hoped. Dipesh Chakrabarty has likewise found it useful to carve the historical past in two and to differentiate each form of history around its potential to reproduce or subvert social domination. Plumbing Marx’s writing on capitalist genesis, Chakrabarty uncovers in Marx a distinction between what he calls History 1 and History 2. The former refers to everything we have thus far identified with capital’s narratives of primitive accumulation—this is that “past posited by capital itself as its precondition,” the “backbone of the usual narratives of transition to the capitalist mode of production” such as we examined in the previous chapter and which run through Casagrande’s pitch to the comuneros of San Esteban and Santa Rosa (Chakrabarty 2000: 63). History 2, in contrast, is also an assemblage of things “antecedent to capital” but which capitalist historiography cannot automatically fold into itself, cannot entirely construct as intrinsically determinate of capital’s path of becoming. “Capital has to encounter in the reproduction of its own life process,” Chakrabarty (2000: 64) notes, “relationships that present it with double possibilities. These relations could be central to capital’s self-­reproduction, and yet it is also possible for them to be oriented to structures that do not contribute to such reproduction. History 2s are thus not pasts separate from capital; they inhere in capital and yet interrupt and punctuate the run of capital’s own logic.” In these History 2s lie potential sources for imagining “other ways of being in the world—other than, that is, being the bearer of labor power” (Chakrabarty 2000: 66). They are sources for accentuating historical difference in the present. But they also challenge capital to integrate such historic sources of otherness into its patterns of reproduction, to tame historical diversity for its own ends. As an object of historical reflection, Ecuador’s agrarian reforms exemplify well what Chakrabarty means by History 2. They severed the control landowners long exerted over rural Indigenous people, allowing new economic and political identities based on property ownership and community membership to emerge. Subsistence land ownership and political community formation have become the foundations for Indigenous imaginaries not determined by the



Accumulation by DisPossession 161

logic of capital. For some. As Transito reminds us, the reforms effected multiple outcomes for Indigenous people. They provided some with the foundations for autonomous economic and political development while making others part of the conditions of possibility for capitalist expansion in the highlands. The potential for, but not guarantee of, Indigenous autonomy from landowners’ control is what drives the suffering and salvation script in capitalist historiography—the folding of History 2 into History 1. Since the reforms gave flower plantations both the land and the resident labor force they needed to start, they provide the grounds for framing regional history around the idiom of failure. The reforms, seen from the present, occupy the starting point of the capacity to organize historical chronology around the notion of failure—we are subjects of capital because the reforms failed us, Transito seems to say. But this failure is only meaningful because it implies an even longer perspective, a perspective that includes the period before the reforms that they were meant to change but didn’t. Failure here is established by showing continuity, not rupture. The plantations are successors to a history of failure because they reproduce longstanding conditions structuring what it means to be Indigenous in highland Ecuador (i.e., subjection to the labor requirements of large landowners in the highlands). This is the source of disruption to capitalist historiography I find in Transito’s narrative history of the region, one that undermines capital’s claims to being a millennial force in the transformation of Cayambe, its arrival in the region the beginning of a proper, modern, and progressive history. Capital is fit into a much longer historical overview of successive waves of landed powers with whom they, the Indigenous poor, must contend. Plantation owners like Casagrande are evaluated in terms of their reproduction of the terms historically structuring a landowner’s relations with his workers and are shown to be guilty of severe violations. But they are the source of neither utopian transformation nor epic destitution of rural lifeworlds; they are merely the most recent expressions of a longer pattern of domination that has characterized the economic lives of Indigenous people in highland Ecuador.

Conclusion What might this chapter tell us about the particular forms of capitalist domination suffered today by populations constituted, by definition, through dispossession? The question, put another way, is about the intersections between

162

Chapter 5

indigeneity and primitive accumulation and about the theoretical advances to come from detailed attention to how these intersections are forged in different postcolonial contexts. I draw inspiration for these questions from the pioneering work of Glen Coulthard (2014), who encourages scholars of indigeneity to adopt an analytical framework that puts colonial relations at the center of the study of primitive accumulation and to ask how capitalist expansion has helped advance colonialism rather than, as Marx had it, the other way around. In his study of the Dene people of northern Canada, Coulthard shows that capitalism acted primarily as a force of land expropriation and cared little for turning Dene people into a local labor supply. “What I want to point out,” he summarizes, “is that when related back to the primitive-­accumulation thesis, it appears that the history and experience of dispossession, not proletarianization, has been the dominant background structure shaping the character of the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian state” (Coulthard 2014: 62). Coulthard’s work helps us avoid treating capitalism as a singular and universally consistent project. What we see instead are capitalisms historically constituted by the particular conditions of their emergence and difference sitting at the heart of how capitalist formations establish and reproduce their core political and economic relations through time. For scholars working in colonial and postcolonial contexts, this encourages us to think of capitalism as a force of coloniality itself, constituted through embedded colonial logics and relations, adopting methods of expansion and accumulation determined in large part by the particular form colonial occupation is taking or has taken in particular sites, and a major source of colonial continuity after its purported end. In northern Canada, capital’s focus on seizing land, not people, is fully consistent with the logic of genocidal elimination organizing settler colonial projects. As Patrick Wolfe (in Kauanui and Wolfe 2012: 240) has famously said, “their—Indigenous people’s—historic role in settler colonialism is to disappear.” This sets the tone for how the racial violence of conquest and the economic violence of primitive accumulation come together through capitalist expansion in places like northern Canada. Andean colonial projects unleashed their violence differently. Their economic dependence on Indigenous tribute, especially acute in the north Andean Audiencia of Quito, along with the mit’a labor drafts, agrarian service for encomiendas, and so on made it possible for Indigenous people to be ascribed utilitarian value by Spanish colonizers and thus possibly, after the initial slaughter of conquest, to survive long enough to enable the total



Accumulation by DisPossession 163

dependence on Indigenous labor that would come with the rise of the hacienda complex throughout the rural Andes. Previous chapters have repeatedly stressed how central economy in general and the hacienda in particular were to postcolonial constructions of the racial category “indio,” constructions that, on the one hand, came to be identified by critics as responsible for perpetuating colonial logics of racial difference after the end of the colonial period and, on the other, tacitly recognized that the postcolonial project, like the colonial one, relied too heavily on Indigenous people’s labor to target them for disappearance or elimination. This was so, to repeat, entirely because of the economic value the ruling classes placed on Indigenous people as workers in the not-­ capitalist colonial and postcolonial Andean world. This is the colonial logic that would inform how primitive accumulation played out in Cayambe, the particular ways difference was marked and imagined to be overcome by it, and the unique forms of historicist narrative emerging around it. All of this follows Coulthard’s argument about the unique ways primitive accumulation unfolds in different colonial and postcolonial contexts. Comparing his study with ours, we see that colonialism was organized around different strategies for dealing with Indigenous people occupying the land colonizers wanted, and took, and that capitalism emerged and expanded through different processes. These two differences were internally related. In both cases, primitive accumulation followed and reproduced local colonial logics, perpetuating historically determined modes of colonial domination through capitalist development. In one context, the ideal figure of indigeneity is the corpse; in the other, it is a worker whose being is fully subsumed to the economic wishes of a racially differentiated overlord. This specificity demands a way of understanding dispossession that points to something more than just the immediate consequences of land theft and that cannot, on its own, substitute for the concept of primitive accumulation.8 As Alena Athanasiou (in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 6, 8) notes, the concept of dispossession “carries the presumption that someone has been deprived of something that rightfully belongs to them” and, for this reason, is without question the founding condition of what it means to be Indigenous in Ecuador, as throughout Latin America. The racialization of pre-­Colombian populations, whose identity was framed in opposition to the terms coming to constitute Europeanness, was coterminous to their loss of land and territory. Dispossession of land was also a dispossession of self, each a part of the “multi-­layered traumas of subjection” that structured the violence of conquest throughout the Americas (Athanasiou in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 6).

164

Chapter 5

But such originary dispossession “is not something simply countered by appropriation, a term that re-­establishes possession and property as the primary prerogatives of self-­authoring personhood” (Athanasiou in Butler and Athanasiou 2013: 6). The agrarian reforms that ostensibly returned some stolen land to Indigenous people in the 1960s and 1970s did not automatically translate property ownership into sovereignty over personhood, something flower growers themselves seized on by laying claim to it. Their limited interest in Indigenous people’s land is partly derived from the “intensive” nature of flower production and the high costs of it. As Florequisa manager Elena Terán put it, “Floriculture isn’t extensive. It doesn’t need large extensions. It can’t, because each hectare costs a lot of money [to make productive], and has to be maintained by a lot of people, per hectare.” But it is also a product of the unique ways Ecuador’s colonial and postcolonial projects have depended on the creation of a figure—el indio—open to investment, manipulation, and extraction by white-­mestizo society and by allowing that figure to guide political and economic relations with Indigenous peoples throughout highland Ecuador. As such, the problem for flower growers has never been finding ways to dispossess Indigenous people of land, even when land becomes, as in the case of Santi, the terrain on which a struggle over the terms of capitalist expansion is waged. The challenge, rather, has been about finding ways to repossess Indigenous selves and fold their trajectories and histories into those of capital. This is what primitive accumulation points to. As such, this chapter has tried to demonstrate how efforts to reduce what Coulthard (2014: 58) calls “Marx’s excessive temporal framing” of primitive accumulation might purge it of its most critical insights, particularly Marx’s exposé of how capital may seize hold of temporality itself, excessively, and bend it around the particular conditions of capitalist reproduction. This attempt to command temporality is what allowed flower growers to target the open wound of indigeneity and promise comuneros a new future, a different destiny, total salvation through perpetual labor, and a chance at immortality. But this promise rests on plantation managers’ claims to being able to access the deep recesses of Indigenous subjectivity, to know Indigenous people to their core and act upon it. This claim, as Part III shows, is not only central to the structure of Indigenous employment in flower plantations. It is also a key component in the long and peculiar history of race thinking in Ecuador.

CHAPTER 6

The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion: Industrial Psychology and the Science of Interiority

Like a missionary or a vampire, capital touches what is foreign and makes it proper. —Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire

Arrival It’s nearing six in the morning at TerraNova farms when a large minivan arrives at the entrance gate. An armed guard checks the driver’s identification card, then shines his flashlight through the tinted windows and offers flat salutations to each of the five men and women seated inside. I’m not far away and with the van’s window down, I can hear lively banter and awful music—mash-­ ups of American dance pop and cumbia hits—filling its interior. Antonio, the guard, is tired. He’s been here all night, sitting in a wooden shack, protecting the plantation grounds from who knows what. What little energy he has left is being safeguarded for his coming thirty-­minute walk back up the mountain to his home in the Indigenous community of Candalaría. I watch Antonio muster up enough energy for the requisite buenos días ingeniero, buenos días doctora, buenos días Señor Miltón, but not much else before raising the gate and letting the van through. The driver returns a gracias Antonio before steering the van bumpily over the rough and muddy parking lot toward a paved stretch of ground in front of the plantation’s two-­story, freshly painted (white, with company logo) administrative office building. A side door slides

168

Chapter 6

open and out step four men, all sporting the standard ranchero-­style professional agronomist’s outfit common throughout Ecuador (light-­colored jeans with tucked-­in dress shirt and tall khaki work boots), followed by a woman wearing dress pants, smart shoes, and a blazer. The woman—her name is Alexandra—is the director of what the plantation used to call its office of Human Resources but recently changed to the office of Human Management and would shortly after come to call the office of Human Talent before deciding a few years later on another name. She, the director of human things, is the reason I am here early today, sitting on a rock outside the administrative building. But my mind wanders, transfixed by this scene, a scene of nothing more than people exiting a vehicle, nothing in itself, except that this van has traveled a rather long way, as it does every day, to bring TerraNova’s administrative and professional staff from their homes in Quito to work up here in the mountainous Cayambe basin, over ninety minutes away. I imagine this scene playing out 120 times across Cayambe at that exact moment, occurring in similar ways in each of the region’s flower plantations, uniting them all in a mass arrival scene of urban professional-­managerial administrators of this sort and that, all coming to this rural Indigenous land to touch what is foreign and make it proper. Years later, I am still taken in by this scene, a banal scene of nothing really, yet also one of many quotidian spectacles of industrial routine that help bring that unwieldy abstraction “capitalist expansion” down to earth. Nothing in itself, its meaning lies elsewhere, elsewhere in space—in the totalizing regional gaze that can capture with simplistic clarity the stark divide between where expertise is cultivated, fed, and rested up, on the one hand, and where it is applied and put to work, on the other—and elsewhere in time, as a repetition of the primal scene giving birth to the cut-­flower industry more than two decades prior. That foundational act was also framed in the idiom of “arrival” and drew on the same cartographic imaginary reiterated daily by these mundane early morning commutes. Recall that the industry began not through any act of auto-­ gestation in the countryside or by anything like an incipient agrarian bourgeoisie, attempts at both notwithstanding; rather, it was explicitly designed as a colonization of the rural by the urban, a transplantation of economic actors and visions associated with “urban” (and thereby automatically “national”) space into a zone considered apart from that to realize a project the latter was considered unable to do on its own. Recall the ideal-­typical moment of recognition that set the whole flower boom in motion—an urban professional and a city banker encounter one another as conocidos, familiar matter out of place, in



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 169

a rural highland park. The latter—a vector for global capitalism’s search for sites to dump its glut of credit—waves a wad of cash in the face of the former and asks if he wants to start a flower farm. Recall that it was urban professionals of this sort—people with no agrarian experience or history of rural living at all— who then became strategically targeted by bankers for industrial stimulus loans derived from foreign credit peddlers, the force that turned cut-­flower growing from a minor and potentially ephemeral experiment on ex-­hacienda land into a globally recognized symbol of neoliberal success. Recall the justifications for this entrepreneurial selectivity, which drew upon an image of the posthacienda rural highlands as a zone of self-­perpetuating decay and misery that could only be changed—could only be deterritorialized in its particularity, brought into national space, made a contributor to national developmental objectives—by the physical movement of outsiders, having no links to the hacienda economy and thus bearing no blame for its historic devastation of the countryside, into rural territories. And recall, finally, the racialization of this space and its inhabitants that came with an urban outsider’s perspective on it, a perspective rooted in longstanding associations between rurality and indigeneity and in indigeneity’s envelopment within notions of abjection and potential for salvation. This future-­as-­(racialized) salvation was the root of capitalism’s image as an inherently beneficent force in Cayambe’s economic transition and social transformation, as Chapter 4 explored in detail. Underlying all of this, from the salvation script undergirding flowers’ promise to growers’ mission for fulfilling it, is the ideology of arrival—outsiders will come and make things right.1 But this mission could not be undertaken by the plantation economy’s top architects alone. It required a team. And for that the flower boom set off a series of aftershock mini-­booms in various worlds of expertise, creating new demand for scores of degree-­holding professionals whose skills could be ascribed an alchemic capacity when folded into the project of rural capitalization. This too is what “capitalist expansion” actually means as a real sociohistorical project. People have to be hired, set to work, and given the task of rendering operational the material structures of accumulation in a zone continually approached as virgin territory—until it isn’t. As the frontline workers of expansive accumulation, these professionals act as mediators between capital and local worlds, where the work of mediation is not so much that of translating domination into local vernaculars or smoothing out the violence of conquest—they are not brokers in that sense—as it is of rendering expansion a question of pragmatics, of folding it into issues of technical capacity and scientific expertise. In Cayambe, these capacities and their bearers are

170

Chapter 6

ideologically coded with the same spatial referents as the industry’s founders and the economic doctrine they represent—they are bussed in from the city and brought home at night, again and again, part of a project imagined as the extension of one world into another. With this, each expert becomes something of an alchemic element in his or her own right, a filter through which a specific feature of Cayambe’s rural landscape is meant to pass through to come out as something else, something that can be revalorized at once objectively as an improved manifestation of its prior state of existence and relationally as, now, a productive resource for capitalist accumulation. But what is it to be Cayambe in this scene—to be figured as a space of difference and desire, as a location that interpolates external intervention, that requires teams of professionals to get things right, professionals whose workday begins by performing the elsewhere-­genesis of their force? How does the center of a target feel the approach of an arrow?

Encounter Alexandra steps off the bus and heads straight over to me, smiling. For over a year, I’d been coming to TerraNova a few days a week and had by this time become a familiar and not entirely annoying guest among even the professional employees of the plantation, with whom I’d only recently started to spend good chunks of time. Most of these professionals seemed to relate to me through a mixture of welcome affinity and curious suspicion—we all trafficked in the cosmopolitan mobility of education and whiteness, but I returned to an Indigenous community at night, not the city, often spoke Quichua with their employees, and carried into the plantation the same smells of burnt eucalyptus wood from indoor cooking fires as their employees did. Not knowing exactly what to do with me meant I was often, by default, not immediately denied access to the more intimate or otherwise classified spaces of managerial operation. This morning was one such moment. “Buenos días, Cristian,” Alexandra says to me, warmly.2 “It’s good you came early today. We’re going to start right away.” Her voice drops its emotion and becomes all business when she turns to address the eight men and women sitting beside me, all young, all from various Indigenous communities in the vicinity, all there to apply for work. One of them, an eighteen-­year-­ old man named Harison from a community called Pitaná Bajo, I know a little. A few weeks back, he and I, along with about sixty other men and women, were digging a water canal together in the high-­altitude páramo of Moras,



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 171

where the Guanguilqui-­Porotoq irrigation canal begins before winding its way down through thirty-­two Indigenous communities. He was there representing his parents’ household, where he lives, earning them the requisite raya (checkmark) that every comunero household was required to earn for a day of work at this minga (communal work event). His father, the household’s only named comunero, had to work an extra shift at the flower plantation that day, I remember him telling me, and his mother was using a day off from work at her plantation to tend to the house. It didn’t matter whether Harison or one of his other four brothers and sisters, a neighbor, or even a paid peon performed the work, so long as someone was there to work the day and say “aqui” (“here”) when their father’s name was called on the list at the end of the day. At the minga, Harison was funny, outgoing, and lightly flirtatious with the young women sent from other families to perform the same task. He sat in my group of nine men and women who ate boiled potatoes and corn out of a plastic bag someone had brought along for lunch. He made fun of my tendency to eat rather than peel and discard the skins on the small and still warm potatoes, something most people in the highlands find completely unappetizing. The jovial nature of this minga, like the countless others I pitched in at, never undermined its importance—with land quantities assumed to be finite, limited, and invariable, it was water, irrigation water in particular, that was considered determinate of people’s ability to maintain some semblance of a household-­based agrarian lifestyle, guard some autonomy from total submission to the flower plantations, and have some control over their and their children’s destinies. Any investment in regular and sufficient irrigation was an investment in a possible nonwaged future. And yet, here he was. Sitting outside TerraNova’s administrative building that day, Harison was solemn, quiet, and impervious to small talk, with me or his fellow applicants. It’s a big day, I thought. Never having worked in a flower plantation before, or anywhere really for something like a wage, he is atypical of his generation, whose members often start working in flower plantations when they are fifteen or sixteen, sometimes not because they dropped out of school to work but because they chose to stay in school—local high schools were known to send their entire classes into the farms at peak harvest season for “career training.” Not Harison. He’d received his high school diploma a few months earlier and had spent the time since doing odd jobs around the house, mainly agricultural work tending to the onions, barley, and potatoes on his family’s small plot of land. I don’t know what motivated him to come here today—“to see what it’s all about” was the most he’d offer, and I didn’t press. He seemed uncomfortable.

172

Chapter 6

Alexandra motions for us all to follow her into the administrative building, up the stairs, and to a series of metal benches facing a row of glass-­walled cubicles stretching across one end of the building’s window-­lined upper floor. She asks everyone to take a seat, to verify that the required papers inside the folders each applicant is clutching are complete, and to wait until she calls them in, one at a time. Silently, everyone does as they are told. Then, turning to the young woman closest to her, Alexandra asks that she and I follow her into her office. We do and Alexandra draws shades to shield the glass walls from outside onlookers. We all choose seats, the applicant and I sitting opposite Alexandra, who assumes the seat behind the desk. She motions for the applicant to hand over her folder and quickly scans the documents inside—a sheet listing the applicant’s name, age, residence, employment history, and schooling; a high school diploma; and a recent fertility exam showing her to not be pregnant (an illegal request, but common). Glancing across the desk, I see that the applicant’s name is Sandra. She’s twenty-­two years old, is from the neighboring community of Buena Esperanza, and has worked in plantations before. No words are exchanged until finally Alexandra produces from her desk a blank piece of paper and a pencil and eraser, places them in front of the applicant, and says “OK, Sandra, I’d like you to draw me a picture of a person.” Sandra looks up, confused: “Pardon me, doctora . . . draw you . . . a person?”

On Capitalist Interiority Capital is an organism that cannot sustain itself without constantly looking beyond its boundaries, feeding off its external environment. Its outside is essential. . . . The progressive proletarianization of the noncapitalist environment is the continual reopening of the process of primitive accumulation—and thus the capitalization of the noncapitalist environment itself. . . . In the process of capitalization the outside is internalized. —Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire

What does it do to our ability to understand contemporary capitalism to ascribe it an organological ontology, to liken it to a predatory being (here a missionary, there a vampire) or imagine it as an embodied being in-­filled with drives, to describe its profit-­making strategies through narrative genres



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 173

mixing economic realism with inflections of the grotesque and monstrous? These are old habits of narration, to be sure, urgently revived at the turn of the millennium by capitalist critics who took the whole world as their object of inquiry and wanted to tell us that something dramatic was occurring in it. Could the right metaphor offer the right perspective on the enormous changes afoot and inspire the right response? I’m curious about the body image ascribed to capital in popular texts of this period, texts like Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) and David Harvey’s The New Imperialism (2003), and the work this image is meant to do. The capital-­ as-­body/capital-­as-­being image comes into view declaratively (“capital is an organism”) and through agentive action here, but also often with great subtlety, as when we are warned that the form of capital underpinning late twentieth-­ century globalization, “overaccumulated capital,” demands extra caution since it “can seize hold of such assets [as land and labor] and immediately turn them into profitable ones” (Harvey 2003: 149, emphasis added). Not long before these influential texts were written, feminist political economists like J. K. Gibson-­ Graham (1996: 8) cautioned us about the dangers of conceptualizing capitalism as a “unified system or body, bounded, hierarchically ordered, vitalized by a growth imperative, and governed by a telos of reproduction” or “as an organic structure that operates as a unity among harmoniously functioning parts” (1996: 100). The caution was sharp and succinct: “In a word, the body economic is an organism, a modern paradigm of totality that is quite ubiquitous and familiar” (1996: 98). The errors were consequential, intellectually and politically: organological capital appears to be “a coherent and self-­regulating whole” (1996: 98), bereft of internal contradictions, combinatory assemblages of surplus extraction, cracks, or points of intervention; it is an unstoppable monolith in a world with no holes, only wholes, to use Derrida’s (1978: 178) words, reinscribing the sovereign, the master, the Man. “We have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole,” Lyotard (1984: 81) wrote: “The answer is: Let us wage war on totality,” not naturalize it (1984: 82). Yet must a body be a totality—bounded, whole, and complete unto itself? Could we not also find, within the condition of embodiment itself, an awareness of the often incomplete nature of our being, insights into the moments when being-­for-­another or the entanglements of selves dissolve the facticity of form, when the apparent material certainty of bodily integrity unfolds into that of others? Could attention to embodiment itself help us grasp the forces animating our release of self to multiplicity or overdetermination by others’ desires? Could we read these figurations of embodied capital as heuristic

174

Chapter 6

devices pushing us to consider just this, showing how the private property model of self underpinning bourgeois epistemology undermines its own claims to universality, demands others’ subsumption of being into a fused relationality that thereby demands that of itself, that works through a form of accumulation modeled as much on possession as dispossession, of inhabiting others’ bodies as much as effecting their surrender? An organism, perhaps, but one whose “outside is essential,” of its essence. Rather than a bounded and secure totality, what we seem prompted to see in capital is an inherently un­stable and incomplete system, one fully dependent on the existence of something outside itself, a thing that, like the boundaries between capitalism and not-­capitalism themselves, must first be posited as if existing in fact (new values must be brought into circulation), then overcome (converted to capital), and then reinstated (what more can be extracted, and what new frontiers can be opened up?). This is a most peculiar relationship to an other, a relationship premised neither on the other’s preservation nor negation but rather on its internalization—a consumptive process akin to organismic feeding but that leaves the internalized element intact, but transformed. Not totality, but projects of totalization, as Sartre (2004 [1960]: 48 n. 22, emphasis added) would say, the embodied self comes into view as a dynamic assemblage of “totalized diversities”: “what I call a ‘whole’ is not a totality, but the unity of the totalizing act in so far as it diversifies itself and embodies itself in totalized diversities.” My aim in this chapter is to bring ethnographic curiosity to this process of internalization, to rest in that liminal space, that threshold or zone of passage, where systemic movement in one direction (outward/“capitalist expansion”) is posited as animated by the movement of people in the opposite direction (inward/absorption)—the spot where purported externalities are internalized. To pose this space as an object of ethnographic inquiry is to ask how people come to inhabit a process of transformative mediation; it is also to populate the technologies of mediation themselves, asking about the agents of capital called on to draw people into capital’s orbit and thereby become vectors of transformation. This chapter thus marks a shift in this book’s perspective, pursuing capital now from inside the walls of the plantations and giving attention to the manufacture of labor itself. What we will see is that labor becomes something altogether different when approached from this location. For capital, the epistemological status of labor here immediately shifts from being the sort of historical abstraction we saw constructed retroactively in primitive accumulation narratives (Chapter 4) to being a concrete and embodied form, something that



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 175

can no longer be figured at a distance. If that distance allowed labor’s movements through time to be plotted on a macro-­temporal register of progress, it now must be recognized as to some degree historically constituted through social and political forces beyond (that is, exterior to) the plantation economy. This recognition of labor’s exterior constitution is the premise on which the notion of “expansion” depends and on which plantation owners’ and managers’ assertions of capital’s beneficent salvation script rests—were people targeted for becoming-­labor already thought to be fully inscribed in histories of waged employment and living in a capitalist social formation, the entire conceptual apparatus sublimating individual profit motives to social-­welfarist ones would crumble. Social transformation is the offer flower growers have made to Cayambe; labor, becoming-­labor, is the vehicle offered for that transformation. Capitalist expansion is the explicit framing of this mission—it is the historically entextualized force for overcoming the dominion and enduring effects of the hacienda system, that which Cayambeños are thought to have been fully consumed by when flower growers first arrived in the zone. What I want to suggest here is that the logical-­systemic map provided by theorists like Hardt and Negri of a discrete capitalist interior and exterior, the former expanding through the work of interiorization, works best if approached not as an “objective” map of socioeconomic reality but a very situated overview of capital’s own map for its project in contexts like early twenty-­first-­century Cayambe. Here we see how this map achieves cartographic confirmation in the spatial distance separating spaces codified as “established-­capitalist” and “not-­yet capitalist.” This is a social cartography, made and remade through institutionalized rituals of difference like the daily arrival scenes of each plantation’s professional staff. Positing that distance as (unidirectionally) traversable, and that traversal as part of the project at hand, is very much part of the performative effect of such rituals—they map, we could say, the distance an arrow travels between a bow and a target. In such a framing, we see how the plantation grounds become something more than a neutral space of industrial activity. They become the setting of a social drama framed around the logic of an encounter, the sort that follows an arrival, and it is in the framing of an encounter that industrial activity happens, the stage on which people must get down to business and be set to work. And it is in this framing, this suspension of distance, that labor realizes its most profound shift, when the preformed externality that marked Indigenous Cayambeños as objects of salvation now comes to mark them as objects of management. Management becomes the set of techniques by which the

176

Chapter 6

historical trajectories of interior and exterior, of plantation and worker, the ideology of the wage and the determinants of profit, must be made to align. It is where not just the conceptual-­systemic boundary marking interior/exterior, or the cartographic distance separating them, must be posited as bridgeable, but where the very histories that constituted Indigenous Cayambeños in their difference/exteriority to capital are rendered visible, evaluated, and overcome. To return to Hardt and Negri’s formulation, we would note that the process their body-­imaging technique helped us identify—namely, capital’s recognizing, valuing, confronting, and transforming an “exteriority” (a figure of difference, identified as such) in its own image—is also a theory of capitalist momentum and historical motion. It is, they tell us, primarily meant to help us recognize the “continual reproduction of the process of primitive accumulation,” to push us, that is, to fold those processes we tend to associate with the apparently more exceptional, singular, and violent episodes of capitalist arising into how we conceptualize capitalism’s systemic, quotidian, and mundane existence (cf. Sanyal 2007). The brutality of territorial expansion and the banality of routine are exposed as equivalent expressions of a singular drive, poetically summarized by the notion of expanded reproduction (reproduction implies expansion and vice versa), the beating heart of capital. This deconstruction of the global implications of Marx’s notion of expanded reproduction, this reminder that, for capital, continuity demands conquest, was the central take-­away point in Rosa Luxemburg’s magisterial The Accumulation of Capital (2003), the point of departure for this generation of macro-­level anticapitalist critics, who sought to update Luxemburg’s insistence that imperialism is inherent to the functioning of capitalist systems, not its aberration. Back to the body. If the notion of interiorization was an aid to help us visualize the way the capitalist system-­as-­body moves through space, and if that visualization was itself an aid to help identify the unobservable drive compelling it to do so, there seems to be a further element to the theory of embodiment drawn upon by Hardt and Negri in their analytics of millennial capitalism. If, as I am suggesting, the notion of interiorization posits the body as a nontotality, open and incomplete, the critical trans-­substantiation of capital into a being further postulates that bodies are not only not singular but also not empty. They are, rather, moved by an internal animating force. Such determinate forces are not observable to the naked eye, and thus, to access them, the analyst must provoke their projection into a form of recognizable matter that can be deciphered—a form like the body.



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 177

What we have here, then, is a theory of capitalist interiority, a theory in which the exterior (body) appears as a text, a source of data, to get at the interior, an interior that is determinate and where essence, the essence of the being, lies; embodiment helped us understand the nontotality of essence, one’s dependence on the continual positing and internalization of (or by) an other, a unique form of predation; predation, however, is nothing more than the activity directed by something akin to instinct, a survival instinct perhaps, the worldly effect of an agency governed by unconscious drive. This mode of worldly existence is fundamental to the being (capital)’s presence but remains unintelligible without identifying that drive that governs it, an insight that took mapping its projection through the image of the body.

* * * We all sit in silence for over five minutes as Sandra draws her person. I am uncomfortable, feeling voyeuristic. I try not to look at Sandra or at the drawing she is producing. Through awkward glances, I notice her hand moving slowly, carefully. Erasing, redrawing, erasing again. It feels like an eternity. Finally, Sandra looks up at Alexandra and indicates that she has finished, apologizing for the crudeness of her sketch—“sorry it’s not very nice.” Alexandra flashes a soft smile and attempts to reassure her. “Don’t worry, this isn’t an art competition,” she says, without clarifying what, then, it in fact is. Alexandra examines the drawing, quickly but intently, hastily circling a few spots on it—the hands, mouth, and eyes—with a red pen. She then looks up from the drawing and asks Sandra a few questions about this imaginary person she has drawn: is this a man or a woman? What is their age? What is this person doing? What are they thinking about? The focus then shifts to Sandra herself, who is asked to narrate a mini–life history of her own adult years—at what age did you leave school? At what age did you start and leave such-­and-­ such job? Which plantation was that? Why did you leave? Then what did you do? Why that? What age were you then? And so on, all the while Alexandra scribbles notes, her eyes darting quickly between Sandra’s personal information sheet (which contains all this information on it) and her drawing. A few final notes are written, then Alexandra looks up—“OK, Sandra, you may wait outside. Please send the next person in.” Sandra has now completed her job application process—the same process that her seven companions, waiting outside, would complete that day and that

178

Chapter 6

thousands of others have completed, and continue to complete, in plantations throughout Ecuador. It’s hard not to let the banality of the scene override its significance. Were we to try to pinpoint the exact moments in the production cycle of the plantation economy when “capitalist expansion,” in the full sense elaborated here, was designed to occur, surely this would be among the most critical—when directors of an industrial enterprise look to the world outside its boundaries and invite others to come in. At any given time, in a place like Cayambe, those others may be, in cases like Sandra’s, already bringing some history of waged employment, some previous investment in the region’s capitalization, with them, or they may be, like Harison, neophyte laborers starting that transformative process for the first time. Whatever the case may be, the applicant screening process is one spot where the grand, theoretical premise of “internalization” is perhaps first fused with the routine requirements of industrial output—vacant posts must be filled, production must continue, reproduction must be expansive, new labor must be found. And as the most condensed and explicitly construed filter between a capitalist interiority and exteriority, the screening process is also a crucial place where capital’s internal vision of its exterior is visibly articulated and instrumentalized, turned into a question of pragmatics. On what basis are applicants to be assessed? What constitutes fitness for employment and what signals cause for rejection? These are matters of boundary regulation. They provide windows into capital’s investment in its borders as sites policed by certain technical capacities. What forms of expertise are best equipped to assess the particular quality of person constituting the labor market here, and what skills must these experts possess to be able to read, assess, and decide on them? What is the professional capacity considered the right one for this place and time to assess the manageability of recruits and to guide them through the sort of project capital imagines for itself—a project here, as we have outlined, premised on saving the miserable through capitalist transformation? But then, with that: who falls outside the realm of salvation? What forms of life could jeopardize the project, and how are such impossibilities or dangers to be spotted and weeded out? These are some of the main tasks assigned to Alexandra, Alexandra the vector, and Alexandra the director of human things, the latter a job title and description designed around some idea of what the former should be. And here is the importance of Alexandra’s training, the preformation demanded of someone asked to fill a role like hers. Notably, Alexandra’s professional education is neither in anything like personnel management or human resources nor in business, agrarian sciences, or the like. Rather, she is a degree-­holding



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 179

psychologist, certified in a specific branch of psychology called industrial psychology. And so is everyone holding her position in every flower plantation I visited or studied in Cayambe. The specific features of the applicant screening process that I witnessed are outgrowths of that professional background. But what exactly had I witnessed? What I came to learn was that, unbeknownst to her, Sandra had been made the subject of a rather rough-­and-­tumble psychoanalytic exam during her job application. The vehicle for this exam was the drawing she was asked to produce, administered along the lines of what has been called the Draw-­ a-­Person (DAP) or human figure test, or one part of the House-­Tree-­Person (HTP) exam. Originally developed by clinical psychologists, this is a “projective” test, meaning that the drawer is thought to unwittingly project critical aspects of their unconscious—latent but determinate “preoccupations and ways of seeing the world” (Lemov 2015: 35)—into the drawing, which are then deciphered by the analyst as a composite sketch of the drawer’s deepest and truest “personality” or “character”—their authentic (though hidden) self. This drawing and the applicant’s answers to questions about it are interpreted alongside the documents they bring along to their interview, including their employment history and records of education, documents seemingly offering concrete proof of job-­related skills and abilities. And yet, the plantation psychologists I came to know universally regarded the human figure drawing as the single most important component of the application process and was, they told me, the most influential contributor to their assessment of the applicant’s fitness for employment. Why? And why go to such trouble? Why is a projective test considered necessary to assess applicants for formally “unskilled,” manual agrarian labor? And why are psychologists even running the personnel departments on Cayambe’s flower plantations? Answering these questions requires us to turn our attention briefly away from twenty-­ first-­century Ecuador and toward the early twentieth-­century United States.

Industrial Psychology and the Rise of a Capitalist Science of Subjectivity Industrial psychology is the domain of expertise that Cayambe’s plantation owners have chosen to oversee the selection and management of their workforce. It is the scientific discipline most directly mediating capital’s reliance on local labor and the field of thought workers encounter daily in their efforts

180

Chapter 6

to navigate the labor process. Its unique disciplinary purpose and history, bound up in the professional training Alexandra and her peers received, can be considered additional passengers in the commuter buses moving urban experts to and from Cayambe every day and influential contributors to the transformative interventions these experts are hired to implement. It is highly significant that industrial psychology emerged in a context very similar to twenty-­first-­century Cayambe. Its origins can be traced to the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century, a time when the country was undergoing rapid capitalist restructuring and experiencing major changes in both the labor process and the demographic composition of its working class. The early 1900s marked the rise of mass-­production and mass-­consumption systems in the United States and the large-­scale proletarianization of its urban populations. But it was also a time when “over half the population of the United States were either immigrants or children of newcomers, persons of mainly peasant and non-­Protestant stock” (Brown 1992: 52)—people, in other words, considered to possess cultural dispositions formed in rural, agrarian contexts not immediately transferable to industrial work routines. Like Cayambe a century later, American capitalists faced a contradiction at the core of their accumulation model between a heightened demand for productive “efficiency” and workers’ difficulty “adapting” to the intensive labor systems implemented to achieve it. In both cases, industrial psychology was called upon to resolve this contradiction in ways beneficial to capital. This was its seminal purpose. Industrial psychology was the vanguard for a “new” and “applied” psychology, promising pragmatic solutions to real-­world problems (Heinze 2003). While intent to prove its social merit, “it is unlikely that the new psychology would have succeeded institutionally if it had not also responded to the needs of the elites of the emerging mass industrial society” (Brown 1992: 51–52). And what these elites most urgently needed was a way of habituating workers to the new industrial production methods they were introducing. For this, industrial psychology brought emerging theories of mind into economic rationality, effectively psychologizing the science of capital accumulation. The result was the creation of a new site of economic engineering—the psychic interiority of workers, which became the discipline’s main object of attention and intervention. With the invention of industrial psychology, workers’ inner lives became the grounds on which to resolve the tensions of capitalist expansion. The origins of this project are evident in the founding text of industrial psychology, the 1913 English-­language version of Hugo Münsterberg’s Psychology and Industrial Efficiency. Münsterberg, a German psychologist



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 181

teaching at Harvard, witnessed the fervor with which Americans were coming to orient their everyday activities around the notion of “efficiency.” As historian Elspeth H. Brown (2005: 47) has shown, “economic efficiency . . . had become, by the second decade of the twentieth century, a nationwide enthusiasm for the efficient rationalization of all aspects of American social and economic life.” Münsterberg was most interested in the outpouring of efficiency work being done in American factories at the time, specifically, that undertaken by the father of scientific management, Fredrik Winslow Taylor, and the teams of workplace engineers redesigning the country’s industrial systems around his teachings. Under Taylorism, efficiency was understood to be the result of increasingly streamlined labor processes that maximized each worker’s output. This was done primarily by subdividing production routines down to the “smallest possible unit of time and motion [and] recombining them into ‘methods of least waste,’” assigning each worker to singular repetitive tasks (Baritz 1960: 29), and by extracting all mental or conceptual work from the labor process and passing it over to a group of specialists—the origins of modern management. To Münsterberg, there was a fundamental problem with Taylorism. The methods of scientific management compromised its goal of maximizing industrial efficiency. A new method was called for, which Münsterberg sought to demonstrate with his 1913 text, making the founding mission of industrial psychology the perfection of Taylorism. Münsterberg arrived at this mission by way of a very specific intellectual path. In 1885, he earned his PhD in physiological psychology from the University of Leipzig under the direction of William Wundt, the founder of the world’s first experimental psychology laboratory in 1879. Wundt’s laboratory effected a major and enduring change in psychological method. Academic psychology before Wundt “had been largely devoted to a search for universal and immutable laws of human behavior, for regularities in conduct and thought which would explain any individual’s behavior under any specific set of circumstances” (Baritz 1960: 22). Psychological method before Wundt was predominantly introspection conducted by the psychologist on himself. Experimentation on individuals, both other and multiple, implied the possibility for variation and difference in psychological comportment. This led Wundt’s students, such as James McKeen Cattell, America’s first professor of psychology, to discover what we might call, following Baritz (1960: 24), the psychological individual—a subject, that is, whose truths lay in the depths of their psyche, are individuated rather than expressions of a universal, are determinate of

182

Chapter 6

their “totality” of being, and are responsive to external stimulation (Carr and Kingsbury 1939). This discovery begins with difference, individual difference, the thing Münsterberg (1913: 10) would himself flag as “the presupposition without which applied psychology would have remained a phantom.” This was also the basis for Münsterberg’s engagement with Taylorism. In its quest for economic efficiency, scientific management had reduced workers to brute physical matter and developed a flat and universal idea of their psychic composition. Experimental psychology, instead, found people to be unique, internally unique, and it was these individual differences that he thought could provide the greatest opportunities—and dangers—for businesses dependent upon human labor. Münsterberg called these differences “mental qualities,” a broad category referring to both “the mental dispositions which may still be quite underdeveloped and which may unfold only under the influence of special conditions” and “the habitual traits of the personality, the features of individual temperament and character, of the intelligence and of the ability, of the collective knowledge and of the acquired experience” (Münsterberg 1913: 27–28). This was less an abstract theory of mind than pragmatic instruction in economic psychology for workplace engineers, insisting that “some are more, some less, fit for [any given] economic task” and that efficiency is the outcome of allowing each worker to realize, through labor and specific motivational stimuli, his or her unique assemblage of latent potentials (Münsterberg 1913: 28–29). Knowing how to access, interpret, and direct these unique capacities demanded experts in the science of mind. It demanded an incorporation of psychologists into the managerial core of industrial capitalism. And so what industrial psychologists came to offer capital was method. This was an “applied science,” after all, and the discipline’s worldly application came in the form of what Münsterberg called “psychotechnics”—an assortment of devices, tests, and metrics that could both find workers’ subjective condition and render it objective, materialize it as a truth, and channel it to the service of industrial efficiency (Lemov 2015: 35–38). Psychotechnics were the “means” in industrial psychology’s means-­to-­ends approach. Because “scientific management gave to industrial psychology its purpose, its ethic,” the end this discipline promised capital was greater profit (Baritz 1960: 31). Münsterberg (1913: 23–24) says as much when pitching his psychotechnics to industrial engineers, offering them three specific results: “We ask how we can find the men whose mental qualities make them best fitted for the work which they have to do; secondly, under what psychological conditions we can



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 183

secure the greatest and most satisfactory output of work from every man; and finally, how we can produce most completely the influences on human minds which are desired in the interest of business.” Münsterberg’s three offerings foreshadow the coming impact of modern psychology on capitalist practice. They also suggest that the conditions of work becoming normalized by mass production were so distasteful to laboring populations as to require an “abrupt psychological wrench” to entice compliance with them (Braverman 1998 [1974]: 83). Programs designed to stimulate worker “habituation” and “adaptation” to industrial routine derive from the discovery that (with the guidance of trained experts) workers’ minds (to paraphrase Münsterberg) can be influenced to meet the desired interests of business. The invention of industrial psychology marks the origin of this psychologization of labor, the moment when “the necessity of adjusting the worker to work in its capitalist form” becomes a commonsense and “permanent feature of capitalist society” (Braverman 1998 [1974]: 96). This origin derives from the specific encounter between the Leipzig school’s brand of experimental psychology and the scientific management practices of Taylorism in the early twentieth century—two extremely consequential developments affecting modern notions of personhood. These developments, however, rest on a profound contradiction. At the same time that experimental psychology individualizes personhood and grounds that individuation in the determination of mind, economy effects a massified, if class-­segmented, condition of humanity, extracting mind out of the experience of personhood for the majority and reducing it entirely to body. Industrial psychology thus expresses, in its core, a fundamental tension in the relationship between body and mind inherent to the notion of personhood emergent in the early twentieth century. The point is greater still. Under Taylorism, the domain of mind becomes not only monopolized by management but also used against labor—it becomes a technology of expanded reproduction, a weapon in class struggle. By identifying the laboring masses as not only a mass of individuals but as individuals governed by an interior force of unique “mental qualities,” industrial psychology had the radical potential to undermine the very foundations of Taylorism. Instead, it enabled its perfection.

The Politics of Industrial Psychology

Münsterberg published his founding text of industrial psychology in 1913— the same year the Industrial Workers of the World began their massive

184

Chapter 6

unionization drive at Henry Ford’s auto plant in Detroit and only months before Ford introduced the world’s first continuous-­motion conveyor belt in his factory alongside his famous $5/day pay increase for workers (Braverman 1998 [1974]: 101–103). This pay increase, which doubled existing wage rates, came with certain provisions. While decoupling pay from productivity, it tied it to certain “standards of conduct and behavior as outlined by the company” monitored by Ford’s “paternalistic” Sociology Department (initially directed by an Episcopal minister) whose aim was “to teach Ford’s workers how to live an exemplary life” (Susman 1984: 137). This project derived in part from Ford’s efforts to help with the “‘Americanization’ of huge numbers of foreigners in the company’s workforce” (Susman 1984: 138). But it also, consistent with that, laid the groundwork for considering how capitalism itself could intervene directly into the production of a broadly normative form of American personhood, for which industrial and domestic settings could operate as complementary sites of subjective pedagogy. Further evidence of this came from Ford’s proposed Muscle Shoals project, a “grand scheme to bring industry to the countryside and to decentralize industrial concentration while offering the advantages of industrial life to isolated rural areas” (Susman 1984: 138)—a dream, we might note, not entirely unlike that held by Ecuadorian flower growers a century later. The point here is to see these two poles of political action—unionization, strikes, and expressions of worker discontent, on the one hand, and managerial investments into shaping workers’ habitus and domestic lives, on the other—as part of a singular process occurring in a time of rapid capitalist restructuring. This is class struggle, but class struggle organizing itself around the space opened up by industrial psychology—the econometrics of workers’ psychic interiority. If access to this space was the means that psychologists used to guarantee worker compliance with capital’s intensifying drive for efficiency and profit, it also thereby helped construe workers’ refusal of compliance with it as pathological (Brown 1992: 53)—it displayed actions at odds with a force already claiming to be better in touch with workers’ interior selves and drives than they themselves were. Ford addresses workers’ psychological individualism through the back door, by intervening in its manufacture before it arrives at the factory gates, working to condition compliance with capital’s objectives as part of workers’ psychic composition. Industrial psychologists, after all, showed the “mental qualities” of the psychological individual to be malleable through external stimuli. But much of the work that psychologists would need to do for managers was to screen out



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 185

individuals displaying psychic malfunctions before they even set foot in the factory. This was the work of personnel selection tests.

Personnel Selection Tests as Exemplary Psychotechnics

“The economic task, with which we want to demonstrate the new psychotechnic method,” Münsterberg (1913: 27) wrote in his foundational textbook, “is the selection of those personalities which by their mental qualities are especially fit for a particular kind of economic work.” These selection tests would become Industrial Psychology’s most enduring legacy, largely through the work of Walter Dill Scott, an advertising specialist who also earned his doctorate from Leipzig. In 1915, Scott became the chair of the United States’ first applied psychology department, held at Carnegie Institute of Technology. While holding this chair, he established the country’s first business-­oriented psychology consulting service called The Scott Company, developing applicant screening tests for many major American factories through and after the first World War (Baritz 1960: 26–27). Screening tests are also one of the specialties of industrial psychology departments in Ecuador, including Quito’s Central University, where most of the cut-­flower sector’s psychologists are trained. In June 2014, the dean of psychology at the Central University, Oswaldo Montenegro, told me that his department was offering degrees in industrial psychology and courses in personnel selection before it was even formally separated from philosophy in 1982. Before then, through the national import substitution industrialization campaigns of the 1970s and up to the present, provisioning what he called “psico-­metricas” (“psychometrics”) in hiring for the private and public sectors has been their most demanded output. To manage this demand, they developed a laboratory that can “process” over 1,000 tests per day, he said. A plantation psychologist I met in 2012 told me that the demand for these tests was so high that she was being hired to screen applicants for jobs in subcontracting firms before she even finished her degree. Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (Münsterberg 1913) outlines various tests to assess the “mental capacities” of job applicants, each meant to showcase the wonders and benefits of this new applied science. None resemble the test Alexandra administered to Sandra, Harison, and other applicants that day at TerraNova. The difference is that Münsterberg’s tests were what today would be considered “aptitude” tests—they evaluate the specific skills

186

Chapter 6

a worker would use in the job for which they are applying. Subsequent work in industrial psychology gave considerable emphasis to tests of this sort. A 1932 textbook called Industrial Psychology in Practice (Welch and Mills 1932), for instance, discusses a test administered in a British confectionary packing industry. A picture shows a woman sitting at a table containing ten wooden disks, a metronome, and a linear board with ten circles drawn on it. The “candidate,” we are told, “picks up the wooden disks one by one and, keeping time with the metronome, places them as nearly as possible in the circular outlines. A small pin in the centre of each disk marks the paper and thus indicates her accuracy” (Welch and Mills 1932: 227–228). Confectionary placement accuracy, presumably, is being measured here—the more accurate the placement, the less time required to pack a box. We learn that tests like these “show the increased stability and the greater efficiency and contentment which result from scientific selection” methods. The confectionary manufacturer, for instance, reports that prior to “the introduction of tests for selecting employees, the proportion of ‘misfits’—workers who had to be dismissed or transferred before the end of their training period—was from 20 to 25 percent. After employing selection tests, the proportion was reduced to about 3 per cent” (Welch and Mills 1932: 232). It also lowered the cost of training new employees, reducing it from 18 to 3.5 months and from 31 to 5 pounds per employee (Welch and Mills 1932: 235). The selection tests used on Cayambe’s flower plantations are different from these tests in that they are not designed to assess the applicant’s physical or mental “capacity” to carry out the tasks required of them—Sandra’s was not an aptitude test in that sense. Rather, it is described as a test of the applicant’s “personality.” Personality tests have a political history. They started being used by industrial psychologists in the 1920s to counter postwar union pressure on managerial decision making, as this 1942 American textbook of industrial psychology makes clear: “The rising voice of labor in determining managerial policies, particularly with respect to hiring and firing . . . [has] made it increasingly important to determine, at the time of hiring, whether an applicant has any incipient personality maladjustments that might prevent him from fitting properly into the organization” (Tiffin 1942: 112, emphasis added). As late as the 1940s, these tests were largely administered as questionnaires that assessed the applicant’s potential to demonstrate the features of one of several psychotypological categories of “misfit” personality. The 318-­question Humm-­ Wadsworth Temperament Scale, for instance, used throughout the United States in the interwar period, included categories like the Manic Cycloid, the



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 187

Paranoid Schizoid, and the Hysteriod, the latter being someone who “possesses a character defect with ethically inferior motivation manifested by stealing, lying, cheating, and similar antisocial behavior” (Tiffin 1942: 114). But what is personality? Historians of psychology note a sharp rise in the use of this term in the second decade of the twentieth century, both in popular American discourse and among professional psychologists. They note a shift occurring at this time in ideas of the self, moving from an emphasis on “character” to a “culture of personality”—the former pointing to the expression of duty, service, or sacrifice, a “moral order through the medium of individual nature,” to use Emerson’s definition (quoted in Susman 1984: 274), the latter referring to a self that is “expressive, adaptable, and morally unencumbered,” a person of “individual distinctiveness,” in other words (Nicholson 2003: 6). Heinze (2003: 228) challenges this way of framing the transformation that occurred in America’s cultural geist at the start of the twentieth century, arguing that the “shift was not from a moral world of character to a social world of personality; it was from a belief in the unitary and solid nature of personal and national identity to a sense of those identities as divisible and fragmented.” Provoking this shift was mass immigration and postbellum racial relocation, the same forces noted earlier as central to the rise of industrial psychology itself: “The new psychological interpretation of personality as something divided or out of adjustment gave Americans a meaningful vocabulary for describing society in a period of massive immigration and racial reconfiguration. Conversely, the depth of an immigrant consciousness in America, where personal transformation and identity change were normative, inclined Americans to highlight notions of a divisible or internally strained personality” (Heinze 2003: 233–234). The entry of the category of personality into American psychology thus gave practitioners a framework for constructing and assessing a field of psychic normativity and deviance at a time when human difference was becoming the undeniable reality of American urban life. Personality, as Heinze maintains, effected a compatibility between the ideal nation and the ideal self, between the individual and the political community, each an assemblage of differential forces that could be harmoniously aligned or in conflict. “Misfit” personality types not only evidenced the mysteries and dangers lurking below the surface of self-­presentation; they also outlined a racialized cosmology of the United States in the midst of demographic transformation. Undesirable personality traits, like persistently un-­American immigrant dispositions, were construed as problems of maladjustment and demanding socio-­and psychotherapeutic

188

Chapter 6

projects designed to promote “integration,” “adaptation,” and “evolution.” As Heinze (2003: 240) writes, the rise of personality tests “was embedded in a strangely conjoined history of psychology, immigration, and race. . . . From the start, social scientists in Europe and America deployed psychological categories of intelligence and personality to rank and organize ethnic groups and to legislate their futures.” American functionalist approaches “held that the job of psychology was to understand human adaptation so as to promote social evolution,” providing “a mighty arsenal for the immigration restriction movement and for racialism in general in the early decades of the twentieth century.” That personality testing came to occupy a prominent role in the work of industrial psychologists as a method for screening applicants for factory jobs tells us how embedded industry was in twentieth-­century American nation building, how flush its labor pool was with immigrants and racial minorities, and how necessary it seemed to protect capital from the dangers that could be smuggled into the workplace in the psychic interiors of its workers. Indeed, the Humm-­Wadsworth test was created in response to the murder of a supervisor by a disgruntled employee fired from the California gas company where Wadsworth worked as its personnel manager (Lussier 2018). This was certainly a different sort of danger than those Münsterberg had in mind, but the logic at work is the same—threats to capital’s ability to achieve its ends will arrive unseen in the interiority of its workers. Psychologists are the natural gatekeepers to prevent this. “A boy may think with passion of the vocation of a sailor, and yet may be entirely unfit for it, because his mind lacks the ability to discriminate red and green,” Münsterberg (1913: 30) notes. “All such deficiencies may be dangerous in particular callings,” but “while the vocation of the ship officer is fortunately protected nowadays by such a special psychological examination, most other vocations are unguarded against the entrance of the mentally unfit individuals” (Münsterberg 1913: 30–31, emphasis added). By the 1940s, projective tests—the “king of technologies for seeing into the inner self ” (Lemov 2015: 20)—came to perform exactly the same role with respect to personality that Münsterberg hoped his “special psychological examination” would perform for judgement, feeling, and emotion management. This role centered on sorting out the mentally fit from the unfit, the useful from the dangerous, and channeling the former into machines of industrial efficiency and nation building. These tests also gave psychologists’ discernments a high degree of scientific validity by providing material evidence of their evaluations, seemingly culled straight from the minds of applicants themselves. The very notion of “projection” —the “distinct and often



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 189

forceful movement . . . of internal concerns onto external targets”—which had, since Freud, been considered an at once “remarkable” yet “entirely, literally, banal” part of “the warp and woof of daily existence” gave credence to its use as a psychotechnic device, seeming to offer “the answer to an impasse in the human sciences: how to ‘get at’ the very essence of human meaning, subjectivity itself ” (Lemov 2015: 35). Like “high-­powered microscopes,” projective tests asserted a strong claim to seeing straight into the determinate essence of the subject—“It is glimpsed—there!—at the place where the card or paper tool meets the user or test taker,” Lemov (2015: 38) writes, mimicking the enthusiasm surrounding this method in the 1940s and 1950s.

La Figura Humana: The Body as Vehicle of Mind

The projective tests used by Cayambe’s industrial psychologists emerge straight from this moment in American efforts to develop an applied science of human subjectivity. Their exact source is a 1949 book by clinical psychologist Karen Machover called Personality Projection in the Drawing of the Human Figure (A Method of Personality Investigation), translated and simplified by Spanish psychologist Juan Portuondo (2010) in an edition first published in 1971 and reprinted several times. Plantation psychologists cite Portuondo’s book as a key text in their university training and keep copies of it in their office’s desk drawers. The importance of this book in Ecuador likely can be traced back to the founder of the Central University’s Psychology Department, Jorge Flachier, an expert in clinical psychodiagnostic tests who published a widely read book in 1973 on the psychoanalysis of painting, which includes a major section on the paintings of human figures (Flachier 1973). His book includes a how-­to guide for administering and interpreting the human figure test, showing heavy (though uncredited) influence from Machover, which has been integrated into the Central University’s psychology curriculum since its foundation. But Machover didn’t invent the human figure test. Credit for that goes to Florence Goodenough, who in 1926 developed the Draw-­a-­Man test as a nonverbal intelligence assessment for children aged two to thirteen. By the mid-­forties, the test had become the “third most used test in clinical psychology,” with wide application beyond child psychology (Thompson 1990: 126). Machover had used these tests in clinics and hospitals for fifteen years before writing her book and came to see them as revealing “rich clinical material not related to the intellectual level of the subject” that could be codified into

190

Chapter 6

a relatively standard interpretive set of psychic expressions (Machover 1949: 20). Her guiding premise for this method was that, in composing a drawing of this sort, an “individual must draw consciously, and no doubt unconsciously, upon his whole system of psychic values” (Machover 1949: 5). Critical to this elicitation was the use of the physical body, the physical form of personhood, as the projective device: “The body, or the self, is the most intimate point of reference in any activity,” she argues (Machover 1949: 5), meaning that in daily life, individuals already relate to their own body as a bridge between inner and outer worlds. The same vehicle thus can be artificially summoned by the analyst to carry the same passenger (a “whole system of psychic values”) from point A (inside) to point B (outside), a perfect method for inciting projection because it already functions as such in life: “The fact that we cannot escape the somatic entrenchment of our desires, conflicts, compensations, and social attitudes has considerable bearing upon the phenomenon of self-­projection through the drawing of the human figure” (Machover 1949: 8). Without such a tool for elicitation, such forces—desires, conflicts, compensation, and so on— may go unnoticed. And for this, a technical capacity to analyze the results must be mastered. This is the point of Machover’s book, which offers diagnostic guidelines for interpreting every aspect of a drawing: “Whether an individual makes his figure large or small, where he places it on the page, whether he works with long continuous lines or short, jagged ones, whether the figure has an aggressive stance, whether it is rigid or fluid, what the essential proportions of the body are, whether symmetry compulsions are observed, whether there is a tendency to incompleteness, to erasures or to shading, are all features that refer stably to the personality structure” (Machover 1949: 6). Machover, as far as I know, never used the human figure test in personnel selection processes. Its adaptation to labor recruitment procedures in Ecuador shows a novel overlapping of industrial and clinical psychology techniques in plantation managers’ quest to access the psychic interiority of their workforce.

Observation (On Capitalist Interiority, Again) The traditional notion of interiors as enclosed and separate from outside and the ability of the boundary to regulate and control intrusion (to ostracize) have produced ideas of interiors as hidden, private, and



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 191

mysterious. Differentiation from outside (considered as a public and universally accessible exterior) locates the interior as an exclusive, restricted, and private space; a repository of privileged information (carnal knowledge, initiation, the password, or a secret handshake) available only to those admitted. —Christine McCarthy, “Toward a Definition of Interiority”

The eight applicants have now finished their interviews, drawn their persons, had their documents examined, projected their personalities, and had them assessed. The whole process took just under two hours. The benches outside Alexandra’s office are crowded with anxious would-­be workers who are silent, completely silent, but restless amid the flurry of office staff—agronomists, economists, managers, cleaners—buzzing around them. Alexandra exits her office and thanks everyone for coming. She tells them to check in with the guard at the front gate tomorrow at 6:00 a.m.—those offered jobs will be let in and will get right to work. Those not will be sent home. That’s it. The applicants are unsatisfied. They want to know now. Two of them approach Alexandra and, prefaced with expressions of great humility, try to convey to her the inconvenience of coming to the plantation tomorrow if not for work. She interrupts these requests and, excusing herself, says she has to run to another of the consortium’s farms to interview applicants for jobs there. Her driver is leaving. People are waiting for her at the other farm. She’s already late. I look around and notice that Harison has left and so run down the stairs to look for him. He’s disappeared. Instead, I find Sandra moving slowly toward the exit. I call after her—“Sandra! Wait a sec”—and when she stops and turns toward me, I don’t know what to say. This seems like an ethnographically rich moment, and I feel pulled along by a compulsive urge to capture it. I want to ask Sandra about the application process, and especially the drawing, about what she thought was going on, how she felt about it, and all that. I suddenly realize the absurdity of this. Of course she doesn’t know what the drawing was about; that’s the point. And besides, I’m now completely implicated in the process. We’ve bored into her mind, and now I am asking her to cough up more. All she wanted was a job. And now, to go home. I try to distance myself. I tell her that I live in Carrera and don’t work for TerraNova, am just studying it. No reaction. I keep at it. How was the interview process? “Regular,” she says—normal. How about the drawing? Have other

192

Chapter 6

plantations asked you to do that? “No, never. But each one has their style.” And why do you think they asked you to draw a person? “I don’t know.” And what was that like, for you? “Like school.” School? Why like school? “I don’t know. It just felt like I was in school.” I think I get what she is saying, but I leave it there. I realize this barrage of questions is not a welcome addition to Sandra’s day. Over the next few months, I would come to ask TerraNova’s workers, ones I knew well already, to reflect back on their job interviews and, especially, the drawing test. Their responses were all more or less the same—no idea why they were asked to draw a person, maybe it was some kind of test, don’t know what of, haven’t given it much thought since, must have done OK because here they are. I’ve fallen, it seems, into an ethnographic black hole. I’ve hit on a spot of central importance to the conditions I am trying to map out ethnographically but which cannot be understood any better through known conventions of ethnographic research. It isn’t simply that such things refuse comment—that it is hard to narrate one’s own experience of subjection. It’s that a technology such as this is deployed with a force that only works through obfuscation. It is, in a sense, a weapon in a battle over transparency and dissimulation, one responding to the idea (central to all core concepts—self, personhood, subjectivity, personality, projection—at play here) that people, all of us, are ultimately determined by a secret inside us, with a countersecret: this isn’t just a drawing you are producing (“this isn’t an art competition, Sandra”). It is a battering ram, a probe, a “high-­powered microscope.” It is the truth serum unwittingly ingested, the polygraph machine hiding behind the curtain, the X Ray Specs that look like ordinary glasses. “They don’t even know why they’re drawing it or that it’s a projective test,” the head industrial psychologist at Primavera Farms, Casagrande’s oldest and largest plantation, admitted to me. She—her name is Sharon—oversees the entire human management team on Casagrande’s farms and credits herself with first introducing the human figure test—“el Machover,” she calls it—into the cut-­flower sector’s worker selection process. I had just spent the day with Sharon and her assistant, accompanying them through many hours of applicant interviews, document checks, and human figure tests. At some point, it occurred to me that Sharon was asking applicants very few questions about their drawings—much less than Machover advised and far fewer than I, now deeply curious about this process, wanted to ask. Short of the figure’s age, sex, and a few “biographical” details, the drawing itself never became an object of conversation between applicant and analyst. Why not? Well, there are time



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 193

constraints, Sharon told me—with so many applicants, she tries to process each in ten minutes or less. But in truth, Sharon added, “It’s really not necessary. By drawing the person, they are already projecting everything they have inside.” “Dating from 1701,” Christine McCarthy (2005: 112) notes, “the word interiority was originally intertwined with a moral notion of truth, and by 1803, it had acquired a more explicitly spatial usage.” It is this overlay of physical and metaphysical properties, that “inside” as a morally constituted space of truth and “repository of privileged information,” that constitutes interiority as a site where desire accumulates. It is where “desire, space and control coincide,” McCarthy (2005: 113) adds. Thought of in this way, plantation psychologists are like computer hackers, using a penetrative technology to access information deemed classified, important, truthful, and revelatory only by way of its metaphorical spatialization in the nonobservable, nonpublic dimension of intimate personhood. The silent anonymity of the drawing test, a technology that doesn’t announce its presence, is what overcomes the conscious and unconscious controls that might guard against access—they don’t even know why they’re drawing it. And this is the importance of the body, the physical form of personhood, and its conscription into becoming an accomplice in this project of induced psychic betrayal. Recall Machover’s insistence that bodies are already sites of intense psychic projection, exteriorities already engulfed by interiority’s claims upon them, organic sites of mediation between inner and outer worlds. By summoning the body, the psyche is already there. This is the genetic root of Machover’s diagnostic technique: the “sources of the motivational, motor, and ideational patterns which contribute to the structure of the body image and thus render the human-­figure drawing significantly expressive of personality are subtly fused in the graphic production” (Machover 1949: 9). Sharon fully agrees. She chose this particular test over all other possible projective methods and over all other objects used in drawing tests (house, tree, etc.), she says, because of her belief that “the human figure effects the most direct projection of the person, how they perceive themselves.” But here, on the plantations, the body receives an extra vote of confidence as the ideal object of psychic scrutiny since the jobs for which applicants are being screened are considered “physically demanding” ones. This is physical, not intellectual, labor, Sharon reminds me. It is work of the body. But applicants’ physical bodies are not themselves subjected to tests, I counter, only their “personalities.” True, she admits, but clarifies that what they are looking for in these tests is “aptitude”—the word, remember, that early industrial psychologists used to describe screening tests

194

Chapter 6

that directly assess job-­related skills, like the confectionary packers we read about earlier. While initially designed and implemented by industrial psychologists, aptitude tests have a somewhat more physiological than psychological emphasis, in that they focus their metrics on actual bodies moving through industrial routine. This is what distinguishes them from “projective” tests, like the human figure drawing, which aim to assess “personality” or “temperament.” In other words, the test Sharon is using wasn’t designed as an aptitude test, in this sense of the word. “But what does aptitude mean, here?” I asked Sharon. It means a “predisposition towards work” and “identification with physical exertion,” she replied (my emphasis). Alexandra, too, months earlier, told me they use the test primarily to “measure [applicants’] attitude towards work” (my emphasis), the one thing, she said, the agronomists overseeing rose cultivation had asked her to make sure the workers she sent them had in good measure. And this thing, this “attitude,” could only be accurately assessed, she stated, by invoking the human figure—the instrument of physical labor. I can feel myself getting lost in the loops that fold mind into body, subjectivity into objectivity, interiority into exteriority. I need to see how the technique works. I need to look at the drawings, understand the diagnostic method, and be initiated into this esoteric art.

Looking at Bodies That Are Really Minds (but Also Bodies)

Sharon selects a drawing from the pile of those completed today. “Here, see? This person is obviously very comfortable doing hard work,” she insists, confidently. I don’t see it, but Sharon is eager to help. A positively valued attitude toward physical labor is shown, she tells me, “when the figure indicates movement, activity” or when applicants draw a body with broad, overextended shoulders. OK, this drawing could be said to be of a person with rather pronounced shoulders (Figure 4). But is that all there is to it? Is the meaning to be taken so literally? Let’s return to the source. Again we repeat the basic assumption, verified repeatedly in clinical experience, that the human figure drawn by an individual who is directed to ‘draw a person’ relates intimately to the impulses, anxieties, conflicts, and compensations characteristic of that individual. In some sense, the figure drawn is the person, and the paper corresponds to the environment. . . . Consequently, the drawing analyst



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 195

should feel free to extract from the graphic product what the subject has put into it. He should feel free to interpret directly aspects which, with striking literalness, often reflect real life problems and behavior of the individual who is drawing. The figure is, in a way, an introduction to the individual who is drawing. Thus, when a subject erases his arms and changes the position of them several times, it may be literally interpreted that the subject does not know what to do with his arms in his behavior. If the fist is clenched, he may literally be expressing his belligerence. (Machover 1949: 35, emphasis added except the first italics) Yes, it would seem so. The instruction is clear. The analyst is to interpret each body part or feature of the drawing with “striking literalness.” This is key to the method. Why? Because, as Machover suggests, that is how projection works—an individual’s body image is already a projection of the (social, shared, conventional) body meanings at their disposal. The drawing simply

Figure 4. “Woman, 18 years old.”

196

Chapter 6

repeats that process, thus publicizing, as it were, which of the possible meanings in this shared lexicon they most (perhaps unconsciously) identify with themselves. This diagnostic reliance on what might be called “projective realism” seems to have opened up a slight crack for applicants to manipulate to their advantage. The drawings in plantation archives suggest that applicants might, at times, see through the test’s secret and not without a touch of playful irony. Nineteen of the seventy-­seven sketches—a full 25 percent—that formed my archival sample group show applicants responding to the command to “draw a person” to get a job in a flower plantation by actually drawing a person working in a flower plantation. These drawings depict people holding flowers (three), fumigating flowers (four), wearing plantation uniforms (one), classifying harvested flowers (one), touching flower bushes as if tending them (three), holding agricultural tools (three), doing things the applicant described as “getting ready to work” (two), and, best of all, dressed in professional attire (two). These applicants, all of whom were hired, quite literally drew themselves into the plantation. And yet, to come back to the example of shoulders, Machover (1949: 71) herself insisted that the “width and massiveness of the shoulders are considered

Figure 5. “18-­year-­old woman.”



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 197

the most common graphic expression of physical power and perfection of physique.” That much is indisputable. Still to be determined, however, is what this common and conventional “body meaning” suggests about the subject when it appears on the page. “Some subliminal and determining process is involved” in the drawing, Machover (1949: 10) adds, “so, for example, a sensitive, puny, undernourished subject [may find] himself impelled to draw a powerful ego-­ model with tremendous shoulders.” The symbol or chain of meaning, then— tremendous-­shoulders-­equals-­physical-­power—even if clearly present in the drawing, and despite its striking literalness, may project an absence more than a presence, a wish or longing embedded in the personality structure rather than a mirror reflection of the subject in his or her present state. “We see then that drawings may contain an open confession of weakness and defect, a determined effort to compensate for defects, or a combination of both” (Machover 1949: 10, emphasis added). It is this mix of “projective realism” in what body parts are thought to mean with a nonlinear openness as to their diagnostic significance that I want to highlight in Machover’s interpretive method. This mixture achieves resolution (arrives at a diagnosis) in a very specific way: “Stress is laid primarily upon inter-­related patterns of drawing traits as they may reflect the dynamics of symptom organization in a particular diagnostic category,” Machover (1949: 21–22) writes. In other words—in the clinical setting, the analyst starts with a known list of possible “diagnostic categories.” These categories express themselves in multiple, but patterned, ways. The body image, as a direct projection of a possibly symptomatic self, will display its symptoms in a similarly organized and patterned way. The significance of one body part is to be confirmed by others, as they exist in a meaningfully patterned whole—a totality, as it were. And yet. . . . What happens when this psychotechnic device moves out of the clinical setting, out of a context in which the self—as patient—can be regarded in isolation and diagnosed in relation only to itself via a set of symptomatic categories? When the ideal-­clinical relationship between the location “analyst” and the location “patient” is overlain by another sort of relationship, an economic one governed by the “patient’s” potential use-­value for the “analyst”? When certain body parts (shoulders, let’s say) retain their striking literalness in the field of meaning (they must suggest physical power and brawn) but are rendered significant to the psychologist by an evaluative schema external to the diagnostic event (by, say, a labor process valuing positive attitudes toward physical labor)? When that human figure is read as the projection of a being formed

198

Chapter 6

outside the world of the analyst and requesting admission to it, an externality on the threshold of internalization, assessed for its potential to be managed and the profit it might yield—seen, that is, as a predator might size up its prey? What happens, at minimum, is an interruption of the body’s potential to be regarded as a totality, as a singular and complete form unto itself, its parts together composing an “interrelated pattern” that reveals a diagnostic condition. Earlier, we proposed a way of reading the logic of expanded reproduction as at once a principle of capitalist momentum and a theory of embodiment, one premised on the dissolution of corporeal integrity and on the nontotality of essence. Here we see that principle put to work in the actual practice of capitalist expansion. The human figure of potential workers has been summoned up and its parts evaluated not as units fitting together to compose a human system but as units fitting into a system of accumulation. Shoulders can only mean one of two things—a good worker or a bad worker. The body is already overtaken by capital’s interest in it. And the body here, as we know, is at once the real, fleshy body and the material projection of the immaterial internal force directing it, a projected effect of personality or self but also in itself the ultimate source of value, the object of labor, the reason this encounter happens at all. This double existence of proto-­workers’ bodies—at once potential objects of value in themselves and projective effects of interior states—makes their transfiguration onto paper extremely valuable for plantation psychologists like Alexandra who are trusted not only with hiring good workers but also with not hiring bad or dangerous ones. For this, they scrutinize the human figure drawings as much for cautionary signs as for any positively valued trait. These are not the kind of dangers that announce themselves in an applicant’s employment history, education records, or life histories. They are the kind that inhere in their beings, are not observable on the surface, and may even be unknown to applicants themselves but threaten the profitability of the firm in some way. Red pens in hand, plantation psychologists make visual sweeps of completed drawings with an itemized list of possible clues in mind, circling body parts here and there that raise concern, often writing the word “ojo” or “oh” (“eye,” meaning “watch this” or “note”) beside a particularly worrisome feature (see Figures 6 and 7). The human figure here becomes a complex field of cautionary signs, each body part a realm of meaning unto itself. For instance. . . . The eyes, Sharon tells me, are especially important to study carefully because they “show the level of adaptation or of relation with the environment” and the applicant’s capacity for “analysis.” The neck refers to the management of instinct,



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 199

Figure 6. “Oh” (ojo, take notice), “ag” (aggression), (under) “observation.”

of rationality. A thick neck is found in people who “don’t manage their impulses well,” a thin one in those who are “overly moralistic, overly ethical, overly rigid.” An open mouth is said to be an indication of either alcoholism or “oral aggression.” Hands are deemed important for their symbolic position of mediating contact between the person and the world (what Machover [1949: 59] calls “contact features”) and are analyzed as the best indicator of interpersonal relations. Big hands convey ambition, hands that appear bubbly or glove-­like convey communication problems or introversion, and hands with fingers that end in points show a propensity for violence. Sex and age are treated as pure projections, opposite-­sex drawings as identification with the mother or father, as the case may be, and the age applied to the figure by the applicant, their “mental age.” While most people attach their own age to their drawing, in a number of cases, the applicant draws a much younger person, including children. According to administrators, this is their IQ level and, in Sharon’s words, “they have to be managed from this age.” Alexandra concurs, noting that “the human figure test allows you to see what age they are, to see if a person’s level of emotional or mental maturity coincides” with their actual “chronological age, since what people are drawing is a projection of the self ” (una proyección de uno mismo).3 The value of this general interpretive schema to the hiring process is that it allows plantation psychologists with experience in the region’s plantation sector to focus their concern on those traits proven to be most disruptive to

200

Chapter 6

Figure 7. “Man, 9 years old.”

the labor demands in this industry. In 2012, a Central University–trained industrial psychologist named Mariela summarized her ten years of using the human figure test in Cayambe’s plantations by the flower sector’s need to control three personality traits common to the people of the region—“instability, kleptomania, and aggression.” Other psychologists mentioned these concerns to me frequently as well. Examining what each of these dangers refers to in the labor context will help concretize an understanding of the human figure test’s place in the social world of Cayambe. INSTABILITY

“Instability” personalizes what is otherwise referred to by management as “rotation,” or turnover. Labor turnover was a constant frustration for plantation administrators throughout my research and is also, as noted above, one of the things that early industrial psychologists in the United States and England claimed to be able to reduce dramatically by introducing personnel selection tests into the hiring process. In 2002, high turnover was blamed on the competitive labor market created by the construction of a massive oil pipeline stretching from the Amazonian territories up through the highlands and down to the coast. In 2012, Mariela blamed TerraNova’s high turnover rate on changes the company was making to workers’ weekly schedule. They were trying to implement a regular seven-­day-­a-­week production routine, unlike the



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 201

usual five-­and-­a-­half or six-­day schedule common on other farms in the area. Workers were being asked to rotate their days off every month, something Mariela believed was disliked by workers and leading many to quit. She also looked to other efficiency experiments as bearing responsibility—unlike many other farms, TerraNova was not giving monetary rewards to people meeting or exceeding their production quotas. They were giving congratulatory certificates. Or extra days off. But “what people [really] want is money,” she said, so they leave, unsatisfied with their incentives. And then there’s the issue of the liquidación, the financial compensation all workers were required by Ecuadorian labor law to receive when they quit a job after working at least a month. People, Mariela said, were becoming accustomed to “working two months and quitting. And with their liquidación of 200, 250 dollars, they can live for a month or two. And then they come back [to work]. This is their style of life.” What I want to highlight here is that despite Mariela’s comprehensive recognition of the many incentives for labor turnover built into the plantation’s production structure and in Ecuadorian law, her efforts to reduce it (whether by choice or job requirement) led her not to suggest modifying either of these but to tighten her search for clues of “insecurity” in the personality complexes of job applicants. And these clues are rather easy to spot in the human figure drawings. Sharon began one of her first conversations to me about their interpretive method, back in 2001, by telling me that a drawing composed of pencil strokes that “are not continuous, and which are instead jumpy, weak” shows “we have found unstable personnel, a person who doesn’t have defined objectives and who, therefore, faced with their first problem is going to go. And this you can prove,” she insisted, since “the figure is given to you with discontinuous sketching, is here and there, and this reflects instability” (see Figure 8). Alexandra later added that a person who draws a figure in profile is someone who suffers from “evasion” and who, “in time, will fly from your hand” (see Figure 9). Mariela continued our discussion by offering to show me the dossiers of recent job applicants at TerraNova. The first one evidenced exactly the issue we had just spoken about. “Here,” she said, “this guy is a very unstable person, because of the strokes, see?” I was by then somewhat versed in the technique. “Oh, because the lines aren’t straight?” I asked, pointing to the choppy, short pencil strokes the applicant used in his drawing. “Clearly, right? It indicates instability, see? So, this man has already reentered the plantation three times,” she added. He’s already known to her. He’s worked here three times already, leaving each time after a few months, then returning a few months later, just as she described more abstractly as a local “style of life”—the thing the test is supposed to detect in order to prevent them from hiring “unstable” people.

Figure 8. Instability.

Figure 9. Flying from your hand.



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 203

“But nonetheless he’s an excellent worker,” she added. “And so for this reason we let him come back.” So what in the world is the test helping to control? I wondered. There’s more. “With respect to his instability, this happens because this man, what he likes is to drink, see? See, there’s pronunciation here [points to drawing], and so his problem is alcoholism.” “Wait, indicated by his mouth?” I ask. “Yes, look,” she clarifies, “look how it is, it’s underlined, and the whole mouth is . . . well, very pronounced, which could mean he’s an alcoholic or it could be that he likes to make jokes, or that he speaks harshly. In other words, we have a lot of patterns we could follow . . . but I can say in this case with certainty, since it came out in his interview, that yes, he’s a very unstable person that will in truth not show up to work one day or will quit, and it’s to drink. But he doesn’t have problems, he’s an excellent worker. Look, you can see it [points to drawing], his back is very pronounced, as if it were very strong . . . so in questions of work, I have no inconvenience. It’s more the aspect of insecurity in his personality.” Mariela is here explicitly invoking Machover’s core interpretive point— that the significance of any one body part is to be confirmed by its relation to others in a patterned whole, of which, she admits, there are several possibilities. She even allows the applicant himself, via the interview, to have a say in things and help decide on a diagnosis. Through all of this, it’s confirmed that, yes, he is an alcoholic and, yes, his personality has in it an aspect of instability. The test works—look at those choppy strokes, look at that pronounced mouth. It’s all there for the eye to see. Alcoholism and instability also confirm one another, together composing a holistic picture of a personality complex—he skips work to drink; he is a drunk and so skips work. This is exactly what the test was put in place to detect. Instability is one of the main concerns with hiring local people, and so this test was introduced to warn management about people with a propensity to leave their posts. His own employment record at this very plantation confirms this further—he has a history here of repeated abandonments and is expected to continue that. But then what happens? We see a gap arise between the test’s purported capacities—producing all kinds of data about individuals’ latent determinations—and its actual impact on hiring decisions. Along comes the strong back, revealing that, despite everything else, the applicant is “an excellent worker.” The gap that arises here, as Mariela puts it, is between the man as a bearer of “personality” and the man as a worker, two images that are out of step with one another. We could rephrase this gap as a tension between each of the two “bodies” of the proto-­ worker that appear before capital at this stage of the capital-­labor relation, the

204

Chapter 6

one that functions as the projected effect of interiority (body-­as-­mind) and the one that is itself the material source of value (body-­as-­body). Here we see a vision of the latter (what this applicant would be like actually working in the flower fields) override just about everything suggested by the former (will quit unexpectedly, is an alcoholic). The “pattern” of body image traits, or totality of form, that Mariela sought to base her analysis of this applicant’s personality on, is broken by an external evaluative schema—will he prove useful to enterprise profitability?—which then reenters the human figure analysis in the positive value assigned to the drawing of the back. It’s not just that certain dangers can be found and then ignored. What we also see is that despite the intense drive to uncover and render transparent workers’ interiorities, it is the material body itself that capital is most after. We could also say that through the human figure drawing, capital has produced an archive of its own recomposition of the worker’s body as a (fractured, discordant) totality that includes its subsumption to the labor process within that body’s essence. A similar process can be seen with kleptomania. KLEPTOMANIA

We need lockers We need lockers For different reasons *Because they’re losing Lots of things *We need more security Because the loss of things is something nobody takes respon sability for, if one asks the guards they say I don’t know-­ if one tells the boss of the farm they don’t do a search and don’t say anything not even speaking about the theft: For this we are thinking of leaving this company Regards, [unidentifiable mock signature] The One Who Is About To Leave —Anonymous submission to the Suggestion Box in TerraNova cafeteria, May 2002



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 205

Including kleptomania in the list of traits most actively screened out by the projective test renders explicit its flirtation with juridical models of guilt/innocence and the confessional framework in which evidence about applicants is extracted by plantation psychologists. While theft appears to be a widespread concern on plantations, as much for workers as management, reducing it to a psychological disorder evident in an individual’s personality complex at once pathologizes crime along the lines of madness and highlights the slippage between the science of psychology and the art of security in the applied work of industrial psychology. Two examples below show the ways theft is construed as an expressive act of personhood (as “kleptomania”) and how the human figure test establishes authority, through this construction, to detect it. The first example comes from 2007, when Sharon and I were again speaking about her use of Machover’s test at Primavera Farms. Again she wanted to give me examples of its use on the farm that proved its merit. This day’s example concerned a purportedly well-­known thief whom she had hired since my last visit. Apparently, this man had worked at a different plantation as a security guard, and under his watch, three large canisters of agro-­chemicals were stolen. He was suspected of being involved in the robbery, which he denied, and the company, though lacking proof, ordered him to pay for the stolen goods. He refused and quit, marking his employment file with the words “fined for theft.” After hiring this man at Primavera, Sharon was reproached by the plantation manager, who asked why she would hire a known thief. She said it was because the human figure test proved he wasn’t a kleptomaniac. She even pulled this man’s test from her file and showed it to the manager, explaining how it exonerated him of the crime. The test’s assessment has been confirmed, she said—he’s an excellent worker and hasn’t stolen a thing. The second example comes from my 2012 review of the drawings Mariela had on her desk at TerraNova. After our discussion of the alcoholic’s drawing, she pulled a second one from her stack. “Ah, here’s one we hired today,” she remarked. “It’s a reentry, she worked for me before. Let’s see . . . what we are being shown about this girl is, you can see her gaze is off to one side, see her eyes? And her mouth is a little strong looking. . . . And so this girl is a little, not a joker, but more . . . suppose I say to her ‘your output [quota] has to be this amount,’ she will say, ‘But why? You haven’t given me enough time,’ and so on . . . not exactly using strong words, but this is not a person who keeps quiet about things, right? And look, she’s not showing me a hand. See that? She’s not showing me her hand.” “It’s hidden?” I ask. “Yes, it’s hidden,” Mariela confirms. “But I don’t have problems with kleptomania with her,” she notes, confirming

206

Chapter 6

that such a characteristic could be shown by such a thing as a “hidden” hand and is something the tests have to screen for. But the drawing, which has in one feature made her suspicious, in another proves her innocence. “It’s because there are no pronounced pockets, no pronounced hands. On the contrary, this is a person who . . . who is also unstable with me. She entered once in cultivo [the cultivation wing of the plantation] and another time in the pos-­cosecha [the postharvest selection and packing wing], but is very good. She’s a very good person who works . . . who, in other words, does things quickly, and she uses her hands for this, right? And so if she hasn’t drawn the hand it must be for that . . . because she’s super-­fast, this girl . . . yes, yes, you can see it in the shoulders.” I confess to not seeing it in the shoulders. “The shoulders are big, right?” Mariela clarifies. “Because if she’d have drawn me some little shoulders, it’d be as if she didn’t have a favorable attitude toward work, and all that.” But she’s drawn a man, I point out. “Yes, an eighteen-­year-­old man,” Mariela notes. “The ideal would be if she drew a woman, yes. . . . But the thing I’m most interested in is her attitude towards work. And I don’t see any problems in that.” While only touching on the topic of kleptomania, this example again shows the license plantation psychologists feel is open to them in reading the test’s clues, a license corroborated by first addressing the abstracted body as a totality and that body as a material projection of another totality—the (holistic) person, or psychological individual. The parts must fit together, the clues must line up; an issue with the hands arouses suspicion, as might the cross-­sex projection, but the shoulders take the stand as character witness and produce doubt. The jury must reach a decision and ultimately find the defendant not guilty. And why not, in the end? Well, what are we really most interested in here if not workers’ quality as workers? The missing hand, rather than signaling evasion, confirms her speed. And what could be more valued in high-­quota production systems than this? What we noted in our discussion of “instability” applies equally here—capital has recomposed the image of the worker around its projected utility to profit. Cautionary clues about character can be overlooked or challenged by evidence about the material body’s probable performance in actual labor routines. The next example shows the limits to this schema. AGGRESSION

“Aggression” was the character trait most often cited by plantation psychologists as the critical danger being filtered out of their workforce by the human figure tests, the main thing (besides “attitudes about work”) they were most



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 207

actively using the tests to detect. In 2002, Sharon emphasized the importance of the test for its vigilance against the high level of “aggression” that exists in the area, which she defined as violence, general antagonism, and an inability to accept orders and supervision. This concern directed special attention to the ways applicants drew hands (read as projections of self-­world relations) and mouths (as indicators of “oral aggression”). One of my favorites of Sharon’s many “proof that these tests work” examples is all about aggression. This example starts with Sharon going on vacation and leaving her secretaries in charge of personnel selection for a couple of weeks. Not being trained psychologists, they didn’t administer the human figure test to applicants. They were also forcing all newly hired workers to sign contracts with a third-­party labor subcontractor, not the company, which made several of this worker’s terms of work, including wage rates and pay schedule, different from company-­affiliated workers. In 2002, flower plantations started outsourcing the contractual bond between company and worker to independent firms. This was one way plantations were reducing their obligations owed to workers, a practice that would become routinized by the year’s end. At this early stage, workers hired under this subcontracting system told me they felt continually on edge, uncertain of their jobs, and angry at being duped by what they considered a bait-­and-­switch hiring trick. Workers affiliated with this particular subcontracting company felt extra resentment—it was widely believed to be a shadow company formed by Julio Casagrande himself to skirt labor laws, fire underperforming workers, and reduce labor costs on his own farms. So when payday came and this newly hired worker didn’t receive his check, he apparently became so irate that he threatened to denounce the company to the local police chief and to mount a legal campaign against Julio Casagrande, despite having the different pay schedules explained to him and being asked to wait only a few days to be paid. Sharon felt that this was not only an inappropriate response but also evidence of a kind of person the plantation should protect itself against: aggressive, impulsive, lacking reason, uncontrollable, and dangerous were all words she used to describe him. What might be interpreted as a reaction to the consequences of highly precarious forms of labor recruiting, a fallout in the “economic equivalence” ideology giving the labor relation a veneer of fairness (see Chapter 3), the stripping of his collective identification as a worker by watching others being remunerated before him, an appreciated critical consciousness, or even just the desperation of needing money was instead held up as evidence of delinquent character and resulted in his immediate firing from the plantation—“before he caused any further damage,”

208

Chapter 6

Sharon added. The missing projective test was deemed the cause for allowing this person to pass through the net, under the supposition that a personality trait as dangerous as this would inevitably have shown up in his drawing and caused him to be turned away. Sharon used this example to clarify how she understands her overall role in the plantation: I guarantee this, see, that people here can work in peace, that those here can have their minds at ease, that everyone is good, that if you have to draw their attention to something [i.e., discipline them], they will listen . . . that people are manageable, that they’re good people, that they’re really good people. You yourself saw when I discharged people the other day, when they came in to be sanctioned, you saw the attitude of the people. They’re very receptive, not quarrelsome. Thus I, with these tests, am guaranteeing this, in other words, that we have an environment that is manageable . . . agreeable . . . nice. Sharon is right. I did see her fire people and sanction others a few days prior and, receptive or not, they certainly were quiet about the whole thing. They showed themselves to be “manageable,” that quality of personhood Sharon claims to be the thing she is ultimately searching for and able to guarantee by adding a projective test to the worker selection process. At the opposite end of the personality spectrum stands “aggressiveness,” seemingly defined in content only by its structural opposition to manageability. Aggression marks the limit of the capital-­labor nexus, its perpetual exteriority. It was in this same conversation that Sharon and I started to talk about ways the region has changed since the arrival of the flower industry. My question was if she had seen any changes over the years in the features showing up in the human figure drawings. Was the interior profile of their labor pool different now than in the past? Is there anything this test might be able to contribute to a longitudinal sociology of Cayambe? “Yes,” Sharon responded immediately, “there is something. I can tell you, if there’s one feature that has notably declined, it’s aggression.” “Really?” I ask, surprised. “Really, aggression has notably declined,” she repeated. “Sure, you still encounter features of aggression [in the human figure drawings] but not the really strong features that you’d have seen before . . . now of ten people that I reject [don’t hire], one or two could be for this, at most,” much lower than in past years. I confess to being surprised by this. It sits oddly with her earlier claim that the tests are necessary to guard against the high degree of “aggression” (her term) existing



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 209

in the area. It also contradicts the pervasive discourse about Cayambe as a region experiencing a marked increase in crime, insecurity, and violence, a place profiled frequently in national newspapers as the birthplace of many of the country’s most notorious gangs, of unparalleled urban tensions created by massive in-­migration of the country’s working poor seeking jobs in the flower sector, and of an increase in things like lynching and acts of popular justice throughout its rural highlands (Krupa 2009). Sharon’s explanation for this decline in aggressiveness was also not what I might have expected. “Yes, well,” she continued, now whispering for emphasis, “here the level of alcoholism has gone down. And one of the things that brings a person to have irrational attitudes is, precisely, alcohol. And alcohol [consumption] is something that has declined.” “And why would that be?” I asked. “Well the thing is,” she continued, “if you are working often, as in other plantations, from Monday to Sunday, drinkers are going to have to stop drinking.” Mariela would later find at least one example of a worker who found a way to manage both a drinking habit and a semiregular work routine. But for Sharon, this turned out to be just one instance of a broader point she wanted to make, with other examples. “Women here have reached a different position, another mentality. She’s no longer a dependent woman,” staying in presumably abusive domestic situations. “Now a woman can get pregnant and live comfortably with her child because economic power creates independence. Women are no longer willing to accept a man’s aggression and men, for this same reason, have stopped, at least, [committing] familial aggression.” I might have glossed over this brief portrait of regional transformation were its logic not so consistent with the form of historicism running through plantation owners’ and managers’ primitive accumulation narratives discussed in Chapter 4. This is again a retrospective teleology of capitalist transformation in which waged employment acts as the motor force pushing this rural space from its miserable condition of beforeness to a present condition of emancipation. Alcoholism declines, sexual tyranny ends, and domestic abuse stops, as do other irrational attitudes. And in their place, p ­ eople develop progressive, modern, liberatory habits and reason prevails. These are not superficial changes. By Sharon’s account, they are what we find in the interior depths of Cayambe’s social body, confirmed by the truth potion of the human figure drawing. The test shows us that aggressiveness itself, as a primary drive or determinate passion, is declining. But there’s more. “I’ll tell you, I am very strict about this aspect,” Sharon adds, meaning she has zero tolerance for applicants whose tests show signs of any potential for

210

Chapter 6

aggression. “Even the people here know I am very strict, very demanding, and I believe people auto-­eliminate themselves [from applying here], since they now know that there’s this test, that we ask for a lot of things. And this has had its advantages, since I don’t have to do a lot of selecting. People listen [to gossip] and rumors circulate, and I know that not every plantation applies this test, or uses this schema, and so [potentially aggressive] people auto-­ eliminate themselves, say, ‘No, I’m not going to apply [there]. I know they won’t take me, it’s better that I just don’t apply.’” To repeat: aggression marks the limit of the capital-­labor nexus, its perpetual exteriority. But there is inconsistency here—is capitalist expansion changing the comportments of the region’s inhabitants or are those enterprises most committed to investing in this change seeing an increasingly limited sample of them? The projective test here is shown to have evolved a secondary function, an additional way of policing the flow of people moving across the boundary between capital’s outside and inside—it creates a security mystique by which “aggressive” people auto-­select themselves as unemployable. What is this way of being that aggressiveness marks, that confesses its unproductivity to capital upfront, that self-­selects its difference, or, if slipping through the cracks, defines its own limits of subsumption, refuses to submit to flexibilization schemes deemed unjust or to become manageable, agreeable, or nice? What is this way of being if not that ever-­receding horizon of an outside that capital must continuously approach yet withdraw from, as a danger that, once evoked, cannot be converted into value by the plantation’s psychosecurity apparatus, that bears the mark of a foreignness that cannot be made proper by capital’s touch? Is this the Cayambe in its beforeness that lingers, still, as limit, horizon, and threat?

On Inverted Multiscalar Projection It’s a very good test because, at the same time, it allows you inclusively, if you analyze [it], to know the medium in which he [applicant/worker] has developed, how he has developed, and why he has this type of attitude, and equally, his level of culture. It is all of this. —Alexandra, TerraNova’s industrial psychologist, January 2002



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 211

We should be starting to see an overlap occurring between two scales of interior/exterior relations evoked by these tests. One of these scales operates at the level of the person, or the individual, the proto-­laborer that the test subjects to assessment. The other scale centers on the plantation as a bounded, barricaded, and place-­set system operating in a surrounding environment marked in specific ways as different from that inner world of capital. It is the inverted relationship between these two scales of interiority that is important—that the private, secretive interior space of the potential worker-­applicant, that space marked by capital’s desire to penetrate and know, is the same space, at a different scale, as capital’s external environment. It is the social world existing just beyond the plantation walls, where workers are raised, formed as people, continue to live, and return to at the end of the working day. Alexandra’s summary of the test’s method, above, makes this point explicit. Workers’ interiorities are capital’s exteriorities. This observation raises the stakes of projective testing considerably. It helps us see how the inverted spatialization of plantation psychometrics that converts (individual) interiorities into (territorial) exteriorities also rediscovers interiority at a different, supraindividual, level. It extends the reach of a knowledge-­generating technology into the domestic spaces of rural social and personal formation, claims access to the world of collective intimacy for plantation workers, and opens that restricted world up to capital’s gaze. Two implications follow. On the one hand, it makes the secretive and undisclosed motives of the drawing test seem doubly duplicitous, for transforming job applicants into community informers or snitches, confessing more than just individual personality traits, drives, and motivations but, with that, information about the fundamental conditions in which proto-­laboring subjects, present and future, are produced. In a context such as this, one marked by an expansive form of capitalist development explicitly championing itself as a sociotransformative project for the region’s inhabitants, the psychometrics of projective testing seem hard to strip of imperialist instrumentality. This is the groundwork of imperial knowledge, that effort to truly know the subject of transformation so that he or she may be more efficiently remade. On the other hand, this observation pushes us to question whether the individual—the ideal subject of projective testing—is really the true, or only, object of knowledge summoned up by these tests, even as they emerge from a scientific genealogy fully dependent on the invention of the “psychological

212

Chapter 6

individual” (Baritz 1960) and the discovery of “individual differences” (Münsterberg 1913). While each applicant is individually assessed and their distinction from other applicants noted, there is an ambiguity in their capacity to be fully regarded as individuals vis-­à-­vis a competing regard for them as exemplars of a particular population, a population, moreover, whose purported particularities (as we have seen above) are precisely the things being screened for in each applicant’s assessment. We saw a similar ambiguity arise in the work of industrial psychologists in the early days of American Fordism, when laboring populations were already unshakably collectivized into various immigrant personalities and racial types. The psychological data produced about individual applicants helped round out these group profiles and contributed to strategies of their “Americanization.” In a similar vein, I want to consider the ways the core target of these tests—workers’ interiorities—are shaped as objects of knowledge by the context in which they are projected and given material form. The question is how this context might act on the data produced from these tests to subsume the individual—as a psychologically governed entity—to a collective and categorical subject. This is a context determined not only by the economic logic of expanded reproduction—which asks, “Can this subject be made into a source of profit?”—but also by the sociospatial logic of the encounter, in which the test meets its object through a path of arrival, a traversal of distance. Traversing this distance, the test finds its object already framed in certain idioms of collective intelligibility. These are the same idioms that territorialize Cayambe in its alterity from the national-­urban, that figured capitalist expansion in the mid-­1980s as a form of beneficent intervention into posthacienda rurality, and that marked and remark its inhabitants as subjects of salvation—a spatial imaginary of urban white-­mestizo society that already knows something about who and what is to be found in these backward rural highlands but still demands to know more.

Elemental Figures

Here, for instance, is what I mean: I can tell you that a person who doesn’t have a high cultural level, but who has had the opportunity to live in a more sophisticated medium—in the city, I mean, right?—will put more detail into the



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 213

figure. They will draw it more aesthetically, yes, above all, more aesthetically. In contrast, the person who comes from a rural environment is much more simple, and perceives himself this way, more simple, or I’d say more elemental, yes. Inclusively, this is the person [drawing] that has a head, arms, body, and legs, but often without proportion, without form. Yes, I think this is the form in which they see themselves because, as I’ve told you, it’s a projective test, it’s what they feel [about themselves] or how they perceive themselves. These people, a lot of the time, don’t take into account the aesthetic part, or the physical part, of themselves. Rather, they ensure, in fact, that they are strong, good for work, and nothing more. Therefore, you see a figure that is very elemental, very simple. (Sharon, Primavera Farms, June 19, 2002) Sharon here reminds me, and I believe her, that the human figure test opens up a space for projection to flourish. What I am less certain about is whose projections, the drawer’s or the interpreter’s, are most actively seduced out of them in the process. Her comments here interject a different scale of analytical discernment than those we have seen so far, one that breaks from the singular uniqueness of each drawing to group them into types based on their level of aesthetic detail, accuracy of body proportion, and respect for corporeal form. One type has these in spades. The other doesn’t—it is simple, elemental, disproportionate, and formless (see Figure 10). Sharon wants me to understand that these qualities of drawing cluster together. She wants me to appreciate the “strikingly literal” significance of each. An elemental drawing suggests a view of self as an elemental being. This much comes straight from Machover’s methodology. All her own is Sharon’s insistence that these ways of drawing and modes of self-­perception are cartographically emplotable—they conform to general divisions between urban and rural space and the populations who live in each. People from a rural environment are people who draw simple drawings and see themselves as simple folk. They have little regard for aesthetics and place value only on their capacity to endure hard physical work. They are, in their very essence, beasts of burden. Brute, physical bodies organically and essentially, in the core of their being, fully oriented toward, and knowable through, work. A psychoprojective technology has been applied and confirms this to be true. This must be good news for a labor-­intensive industrial complex that finds itself rooted in a heavily populated rural environment.

214

Chapter 6

Figure 10. “Man, 5 years old.”

“If I were not a psychologist,” Sharon adds, “I would analyze this from a very different point of view. I’d be able to say that these are people who aren’t, who knows, adapted. But a psychologist has to situate a mentality in its medium. And so they, in their medium, are fine. They’re not disequilibriated. They are in accord with their medium, right? And why? Because one, as a human being, looks for the elements to adapt themselves to the environment in which they have to live, right? And so you could say that this form in which they conceive of themselves, the mental schema, for the environment in which they are in, is good.” The language of “adaptation” grounds Sharon’s analysis of her workers’ mentalities on the firm terrain of science. Her expertise allows her to claim a refined, nonjudgmental appreciation of difference even as it emphasizes her own difference from her workers—were she not a psychologist, she, or someone of her location, would naturally perceive her workers’ apparent incapacity to draw an aesthetically detailed and morphologically proper person as a sign of something objectionable, flawed, imbalanced. She has arrived at a different conclusion but, it bears stressing, through a path that mirrors that of her fictitious interlocutor—this is a sign of something, an anomaly that must be explained, a question that must be answered. And in providing that answer,



The Psychotechnics of Capitalist Expansion 215

a universal theory of mind emerges—call it environmental determinism— that moors psychological personhood, through its collective assemblage, to a binary structure of space. That binary—the urban and the rural—appears culled from the projective data itself while also existing apart from it. Rurality is an objective fact, a place one can point to. But it is also a personality type, a mode of self-­perception, a total human form. Topography is typology. The tests confirm that inner and outer worlds must align, as Alexandra likewise noted, and the distinction this world, Cayambe-­as-­rurality, still holds from the world of the psychologist, the test, the plantation. Workers’ interiorities are capital’s exteriorities, both “good” and “fine” of course in their complementary togetherness but both targets, remember, of capitalist interiorization, transformation, and expansion.

Conclusion The question we return to here is how an aggressively expansive form of capitalism constructs its object of intervention. Adaptation—or, the externalization of psychic causality—does considerable work in this project for it deepens and scientizes the affective bond of sympathy structuring subject-­object relations between capital and its (becoming-­) workers. Chapter 4 unpacked this affective complex in detail, tracing the ways Cayambe’s inhabitants came to be perceived by plantation owners and managers as a miserable and suffering lot but also as bearing no blame for their condition. That blame was reserved for the hacienda system, long perceived by the country’s urban, liberal intelligentsia as a lecherous colonial relic determining and limiting the life chances, behavioral capacities, and personality structures of everyone caught in its orbit. “Rurality,” as a concept, marking absolute distinction from the urban and the national-­normative, emerged out of this discursive-­political framework, coming to signal spaces and peoples marked by the hacienda and its legacy. At the heart of this assemblage of hacienda effects was the postcolonial indio, the iconic subject of hacienda bondage, posthacienda abandonment, and rural sociality. Rurality, in such a framework, is not only a product of the urban, liberal, and modernizing imaginary; it is also, via this trajectory, a thoroughly racialized concept that naturalizes categorical differences of personhood by ascribing sociogenerative capacity to space. Here’s where this becomes critical to the present discussion. Because indigeneity signaled abjection, but abjection as an effect of something external to

216

Chapter 6

those it afflicted, Indigenous abjection was considered curable. And because indigeneity and its source of abjection were territorially bound in the highlands to the notion of the rural (as either the active domain of the hacienda or, later, the sites of its abandonment), the idea of Indigenous improvement rested on a spatial dynamic—extra-­rural people need to enter rural spaces to generate processes of change. This is the concept of space that figured capitalism as a benevolent force in the highlands—as an externality, its expansion into the highlands could override the oppressive force of the hacienda and stimulate improvement in stagnant posthacienda territories. If Chapter 4 showed the historic intersections between ideas of economy and of race in the urban, liberal imaginary, here we can now add ideas about space and geography as a third ingredient in the long construction of an interventionist agenda targeting the rural highlands and their inhabitants. One of the main forces animating this economy-­race-­space triad, however, is knowledge—knowledge, specifically, about highland Indigenous peoples and their inner, psychological, life. The following chapter flashes on a variety of instances demonstrating the ways Indigenous interiority developed as a critical object of knowledge and expertise, in Ecuador and throughout the Andean region. Knowledge here structures a certain kind of relationship central to Andean race thinking in which the two locations brought into relation are differentiated according to their capacity to know, or be known by, the other. “Indio,” as one location effected out of this relation, will signal a dynamic object that vacillates between the unknown, the knowable, and the intimately and surely known. It is a site of knowledge creation and extraction, dialectically related to its opposite, the site from which knowledge can claim itself as such. This location can be called white or mestizo. And the end point of this knowledge, the stuff of its reach into truth itself, will be that mystical collection of deep content shorthanded here as “interiority.”

CHAPTER 7

Indigenous Interiors

Industrialization in Ecuador implicating its highland Indian population is necessarily predicated upon the presence of non-­Indian actors. Industrial managers and technical personnel must be, in the nature of things, strangers to such prospective industrial workers. In turn, Indians are bound to strike such persons as strange beings. —Beattie R. Salz, The Human Element in Industrialization: A Hypothetical Case Study of Ecuadorean Indians

In the early 1970s, around the time of the second of two agrarian reforms that would undue Ecuador’s hacienda system for good, Emilio Bonifaz took time away from whatever it is that the owner of the country’s largest hacienda1 does to write a book-­length study of the Indigenous men, women, and children he came in contact with at Guachalá. Despite being an elite member of the country’s landed aristocracy, Bonifaz came in contact with Indigenous people in much the same way that whites and mestizos of all classes did— through the work they performed for them or people like them. Work was a primary space of racialized contact in these years. And so it was also a primary sphere of quotidian racial knowledge production, a domain in which whites and mestizos, having time on their hands, would observe Indigenous people and make assessments about what they were all about. In such a context, in which difference is presumed, the smallest of things might strike the keen observer as a window into the root of difference itself, a revelatory moment in which workers, known to their employers for perhaps many years, unwittingly shift their identity from milkmaid, caretaker, carrier, shepherd, or any personal name they might be known by, to indio, expressing the ways of the indio.2 The smallest of things, if pursued with a detective’s determination or

218

Chapter 7

an ethnographer’s curiosity, might just reveal the biggest of truths about what an indio is and why. The smallest of things, like a missing vase, for instance. One day I noticed that a flower vase that used to be on top of a table in the house at my farm wasn’t in its place. I called the servicia3 and asked her where the vase was, and she answered: “yesterday here, on the table (it) was; now no see it; where could it be?” I called the cook, who said the same. Once alone, I undertook a small investigation that allowed me to find, on the ground, a few small pieces of porcelain that, obviously, had belonged to the vase. I called the two again and asked them if, while sweeping or dusting, they hadn’t caused the vase to fall, to which the two responded no. And so I showed them the pieces that I’d collected and told them: “The vase is broken. How did it break?,” which produced the following response: “by falling it broke by itself; we didn’t make it fall; just yesterday it broke falling; while sweeping the room.” (Bonifaz 1979: 92–93) Having set the scene, Bonifaz immediately tells readers its significance: “They try above all else to avoid difficulties and bothers and it is because of trying to avoid this that they answer in the way they do. It’s such that, for many of them, the truth isn’t a fact; rather, it’s something that won’t cause one difficulties; in spite of this not agreeing with our ideas [of truth], it’s a practical definition applicable to their way of life” (Bonifaz 1979: 93). Earlier in the book, Bonifaz writes about catching one of his servicias taking some alfalfa from the fields of pasture surrounding the hacienda manor, presumably for her own animals. He doesn’t stop her, choosing instead to confront her later in the day. “How is it that you,” he asks, “who never steal not even one cent from the thousands of sucres sprinkled around the house . . . steal weeds from my ranch?” Bonifaz narrates the ensuing scene for us: “She laughed at my idiotic reasoning and gave me a class in indigenous psychology: ‘What’s in the house belongs to the boss, pes; but what’s outside it belongs to the hacienda; and what’s the hacienda’s is the hacienda’s, pes.’. . . What is one to do with this mentality?” Bonifaz (1979: 72) asks in frustration. These two scenes describe a secondary economy transacting itself on top of the contractual one between worker and boss on the hacienda. In one scene, a worker gets weeds but in exchange gives Bonifaz a lesson in Indigenous psychology. In the other, Bonifaz loses a vase but gets schooled in Indigenous thought and culture. Neither of his teachers seems particularly aware that they



Indigenous Interiors 219

are providing such a service. Bonifaz, in contrast, knows exactly what these encounters can offer him, and his curiosity is poised to receive it. We might consider this a template for how quotidian racial knowledge has long worked in Ecuador. This template positions the indio as a question and the white or mestizo as if the question was posed to them. It’s as if part of what it meant to be mestizo or white in Ecuador was to feel oneself continuously addressed by Indigenous people with the question “What am I?” and to bear the burden—the right, the audacity—of providing an answer. The source of this answer knows no limit—it can be as deep as the soul, the psyche, the ways—and no limit is untraversable. The indio enters the scene as both a mystery and an open book. Chapter 4 explored an earlier expression of this template in the debates about concertaje, or debt peonage, that erupted in the late 1800s. Parliamentarians who argued for and against the practice based their arguments on personal assessments of the interior world of the indio, a world whose very knowability these debates helped craft. As Guerrero (1997: 565) notes, the “debate of the honorable legislators” rested on “the concrete principle of freedom of the laborers (conciertos) ascribed to farms” but which, by wrestling with this principle, brought them “to design the contours of an indian depth psychology, of his ‘character.’” And it was “‘the character of the indian,’ the appreciation of his psychology and degree of awareness, the evaluation of his intelligence and sensibility, [that came to] define a crucial point in the strategy [of intervention]. The descriptions of misery and even physical degradation do not reach far enough. It is necessary to reach the depths, his sublime and sacred being: his ‘soul’” (Guerrero 1997: 578). This reaching into the sublime depths of Indigenous interiority certainly has colonial precedents, both secular and religious, dating back to the first moments of conquest (Todorov 1982) but were given new purposes— and technologies—under postcolonial efforts to fuse racial knowledge with national integration. Between the “indian depth psychology” occurring in the concertaje debates and Bonifaz’s ad hoc lesson in Indigenous psychology stands a century of work in the racial sciences dedicated to tapping into the essence of the indio’s mind, body, and being.

Superficies and Contents: Physiognomy’s Influence One especially influential strand of work followed the rise of physiognomy, the popular science claiming to read a person’s character or personality from

220

Chapter 7

his or her outer appearance, especially the face. A “virtual obsession” throughout Europe in the mid-­1800s, physiognomy bolstered Andean racial systems of the period by providing a method for moving from the exterior and public matter of the body to the inner constitution of character, that determinate space of interiority (Poole 1997: 110). “Here was a formula for deciphering exactly who a person was,” Poole (1997: 160) writes. “By learning the rules of physiognomic method it was possible, the physiognomists claimed, to know not only a person’s social background but also the intimate moral and spiritual qualities that constituted that individual’s character or personality.” And while “formulated as a guide to individual character,” Poole maintains, “the rules of physiognomic method were, of course, both aesthetically and racially coded,” developed, as they were, through their technologies’ travels through colonial and postcolonial spaces and all coming to confirm white and European superiority. These “rules,” first laid out in pastor Johann Caspar Lavater’s 1772 Essays on Physiognomy (1862),4 bear uncanny resemblance to the diagnostic method of human figure tests. Physiognomy’s revival in the late 1800s overlaps with William Wundt’s revolution of the psychological method, both part of the “new bourgeois cult of individuality” underlying physiognomy’s appeal. Similar to how Wundtian psychology gave industrial psychology its theoretical premise, physiognomy gave scientists a toolkit for documenting, demarcating, and qualifying the morphological specificities of the distinct “types” of people thought to populate the Andean region. “As the most inexpensive, numerous, and widely circulated images of colonial and non-­European people” existing at the time, Poole (1997: 134) writes, physiognomic portraits “were soon enlisted to service the new racial studies” of the early twentieth century. In Europe, these photographs provided the objective material on which the pioneers of scientific racism—Cuvier, Camper, Blumenbach—designed the quantitative methods that anthropometry, skeletal biology, and physical anthropologists would use to compose their racial typologies. “Enlightenment practices of physiognomy interpreted Jewish and European bodies in relationship to numerous accounts from global encounters arriving with the exploits of colonization and the growing dependence on scientific methods of interpretation” (Bantum 2014: 46). A concrete interpretive method had emerged—the body, real or in image, is the matter through which the essence of the person, singular or representing a collectivity, is known.5 And in each case, the traffic between body and being is mediated by a technology of visual realism—the camera, the Bertillon apparatus, the cranial measuring devices, and so on,



Indigenous Interiors 221

each grounding the immaterial world of determinate essence (racial character, interior state) on material evidence provided by the body. “Is not all nature physiognomy?” Lavater (1862: 16) wrote in 1772. “Superficies, and contents; body, and spirit; exterior effect, and internal power; invisible beginning, and visible ending?” And “what knowledge is there, of which man is capable, that is not found on the exterior; the relation that exists between visible and invisible, the perceptible and the imperceptible”?

Measures of Body and Mind: The Rise of the Racial Sciences in Ecuador It is precisely this body-­to-­mind, exterior-­to-­interior formula that guided the explosive growth of the racial sciences in Ecuador in the mid-­twentieth century. Concentrated primarily at Quito’s Central University—where all industrial psychologists working in Cayambe’s flower plantations would later be trained—this research grew up in tandem with the state’s indigenist agenda, premised, as Chapter 4 showed, on efforts to improve the lives of Indigenous people by assimilating them into the national polity. The racial sciences absorbed this governmental mission and added content to it, making the indio into an object of curiosity as much as concern, as if the explanation for, and solution to, Indigenous abjection could be uncovered by sustained “inspection” of the “biology and mentality” of the “Indian race” (Prieto 2004: 165). If national transformation required deep knowledge of the indio and his medium, by the 1930s, an expanded cadre of experts was trekking from city to country to advance both. A key pioneer in this research was Victor Gabriel Garcés, whose 1932 Psycho-­Social Conditions of the Indio in the Province of Imbabura established a correspondence between what previous researchers had called “el espíritu indio” (“the spirit of the indio”)—a sociobiological adaptation to telluric forces (Prieto 2004: 170) thought to define the core of Indigenous subjectivity since pre-­Colombian times—and the modern psyche, a determinate but developmental composite of emotions, personality, drives, instincts, and needs. This psyche, always understood to express itself at the level of the race, was now something that could be made its own object of inquiry. For this, no special devices were needed other than a watchful eye and a penchant for seeing evidence of general truths in whatever any indio might say or do. “The indigenous mentality is like that of a child: suggestable, capricious, without many

222

Chapter 7

goals. It never asks about causalities. It doesn’t express doubt, something distinctive of deeper psychologies. . . . It carries in itself a defect of bewilderment. Its soul doesn’t vibrate with or hatch an eagerness for improvement. It’s as if the weight of a century of oppression has squashed its spirit forever!” (Garcés 1932: 136–137). Psyche, mentality, will, soul, spirit—interchangeable terms for a space of interiority that defines the racial character and being of the indio. History is a force in the production of this space, but that history, as a history of destruction, arrests the movement of historical time. The psyche of the indio is the black hole of history. It sucks colonial violence into it, along with its structural legacies, and yet cannot animate itself as a historical force. The indio psyche expresses the deepest traces of a truth of suffering that calls out for salvation, a salvation that arrives not only to redeem the indio but also to atone for the sins of conquest. Is this the space into which white psychic guilt is projected? “All the oppression, tyranny, injustice that the white has done to the weak soul, the malleable and inconsistent spirit of the indio, has to have eternally left behind some profound psychic trace,” Garcés (1932: 132) insists. Yes, but on whom? This psychologization of the soul-­spirit by urban researchers was part of their effort to construct an antiracist racial science of the indio. This radical rejection of natural inferiority finds the root cause of indigeneity in colonial and postcolonial oppression. Psychology is critical for identifying this since it uncovers the endurance of this violence in the depths of Indigenous being and identifies it as the determinate force through which Indigenous people think and act, the root of anything that can be called personality, temperament, and character. To be indio is to express this legacy in the very fact of existence. “The personality of the indio is incomplete,” Garcés (1932: 138– 139) writes. “Delivered into the randomness of his life as always—old and new—the indio can’t but perpetuate himself in the spiritual lethargy in which he today vegetates. Add to this the constant, tenacious oppression to which he has been victim—and is still to this day—this is a derisory and inhuman lampoon, and so will find its deep traces in its cut and truncated psychology before its complete development.” Colonial violence is the indio’s psychic inheritance. His psyche is a trace. The consequences of this legacy are clear—agency is replaced by stagnation and lethargy; full personhood is replaced by fragmentation; psychic development is incomplete. And, as the pioneers of rural capitalist expansion would repeat over half a century later, a truth is observed and documented about Indigenous being, one rooted in misery and stagnation, but judgment and blame are



Indigenous Interiors 223

withheld, and sympathy arrives in their place. If only the indio could feel and then process and then act upon his predicament in the way outsiders do. If the indio could feel, in all its intensity, not only his own weight, his pain, but also the weight and the pain of his race he would have disappeared long ago. He would have committed suicide a thousand times over. What has happened is another thing entirely. What’s happened is that his soul is a synthesis of past martyrdoms that have reached the point of becoming part of its nature. The psychic degeneration is at the level of physical degeneration. . . . The soul of the indio is ossified. . . . The biological inheritance is undeniable, having cast the indio in an eternal prison, without any rehabilitative process arising on anyone’s part. There is no regeneration, only degradation. By way of three colonial centuries and a hundred civilized years of democratic republicanism, the indio has moved regressively, marching backwards. (Garcés 1932: 141–142) Garcés expresses well not only the sorrow and sympathy for the indio that overtakes liberal intelligentsia writing of the period but also the way this structure of feeling maps onto a structure of knowing. To know is to feel. To be known is to be felt. The indio is that which emerges as an object of (others’) knowledge and an object of (others’) emotion. This is the template of quotidian racial knowledge production identified earlier. With Garcés, a union is forged between the biological and psychic constitution of the indio, each confirming the story told by the other, each a degenerative inheritance in its own right. The concept of biological degeneration had been popularized in the 1920s by members of the Central University’s Faculty of Medicine, who exerted considerable influence over future efforts to construct a racial profile of the Ecuadorian indio. Degeneration in this sense—shown by high infant mortality rates, cretinism in children, and, especially (see below), elevated incidents of goiter—was not an inevitability. Rather, intergenerationally transmitted corporeal decline was considered an effect of the perpetually poor living conditions of the country’s Indigenous people—inadequate diet, extreme poverty, physical isolation and distance from modern medical care and education, unhygienic living conditions, and so on. This research gave further credence to political arguments about the need to integrate Indigenous people into the national mainstream and influenced a new generation of research into the specificity of the Indigenous body.

224

Chapter 7

By the 1930s, physical anthropologists like Antonio Santiana were venturing into the countryside to perform full anthropometric studies on Ecuador’s Indigenous people. Santiana’s early work on body hair distribution (where body hair grows, its thickness and variability) set an agenda to prove that such features were racially specific, solidifying the notion of race as a biological fact (Santiana 1941). His conclusions are typological—his examination of 1,203 Indigenous bodies between 17 and 100 years of age suggests to him that Indigenous body hair patterning is of an “infantile-­feminine” type (Santiana 1941: 27). Holistic summaries of the total body would emerge later, like Santiana’s 1960 assemblage of data collected from 173 Indigenous men and women into short descriptive reports about almost any measurable part of their bodies—nutrition (“pathological,” deficient), thorax (normal), dorsal (accentuated curve), neck (normal, some short and thick), larynx (reduced thyroid cartilage is common), abdomen (normal to bulky), and so on (Santiana 1960). If, by midcentury, the Indigenous body was increasingly becoming an object of empirical scrutiny and scientific expertise, a thing that could be made fully knowable through technologies of deep visibilization (Santiana 1966), it was not simply made so for the advancement of knowledge. Science, racial science, even at its most rigorous, was meant to be a political force: Santiana . . . thought that the biological approach to race—a mixture of in situ bodily measurements and statistics—was the most “scientific” manner of confronting the problem of the indio and his physical and social improvement. He criticized the indigenista artists who, while representing the degeneration of the indios, especially the indio of the hacienda, were incapable of providing useful scientific bases for state intervention. It was time, he argued, that scientists elaborated accurate knowledge about the indios, whose social and biological characteristics were “incognito.” (Prieto 2004: 185) For Garcés, in the early 1930s, this was precisely the point of developing an indigenist psychology. Psychology was thought to afford a unique window into the truth of the indio precisely because it brings to light what is most unobservable to the naked eye. There was a historical specificity to this assertion. Since oppression had historically come as an external force, shaping Indigenous reality from the outside, interiority had become a site where the “deep soul” of the indio had been secreted away, guarded, but still alive; it was the psyche where the true “traces of an ‘Indianity’ lay, still undiscovered” but containing



Indigenous Interiors 225

the fundamental difference and uniqueness of the Indian “race” (Prieto 2004: 171). And this difference, this uniqueness of the “interior spirit,” for Garcés, was the indio’s “attachment and impulse to work his own land” (Prieto 2004: 172)6—a quasi-­spiritual symbiosis between person and productive land that the ethnographer Humberto García would call the basis of “the racial spirit and indigenous psychology,” such that the original loss of land to hacienda expansion produced not only a material loss but also a “loss of psychic territory” among the country’s Indigenous people (in Prieto 2004: 172). This loss, the dissolution of the fundamental bond between person and land, was, as Chapter 4 showed, the founding principle of the critical indigenista movement that sprung up under Pio Jaramillo in the early twentieth century. That political movement directed its attention to the economic consequences of this original act of land theft. Now, with Garcés, it comes also to be understood as the basic condition of the Indigenous psyche, the determinate cause behind everything he and others would uncover in their proto-­psychological observations—the source of the vegetation, incomplete personality complexes, and temperament disorders said to characterize the early modern indio. The science of Indigenous interiority begins its life as a psychology of dispossession. But dispossession of this sort has only one cure—stolen land must be returned. And yet, most proposals from, and serious debate among, concerned intellectuals and politicians of the period tended to focus on forms of hacienda regulation or ways of “integrating” Indigenous people into the national culture and polity, not land redistribution. Claims about Indigenous interiority often entered these discussions, such as that offered by Garcés (1932: 540–541) in his gently sarcastic critique of governmental attention to Indigenous clothing: As a drastic measure on the part of the Government, it has been advised, as a salvationist measure, that the indio be obliged to undergo a change of clothes. It would be easy—it has been said—to inhibit the indios from penetrating urban centers with their habitual clothes. . . . [But] if what is aspired to is the incorporation of the indio into our culture, are we to suppose that we have culturalized him with only a change of clothes? . . . Clothes, the exterior manifestation of the individual, is a demonstration of his state of psychic cultivation; for the same reason, thus, the changing of clothes supposes a transformation in the spiritual conditions to which one is submitted. But if we do this with force, where is the natural process

226

Chapter 7

of moral and social rehabilitation that we want to give the indio? . . . Evolution has to be integral, complete. It wouldn’t be agreeable for us if just the poncho and sandals disappear, if this lethargic and sleepy soul remains untouched. It would not be politically favorable for us if these changes are only exterior ones, since citizenship doesn’t demand, as the only requirement of the subject, his nice appearance, his way of wearing clothes. Real transformation, for Garcés, involves a change in the totality of being, is “integral.” And though the essence of being necessarily manifests itself on the exterior (pace physiognomy), it is something that originates elsewhere, in that space identified as the “soul” and requiring, for proper evolution, constant and routinized “psychic cultivation.” See how interiority becomes both a space of truth and a site of intervention, the site of intervention when what is desired is a change in the truth of another. But see as well the spatial image contained in the example above. The question is whether indios should be required to change from their traditional clothes when they enter urban centers. Up for debate is whether this change in clothing would advance or not the assimilation of Indigenous people into “our” culture and their cultivation as proper political citizens of the nation. Not up for debate is the racialization of territory symbolized by clothing here or that the point where Indigenous transformation occurs is that liminal space of contact between urban and rural, white-­mestizo and Indigenous, national and extra-­national.

Contact as Curation A consensus is here emerging about Indigenous improvement that not only sees that as the mandatory end point of all scientific work in rural areas (this was well established) but that frames the progressive temporality of such improvement in explicitly spatial terms. “If the essentially rural and peasant modality of Indigenous life doesn’t seem convenient” for the assimilation of Indigenous people into the national mainstream, Garcés (1932: 542) asks, “then how are we to modify this traditional mode of living of the indios?” (Garcés 1932: 542). “Degeneration,” as a process, is unanimously equated with isolation and apartness, which is what rurality comes to represent as a space of Indigenous habitation.7 “The indio,” Santiana (1941: 9) writes, “isolates himself with himself; he searches only for the society of his racial brothers and doesn’t want to know anything about what occurs in the country.” And this has



Indigenous Interiors 227

an effect. “Their economy has poverty or, better said, misery, as its common denominator,” he would later write (Santiana 1960: 165). Practices like land restitution, which could potentially strengthen Indigenous people’s capacity to sustain themselves apart from national, urban-­centered life, could only further the capacity for degeneration, it was believed. Progress is a national endeavor, unshakably bound to notions of national integration; it is also, with that, for Indigenous people, absolutely tied to what might be called “contact.” Contact emerges here as something of a curative force in its own right. Contact—with outsiders, that is, with people who in such moments retain their individual identity but also, because of that, embody things national, of the state, of science, and so on—can be called curative because it responds to a condition that has been fully medicalized. Difference (indio-­ness) is an effect of apartness and isolation (it is mediated by space), of which degeneration is the key symptom. Biology, medicine, and hygiene have provided the idiom, but indigeneity is universally approached in the early twentieth century as a pathology that the racial sciences emerged to address. These sciences, those of the body and the mind, the outer and the inner, were premised on contact, on the logic of the encounter, the momentary suspension of distance-­as-­ difference, to understand and study the indio in the context of its production. Expertise extends this contact further, deepens it, pushing into the nuances of the body and the problem of the mind, making contact with the source, touching it. And science here, as we have seen, must be put to some use. Touch must both extend the intimacy of knowing and the benevolence of feeling. Touch is an affective act of healing. Isolation leads to misery, contact to curation. It is the first step in the overall goal of integration, absorption, assimilation of Indigenous people into the nation, and the elimination of difference and, thus, of misery. By the early 1970s, perhaps the final stage of a truly racial science in Ecuador, the lessons of the Indigenous body and those of the mind would be afforded a most unusual relationship in the study of endemic goiter. Which brings us back to Emilio Bonifaz.

Endemic Goiter, or Why the Indigenous Mind Is Not Logical “I will cite an example I consider typical of the indigenous mentality,” Emilio Bonifaz (1979: 132) informs us, midway through a chapter on Indigenous people’s “Comportment.” “In my house in the capital city, I had a servant from a family that worked on my agrarian property,” meaning Guchalá. Bonifaz tells

228

Chapter 7

of an incident when he returns to this house at night and honks his horn outside the gate. The servant appears and opens the gate for Don Emilio, who parks his car in the garage. The two meet up in the garden and walk into the house, whereupon the servant says to him, Bonifaz tells us, the following: “‘The niña’ (my wife) ‘said, patrón’ (me), ‘bring to house, taitas’ (the parents of my wife), ‘wait for patrón’”—Bonifaz’s wife, in other words, had asked the servant to tell Bonifaz, when he arrived home, to go pick up her parents, who were waiting for him. Bonifaz, surprised, asks his servant why he didn’t tell him this before opening the door, letting him park the car, and guiding him into the house. “And to this he answered: ‘Perhaps the niña said not to open the door? Nothing, no said . . . go patrón and bring . . . she said . . . this, yes, as I’ve said.’” Other examples follow, leading, as before, to a comment, a translation of sorts, to his readers, who he assumes to be like him but lacking the amount of contact and experience with, but not the curiosity about, the ways of the indios and who, like him, must see them every day when they need some work done. For many, these and many other observations of the present study will appear confusing, lacking logic, and even contradictory, all of which I admit without reserve. What has to be taken into account is that the highland indigenous mind is not logical, according to the definitions we give to this word; it wraps itself in contradictions and constant fluctuations to degrees that are, for us, no less than unexplainable. I am not trying to transform these observations into logical things because that would falsify the truth; and if they are confusing and contradictory it is because the observed facts have so been. [Their] comportment in general appears to be infantile. And is there logic in 8-­to-­10-­year-­old boys? (Bonifaz 1979: 133) Bonifaz’s lay investigations into the highland Indigenous mind have presented him with a puzzle. He has uncovered several curiosities: a unique mode of truth-­reckoning based on conflict avoidance, an idea about things that subverts notions of private property and theft and, now, an infantile obeisance of orders to a degree that confounds reason. These will not be transformed into relativistic logic, but they cannot simply stand as portraits of the ways of the Ecuadorian indio. Imagining himself more a scientist than an ethnographer, the hacendado must come to some explanation for why indios think and behave in this way. Difference must be accounted for.



Indigenous Interiors 229

* * * In 1973, the endocrinologist José Varea Terán, of the Central University’s Faculty of Medical Sciences, organized a series of field-­based studies in three Indigenous communities in the central highland province of Cotopaxi. The UNICEF-­funded project’s goal was to produce a holistic study of a sector of Ecuador’s Indigenous population “to know the reasons for its inexplicable capacity for biological survival” into the late twentieth century (Varea Terán and Varea Terán 1974: 8). Varea’s team contained social anthropologists, psychologists, nutritionists, and a variety of medical scientists, each of whom contributed separate sections to the published results. Bonifaz seizes on one comparatively small aspect of the final report—the finding that a large number of people in these communities suffer from endemic goiter (Varea Terán and Varea Terán 1974: 298–301, 338). Goiter, a swelling of the thyroid glands, is often linked to inadequate iodine consumption but can also be attributed to the underproduction of thyroid hormones by the gland itself. The disorder has long been associated with alpine populations (Droin 2005; Merke 1984) and gained considerable attention in the 1930s, when it was identified as one of the most visible markers of the highland Indigenous body and its purportedly “degenerative” trajectory. Bonifaz becomes fascinated with goiter not only for its apparent racial specificity (i.e., as an affliction of the indio) but also, more important, for the intellectual and behavioral symptoms—“apathy, hyposexuality, the lack of aggression, [and] intellectual infantilism” (Bonifaz 1979: 198)— science has shown to attend to it. How would one prove this relationship between physical and mental symptoms, not just theoretically, but in concrete terms, as well as their racial specificity? For this, Bonifaz turns back to Varea’s investigations, which, again, involved more than just endocrinological tests in the Indigenous communities. In their work with school-­aged children, Doctor Varea and his collaborators realized, as well, mental tests in the populations of José Guango Alto, San Agustín de Callo, and Mulaló. The Dearborn tests threw up discouraging results and the same happened with the human figure test of F. Goodenough, which proportioned the most negative data, despite its simplicity. The investigators had to design a mental test that was adapted to the mentality of the rural environment to explore degrees of mental comprehension,

230

Chapter 7

reasoning, and agility. They controlled the experiment by way of a comparison group from the city of Quito. (Bonifaz 1979: 198) This is the first recorded mention I have found of the human figure drawing test being used in Ecuador’s Indigenous communities, here functioning as an intelligence test for children as its creator, Florence Goodenough, intended. This is the same test that Karen Machover would modify slightly into a personality projection test and, following that, would find its way into the hands of industrial psychologists screening Indigenous applicants for jobs on Cayambe’s flower plantations. As expected, the results of these earlier tests do not favor the Indigenous subjects, revealing, instead, “considerable difference between the mental reasoning [capacities] of peasant children compared with those from Quito” (Bonifaz 1979: 199). “The noted differentiation,” Bonifaz adds, “can be explained, in large part, by the causes we have studied [that is, thyroid deficiencies]; but it also must be remembered that the inhabitants of Quito are, in general, much more mestizados [mixed, biologically, culturally] with the white race than are the rural inhabitants” (Bonifaz 1979: 199, emphasis added).8 The test confirms negative deviation from a norm (which Bonifaz sees Quito, a political, cultural, and biological location, standing in for) and suggests to Bonifaz an endocrinological cause behind the mental inferiority of the Indian race. But this correlation between goiter and intelligence suggests more than just biocausality of mental process. It is part of a complex correlation Bonifaz feels he has uncovered between biological, mental-­psychological, cultural-­ behavioral, and environmental factors that together explain, in their interactive totality, the essence of the highland indio. Iodine-­poor soils produce hypothyroidism, which, combined with a low-­protein diet, produces “an adaptation based in passivity” (Bonifaz 1979: 199). Passivity leads to small endogamous groups, causing a biosexual production of inertia and increasing “the genes disfavoring progress,” which is offset only by the imposition of better foodstuffs by outsiders. Demographic growth results but creates land partitions below group subsistence levels, causing “the most restless and valiant to emigrate to the cities,” splitting the genetic pool in two (Bonifaz 1979: 200). The brightest and most agentive reproduce populations of the same in the cities; the most passive and mentally inferior reproduce more of the same in the countryside, continuing the process from the beginning and furthering the equation of rural areas with a “pure” (unmixed and unmixing) indigeneity characterized by inertia, low intelligence, and incomprehension of progress (Bonifaz 1979: 199–200). Something like Figure 11.

Soils with low and decreasing amounts of iodine

A race with hypothyroidic tendency

Mini-mini landholdings

Erosion

Selection of the most passive by emigration of the most active to cities

nutrition and few animal proteins

Demographic explosion

Hypothyroidism Adaptation; passivity; intellectual retroselection; goiter; cretinism

Plow, cereals, domesticated animals

Hyposexuality

Selection of the of the mitas [labor draft]

Low aggressivity

Reduced and isolated populations

Consanguinity

Socio-cultural stagnation

Colony

Figure 11. Indigeneity, explained. Adapted from Emilio Bonifaz, Los Indígenas de Altura del Ecuador (1979), 201.

232

Chapter 7

At the center of the diagram is the word “adaptation.” This notion summarizes the argument Bonifaz assembles throughout his book—the traits that have defined the indio as an object of scientific inquiry for the past half century (passivity, intellectual deficiency, goiter, cretinism) and, before that, explained the propensity for debt bondage on haciendas do not suggest a racial “degeneration,” as researchers since the 1920s have argued, or resignation to the excesses of hacienda exploitation and land hoarding, as others suggested much earlier. They are all, rather, an “adaptation to the medium,” to the ecology in which highland Indigenous people live, “the defense of an organism against a hostile environment,” found in the rural high-­altitude regions of the Andean cordillera (Bonifaz 1979: 209). Hypothyroidism and goiter are adaptations to this environment, bringing with them, as “a secondary consequence, a general diminution in the quotient of intelligence,” as well as all the psychosocial characteristics identified with indigeneity since the 1800s: lethargy, vegetation, submissiveness, simplicity (Bonifaz 1979: 209). These are racially specific traits, each providing a clue to the other, showing a perfect union of body, psyche, and “medium,” or place. Together they define what it means to be Indigenous in highland Ecuador. There is a politic to this argument. Writing in the midst of the agrarian reforms, which Bonifaz was aggressively trying to prevent (see Barsky 1988, chap. 6), he is here, in this work of evolutionary science, trying to prove that the reforms are bad for Indigenous people and for Ecuador as a whole. Dividing the haciendas up among their workers will not only produce more communities of “independents”—Indigenous groups maintaining little contact with national society—who will follow the same maladaptive trajectory as such groups have in the past, accentuating the Indian problem. It will also turn large productive units into an assortment of what he called mini-­ minifundios, or ultra-­small plots, leading to an overall decline in productivity. “The minifundios and small properties produce two or three times less, per cultivated unit, than the more extensive properties, because they can’t use adequate doses of fertilizers, nor use fungicides, herbicides, etc, due to their high cost. Furthermore, their production is oriented to the family economy and, for these reasons, contribute little to consumer markets. . . . The possibilities for improvement by way of redistribution of cultivated lands in the Inter-­Andean Passage are, thus, minimal” (Bonifaz 1979: 68–69). If racial scientists found dispossession to lie at the core of the indio’s psychobiological constitution and committed themselves to proposing modalities for improving the lives of this miserable race, they also found ways to



Indigenous Interiors 233

dissociate Indigenous improvement and national progress from land politics. This, too, is one legacy of the racial sciences—assimilation, integration, and extended contact are what will improve the lot of Indigenous people, not measures encouraging their isolation and capacity to exist apart from “national” society. Land reforms did, of course, happen, spurning a series of processes that would lead Bonifaz’s nephew Neptalí to invent Ecuador’s export flower industry, his hacienda’s lands to be bought up by upstart flower growers like Jorge Castellano, and his ex-­huasipungueros to become new sorts of salaried workers, working for wages on those very plantations. Now, though, to get those jobs, workers will have to pass through screening processes like the human figure test, which will assess their potential for profit and for danger in new—but not unprecedented—ways.

Conclusion This chapter has charted a brief and selective trek through a period of epistemic history in Ecuador to understand the context in which industrial psychologists are working and administering psychometric tests in Cayambe’s cut-­flower plantations. The point has been to consider these tests as sites of intersection between a particular economic rationality, rooted in the uncertainties of expansive forms of capitalist reproduction, and a particular structure of reckoning with racialized difference, rooted in Ecuador’s postcolonial condition. That intersection has made the plantation a setting overdetermined by what we called the logic of the encounter, involving the momentary suspension of distance, the arrival of expertise, the touch extended to that which is foreign. Key elements of the present, psychologically framed and fully capitalist, version of the encounter we examined in Chapter 6 can be spotted throughout the history of Ecuador’s racial sciences outlined in this chapter, including its spatial dynamics (the movement toward difference, the urban origins of expertise, contact as a therapeutic process), attention to the interplay between Indigenous bodies and minds and between inner and outer worlds (including the impact of land and the environment on personality structures, mentality as an “adaptation” to ecology), the folding of individuals into the categorical, and the general framing of knowledge as a necessary component of a project designed to change Indigenous lives for the better. The forms of knowledge examined in this chapter and the last have all contributed to shaping modern notions of interiority. This interiority is

234

Chapter 7

a space of truth—it is where the determinate truth of personhood resides, the controlling force of personality, character, morality, behavior, belief, and action. It is the genetic core of the modern self (Taylor 1989). But this is also an interiority that maintains an interactive relationship with exteriority. It is shaped to some degree by external forces, can be directed and altered by guided stimulation, and, importantly, can be enticed out in the open by the right techniques or circumstances. This potential for interiority to be externalized—to be seen and known—has made it a site of intense investment by architects of one agenda or another. This is what enabled the link between experimental psychology of the late nineteenth century and Taylorist efforts to increase labor’s efficiency in the early twentieth century—the origins of industrial psychology. It is what spurned the use of projective testing in clinical therapeutic practice, such as that which Karen Machover pioneered with her human figure drawing tests. It is what revived ancient physiognomy at the turn of the twentieth century and what allowed the racial sciences in Ecuador to provide hard evidence for the curative effects of Indigenous assimilation projects in the highlands. The story of modern personhood is also the story of interiority’s rising instrumental value. Our study of Cayambe’s cut-­flower plantations in the previous chapter showed this desire to peer into the sublime interiors of others to be concentrated at a single point in the plantations’ production cycle—the hiring of workers. The projective technology of the human figure test, that “high powered microscope” claiming to expose the inner self (Lemov 2015), was administered here and only here, the exact point that theorists of contemporary capitalism have focused on as the most critical moment of expanded reproduction. This is that point when capital’s “outside is internalized” and its immediate “noncapitalist environments” are capitalized in a “continual reopening of the process of primitive accumulation” (Hardt and Negri 2000: 226), a process we saw to be framed by a bidirectional dynamic, in which systemic expansion, or outward growth, is animated by the inward absorption of people. From a purely economic perspective, these spatial coordinates of inside and outside, interior and exterior, are, we argued, best understood as figurative abstractions, tropes designed to help identify the mechanisms by which new sources of value are created and captured in the ongoing process of accumulation. The metaphor of an embodied capital governed by a predatory drive was a visual technology of that. But abstractions and metaphors of this sort may be especially provocative in contexts where capital itself frames its mission in similarly spatial terms—where it claims to represent a central



Indigenous Interiors 235

location of some sort that is reaching out to a population or expanding upon a territory its agents conceptualize as existing beyond that, one distinct or different from them, and where that difference is marked to some degree as non-­ or not fully or not-­yet capitalist. Such conditions might be more common in the postcolonial Global South. But the point in identifying the ethnographic veracity of such spatial abstractions is to dig deeper into their concretization in particular contexts, to render an economic rationality unintelligible apart from the postcolonial logic it draws upon in its actual operation. This is what we have sought to do in this chapter. Industrial psychology emerged under conditions of aggressive capitalist expansion that relied on a labor pool marked by difference from the centers and agents of capitalist industry—immigrants and racial minorities presumed to arrive with limited wage-­earning experience and forms of cultural particularism. The discipline’s central promise to capital was that by peering into the inner worlds of this new labor force, it could police the boundaries of difference and render from it an optimal, efficient, and manageable labor force. Just like that American context, the inner worlds of Cayambe’s workers are not simply seized upon as sites of knowledge. They are also sites of transformative intervention, spaces in which capital can really impact people at their core and thereby fashion itself as a force of human change and improvement. This is one of the ways Fordism perfected Taylorism’s entanglement with industrial psychology in the United States. It also defines the agenda guiding the growth of the racial sciences in Ecuador and the point, for its pioneers, of trying to define and work through the concept of race itself. Where Fordism found the connection between the physiological body of Taylorism and the psychological individual of the new mental sciences to be the ground for forging “a new type of man suited to the new type of work” in mass production systems (Gramsci in Forgacs 2000: 279), so too did Ecuadorian scientists understand the synthesis of anthropometry and psychology to be the basis for making indios into new subjects of progress in a modern nation. If [the concept of] race has to have—as Dr. Paredes confirms—a double sense, a double significance, we will reunite them together in precise synthesis. For one part, as Le Bon confirms, race signifies spiritual conditionality, psychic aptitude. For the other part, as Lapouge among others wants it, race entails a concept of physical and external appearance, of morphology, of cephalic index, of skin pigmentation, etc. Race, thus, participates in both modalities,

236

Chapter 7

external and internal, but in function of something more important and newer: the capacity or possibility to adapt to a determinate culture, to live it, feel it, create it. (Garcés 1932: 169) And “culture,” Garces (1932: 169) continues, “is forward [momentum], betterment, progress. . . . Culture is the advancement toward perfection, the conquest of better destinies.” In the 1930s, a proper culture of progress was precisely what had to be cultivated in the indio, given the primitive, limited ends to which the Indigenous mind was thought to be organically attracted. “His progress, his betterment, has to be translated precisely into this: the satisfaction of his primitive, barbaric, desires. Nothing more than this. What other conception could such a mind have of what is progress, advancement?” (Garcés 1932: 151). Part IV will examine the ways Cayambe’s cut-­flower plantations have come to function as sites oriented around guiding Indigenous people through not only the sort of “adaptation” Garcés is advocating here—assimilation into a determinate culture or singular “national” destiny—but also that of a distinctly Fordist type that inscribes workers in projects of self-­improvement through their ongoing adaptation to ever-­intensifying industrial labor routines. Together, these twin projects show the production process on these plantations to be designed to engage its workforce less as containers of value to be extracted than as units of potential to be cultivated. This categorical regard that attributes value to a population only through its potential to be something other than what it presently is, that envelops value in potentiality and subsumes being to becoming, is what most clearly aligns this mode of capitalist expansion with Ecuador’s postcolonial project. Like children requiring the tutelage of adults to reach maturity,9 what has better defined the meaning of indio in postcolonial Ecuador than this?

CHAPTER 8

Continuous Improvement: Investing in Human Potential

Alexandra, TerraNova Farms’ industrial psychologist, is perplexed. Five workers hired in the last few months have just quit, all for reasons equivalent to just not liking their job. It’s not the thought of having to fill five vacant posts that disturbs her; it’s the way this seemingly casual and dismissive attitude toward employment conflicts with the company’s long-­term vision for its employees. They aren’t just workers to us, she says. They’re investments. And “an investment that doesn’t produce returns doesn’t bring any benefit to the business or the worker.” This idea—that people are a form of capital whose returns multiply with investment—is an old one in neoclassical economics, dating back to Adam Smith (1776) and revived in the 1960s by Chicago school economists as the “human capital” thesis (Becker 1964). More than simply a strategy for maximizing labor’s output, the notion of human capital is also a theory of economic subjectivity. At its core is a view of the self as a subject who “seeks to appreciate and to value themselves, such that their life may be thought of as a strategy aimed at self-­appreciation,” or increasing their personal stock value (Feher 2009: 28). For Alexandra, this is precisely the mode of self-­regard that TerraNova is trying to help its workers cultivate. Labor is an opportunity for workers to both develop and cash in their human capital, a practice of human becoming that provides the primary conditions for subjective formation and the realization of its expanded value. Like every notion of investment, its crucial variable is time—the present is devalued relative to the future, the temporal space of the “return.” To invest is to value the present not in itself but for its potential. Just wait, it will come. You’ll see. But the recent departure of workers hasn’t shaken Alexandra’s conviction in this project’s merit. “Do you believe that, after working here a few years

240

Chapter 8

or so, people leave a little different from when they came in?” I ask. “I don’t believe they leave different,” Alexandra responds. “I am convinced of it. This I promise you.” She has evidence, but it’s not what I might have expected. More than anything, she wants to talk about plumbing. The bathrooms at TerraNova aren’t perfect, she admits, but their workers “are people who come from conditions very different from those you see here.” Even toilets, she says, are a completely new thing for most of them. And sometimes a toilet isn’t just a toilet. It’s a pedagogical tool. Just the other day, Alexandra adds, she was speaking with a group of workers who told her that they had grown accustomed to the style of bathrooms at the plantation and, as a result, “improved their bathrooms, improved things” at home. Alexandra finds this inspiring. “But,” she qualifies, more than this, it’s necessary to approach them, show them how to better themselves personally. Because it’s beautiful that they’ve installed a toilet with a lever. That they use soap, toilet paper. But then what happens? After two days there’s no more toilet paper [here at the plantation] because someone’s taken it and brought it home because soon enough, in their house, they’ve run out. And so this is it. It’s about culturally bettering the people, instructing them, educating them. And this is a very difficult task. And not only this, at this level because, as we tell them, this is about permanent improvement. And so we are guiding people . . . to wash their hands before eating, things that in their lives they’ve maybe heard somewhere before. And maybe we want or don’t want to oblige them to comply with the norms of the business, but what we really want is for these to become habits of theirs. Normally in the afternoons, we train people to wash their hands and all that. Of everything we recite, I’m sure that, of 100 percent of what we tell them, they are going to transmit no more than, say, 20 percent, to their households. And for this we are helping them not only have a good job but also to improve their station in life as well. This is a most unusual notion of investment and return, one that breaks from a rigid econometrics of profit to point to a much bigger and more ambitious project unfolding around the capital-­labor relation. But what exactly is that project? Twelve months later, another of TerraNova’s psychologists, Anita, was explaining to me the logic of her office’s recent name change from the



Continuous Improvement 241

Department of Human Resources to the Department of Human Talent to the Department of Human Capital. “We want to remind workers that they’re not disposable,” she told me. Implementing this reminder into the structure of plantation work has involved subtle additions to every aspect of it. Like its bathrooms, for instance. In the first years of its operation, TerraNova’s larger sister plantation, Primavera Farms, didn’t have bathrooms at all, just latrines, she tells me. The justification for this, she says, was that the people who worked there didn’t need any better since they weren’t used to clean, complete bathrooms with flushing toilets, running water, and all that. “That isn’t the custom of our workers,” the argument went. But out of this observation came an idea—if they improved the bathrooms there, a new “custom” could arise among their workers who, habituated to the use of “proper” toilets, might bring that custom back to their homes, “bring it back to their families.” And that might result not just in improved bathrooms throughout the countryside, or even an “improvement in [their workers’] conditions of life,” as a change in their external world, but “the improvement of individuals” themselves, fully and completely, as human beings. Workers will “formarse como nuevos personas,” form themselves into new people, Anita stressed—“all by way of their participation in the labor process of the plantation.” “At its simplest,” Simon Mohum (1991: 297) writes, “the labour process is the process whereby labour is materialized or objectified in use values. Labour is here an interaction between the person who works and the natural world such that elements of the latter are consciously altered in a purposeful manner.” The labor process is by definition an arena of transformation. It is the process that, in Cayambe’s flower plantations, turns plants into commodities. In so doing, it also manifests the transformation of a person into a laborer. “By working,” Marx (1976: 283, emphasis added) notes, the worker “becomes actually, what before he only was potentially, labour-­power in action, a labourer.” This and the following chapter are devoted to exploring the doubly transformative dimension of labor processes in Ecuador’s cut-­flower sector, the way, that is, the production of flowers is also a production of people. And not just any people but “new people,” people who, in becoming laborers, managers like Alexandra, Anita, and others imagine to be “improved” and whose improvement managers take as their task to guide. All capitalist labor processes imply some degree of supervisory control over workers’ actions (Burawoy 1979). It may also be true that the profit-­driven and competitive nature of capitalist production systems generally compels this guidance to

242

Chapter 8

Figure 12. “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” Painting on workers’ building, Latinflor.

be oriented around increasing worker efficiency, “optimizing” labor’s performance, and increasing productive output (Braverman 1998 [1974]), principles we noted earlier to become central to flower production in Ecuador after the economic crisis of 1999–2000 (see Chapter 4). The question I ask here is how such economic mandates guiding commodity production around the world come to be inflected with, or even overtaken by, the kind of social mission and humanitarian logic that managers, owners, and supervisors in Cayambe’s floriculture sector impart upon the labor processes in their plantations. The secret to this, I believe, is contained in the ways the potentiality Marx identified as inherent to the commodity of labor power is activated, vitalized, and directed through its intersection with the postcolonial racial discourses I identified in previous chapters. Central to these discursive formations is their marking of Ecuador’s Indigenous people as unfinished matter, valued for what they might become rather than for what they presently are. Indigenous people are, in this sense, like any raw material brought into the labor process, pure potentiality waiting to be “consciously altered in a purposeful manner.”



Continuous Improvement 243

Value-­in-­Potentia Scholars of neoliberal capitalism have turned to the notion of potential to explain the current economy’s historical distinctiveness vis-­à-­vis the form of capitalist accumulation they believe to have been dominant before it. The notion points to a conception of value as an emergent rather than retroactive property, something stimulated in, rather than extracted from, its source, thereby positing an equation between the speculative turn effected by finance in the overall profit structure of contemporary capitalism (see Chapter 1) and the particular position of labor in capitalist systems today. This future-­ oriented and speculative mode of labor’s valuation, Feher (2009: 24) argues, is what pushed the notion of human capital, despite its long genealogy, to the center of capital-­labor relations at the end of the twentieth century to become the “dominant subjective form . . . of neoliberalism.” Lisa Adkins makes a similar point regarding women’s employment in neoliberal Britain. In post-­Fordist economies, she argues, value is “increasingly organized and harnessed not via retroactive accumulation processes,” as she says it was under Fordism, “but via a prospecting for potential, that is, for new sites of possibility and future commercial energies.” Under “post-­Fordism,” she continues, “the value of the commodity lies not in crystallized, spent, or congealed labor time but in what a commodity might or can do, while the value of labor of the worker lies not in accumulated embodied skills and experience but in potential capacities” (Adkins 2012: 625, emphasis added). Adkins asks what this shift means for women and reminds us that women’s obligations to perform socially reproductive labor for male workers in the Fordist era meant they were largely unable to assemble the “package of capacities and abilities, developed and accumulated over time,” that construct labor power as a marketable commodity (Adkins 2008: 185). And yet it was precisely this history of “exclusion and segregation experienced by women in regard to paid employment in the Fordist era,” she suggests, that made women such ideal subjects of employment when post-­Fordism effected a “restructuring in the organization and value of labor, especially the temporality of the latter” (Adkins 2012: 625–626). The exchange value of women’s labor power in the new economy came less from a positive relationship to its past (imparting specific attributes into labor power’s use-­value) than a negative one (as a structured deprivation of that history), allowing women’s subjection to capitalist wage relations, a negation of that negation, to be framed as an act of social and sexual liberation.

244

Chapter 8

The economic history of Cayambe is different from the British and European models undergirding Adkins’s analysis, entirely bereft of the mass-­ production factory complexes dominating the latter. Here, in place of the “Fordist pact,” in which industrial labor contracts were underwritten by the (hetero)sexual contract of the household unit, we find the “reciprocal pact” of the hacienda system that folded the entire reproductive cycle of Indigenous households into the hacienda complex in exchange for total control over that household’s labor—its men, women, and children. Categorical exclusions from permanent and regular waged labor routines, consequently, organized not around ideologies of sex but of race. By substituting the category “woman” with that of “Indian,” this chapter builds on Adkins’s insights to ask how that category’s historic constitution as a nonlaboring subject (in a capitalist, “free,” and wage-­earning sense) becomes woven into its value as labor in the present, part of the “potentiality” that flower growers aim to cultivate, orient, and extract value from.1 Here it is the postcolonial, not post-­Fordist, history that reconfigures notions of value around the idiom of potentiality. This value contains but exceeds its economic form—Indigenous laborers, as we will see, are unable to completely abstract their labor power, as a commodity or property, from their subjective conditions of personhood. It is this not fully abstractable nature of Indigenous labor power that allows managers to design labor processes in Cayambe’s plantations around the realization of appreciated returns from what Alexandra called her “investments,” that is, as both progressively accentuating labor’s surplus value and guiding workers along projects of self-­improvement. While Alexandra and Anita’s fixation on bathroom design might seem a rather innocuous expression of this agenda, especially when compared with the harsh forms of labor discipline examined ahead, it reveals a critical point. Through their managerial eyes, we see the plantation as a totality whose potency, while derived from the labor process, overflows any explicitly productive space or activity to animate the plantation grounds in its entirety. This potency is what distinguishes the plantation as a spatial enclosure from the “rural” world that surrounds it. By physically crossing that intensely regulated threshold from the outer world of the community to inner world of the plantation—the “interiorization” of capital’s exteriorities—workers’ difference from that which the plantation represents—urban-­national society, progress, development—is highlighted, exposed, thrown up for investigation and manipulation. Workers’ “customs”—like using a latrine—enter with them as behavioral expressions of the external environment to which their



Continuous Improvement 245

life expectations and bodily dispositions have “adapted.” The ethnographic material below will show how things that stand out to plantation managers as markers of workers’ difference from national-­normative culture also come loaded with associations with the poverty, misery, and marginality they believe characterize posthacienda rural society. Each “custom” or marker of rural difference thereby enters the plantation grounds as a source of labor power’s potentiality, an opportunity for plantation owners and managers to enact “improvement” upon, a site on which to perform the groundwork of capitalist salvation. Without being able to enter Indigenous communities directly, such manipulations of workers’ habits, expectations, and comportments allow capital to restructure rural society through the back door, open it up to intervention and reconstruction around the image plantation owners and managers have of progressive transformation. Notice how this inscribes into the labor process the same dynamic binary between capital’s interior and exterior spaces identified earlier—this redemptive work is primarily concerned with workers’ subjective interiors, not public exteriors. The goal of teaching people to use flush toilets and soap, Alexandra insists, isn’t simply to improve the sanitation systems of the rural highlands; it is rather about altering the habits, mentalities, and personality complexities of workers, improving them to the core, altering their senses of self and the futures such selves can realize. And yet this project has to work through the external worlds that are thought to condition and shape the internal core of the person. A material change effected in the plantation produces material changes in workers’ homes and communities, which produces new habits, worldviews, and so on. The theory of capitalist interiority—truth resides on the inside of a person; interiors are accessed through exteriors; the route to essence is through its expressive manifestations—is now put into practice. This chapter and the next chapter’s study of plantation labor processes is thus at once an inquiry into how roses are grown, packed, and prepared for shipment in Ecuador and the methods for activating labor’s transformative potency through forms of labor discipline, sanction, and reward. Its data come largely from the three plantations—Primavera, TerraNova, and Santi— that together compose Jorge Castellano’s SierraFlor consortium. Like all rose plantations in Cayambe, over 90 percent of workers are concentrated in two areas, the greenhouses where flowers are grown (65 percent of workers) and the postharvest room where flowers are selected and packed for shipping (25 percent). It is in these two locations that the central manual tasks of all rose growing occur, flower cultivation in the former and preparation of flowers

246

Chapter 8

for export in the latter. My analysis focuses on these two sets of workers. While all receive equal pay and benefits, around U.S.$120 per month during my research, the tasks of each of these two blocks of workers are compiled by administrators in ways that aim to capture and modify what they perceive to be very distinct aptitudes and comportments between different sorts of people. Workers, in other words, are assigned to different stations in the plantation based on who they are perceived to be when they get there.

Part One: The Labor of Cultivation and the Cultivation of Labor The Work Day

We can learn a lot about these segmented labor systems by examining how workers get to work in the morning. Most people come and go on company-­ contracted busses. Busses travel designated routes, each making only a few stops at predetermined pickup points. These stops can be mapped to show something akin to a labor “catchment area” for each plantation. Routes shifted constantly, but one thing remained constant—only busses for cultivation workers went up into the Indigenous highlands. Those for postharvest workers went to the city of Cayambe and regional towns. The dominant labor pools for the two main work areas in a single production complex are thus different. One (postharvest) is urban or peri-­urban; the other (cultivation) is rural. Right from the outset, then, we can note a managerial association of cultivation work with rurality and postharvest work with urbanity, and place workers from each zone accordingly. This distinction runs through all forms of labor discipline and task scheduling on plantations and organizes the doubly transformative nature of the labor process Marx noted—producing both commodities and laborers—in specific ways. Here is how this works in the cultivation wing. At TerraNova, cultivation workers are bussed in by 6:30 a.m. They have thirty minutes to change into company uniforms, eat a quick breakfast, and assemble in teams of five at their assigned greenhouses. These five hold total responsibility for that greenhouse’s production and maintenance. Each greenhouse covers 4,800 square meters and contains approximately 46,000 rose plants grouped into 115 rows, called camas (“beds”), of 400 plants each. Each worker holds sole stewardship of over one-­fifth of each greenhouse’s production, resulting in individual responsibility for twenty-­three beds containing 9,200



Continuous Improvement 247

plants. This figure must be doubled (totaling forty-­six beds and 18,400 plants) because workers are assigned a second section in a neighboring greenhouse so they may work in one when the other is being fumigated. Section assignments are divided by markers of some sort (an orange plastic flag, for instance), which workers often personalize by writing on it their name or initials. Individualized stewardship over a greenhouse section is an important motivational strategy built into cultivation labor throughout Cayambe’s floriculture sector. Salamea and Waters (1995: 42) see this as a technique designed to increase labor productivity by “stimulating [workers’] feeling of responsibility based on the peasant conception of land proprietorship.” Such a strategy, of course, only works if imposed on people who conceptualize land this way—who are otherwise considered “peasants.” Yet land ownership is neither required of cultivation workers nor something they are asked to disclose in their job applications. It is, rather, something management infers to govern the social worlds from which a certain segment of its labor pool is drawn and to orient those people’s dispositions around the rural personality complex we saw plantation psychologists construct in Chapter 6. While that personality type was deemed simple and elemental, it also valued hard, physical labor, with both sets of traits arising as adaptations to the particular social context of rural life. Peasant agriculture is a central component of this image, uniting an instrumental regard for the body with an affective attachment to land. It carries into plantation grounds a legacy of hacienda bondage, since this is the only way one would come to be a peasant in Cayambe these days and with that a preindustrial era when agriculture was the only basis for survival and commerce in the rural highlands. In today’s Cayambe, that anachronistic figure of the peasant can be localized exclusively in the Indigenous communities formed out of the agrarian reforms. Its entry into a life governed by something different, something modern, therefore finds a rather perfect fit in the more agrarian end of this agro-­industrial production complex, under the greenhouses in the cultivation wing, where there are familiar things like plants and dirt around and watering and pruning to be done. Here this archaic personality complex and its social foundation can be appeased, stimulated, almost valued as if a skill or attribute of the labor power a worker sells. “How,” the human resources manager at Latinflor told me, “could I tell people who have survived all their lives from agricultural work that they don’t have the experience necessary to work here”? As if to both acknowledge and capture the spoils of this experience, simulacrums of peasant life are everywhere smuggled into the lexicon of cultivation labor. Scarecrows appear inside tightly sealed greenhouses.

248

Chapter 8

Supervisors refer to the cultivation wing as “el campo,” or countryside. A task requiring two or more people is called a minga, the Quichua word for collective labor. And so on. It’s as if the urban-­based professional-­managerial staff received some generic crash course in diversity training—How to Get Along with and Motivate Your Indigenous Workers—or something. And yet it is this experience, this way of life, that marks the peasant-­ worker as an unfinished object of sympathy and bearer of suffering that the plantation system is determined to heal. Peasant life is what leads people to use latrines, not toilets, a marker of their exclusion from the benefits of living in the present. The hyphen of this agro-­industrial complex must become an arrow signaling a past but pointing to a different future. People must learn to do things better. They must be optimized. And this is what the labor process, a controlled and demanding industrial labor process, must offer its workers.

The Labor Process in Cultivation

I am trailing behind Rosa B. as she rushes through a row of rose bushes in Greenhouse #7. Rosa is from Carrera, and we ride the company bus together to TerraNova every morning. She is twenty years old, has worked here a little over a year, and owns no land in Carrera, though her parents do. She worked in flower plantations before, always in cultivation, and knows the routine. And hates it. She just wants to provide enough for her two children so they won’t have to work in flowers. Maybe they can go to school. Or own land. Anything but this. I entered Greenhouse #7 with Rosa and four others at around 7:05 a.m. after a brief collective meeting with a company agronomist. They need lots of Classy today, he said, a deep-­red, ruffled-­petal rose that Americans then seemed to adore. That’s what’s planted in Rosa’s sections. “Great,” she scoffs— extra pressure. Rosa immediately prepares the cart she will tow behind her while harvesting, always the first task in the morning since it sets all others in motion. Hefty harvesting quotas mean this has to be done at breakneck speed. At TerraNova, workers must cut twenty-­one stems per row per day, giving them a total daily output of 966 roses, which must be completed in two hours (equaling over eight flowers harvested per minute). This is tabulated at the receiving end by way of slips of paper that each worker inserts into their packed bundle, bearing their greenhouse number, section, and exact time of harvest. Speed has to be tempered by a careful eye since roses are also



Continuous Improvement 249

assigned a precise “point of cutting” (punto de corte), referring to their maturity and determined by the number of petals open on the rose’s bud or “head.” This point is different for different varieties, for different intended consumers (e.g., Russian vs. American), and changes depending on the date the day’s harvest is expected to arrive at its destination. Alongside this, workers must observe precise locations on the stem to cut the rose. This will determine the length of the final rose exported, or at least set the range that postharvest room workers can use when compiling “bunches” of equivalent roses for sale. Stems should thus be cut as long as their condition will allow and yet not fall below a point that disables the remaining stem from future growth. The simultaneous attention to detail and speed means that workers’ eyes and body are in constant motion. This is tough today in Greenhouse #7— the plants are mature and stretch well over Rosa’s head. I watch her scan the tops of the plants on either side of her, eyes drawn to the color of the bulb to decide if it has reached its point of cutting. It is the openness of the buds that determines if she has to stop or not. Rosa holds her clipping shears open in the right hand, while the left tows her cart. She identifies a flower ready to be cut and releases her hand from the cart. Pulling the rose toward her from a lower part of the stem, Rosa finds the appropriate part of the stem to cut and, with a quick motion of the right wrist, clips the stem at a slight angle. Her nonclipper hand then struggles with the cut flower to release it from surrounding foliage, pulls it up over the top of the strings that stretch across the rows to straighten the plants, and, once the flower is free, cuts off any excess stem or shoot node that flanks the bottom of the stem, resting it softly in her cart’s mesh. Each holding mesh, or malla, is packed with twenty-­five roses of the same variety before it is prepared for transfer to the postharvest room. To pack the malla, Rosa puts pressure on the stack of flowers with her left hand, twisting their heads upward. She counts the heads with her right hand, glove removed, touching each one. Her left hand pulls an empty mesh from a pile and places it over the flowers at the same time that her right hand clenches around the twenty-­five selected stems and pulls them from the recently harvested collection. These are placed in the new plastic mesh. She then pulls out a small piece of paper and a pen from her coverall pockets, writes on it a code indicating the variety, the greenhouse and section numbers they were harvested from, and the time their harvest was completed. This paper is tucked in among the flowers. The bunch is then delicately aligned, with all heads well under the end of the mesh, which is then rolled up tightly and held shut with the nonclipper

250

Chapter 8

hand. Rosa uses her clippers to snip a two-­inch piece from the longest stem protruding from the bottom of the mesh and strips the thorns from it, wedging it between the holes in the mesh to hold it shut. The bunch is finally placed heads-­up in one of several water buckets along the perimeter of the rows, ready for the malleros, the carriers, to transfer them to postharvest workers. That’s one of 966 cuts and thirty-­nine mallas required of Rosa in two hours if she is to meet her quota. Experienced workers like Rosa have found ways to manage the conflicting demands of speed and precision. They race through the cutting phase and move very slowly when packing cut-­flowers. This makes sense. Filled mallas are received at the next stage of production as finished products of cultivation labor. They carry information that identifies numerical accuracy and cutting quality with the worker who performed the tasks. In contrast, any errors performed during the harvest carry no immediate repercussions and can be covered up in a number of ways. When a worker packs up a malla, roses discovered to have been cut improperly or damaged by moving too fast through the rows can be thrown out. Speed can also cause a number of harvestable flowers to be overlooked, which, if let go, will soon become apparent as the colorful leaves open visibly past their prime. Such roses represent a direct loss of profit for the company, and as such, open flowers are the main thing engineers and supervisors look for in their inspections of the rows, leading to immediate penalties for workers, who are deducted points from a monthly scoring of their labor. High scores are rewarded with days off, while low-­scoring workers are fired. To avoid penalties, workers perform their own reviews of their rows after harvest and either pop open flowers from their stems or cut the entire stem. These have to be hidden from supervisors who routinely review the open garbage bins in the greenhouses for signs of rosas descabezadas (beheaded roses). Cut stems are bent or broken, intending to show their earlier damage, and descabezadas are usually pocketed or hidden deep in the bins. One consequence of these techniques, however, is a lower flower count sent to the postharvest division, threatening workers’ abilities to meet their harvest quotas. Again, workers have developed tactics to offset this. One is the intentional harvesting of roses slightly before or after their ideal point, filling out the bundles sent on to the postharvest section, and allowing a less-­ concentrated eye and more quickly moving hand (packing in sick or damaged flowers similarly falls in this category). This is risky, since it assumes the receivers of these flowers at the postharvest section will not carefully examine



Continuous Improvement 251

the quality of each bundle they receive and simply perform a quantitative tabulation. Rosa quantified the potential for sanction for me: two bad flowers can be packed into every malla without consequence, while three was risky, she said. These risks and their consequences are real. Workers’ harvests and section maintenance are evaluated routinely by management, scored for their quality, and publicly read out or posted on boards each day at greenhouse entrances. Workers’ weekly scores are calculated and tokens are assigned to the highest achievers. These tokens are used by workers to “buy” vacation days, the only way in which days off may be acquired. Workers receiving successive low scores are fired. All of this led me to doubt the premise of the “section ownership” model management used to stimulate worker output. Techniques like those mentioned above suggested less a peasant working in their fields than a laborer searching out routine ways to gain some control over the labor process. Rosa taught me this. Returning to work after being absent the day before, Rosa found that she’d been moved to a new section (as punishment). This upset her. The problem, she said, was learning to deal with new varieties, after getting used to the demands of the previous ones. She compared this to her children. Her oldest child, now ten years old, can be left in the house alone while she is at work. But these plants, she insisted, “I can’t leave for one day, they will get sick.” I was sure that I had heard the words management would most like to hear. While saying this, she pulled a stem down to check its readiness for harvest and it snapped in her hand. Her reaction: a simple “oops.” “Did you just kill a child?” I asked. Her response: “Nah, it happens, what can you do? It was too tall anyway.” A smirk spread across her face—everybody knows there’s no such thing as a too-­tall rose. Comparing workers’ and managers’ views on cultivation labor makes its rural-­Indigenous-­agrarian bias look like a heuristic capitalist fantasy that is also quite useful for gaining leverage over workers. Consider the dispensation of protective clothing like masks, gloves, bodysuits, and hats that protect workers against thorns and lingering chemical additives. The free provisioning of this equipment is legally required, monitored by the Ministry of Public Health, and under constant observation by local and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Regardless, workers do get sick, often deathly, from their work conditions (cf. Mena 1999: 53–63; CEAS 1998). Managers and engineers frequently explained such episodes to me as the fault of workers not using their equipment properly. Cultivation workers are used to working

252

Chapter 8

their own land and spreading chemical fertilizers and pesticides freely on it, without using any form of bodily protection. Since they have never become ill from this or don’t make the connection, they feel at no risk in the greenhouses. Toxic illness, to management, is an effect of the peasant-­agrarian symmetry structuring cultivation work. Its cause is an embodied memory in workers so deep, and so triggered by the agrarian-­like conditions of greenhouse labor, that it is impossible to shake, even when causing harm. Workers are of a different opinion. They unanimously told me that equipment is not always given, particularly when replacements are requested for damaged items. The damage is blamed on their carelessness and the punishment is to go without until they learn its proper value. I have seen in many cases the handing over of protective gear used as a bargaining tool by management demanding higher outputs from workers. Workers are told they will only get this equipment when their productivity increases, an image that resonates sharply with the social pact established previously between hacienda owners and resident Indigenous workers, in the exchange of protection and care for labor. The violence that entered this pact at points of its rupture is terrifyingly replicated here in the threat of toxic poisoning. “Rural” behavior and dispositions, then, when brought into the plantations are seen as either a value or a handicap. In management’s naturalization of rural people’s suitability as cultivo staff, they are producing a bourgeois narrative of what Marx (1976: 1025) referred to as the “formal,” not yet “real,” subsumption of labor to capital, a critical component of primitive accumulation that occurs when capital absorbs into its productive operations parts of the labor process that defined the prior, “noncapitalist,” system. Capital not only reorients these social forms around surplus capture but also presumes workers’ ability to realize aspects of their selves by transposing preproletarian forms of social labor into the context of waged employment. Here, as we have seen, any such self-­realization becomes abstracted in a monotony of task performance and harsh forms of labor discipline. Marx imagined formal subsumption as a transitory step toward an eventual degrading and deskilling of the labor process, a means of increasing the extraction of surplus-­value from workers by the overall technification of production. Here, with limits to mechanization, it appears part of a different sort of transition narrative, one bound up in the simultaneously economic goal of maximizing labor’s output and social goal of transforming a poor Indigenous peasantry into a modern class of wage workers. This transition schema was materialized in an actual change of TerraNova’s labor process in March 2002.



Continuous Improvement 253

Changes to the Labor Process in Cultivation: Valentine’s Day 2002

Valentine’s Day 2002 was hard on Ecuador’s flower industry. Normally, a plantation owner will make between 50 and 70 percent of his or her annual income from sales leading up to that day alone. Annual harvesting schedules are carefully planned around this day, so that at least three-­quarters of the plantation’s flowers will reach their perfect cutting point in the week and a half leading up to February 12, the last day roses can be shipped and arrive for sale on February 14.2 But in February 2002, the U.S. flower market seemed to be thoroughly saturated, driving down prices of roses around the world. Furthermore, Cayambe had been hit in late 2001 and early 2002 with extreme winds that destroyed greenhouses across the region, exposing flowers to disease and excessive sunlight, which caused their petals to open earlier than planned. Stem prices were at an all-­time low, and Cayambe producers suddenly had what looked like an inferior product. Moreover, plantations in the area had not only taken on a large group of new workers to help with extra production for Valentine’s Day but also had signed permanent contracts with many new workers, in an attempt to compete with other demands for their labor that had emerged with the creation of a new airport in Quito and a new oil pipeline running along the coast. Cultivation staff was thus grossly inflated by February 14, and yet, because of poor holiday sales, the budgets had to be cut further that year than ever before. Workers would have to be let go. The problem was that, because of Ecuador’s strict labor codes, workers bearing formal contracts cannot easily be fired. The most common way for a plantation to rid itself of workers is to subject them to conditions under which they will be inclined to quit. Exactly one week after Valentine’s Day had passed, cultivation workers were given an entirely new routine. The change was motivated by two aims: to use the opportunity of a period of low demand and low per-­unit returns to experiment with more efficient forms of labor discipline and to create conditions under which a good number of workers were likely to quit. Under the standard system outlined above, each of five workers was assigned permanent responsibility for a separate section in two greenhouses. They would harvest the flowers from that section every morning and spend the remainder of the day performing a specific task, like straightening the beds or irrigating the plants, assigned to that day. All cultivation workers followed the same routine and were not differentiated. Under the new system,

254

Chapter 8

however, workers were divided into two groups, referred to as the “insiders” and the “outsiders.” THE “INSIDERS”

The “insiders” were grouped into teams of eight and given control over four greenhouses, in which they were only to do the daily harvest and one additional task, usually removing excess buds forming on the central stems (desyemando). Their responsibility thus shifted from forty-­six rows of plants in two greenhouses to fifty-­six rows in eight. With per-­row quotas staying equal (limits set by ideal production rates) at twenty-­one flowers per row, workers who previously had to harvest 966 roses per day now had to harvest 1,178. Harvests were still confined to two hours, meaning that workers who previously harvested eight flowers per minute were now to harvest ten. The organization of labor was likewise modified. Flags separating sections in the greenhouses were realigned, from marking five sections of twenty-­three beds to eight sections of fourteen beds. Workers were to accept a placement among these eight sections that could change daily. As such, the basic motivational tactic used to stimulate worker productivity was changed from an image of individual proprietorship to one of individual competition. Supervisors now imposed strategies for maximizing worker competitiveness. One put his best and fastest workers at the ends of the greenhouses to act as pace setters for those working in the innermost posts. Another tried to fill these outer posts with women because they, in his opinion, worked faster than men, and their speed would inspire in men a new kind of macho competitiveness to not be beat in their tasks by a woman. Working in four different greenhouses and rotating among placements in them also meant that workers would have to work with a wider array of flower varieties than they previously had, eliminating slower workers’ ability to blame their slowness on the higher demands of some varieties. THE “OUTSIDERS”

All additional tasks that workers normally did inside the greenhouses after harvest now were performed exclusively by the “outsiders” who lost control over their sections and could be shuffled between greenhouses and jobs at will. Their tasks resembled that of an all-­purpose maintenance crew, assigned to do irrigation work, realign soil beds, pick up plant debris, rebuild the posts that hold roses in place, and so on: essentially the hardest work in cultivation. Approximately five workers formed the group of outsiders for every four greenhouses. The demographics are important here. Each supervisor



Continuous Improvement 255

had previously managed six greenhouses and now had to manage only four (meaning an overall increase in supervision). Under previous conditions, it had taken ten workers to do all tasks on four greenhouses, but it now took thirteen. The extra three were those who had been hired during the Valentine’s Day peak. Remember that the goals of this new organization were both to prove that worker output could be increased and to rid the plantation of many workers, preferably those with the lowest outputs. Being converted into an outsider was for many a punishment for low quotas realized under the previous system. It also represented a transformation into a member of an internal reserve army of labor. If any one of the insiders failed to show up, they were to be replaced by one of the outsiders. Workers returning from an absence were to be sent to the outside group. It was expected that, over time, because of the unrewarding work and hard physical labor to which outsiders were subjected, this group would gradually assemble all the “worst” workers, who would eventually quit. Did this new system work out as planned? The question is in fact about the degree to which individual competitiveness and differentiation can be deployed as motivational strategies among people who are otherwise united by domestic agrarian practices built around collective work projects, who maintain important relations of reciprocity between them, and who live in collectively administered sociopolitical arenas. I asked one worker, a Maria L. from Carrera, why she was selected as an insider, despite only having been hired a month earlier, as part of the pre–Valentine’s Day expansion. She said it was because, after years working in floriculture, she “knows roses,” unlike “others who don’t know and leave their rows in neglect.” I asked her why, if she knew roses so well, she had fallen behind the pace of others in her group. She claimed that she was working carefully, doing some of the maintenance work (pinching off the excess shoots) as she went, saving her time later and producing a “clean” section. She pointed to a neighboring section and identified a lack of “pinching” and what a task it would be to do later. A fellow Carrereño, Maria A., came in on the same day as Maria L., yet was sent to the outsiders. She was still wearing the uniform from her previous plantation when I caught up with her, hauling plant debris across the grounds in an empty woven sack. I asked her why she was sent to work among the “outsiders.” “I don’t know,” she said, “I work hard but their quotas are impossible.” Would she stay? “No,” she said, “the work is too forced here.” She planned to quit within a few days. So it does appear that the bifurcation and new hierarchical differentiation of cultivation staff did produce some effect in encouraging acquiescence of

256

Chapter 8

the insiders to higher and more intense labor quotas for fear of not being sent to the drudgery suffered by the outside crew. It also did cause, as was hoped, a large wave of outsiders to quit. On March 15, three weeks after the new system had been imposed, I met another Carrereño, Rafael L., alone in a greenhouse irrigating it in its entirety. I knew he had been assigned to the inside group and asked him why he was doing the job of the outsiders. Rafael said that a few days back, the entire outside group simply walked off the job. The administrators had hired a few subcontracted workers to pick up the slack, he said, but by early April, the new system had completely fallen apart. Which, I soon realized, was the intention all along.

Tercerizacón and the Intentional Collapse of a Labor System

Cayambe’s labor market had gone through a very important change in the period between January and April 2002. A number of third-­party labor recruiting services (called terceristas) sprouted up in the city of Cayambe, offering to handle for plantations the task of finding workers. This method offered considerable benefits to plantation owners. For one, such workers sign contracts, usually short-­term renewable ones, with their recruiting firm, not the plantation, allowing the latter to avoid the benefits they are legally obliged to offer permanent staff, including a minimum wage, severance pay, health care, limits to the workday, and so on. They also permit quicker modifications to the labor force than what occurred before and after Valentine’s Day, since third-­party contracted workers can be hired or fired at will. An engineer whose greenhouses, by May 2002, were entirely staffed by third-­party workers explained to me that the modification to the labor routine had come full circle and achieved its desired effects. The creation of “outsiders” was indeed a temporary stage in the progressive tercerización of labor in the plantation, that is, of replacing permanently contracted staff with a more manipulable body of subcontracted workers. The division of staff and intensification of their work routines had eliminated the thorny issue of firing workers but had prepared those who stayed for both higher output quotas and a competitive spirit. They would be required to maintain this spirit, working side by side with subcontracted workers who would be doing essentially the same job as permanent staff while costing the plantation significantly less in wages and benefits. Cultivation workers would return to the stewardship model, now working four to a pair of greenhouses, not five as before (increasing their area



Continuous Improvement 257

to fifty-­seven rows, even greater than under the eight-­person system). And the new subcontracted terceristas could be counted on to maintain reserve labor in waiting, should any worker decide to quit, further reducing labor costs.

* * * Labor processes in cultivation revealed a contradiction—Indigenous workers were marked by assumedly rural residence and agrarian livelihoods that were at once valued and targeted for elimination. The task segmentations resulting from this managerial perception represent an ideal that has to be malleable enough to accommodate market fluctuations that are inevitably sharp for newly mass-­produced commodities like roses. The changes in labor organization imposed on cultivation workers in the period following Valentine’s Day 2002 came from one such fluctuation. They were devised by management as a strategic response to threats to profit from global shifts (heightened international competition and market saturation), environmental forces (winds that destroyed greenhouses and altered flower maturation schedules), and regional challenges (other wage-­earning opportunities for their local labor pool). As seems likely to periodically happen in newly capitalized and racially segregated areas like Cayambe, a socially differentiated labor force had to ultimately be reminded of the entirely non–socially determined and fully abstract character of its value-­producing unit (labor power) when costs had to be cut and greater “efficiency” imposed on commodity production. In the flower sector, this period of increased flexibilization of the labor process in cultivation was merely a step toward the much greater flexibilization of the labor relation, its transformation into a fully subcontracted structure. Through this process, tensions erupted between the “proprietorship” model of plant cultivation and the new, more mechanistic job of performing repetitive tasks on anonymous products. The key tension here is, at base, between recognizing and assimilating a “peasantry” (an “Indianized” location) within a capitalist production system, on the one hand, and denying its existence or relevance on the other. As such, the scale at which the post–Valentine’s Day 2002 tensions operate is infinitely greater than simply that of the immediate labor process. They are, rather, emblematic of the greater contradiction between the two principles organizing the way Indigenous people have been “fit” into capitalist labor regimes in Ecuador throughout the past century: labor at once constructed as a site that reproduces racially defined social distinction and as an arena in which such distinctions are to be overcome.

258

Chapter 8

Cultivation workers get caught between these contradictory objectives, quitting when the demands feel excessive but fearing most their transfer to the postharvest room. Work in postharvest was simply not “for them.” As Rosa B. told me, “I don’t even know what goes on in there. I wouldn’t know what to do!” She complained that, unlike her work in cultivation, she doesn’t know anyone who works in postharvest. Besides, she stressed, “the girls in there are of a different sort” (“las chicas de allá son de otra tipa”). Rosa may have a point.

Part Two: Postharvest Labors The postharvest room is like a processing plant for freshly cut flowers. It is where harvested roses are received from the greenhouses, assessed for quality, sorted by type and length, and packaged up for shipment. It is also the last stage in the production chain leading flowers from soil to market and thus a heavily regulated interface between the plantation and the rest of the world. A tight client-­producer feedback loop presses workers to respond to microfluctuations in consumer preference and allows complaints to be traced immediately back to their purported source. Workers here are stationary, performing repetitive, mechanical tasks over waist-­high workstations. Supervisors circle the room, pushing workers to move faster and lambasting them for any mistakes. Watching the postharvest room in motion is like watching a high-­pressure assembly line running at full speed. This is not a routine management expects everyone to find tolerable. They select postharvest workers based on profiles of the sort of person most able to handle its intensity while also matching the profile of the interface itself—the spot where Cayambe comes closest to touching the imaginary world of international flower buyers. In this, the postharvest room is the antithesis of the greenhouses. Here, flowers move and people stay put. Jobs are specialized and segmented, distributed among a host of single-­task workers. Carriers rush flowers in from the greenhouses on mini-­gondola-­like carts suspended from rail lines that run across the plantation and plunk them into water buckets. Handlers record the number and origin of flowers received, moving them to hydrating tanks beside the next workers in the assembly line. These are the classifiers who sort roses into one of three quality categories: exportable, national (flor nacional), or garbage. National flowers are those deemed sellable but of inferior



Continuous Improvement 259

Figure 13. Postharvest labor.

quality, usually due to slight stem curvature or having opened their petals beyond the point desired by foreign importers. These flowers are carted off to a small group of workers who assess the reason for their substandard quality, trim their extremities, and package them for sale in the Ecuadorian market. Exportable roses are separated according to stem length and passed off to the next stage of workers, the bunchers, who arrange these flowers into neat units of twenty-­five and bind them with packaging bearing the plantation logo, stem length, and variety. Completed bunches are picked up by handlers and brought to a final inspector who confirms their quality, cuts the stem bottoms to an even length, and adds a check to a tabulation of worker outputs. These bunches are set again in hydration tanks before packers arrange them into boxes for transport to the cold-­storage room. A separate group of workers assembles bouquets, mixing roses from the plantation with varieties and foliage purchased from other plantations in the country and binding them all up in the dressing and labels they will bear at their point of sale (mostly supermarkets). Let’s zoom in for a closer look at the two main groups of postharvest workers, the classifiers and the bunchers.

260

Chapter 8

Stage One: The Classifiers

Classifiers are arranged in rows facing outward into the walking spaces of the postharvest room. They stand behind a 1.5-­meter-­long waist-­high table that is inclined toward them and boldly marked from right to left with measurements in increments of ten centimeters measured from the table’s edge, beginning thirty centimeters in and ending at ninety. Workers use these measurements to determine each flower’s ideal stem length, the basis of how they will classify the flowers they receive. Attached to the table’s right edge is a dull, slotted pivot-­blade, its edges covered with masking tape or filed down to a blunt edge. This will be used to strip leaves from the bottom half of each stem. To the right of the table is a large plastic garbage bin into which unsellable flowers are crammed. To the left is a large box, intended to hold the flowers assessed as sellable only in national markets. Behind each worker stands a tall metal rack with deep holding slats running along each side, on which they will group exportable flowers by stem length. In addition to their uniforms, workers wear tall rubber boots and long rubber aprons to protect them from water, as well as thick rubber or leather gloves to guard against thorns. I have broken the cyclical labor process down into eight component parts, as follows: 1. The handler drops twenty-­five roses from an opened mesh container on the outward edge of the sorting table, petals facing to the classifier’s left. 2. The classifier selects one stem from the pile and pulls it toward her, lining it up along the table’s measurements to assess stem length. 3. The stem is pressed flush with the table by the classifier’s left hand to determine its straightness. 4. The classifier’s right hand turns the flower’s head upward to check that it has been harvested at the appropriate point of petal openness. 5. The classifier’s right hand pulls off any bad petals and flings them to the floor. 6. The classifier makes a decision about the general quality of the flower, that is, if it is to be passed for export, sent to the national market, or be thrown out. 7. If the flower is of export quality, the classifier holds it loosely in their left hand and strips the bottom leaves using the stripping tool manipulated by the right hand.



Continuous Improvement 261

8. The flower is then transferred from the left hand to the right and placed in its appropriate holding location. For an experienced worker, this entire process takes approximately four seconds to complete, meaning that classifiers will handle around nine hundred flowers per hour, equivalent to thirty-­six bundles sent from cultivation each hour. This is close to the output quotas demanded of classifiers. During my research in Castellano’s farms, minimum quotas for classifiers were set at thirty-­five mallas per hour. My calculation of thirty-­six bundles per hour admits little room for second-­guessing stem quality, gaps between flowers arriving at the classification tables, or a second to wipe the sweat from one’s brow. But because classifiers’ quotas are recorded by the malleros who stock their tables—that is, it is a tally of flowers received, not sent on—they may gain time and up their quotas by simply passing a few stems, without evaluation, into the garbage or national flowers box. Remember that cultivation workers are themselves prone to including, intentionally or accidentally, nonideal flowers in the containers they send to postharvest. Cultivation worker Rosa B., who we met in the previous section, had, through trial and error, established that two bad flowers per malla was probably the most she could send without reprimand. Assuming this tactic to be widely adopted by cultivation workers would mean that classifiers can expect to find two discardable flowers in each malla. Flowers are also often damaged in transport or can easily be made to appear so by simply bending or snapping them. Classifiers can also dismiss their uncertainty about a flower’s fitness for export by sending ambiguous roses to the national market. These are all time-­saving devices since only export-­quality roses must have their lower leaves stripped, bad petals removed, and their stem length evaluated. And each of these labors involves its own set of complicated assessments and precise actions. To strip leaves, for instance, the classifier must determine with precision the point at which leaf growth is to be kept, a point on the stem that is different for every rose variety and depends on stem length, head size, and packaging used. The leaf-­stripping tools are also clumsy and dull, often requiring multiple passes or causing stems to break. Petal removal must be delicately performed with a thickly gloved hand and an eye that can distinguish between any number of plant diseases and natural colorations on the petals. And a rose’s stem length is assessed as an ideal final length, not simply that which the flower bears upon arrival. An unusually large head on a flower, for instance, cannot be supported by a long stem without causing stem curvature and must in such

262

Chapter 8

cases be slotted as a short-­stemmed rose. All this must be performed in four seconds. As such, increasing the number of flowers kept from export and sent to the national holdings or put in the garbage saves considerable time and amplifies a worker’s quota. Workers must take care in their use of such tactics. Each exportable flower that does not reach its destination represents a loss of 10 to 50 cents profit for the company and wastes the investment in its production. Many checks are placed on classification laborers to ensure that this does not occur. Supervisors patrol the workstations and watch workers, scoring them on speed and accuracy. They sift through garbage bins and national flower boxes looking for evidence of misclassified or damaged flowers. Workers collecting national flowers review those they receive and sort them according to the apparent cause of their substandard quality. This revision can identify problems occurring in the cultivation wing (poorly positioned guide strings producing bent stems, irrigation malfunctions, diseases, and worker negligence), but it also serves to monitor fellow postharvest workers, guarding against classifiers “dumping” flowers there to raise their quotas. As a result, tensions arise between workers in the national section and their peers in classification as the former become woven into the fabric of surveillance over the latter. These tensions often play out in the group meetings workers have with their supervisor first thing every morning. Here is one example: In the week after the 2001 Mother’s Day sales peak, TerraNova’s postharvest manager, Ricardo Dávila, discovered an anomaly. Their North American clients were requesting boxes of the “Charlotte” variety—a bright red rose whose petals open into a ruffled star-­like shape—yet there were none in their freezers at Miami. The Charlotte rose grows best at cooler temperatures like those of Cayambe, and TerraNova has devoted considerable space to growing them. Dávila stormed into the morning meeting waving sheets of paper in the air, claiming that the sheets indicate the exact number of boxes of each rose variety in “the system,” meaning their holding docks at Primavera and in Miami. He listed a few varieties and arrived at Charlotte, stressing the count of “ZERO.” This was a major problem, he indicated, since the period after Mother’s Day is a period of low demand and yet here was a flower with demand but no supply. Each postharvest worker works with only one or two varieties of rose, a specification justified by the unique set of conditions used to select and package each variety but also helping identify the exact workers responsible for any errors. Here was one such error, which Dávila quickly



Continuous Improvement 263

diagnosed as resulting from negligence on the part of the classifier and buncher he assigned to work with this variety. Singling out these two workers, he yelled at them for not “giving” enough—enough of themselves to the job and enough roses to company supplies, as if they were the source from which the commodity springs. I found the whole thing bizarre. But Dávila was just getting started—their failure to give more roses was, he said, like “putting [their] hands into the pocket of Jorge Castellano and taking out money.” Were workers to hear this as an accusation of theft or a request for empathy? It matters little for the issue soon sought refuge in the force of paternalistic reciprocity: “You ask me for gloves, boots, hats,” Dávila continued, “well I’m asking you for Charlotte.” Again, (legally mandated) protective gear mediates the slippage of workers’ bodies, their health and integrity, into a negotiated part of their productivity. Then, another slippage. Waving the sheets above his head in a clenched fist, Dávila reminded workers that he “can’t take these papers to the store and use them as payment!” as if workers needed to be reminded about the difference between real and fictitious values or sold the idea that profit, capital, and wages are united in measure and thus equivalent, completely trivializing the struggle workers face in meeting their basic needs on minimum wage, the meager earnings that border on the fictional that they take with them to the store to use as payment. The message, in any case, was clear: Dávila wanted more flowers. But how, I wondered. Isabel, the woman in charge of national flowers, answered my question. She told me that an unusually large number of Charlotte roses had been sent to her since Mother’s Day, marked as national quality but appearing to her as exportable. Afraid for her own job, she stopped packaging Charlotte roses and reported the issue to Dávila. This led him to check both the inventory sheets, showing lower Charlotte counts than previous years, and the output quotas of these workers, which were unusually high, even earning them tokens for excellent performance and the right to days off. According to Isabel, the workers were reprimanded and had their tokens withdrawn and their pay cut. Dávila’s outburst was the public exhibition of that sanction, a warning to others like a hanging in the town square. To “give” more Charlotte roses, then, meant sending more to export and not “keeping” them (in national markets) as a benefit to one’s self by upping output quotas without profiting the company. I was not able to speak with the accused worker about her tactic. To me, her decision to exaggerate the number of flowers sent to national holdings and

264

Chapter 8

quickly earn days off seemed related to a burnout workers feel after peak periods like Mother’s Day, when they will remain at the plantation often beyond midnight for a week or more. The lesson, perhaps, was this: classifiers must use their labor-­saving tactics in moderation. How about the “bunchers”?

Stage Two: The Bunchers

The bunchers stand with their backs to the classifiers, separated from them by tall racks of flowers to be packaged for export. There are fewer bunchers than classifiers, often organized at a ratio of 2 to 1, given that not all flowers received in the postharvest room will make it to export. Bunchers are likewise positioned behind individual tables bearing markings of ten-­centimeter proportions to gauge stem length. On each table rests two wooden blocks and a stapler, used for packaging the flowers, and to their sides hang rolls of stickers and plastic or cardboard wrappings. Some plantations have given cutting shears to bunchers or attached a blade to their tables, to be used to even out stem lengths of all flowers in a “bunch.” It is more common, however, to pass this task on to a final inspector for reasons that I discuss below. I have broken the labor process of bunchers down into thirteen component parts as follows:   1. The worker turns to the stem-­holding rack and selects a pile of flowers classified by stem length.   2. These flowers are placed at the extreme top end of the worktable.   3. The two wooden blocks are positioned close to the left edge of the table, in parallel horizontal formation, roughly thirty centimeters apart.   4. A plastic or cardboard wrapper is laid over the wooden blocks.   5. A worker assembles on the wrapper a row of thirteen flowers, made by drawing individual roses one at a time with the right hand from the pile at the top of their table, shaking them to disentangle their thorns, and lining them up evenly, flower heads facing left.   6. After the first flower has been positioned, the left hand rests securely on the pile, ensuring that the row does not lose its snug alignment.   7. A second row of twelve roses is laid on top of the previous row, in the spaces between the stems of the latter.



Continuous Improvement 265

  8. Once all twenty-­five flowers are assembled, the worker performs a final alignment, making certain that all rose heads are evenly arranged about five centimeters from the edge of the wrapping.   9. The worker positions her torso against the table to hold the lower wooden block in place, resting under the wrapping. 10. She then draws the upper wooden block down into the flowers with her right hand and, with her left, slowly rolls the plastic or cardboard into itself, forming a tight wrap around the rounded (or rectangular if cardboard) assemblage, now considered a “bunch.” 11. Holding the rolled bunch securely against the table with her left hand, the worker grabs the stapler with her right and adds a staple or two to the bottom of the plastic and the same to the top. 12. Stickers identifying the flower variety and stem length are peeled from rolls hanging along the worktable and added to the outside of the wrapper. 13. The completed bunch is placed in a collection cart positioned beside the worker or on a conveyor belt leading to the final inspector. For experienced workers, this process will take an average of one minute and forty-­five seconds to complete, allowing about thirty-­four bunches to be processed in an hour, or a total count of 850 flowers per worker sent for export per hour. This falls just short of the quota of thirty-­five bunches per hour (875 flowers) demanded by management at Castellano’s farms. Bunchers can save a few seconds needed to raise their quotas by waiting for stems of a given length to accumulate on the rack and carrying to their tables enough flowers for two or three bunches at a time or carrying multiple stacks of different lengths of roses to assemble a number of bunches from them. These are permitted strategies that afford minimal rewards. Compared with classifiers, bunchers have a much more constricted arsenal of clandestine strategies to draw on in raising their output quotas. The most effective and often-­used one is to grab stems of any length from the rack and labeling the bunch according to the shortest among them. Such a tactic can go unnoticed when bunchers themselves must cut stems to an even length before sending them on for inspection. For this reason, many farms have passed this duty off to the inspector or added an extra worker between bunchers and their inspector who cuts stems to size. It is almost always in the company’s interest to label flowers at

266

Chapter 8

their maximum length, since longer-­stem roses sell for considerably more than shorter-­stem ones.3 But as we saw in our examination of classification labors, flowers are categorized according to their ideal final stem length, not the actual length they hold when arriving at the postharvest room. A number of long stems will be found, in other words, on the classification racks holding short-­stemmed roses. For this reason, a few long stems sticking out from a bunch labeled as forty or fifty centimeters will likely go unremarked and can be justified as a decision made by classifiers, not bunchers, to match stem length to head size. It is harder to do the reverse, to slip shorter stems in with a bunch of longer roses. In such cases, the shorter roses are hidden in the middle of the bunch, and the sticker placed on the plastic will indicate that they are to be cut to the shorter length. Such tactics bear their own risks. One morning in October 2001, a buncher named Maria left the postharvest room for an extended period of time and came back to her worktable appearing as if she had been crying. I knew Maria and her two brothers quite well by then, all of whom worked in Castellano’s plantations, and I asked her after her shift what happened. She said she had been preoccupied all day with the failing health of her mother and simply wasn’t moving as fast as she normally does. To fill her bunches faster, she had packed a few shorter-­stemmed roses in longer packages (labeling them with the shorter length) and had been caught by the final inspector, who brought this to the attention of the manager. The manager shouted at her from across the room, threatening her with unpaid overtime, and denied her a day off that she had been saving to accompany her mother to a hospital in Quito. Bunchers are reprimanded in other ways, often becoming targets of managerial critique in the morning meetings. Because they are the last line of labor to handle individual flowers before they move in packages to the clients, bunchers are expected to detect, eliminate, and report any bad roses they encounter when packaging up their bundles. They are thus also often the first to be blamed for customer complaints. Workers say that the quotas are too high for them to adequately inspect every rose they handle and insist that this is the job of the classifiers. Yet a frequent exercise to occur in the morning meeting involves the manager pulling from storage a few bunches packed the previous day, opening them, and asking a buncher other than the one who packed it to examine the roses one by one and remove any deviant stems. This scene always made me cringe. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the worker who, caught between her manager’s gaze and her fellow workers, would with great trepidation and a shaky hand inevitably produce a stem or two that



Continuous Improvement 267

looked perhaps a little suspicious. Their reluctance bore a rather significant motive. If they were correct in finding a bad flower, the worker who packed it would have to relinquish tokens they had earned to “buy” days off. If they were wrong, the same sanction would be imposed on them. In June 2001, a worker found herself reviewing a bunch of the Black Magic variety that was part of a package destined for Russia. Russia is the second-­largest buyer of Ecuadorian roses (after the United States), and local knowledge claims that this affinity is due to the country’s preference for large-­stemmed and thick-­headed roses, the sort that Ecuador in general and Cayambe in particular claims to have a specific knack for producing. The worker reviewing the bunch failed to isolate a rose that the manager considered to be rather thin-­stemmed. Holding the rose in the air, he brandished it, threateningly, like a sword about to strike, shouting, “This, this is a flower for Russia?! Really? Do you want them to stop buying Ecuadorian roses altogether? Huh?” The reviewer duly lost a day off that she had been saving for an upcoming family occasion. What do these scenes from the labor process and worker discipline in postharvest tell us about the broader social construction of labor in this section of flower plantations? Answering such a question requires that we know who works in the postharvest room and why.

Capitalist Historicity and the Rationalization of Labor Segmentation The most visible manifestation of the distinct composition of the postharvest labor force is its gender specificity. Only on rare and temporary occasions are the bunching and classification tables not staffed entirely with women. It is here that floriculture most glaringly seems to earn its status as exemplary of the broad feminization of labor in low-­wage export-­processing enclaves expanding throughout the Global South.4 Ecuador’s flower growers, in their own publications and the mainstream press, have celebrated this as their contribution to poor women’s liberation from oppressive masculine dependency, a claim we have heard industry representatives make throughout this book. This feminization of floriculture labor, however, is uniquely concentrated in the postharvest room—the overall ratio of men to women in all plantations I studied was roughly one-­to-­one. Managers’ explanations for their selective feminization of postharvest labors echo those heard in similar

268

Chapter 8

industries elsewhere5—women’s supposedly delicate and nimble fingers (however sheathed in bulky protective gloves) make them more adept than men at handling roses carefully at the threshold between their production and sale. This feminine body-­mind nexus carries an extra weight in Ecuador’s flower plantations due to the symbolism bound up in the flower itself. Roses, particularly cut ones, serve as a core archetype of femininity, even in contemporary Ecuador. The “qualities” of femininity they express read like a job description for postharvest workers: delicacy, intimacy, and beauty (i.e., “bearers of quality”). This connection is read by management as already contained in the ideal of femininity. Alexandra, TerraNova’s industrial psychologist, put this bluntly when she confessed to staffing the postharvest room with women because “we women, it gives us pain to tear a petal off a rose.” Women will strip petals in ways that do not disfigure the flower, that preserve its beauty and minimize the “pain,” producing, in other words, more export-­quality flowers than would men. Turning this affinity between women and roses into a use-­value is rather straightforward: women will realize and perhaps sharpen their femininity by working to transform the flower from a plant into an object of beauty. Focusing on the gender of postharvest labor shows how far the symbolic meaning of the rose has moved from the realm of agriculture. It is no longer the plant-­like character of the product that contains the secret to labor discipline and work processes, as it did for cultivation workers. It is, rather, the character it will absorb when it becomes a commodity, the image marketed at its point of sale and the cultural sensibilities expected of consumers. This, I believe, is the secret to understanding the specific composition of the postharvest labor force and why a fully gendered analysis of it cannot stop here. For it became immediately apparent to me that most, if not all, women working in the postharvest room lived in Cayambe’s urban centers, that is, the city of Cayambe itself or one of the canton’s parish capital towns. This was confirmed by a list of personnel I was given indicating the place of birth and residence for all workers at TerraNova Farms that showed the postharvest facility to be staffed by forty-­eight women and thirteen men (exclusively the handlers and cold-­storage packers). Of the forty-­eight women workers (primarily classifiers and bunchers), only six lived at the time in rural Indigenous communities, making up only 12.5 percent of the workforce. Two of these six women were in fact born in southern cities and had met their husbands on the plantation, marrying into a community with which they claimed to feel no affinity. Comparing birthplace with current residence shows no evidence of Indigenous migrants to the cities and towns finding work in the postharvest



Continuous Improvement 269

rooms. Random samples confirmed the consistency of this pattern. Why are postharvest workers urban? It was only after many conversations with the postharvest manager at TerraNova and the industrial psychologists leading the human resources teams at all of Castellano’s enterprises that I found an answer to this question. Recall the key insight gleaned from examining the gender of postharvest labor: worker selection and labor discipline practices draw on images invested in the rose as a commodity, not a plant, and those thought to match the cultural sensibilities of its foreign consumer base. Consider, too, how this imagery might supplement our observations of postharvest labor processes as referencing more industrial than agrarian practices. And remember how important such correspondences between plants, agrarian work, and cultivation labor were to managerial justifications for channeling rural and Indigenous people into the greenhouses. Postharvest work is its flipside. This division, between postharvest and cultivation work as between the ­people slotted to each, is, I argue, a racializing one expressed in the sociospatial idiom of rural versus urban. It is also, with that, a full extension into the labor process of the mode of capitalist historicity we first uncovered in Chapter 4’s scrutiny of capital’s transition narratives. Describing the “profile” he uses to select workers for his section, TerraNova’s postharvest manager explained that he needs people who have “more abilities, as opposed to fuerza [force/strength], who have critical thinking skills, who are more prepared, perhaps academically,” than those who work in the greenhouses. While the link between cultivation work and its workers as bearers of only brute strength is itself a spatio-­racializing quip (see below), it is the perhaps that is most instructive here—education points to but exceeds academic capacity. All workers in Castellano’s farms, regardless of their stations, are required to hold only primary (pre–high school) degrees, and any more than that was neither required of nor common among postharvest workers. I once asked Sharon, Primavera’s director of human capital, about their workers’ education. Her response evidences a common slipperiness in national Ecuadorian Spanish between the notions of educación and cultura. Educación is often used to refer to the development of refined and controlled comportment, as in describing a person as buen educado, meaning of good character. Cultura, on the other hand, is often used in its original agricultural sense, indicating directed attention to growth, and in this bears a more specific reference to formal schooling. Sharon claimed, “The majority, 70 percent, I think, of the people that work in our company are of a cultural

270

Chapter 8

level in which they at least have completed their primary.” I asked if she meant primary education. “Yes,” she said, “level of education, up to primary,” which demanded a qualification: “Obviously, a person with their primary from the city is much more advanced than a person with primary from the rural zone . . . there is a difference. It is the same with communication. Someone from the city learns to be much more expressive, more extroverted, more communicative.” These were the exact differences Sharon earlier claimed to see in the psychological tests she administers to applicants. Rural people, remember, are people whose only goal in life is to “ensure, in fact, that they are strong, good for work, and nothing more.” And so, lacking an aesthetic sensibility, in their human figure drawings, “you see a figure that is very elemental, very simple.” And therefore, they go on to work in cultivation, not postharvest. Simple strength for the former, refined aesthetics for the latter. This was confirmed by Dr. Lorena Ventimilla, responsible for worker placements at TerraNova, who was quite sure rural people lacked the care-­ in-­work needed to maintain the quality standards demanded in postharvest: “They are good workers, but they are used to handling plants in a different way: potatoes don’t need this kind of care,” she told me. Under the greenhouses, this accumulated set of agrarian dispositions thought to guide rural workers’ behaviors was an asset, a capacity, that could be captured and channeled into the labor process and used as a guide for effective labor discipline, a source of value for capital. Set against the demands of postharvest labor, they are a liability, a lack, something that could extinguish value by disfiguring roses, treating them as potatoes or plants and not commodities, not recognizing them as bearers of aesthetic, not elemental, value. Potatoes versus roses— could there be a more racializing discourse than this? And yet could this binary between postharvest and cultivation, between industry and agriculture, between urban and rural existence, be seen not ­simply as a structure of segregation but also as a spatial and temporal map, an ur-­statement of the transformational imperative flower growers ascribe to their work in Cayambe? For this, we might let the rose itself be our guide, each one a teacher in how to read the commodity chain of flowers as a lesson in the evolutive historicity of capitalist transformation. Starting with cultivation and ending with consumption, each flower’s trajectory reads like a simplified version of modernization theory when set into the political economy of highland Ecuador. Its movement from greenhouse to vase takes us from agriculture through industry to mass consumption. Our ideal agent in each stage is first a rural Indigenous peasant, then an urban mestizo laborer, and



Continuous Improvement 271

finally a white North American consumer. The hands our flower touches as it moves along this path become whiter as it moves along, and their scales of residential affiliation increase, from the local community to the regional town or national city (Cayambe) to the global metropolis (Miami, New York). This chain takes the flower across time as well as space. In cultivation, capital looks to the country’s agrarian legacy and, with some dismay, admits that it still has not been entirely overcome by industrial development. This legacy is admitted into the enterprise, partially, as a residual form in which various non-­or precapitalist economic behaviors (such as peasant-­like “ownership” of greenhouse sections) have to be incorporated into the labor process for it to work. It is here that indigeneity is likewise confined. The postharvest area, in contrast, is a portrait of Ecuador’s ideal present. It is fully capitalist, industrial, mestizo, and defined by affective institutions of nation building like the educational system. The future-­emergent, as can be reached through the initiative of industries like the flower sector, is a postindustrial mass-­consumption society, in which one’s defining economic moment is the purchase of high-­cost luxury goods with disposable income (see Figure 14).6 It was labor that best showed the sociospatial and historicist ideologies imposed by management on the two “stages” (cultivation and postharvest, production and processing, etc.) that Ecuador can as yet claim as its own. The very equation of substandard roses with a “national” market demonstrates that Ecuador remains far from reaching the mythical stage 3, the position occupied by the “first world.” “National” quality flowers are sold to flower shops and roadside vendors in major Ecuadorian cities for about one dollar

CULTIVATION

POST-HARVEST

SALE

Production

Processing

Purchasing

Agriculture

Industry

Consumption

Rural

Urban

Cosmopolitan

Local

National

Global

Indian

Mestizo

White

Figure 14. Commodity chain as social text: The Ecuadorian rose.

272

Chapter 8

per dozen. There, they are mostly purchased by the upper middle class. Roses are sold at a more general level on the streets during certain festivals and holidays, such as the Day of the Dead, that have not yet been aligned with the North American holiday calendar (Valentine’s Day is not a major sales peak for flor nacional). The flower industry has barely attempted to encourage a national culture of flower consumption—marketing teams have told me that the country “isn’t yet ready” for this. This is fully consistent with Goody’s (1993: 24) claim that “the growth and use of domesticated flowers, like their representations in art and literature, in graphic and verbal media, are part of the growth of ‘cultures of luxury’ and subsequently ‘cultures of mass consumption,’ consumer societies.” Ecuador, flower marketers seem to suggest, isn’t ready to buy flowers because it hasn’t yet grown a culture of this sort. But what is this “culture” that Goody so insistently identifies flowers with? “In a derived sense the word [culture] relates to the ‘civilization’ of manners, of ways of behaving, especially of elaborated ways, those that have been carefully tended. Often enough, without any qualification it refers to ‘high’ culture, as in the phrase ‘a cultured individual.’ In this sense, the concept even takes on some of the connotations of ‘civilization,’ the culture of cities” (Goody 1993: 26). This, I think, is the clue to understanding how postharvest labor in Cayambe’s plantations has been imbued by management with such powerful distinction. This distinction derives in part from its contrast with cultivation. Just like Ecuador is the “not yet” against which the “civilized” can mark themselves against (through such practices as flower appreciation), so too does the postharvest room draw its status in relation to the “not yet” of cultivation, where workers like Rosa B. are asked to approach flowers as plants and others like Maria (who we met in the Introduction) are able to work for years in a greenhouse without ever knowing what the objects of her labor are for. Postharvest workers have to be able to apprehend flowers through the eyes of their consumers. Their labor process and the forms of micro-­discipline to which they are subjected demand that workers can at least perceive the elementary forms of a rose’s beauty, the basic cultural sensibilities that their buyers will have mastered when entering the market. But at the same time, the very act of labor that workers perform, an industrial assembly-­line form of manual labor, admits that the consumer-­driven persona (coming from a postindustrial society of “mass-­consumption,” in Goody’s words) they have to adopt remains alien. Management compensates for this lack, this confession that “we are not yet ready,” by grafting other compatible symbolic images of



Continuous Improvement 273

beauty onto the postharvest labor relation. “Femininity” must be understood in this regard. It comes to replace a lacking “culture of flowers” among its workers, and therein, I believe, lies the secret to the feminization of labor at this stage of production. Management also incorporates into the postharvest workforce as much “civilization” as it feels a region like Cayambe can offer, by making “urbanism” function as its placeholder. The “culture of flowers” is, as Goody tells us, the “culture of cities.” The ambiguous notion of educación that workers must have to work in the postharvest room is really, as outlined above, a shorthand for this urban “culture.” Rural dwellers are simply too far removed, according to this evolutionary model, from North American culture, from sharing a consumer’s symbolic vision of the rose, and too rooted in agrarian patterns and prone to treating the flower like a plant (“Potatoes don’t need this kind of care”) to find a fit in the postharvest room. This is precisely the problem that Dávila has with managing the postharvest room at Santi, which he oversees in addition to his services at TerraNova. Santi, as discussed in Chapter 5, lies high up in Cayambe’s rural sector, quite far from the Pan-­American highway and the city of Cayambe. Recall that, to assuage protests against the plantation, Castellano agreed to hire preferentially people from the Indigenous communities surrounding the plantation. As a result, its postharvest room is unusual for being staffed almost entirely with Indigenous women. This, Dávila complained, made his job quite difficult. There, he said, “work goes much slower. They aren’t trained [no son capacitados], they don’t know how to think critically, and thus the training process begins at a different point and is very slow” (emphasis added). Like Ecuador, relative to North America, Indigenous people aren’t yet ready for postharvest work—they enter the wage relation at a different point of self-­ development, manifested in their thoughts and actions, and this (ideally) must be excluded from the postharvest arena if it is to work efficiently. The stage of (self, national) development that Indigenous people do enter at is perfectly expressed by their work in cultivation. Cultivation workers represent an indigeneity that is not so distant from urban, managerial recognition of Ecuador’s social composite to be excluded from the plantation’s project for transforming it—indeed, they are its primary targets. It is the job of plantation psychologists to ensure this, to identify applicants whose level of “cultural” development is so “basic” as to be a liability to the plantation and not let them in. Such people may still find themselves working in the plantation in completely “off-­the-­record” ways, however, by aligning themselves with a labor contractor, or contratista.

274

Chapter 8

Contratistas are men hired to perform specific short-­term jobs on the plantation that fall outside the normal set of tasks required to grow and ship flowers—building new greenhouses, preparing its soil for planting, digging irrigation trenches, and so on. They are paid a set amount for the job, and it is up to them to find people to do it and pay them. A contratista’s workers move about the plantation like a spectral force—they bear no contracts, are not regulated by national laws, and do not wear company uniforms, ride company busses, eat in company dining halls, or appear anywhere in the plantation records. They also tend to be people who fall well outside the image management holds of any ideal regular laborer. Among a contratista’s workers, we find the very old and the very young, minors whom it would be illegal to formally employ, and elders who would be seen as a liability. They are generally members of very poor families from a select number of low-­lying Indigenous communities in the southern part of Cayambe (where land is dryer and whose members have had a longer involvement with wage labor routines) and who came to know a contractor through some form of personal connection—a previous history of working for him, living nearby—or by being picked up in Cayambe’s central park, where people looking for short-­term work congregate each morning. Increasingly, though, contratistas may find themselves absorbing new workers whose applications for formal employment on the plantation were rejected by management. These people are those who “failed” their psychological exam or who gave the human resources director the impression that they would be underproductive or unmanageable workers. All are Indigenous people who bear bold traces of rural living and abject poverty on their bodies and in their comportments and yet do not appear to management as redeemable through regularized wage labor.

Conclusion If there is, as suggested, a direct correspondence between the compendium of permanent jobs on plantations and the range of normative economic subjectivity in Ecuador, then contract workers appear to be not only completely invisible to this schema; to the extent that the internal production line of flowers can be read as a plan for national development, contract workers are positioned completely “off the map” of progress, even the residual components of the past that are carried along into the present to make it possible. The ideal figure of this residual past was the Indigenous comunero who works under



Continuous Improvement 275

peasant-­like labor conditions in the greenhouses, an icon of articulation that will be superseded in the movement to an industrial society. Contract workers are of this rural past as well but represent a degenerate rurality, that sector of the population that has not earned the right to the benefits of industrial development in the region or to formal recognition in the present. By an act of capitalist triage, their fate, this interpretation suggests, is to be killed off (physically, by not earning a living wage, and symbolically by nonrecognition in labor statistics, uniforms, state policy). And yet, these workers have become integral to the routine functioning of many plantations in Cayambe. This seems a rather extreme form of bourgeois arrogance, claiming at once that it is possible for capitalist development to not produce an underclass and yet finding great utility in the fact that there is one. The following chapter sets this whole schema in motion. It shows how plantation labor processes don’t just reproduce existing social divisions in Cayambe but strive to alter and shape them as well.

CHAPTER 9

The Finca de Personas: Labor and the Art of Personal Transformation

Flowers are snitches. Every package of roses sent from TerraNova Farms to global consumers is labeled with information allowing it to be traced back to the classifier and buncher who last handled it. This made the morning meetings among postharvest workers and their boss, Ricardo Dávlia, rather tense, always, but especially on Wednesdays when weekly summary reports came in from purchasers with feedback on the quality of the bunches they received. Some Wednesday mornings were brutal. Like the day in early May 2002 when the reports showed consistent problems with a particular variety—I can’t remember which—that only four of his staff had been working with the previous week. Calling those workers by name, Dávila demanded they account for their poor performance. Trembling with fear, the workers could only disclose that they found that variety of flower a complicated one, with more than the usual things to check when completing their bunches. There simply wasn’t time to check for everything and meet the high output demands, they insisted. Scoffing at their defense, Dávila summoned a classifier he regarded as his best, a young woman from the city of Cayambe named Daisy. Opening a fresh bunch of this variety packaged the day before, he asked Daisy to review the work of her companions. With shaking hands, Daisy managed to get through three stems, pronouncing each one acceptable (with nervous glances to Dávila), before admitting she’s never worked with this variety and was unsure. This sent Dávila into a rage: “You’ve been given license to drive a Formula One, but you can’t even manage a bicycle,” he shouted. Car analogies seemed to be a favorite of plantation administrators. The meeting ended with Dávila threatening to bring The Manager to the meeting the next time such serious offenses were discovered, implying that he would be harsher and simply fire the whole lot.

The Finca de Personas 277

I caught up with Dávila after this meeting and asked him to tell me something about his managerial style. To him, the morning meetings were designed to build motivation in his workers, to make them want to always better their performance. “The idea isn’t exactly to instill fear, but. . . .” He wanted to inspire workers to think “to not have problems I’ll work in a certain way.” He intended the regular review of randomly selected bunches to be a way of using surveillance as a motivational technique. Not knowing if their bunch will be selected for review, each worker will learn to strive for the best, he hoped, to the point of this becoming habit. All of this, he explained, was part of a broader managerial agenda “to touch the heart and the brain of our workers.” Touching the brain amounted to changing what he called the “mentalities” of people in Cayambe. To him, the whole region, even its urban center, is contaminated by a fatalistic mind-­set he described as “peasant”: “we’re poor and will die poor,” nothing can be done. He knows this because, while born, raised, and educated in Quito, he has taken to renting an apartment in the city of Cayambe to reduce his commute to the plantation. The whole place has been overtaken by this peasant mentality, he insisted, and this is exactly what the plantations are set up to change. Labor is the antidote to the peasant mind, and control over the labor process offers plantation administrators like himself the chance to teach people to want to superarse, to better oneself. As for the heart, he said, just look at the company motto printed over the heart on every worker’s uniform: mejoramiento continuo (continuous improvement). My talk with Dávila inspired me to ask other plantation managers and supervisors in plantations throughout Cayambe to describe for me their managerial style, their way of relating with workers under their supervision. I was somewhat surprised to find that no one seemed to find this request unusual or requiring much thought—answers were always forthcoming and enthusiastic. They offered much more than descriptions of a preferred approach. They provided explanations for them, explanations grounded not in abstract principles of good management practice but in who managers took their workers to be. These two variables were related in a specific way—a particular style was adopted not just to respond to the particular type of person working in the plantation but because it was deemed the best way to change that person. Consider Victor Sanchez, a cultivation supervisor at TerraNova. Victor described his approach to supervision as based around a single concept: friendship. In the plantation context, friendship is more than just about overriding hierarchical relations with claims of comradery. It is also an invitation

278

Chapter 9

extended to workers to join a community of persons striving toward growth, a technology of self-­cultivation that, like sunlight for roses, shines with a light orienting the trajectory of development. This analogy between people and flowers is key to the class politics of friendship. “You have to have friendly relations with workers,” Sanchez explained, “because, in reality, this has to be a farm of people [una finca de personas], not flowers, because people are the motor here. . . . This may be a flower farm, but it’s a human farm too.” This equation between people and flowers is an old one. Recall Goody’s (1993: 26) argument that flowers have always been associated with “the ‘civilization’ of manners, of ways of behaving, especially of elaborated ways, those that have been carefully tended.” Flowers are plants whose growth is, unlike weeds, intentional, signaling attention to refined practices of cultivation, but also extra-­utilitarian, showcasing cultivation beyond the fulfillment of base drives like hunger. Flowers, as psychologist Lorena Ventimilla previously noted, are not potatoes—they demand a higher level of care. The distinction is intentional. Cultivation workers like those Sánchez manages enter the plantation accustomed to handling plants (potatoes) “in a different way.” Their agrarian backgrounds are useful to an extent (they provide an undeniably valid “experience” with agriculture) but mark workers as basic and unrefined, different, in need of training, a rupture with habits accumulated in their prelaboring lives. We could take Ventimilla’s analogy further. When they enter the plantation for the first time, workers are regarded by management as akin to potatoes—fully encapsulated by soil, growing up in rather raw conditions that are barely altered by professionalized tending, nourished by natural sources, substantial but with no aesthetic or elaborated flair, and destined for a future that aspires only to the most basic, flavorless end. This is precisely what the human figure tests taken by labor applicants uncovered as the essence of the rural person. Workers’ psychic interiorities showed them to be “elemental” beings, a simple folk whose sense of self revolves entirely around the tasks of subsistence, nothing more. Becoming a laborer gives rural people the chance to become entirely new sorts of beings. Entering as potatoes, they must become roses. Fulfilling this potential is the work of management, an effect of controlled labor discipline and proper styles of supervision. Labor management mirrors scientific agronomy as a discipline for guiding growth. In the greenhouses, tight strings stretching along rose beds straighten stems from their naturally twisted paths; buds are protected from the elements by temperature and light-­controlled greenhouses, an

The Finca de Personas 279

enclosed and controlled space approximating nature but in a heavily regulated form; heavy doses of growth agents (fertilizers) and threat expellants (pesticides) are administered to engineer processes of maturation; and systems of monitoring, evaluating, and ranking are implemented throughout the entire process. In the flower farm that is also a human farm, human growth is likewise a highly regulated process, as Dávila’s morning meetings suggest. But as we saw in Chapter 8’s discussion of toilets, that growth extends well beyond the production process and into all points of encounter between management and workers—contact, again, is curative. This includes modes of communication and ways of speaking. Pressing Victor on his claim that “friendship” with workers was instrumental to their personal development, he disclosed for me his approach. “I go and converse with the workers, often for fifteen or twenty minutes,” he said. “I take them all out [of the greenhouses] and we sit down, just to talk, share jokes and such, everybody laughing, everybody enjoying themselves and everybody talking. There, the boss disappears. There we are all just friends, telling jokes, screwing around.” Victor stressed that he applied this display of friendship equally to men and women, with equal results. “Women are treated the same. I call them dolls, señoras, old ladies, ha ha. A good relationship exists. This way, the people start to trust you. And then they start to talk.” Starting to talk was of great significance, he stated, because of how dramatically it contrasts with the comportments Indigenous workers bring in with them when they start to work on the plantation and with what, he felt confident to surmise, Indigenous behavior has always been until now. These people, the people from up there [the communities], are a people who are very honest, right? Very honest and very humble in their way of being. This is the way I’d characterize the people from these communities, honest and humble. And hard working. They’re really good workers. Very humble, humble in their way of being, not humbled by poverty, but humble as a way of being. They’re good people, upright people we could say, who have lived through . . . survived. But thanks to the interrelations that the plantations are causing among us, the people [of the communities] are learning more every day, are developing more. They have more trust when they speak. It’s not like before when most of the time they would stand to

280

Chapter 9

one side, hunched over. Now this is a people who are speaking with their heads held high. . . . Things are different now. The change Victor narrates should be familiar to us. It is the trajectory of self-­realization Indigenous people of rural Cayambe are thought to have gone through, and are continuing to go through, with the coming of the flower plantations. This total transformation of personhood, expressed here in the idiom of speech, is from a culturally silent beast of burden to a speaking and communicative subject. For Sharon, Primavera’s head industrial psychologist, people from the communities are “people who have difficulty with communication, who don’t express themselves easily.” As an example, she enacted how workplace grievances tend to play out with rural workers. “If they don’t like something,” she told me, “they pick up and leave and don’t, don’t give you the option of saying ‘Alright, what happened, how can I help you.’ Rather, they simply pick up and leave, without even telling you. There has to be a reason, and yet they don’t express it.” Confronted with such ways of being, the goal of plantation managers and supervisors, Sharon stressed, is to “help them have a better level of communication.” They should “take them aside, alone, and say ‘look, tell me what happened, what is going on,’ because they, at times, look for superficial excuses, and the true problem is much deeper, it’s down there. So you make the person aware, you search out in the person, until this very person TELLS you the truth.” As a psychologist, Sharon is concerned with depth. It’s where truth lies, the site of reason. Full personhood is expressive, confessional. It can access this truth and externalize it as a condition of sociality. Blocked speech indexes limits on a subject’s capacity for self-­realization. It’s not just a language issue, Sharon insists, but the effects of “a whole social process in them, no? These are people who are very repressed.” Hence the need for projective tests. The deepest truths of neophyte workers can only be accessed against their will, so to speak, through a clandestine depth-­probing projective technology like the human figure drawings. This is what it means to confront history in the present, to come in contact with a developmental context that has undermined the possibilities for personal growth among a population to such an extent as to generalize repression as a cultural virtue. Undoing the effects of that history, labor’s role as a lesson in personal development expresses its instructional method around the art of communication, teaching workers to speak and speak properly.

The Finca de Personas 281

“‘Speaking properly,’” Butler (1997: 115) notes, “appears to be an instance of the ideological work of acquiring skills, a process central to the formation of the subject” in capitalist societies. Her point comes from Althusser’s (1972) analysis of the ways various social institutions prepare future workers for capitalist modes of subjection. Skillful speech, or normative communication, is the performative expression of one’s inscription into the grammatical location of the subject. “The ‘diverse skills’ of labor power must be reproduced,” Butler (1997: 115–116) continues, “and increasingly this reproduction happens ‘outside the firm’ and in school, that is, outside production and in educational institutions. The skills to be learned are, above all, the skills of speech. . . . Workers are taught to speak properly and managers learn to speak to workers “in the right way [bien commander].” Learning to speak properly, and enacting such codes of conduct in relations with managers, is part of the package of “skills” flower workers develop as a condition of subjection to plantation labor routines. For Butler and Althusser, members of the working class acquire such skills over the course of their prelaboring lives, in their involvement with extra-­economic institutions like schools—this is the service such institutions provide to the reproduction of capitalist class relations. In highland Ecuador, however, plantation managers regard their incoming workers, especially rural ones, as “unskilled” in such “linguistic” capacities. Their assumedly limited and deficient formal education has left them less “advanced” academically and culturally than their urban peers, slotting them for cultivation work but also rounding out the potentiality inherent in Indigenous workers—they are raw material to be shaped and formed under guided projects of self-­ improvement. Instruction and discipline in the exacting demands of labor are themselves intended to provide both the medium and the context for such skills to develop. This occurs through informal mechanisms, like the ways managers like Victor learn to speak with workers “in the right way”—friendly ways, ways that do not make the force inherent in the command to speak obvious or threatening—and through more formalized mechanisms like, in the case of postharvest workers, Dávila’s morning meetings, which compel (more “advanced”) workers to assume the speaking position of a manager and publicly assess the quality of others’ work. Labor in all areas of the plantation is conceptualized as a fully pedagogical arena, a context in which workers are instructed in the subjective forms consistent with their class position. A

282

Chapter 9

good worker is one who at once meets or exceeds her high output quotas, upholds the company’s standards of product quality, wants continual personal improvement, expresses her grievances with managers, is comfortable sharing a joke with a supervisor, and displays herself as a communicative, self-­actualizing subject. Learning to speak properly shows that the plantation’s efforts to remake workers not superficially, but to their core, in their depth of being, have succeeded. Even more elaborate expressions of this mandate punctuate workers’ experiences in the plantations.

Indigenous Education and the TerraNova Farms School Like what is called the “TerraNova Farms School,” an instructional curriculum for workers run on-­site at TerraNova Farms. Every few months, management pulls twenty-­five or so workers from their stations for two days and gives them mandatory instruction in everything from principles of plantation hierarchy and proper ways of expressing grievances to rudimentary subjects of primary and secondary education, like math and grammar. Workers learn calculus, for instance, by calculating the output quotas of their fellow workers and deciding if they meet the minimum requirements of employment or not. Victor and others showed us how all relations between workers and their supervisors are structured by a pedagogical form. The “school” reinforces that. Here, workers are literally students receiving a simulacrum of formal education from managers and supervisors on plantation grounds while they continue to receive a wage. As a result, the traffic between instruction in workplace skills, disciplined submission, and personal development in these schools is constant. In June 2001, for instance, I found myself completely awestruck by an hourlong class The Manager gave on the concept of “quality.” It was the “quality” of Ecuadorian roses that gave them an edge over competitors, industry insiders often told me, though no one could really explain to me what that means. There were institutions for that, like the International Standards Organization (which sounds like a made-­up thing but isn’t), with which most flower growers were certified. The Manager gave it a shot. Comparing their work among the roses to that which built the pyramids of Egypt (“the origins of quality”) and the practice among Chinese pot makers of inscribing their names in their finished products, The Manager reminded workers that individual flowers could

The Finca de Personas 283

be traced back to them and that it was up to them to ensure the quality of products sent on for final sale. “Quality” here meant whatever we tell you a customer wants. The point, I think, was to teach workers to take pride in their work, to see its products as an extension of themselves, and to treat flowers as mirrors of self-­care. The Manager reminded everyone that removing them from work, while debilitating to the farm, was an “investment” in them, in their growth as people and their productivity as workers. The identification of quality and its threats was indicative of this broader goal of the school since it was intended to “teach [workers] a form of thinking which will serve [them] in [their] lives in general.” What workers I asked remembered most was that Chinese pot makers also received brutal punishments when the quality of their pots was in doubt. There is reason to find fear lingering around the command to improve. The school ends with an exam. Workers scoring under fifty percent must repeat the curriculum, unpaid. A second failure results in dismissal. This threat was a constant source of conflict between human resources administrators and greenhouse managers, the latter of whom complained regularly of their best workers being fired for reasons having nothing to do with their job performance. Dr Ventimilla laughed disparagingly about this. True, she said, intellectual ability is not the main skill needed for work in most areas of the plantation. And yet she maintained that a certain level of schooling must remain a baseline for workers, and the process of instruction had to remain a part of the institutional design of plantations in a place like Cayambe. If instruction was not geared toward developing a worker’s intellect, I asked, what value did it serve? “Respect,” she answered. “Above all, respect.” I was caught off guard by Ventimilla’s candid summary of the real value of worker education, but I doubt Althusser would have been. As Butler (1997: 116) notes, Althusser knew that if the “reproduction of the subject takes place through the reproduction of linguistic skills, constituting, as it were, the rules and attitudes observed ‘by every agent in the division of labor,’” then “the rules of proper speech are also the rules by which respect is proffered or withheld” from one class to another. To organize a school in a workplace and to identify its main goal as teaching workers how to respect, above all, their bosses and the labor opportunity given them is to confirm a vision of the local labor pool as lacking the kind of background that prepares its labor power as a sellable commodity, that lacks, in Althusser’s terms, the capacity to “speak properly” or conduct oneself as a subject of capitalist discipline. Flower plantations work around this by making schooling a part of the labor

284

Chapter 9

process and by approaching workers as bearers of potential, not storehouses of value. The flower farm must also be a human farm.1

The “Program of Conduct” Victor insisted that the best example in all of Cayambe of how the plantations “grow” people as much as flowers was TerraNova’s programa conductiva, or “program of conduct.” This is a motivational strategy designed to complement the other task-­specific and results-­focused labor controls used on the plantations like the daily recording of harvest quota scores. It also promises to expand their reach by subjecting the entirety of a worker’s comportment on the plantation to evaluation, from the moment they step off the bus in the morning to the moment they get back on it. For this, supervisors fill out scorecards once a week that evaluate each of their workers on the following terms: 1. Complies exactly with the hours of work: 2. Doesn’t argue over orders when they’re given: 3. Doesn’t need supervision constantly: 4. Doesn’t quarrel frequently with his workmates: 5. Shows an interest in learning from his or her work: 6. Does the tasks asked of him or her: 7. No outstanding concerns:

10 percent 10 percent 15 percent 10 percent 15 percent 15 percent 25 percent

Unlike Victor, I found this a rather hodgepodge assembly of what “personal conduct” might entail, asking workers to at once respect hierarchy (#2) and operate independent of it (#3). It warns workers of surveillance over seemingly private encounters among them (#4) and renders equivalent in value a worker’s willingness to become a thoughtful innovator or student (#5) and just do what they are told (#6). Most curious of all is the full 25 percent reserved for what is still unknown about worker comportment and its potential for generating “concern” (#7). Despite these ambiguities, the scoring process carries real weight among workers that extends beyond their labor experience. What is gained and lost by one’s score is the right to a degree of negotiation over the impact of labor on one’s social and personal life, specifically, the right to request vacation days.

The Finca de Personas 285

Earning an absence from work is political, especially for cultivation workers. Victor claimed that the hardest thing about trying to coordinate Indigenous laborers was that they frequently did not show up for work and incessantly requested days off. Their “excuse,” as he put it, for this request was most often tied to attending a community work project (minga) or political protest, basic conditions of comunerismo that all members of a community need to fulfill to reproduce their household and community life. Basic resources like irrigation and potable water, electricity, and high-­altitude grassland (páramo) usage are controlled by the community and withdrawn if work projects are missed. It is through these projects that a sense of shared purpose and interdependency is constituted. They are what enable the continued viability of an economic, political, and social life not thoroughly overtaken by plantation labor and capitalist expansion. This life is the very thing plantation managers believe they need to purge from rural workers as a condition of their improvement, the present and determining cause of Indigenous people’s economic poverty and political marginality. For Victor, Indigenous communities requiring participation in indirectly remunerated activities was evidence of the irrational “totalitarianism” built into the community logic—this was forced participation handed down by corrupt community leaders that deprived people of their individual right to pursue wage work. To help this emancipation project along, he and other managers frequently denied workers’ requests to cash in their tokens when they suspected that they were using the day to attend a minga or a protest called by the national or regional Indigenous movement. “We are trying to make people more sensible, more intelligent,” he insisted, “and this comes by valuing real work,” waged work, the work in plantations, not the fatalistic and nostalgic clinging to independent subsistence agriculture practices. It was Victor who instructed an Indigenous worker from the community of Carrera who was fired after missing a day of work to attend a minga (in this case to upgrade its irrigation canals) to “Go home and tell your [community] president that he lost you your job. Tell him he has to realize that people don’t live from mingas or the community or the little water going to your little lands. People live from work, from wages. This, the flowers, is work!” The program of conduct and similar programs that explicitly translate systems of labor discipline and modes of subjective engineering into managerial design over workers’ extra-­laboring lives must be seen as more than just motivational strategies designed to increase worker output. They are also

286

Chapter 9

technologies of primitive accumulation, part of the historicist convention of transition narrative that asserts the present as fully capitalist (“people live,” present tense, “from work, from wages” in the flowers), turns Indigenous workers into messengers of that version of reality (“go home and tell your president,” again directing what kind of speaking subjects workers should become), and backs that claim on the present with force. That force serves to undermine the economic strategies by which rural agrarian livelihoods are reproduced and the political forms—the community, the Indigenous movement—protecting that.

CONCLUSION

Postcolonial Redemption

The indio, abandoned in his integral misery, is increasingly less productive due to the degenerative factors to which he is subjected, such that to save him, reconstitute him, regenerate his energies or the residues of them, whose eternal exhaustion has been prevented by some extraordinary miracle of natural vigor, is not only a task of humanity and charity but an imperative of collective redemption. —Rodrigo Jácome M., “Cultura Indígena,” 1944

Labor in the Global South tends to command attention when it can be framed as an instance of capitalist exceptionalism, when, for instance, established conditions (low pay, excessive precarity, unregulated toxicity) or some tragic event (a factory’s collapse or fire) exposes a gap between labor practices there and the expected standards of industrial routine elsewhere. Such exposés have a point—they contribute to the moral outrage we feel when the quest for profit reveals the uneven distribution of human suffering. And yet because this outrage arises from the gap between a norm and its deviation, it also may make us accustomed to regarding capital’s exploitation of labor as curious and jarring not on its own terms, always and everywhere, but only in its excess. The Global South, in its new figuration as the world’s industrial labor reserve, has come to stand for this excess. Postcolonial primitive accumulation often appears in a similar light. What is said to mark capitalist expansion in such contexts is its foundation not simply on the violence of dispossession but rather on excessive dispossession, dispossession at a scale that exceeds even capital’s voracious needs. This excess finds its own iconic figure of suffering around which an image of

288 Conclusion

capitalism in the Global South emerges—the landless and wageless surplus populations who have had their productive resources expropriated but who, left with only their labor power, are nevertheless unable to find a buyer for it. The result is a human wasteland, Sanyal (2007: 53) tells us: “It is this wasteland, constituted by the shadowy figures of the rejected, the marginal, the leftovers of capital’s arising, the wreckage and debris, that remains as an outside of ‘self-­subsistent’ capital.” With this, our focus and concern shift to the ambivalent location of capital’s internal exteriorities—this surplus is at once an immediate effect of capitalist expansion and something capital continually ejects from its productive relations. By disconnecting the particularities of postcolonial capitalism from its internal relations of production, such studies may also give the impression that the main problem with labor in the Global South is that there is simply not enough of it to go around. In the end, it is the suffering subject who marks postcolonial capitalism as exceptional and whose suffering is derived from capitalist excess. The South continues to be worrisome when it deviates from a northern norm. My approach throughout this book has been different. My critique of labor under postcolonial capitalism has centered on labor itself, in its normal and routine dimensions, as it takes shape within the internal class relations and labor processes of a commodity producing system. Understanding labor from within the basic capital-­labor relation, it has shown a particular notion of suffering to be already internal to labor’s discursive and material production. Suffering is not the accidental side effect of capitalist expansion but its precondition. It holds the place of history in the transformative act of labor, the state of beforeness that the labor process is designed to negate. Labor is a here both a curative act and a historical intervention. It is the groundwork of human salvation. How labor comes to absorb this function in twenty-­first-­century Cayambe can only be explained by understanding capitalism as a postcolonial artifact, that is, as a historically constituted force of improvement when extended into Indigenous territories. Postcoloniality points to an engagement with difference, the structured conditions of difference established and elaborated under colonial rule and their enduring legacies in the present. In highland Ecuador, the core figure of difference is the rural indio, an icon of alterity racialized less by biology than by economy and space as the subject of hacienda bondage and its aftermath. It is through its historic subalternization in and around hacienda enclosures that Indigenous peoples achieved, in Ecuador, the status of a problem, objects of suffering and sympathy, appearing to white-­mestizo



Postcolonial Redemption 289

society as requiring curative salvation through economic intervention. If, as Lisa Stephenson (2014: 160) has argued, the “history of the colonization of indigenous peoples could be written as the process of becoming intelligible through inhabiting the ‘subject position’ of a ‘problem,’” the history of postcolonial capitalism in Ecuador could be written as the quest to solve it. In Cayambe’s flower plantations, postcolonial critique is immanent in capitalist productive routines themselves, embedded in the quotidian dynamics of commodity production and something plantation owners, managers, and supervisors wrestle with continually in the performance of their jobs. Through this, capitalism has become that imperative of collective redemption that Rodrigo Jacome wrote of in the 1940s and labor its main device.

NOTES

Introduction 1. Although “difference” is a common word, here I draw on Gyanendra Pandey’s (2011: 2) use of it to theorize how social ideologies “involving the pronouncement of radical alterity, allegedly based on ‘natural,’ ‘biological’ dissimilarity or long-­established and deeply-­rooted conditions of apartness” come to reinforce “articulations of dominance and subordination, and the hierarchical ordering of social, political, and economic power.” “Difference,” in this way, “becomes a mark of the subordinated or subalternized, measured as it is against the purported mainstream, the ‘standard’ or the ‘normal’” (Pandey 2011: 3). 2. We can compare this with the neighboring region of Otavalo, where only 31 percent of Indigenous people were bound to haciendas, the remaining 69 percent living in free communities or the expanding urban center and practicing various forms of independent artisan and agricultural production (Ramón Valarezo 2003: 35–36). 3. In 2001, the canton of Cayambe reported an economically active population of 29,101 people, 14,727 of whom the regional census classified as “agricultural workers” (INEC 2001). Property registries listed 129 flower companies owning 1,700 hectares of land. Approximating 60 percent of this land to be under production means that over half the canton’s population who can work in a flower plantation (15,300) likely does. This figure matched my own census of the Indigenous community of Carrera, where 154 people, roughly half its economically active population, worked in a flower plantation in 2002. The numbers are even higher in lower-­altitude communities bordering the plantation zone (Mena 1999).

Chapter 2 1. The main lenders at this time included, from the United States, Bank of America, Bankers Trust, Chase Manhattan, Chemical, Citibank, Continental Illinois, First National Bank of Chicago, J. P. Morgan, and Manufacturers Hanover and, from the United Kingdom, Barclays, Lloyds, Midland, National Westminster, and Standard Chartered, plus four French banks, seven Japanese banks, and three West German banks (see Joyce 2013: 45). 2. Chase Manhattan, Citicorp, Bank of America, Morgan Guaranty, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, and Bankers Trust (Gwynne 1986: 104).

Chapter 3 1. Campaña Apolo (2004: 40) lists this as 68.22 percent of the production costs of growers at this time. 2. “The concept of the credit supermarket encouraged [financial] administrators to use depositors’ resources to finance their own businesses and was the trampoline that converted

292

Notes to Pages 66–128

[bank] managers into banking businesspeople [banqueros empresarios]. The deposits into businesses linked to bankers grew scandalously to 2.4 billion sucres in 1998, a quantity equivalent to thirty percent of the national patrimony” (Arosemena 1999: 62). 3. In Quito, De Bueno owned a small furniture workshop and her husband was an architect. 4. The National Film Board of Canada’s 1987 documentary, called A Struggle for Shelter, features interviews and video footage from this case. 5. Through 2001 and 2002, when I lived full-­time in the Cayambe region, banks valued the lands of flower growers at $25,000 per hectare. Riots broke out in Cayambe when the municipal government attempted to use those values as the basis for updating its decades-­old land tax calculations (see Krupa 2015). 6. Stanley Fischer maintains that dollarization occurred without IMF consultation and was not something his agency would have endorsed. “If they had asked us,” Fischer (2000: 5) claims, “we would have said that the preconditions for making a success of dollarization were not in place. In particular, the banking system was unhealthy and the fiscal position was weak.” The IMF did assist with the transition, however, approving standby credit of $304 million, which, with “additional support from other multilateral lenders,” offered Ecuador around $900 million over the next twelve months, with up to “$2 billion available from official lenders over the next three years” (Fischer 2000: 6). 7. The CFN, incidentally, went from being classified as zero-­risk AAA subject of credit at the start of 1998 to receiving a Moody’s risk qualification of CAA2 in 2000, one of the worst scores among state banks in Latin America at this time (Berreno Carranza 2000: 27).

Chapter 4 1. Jacome (2004: 5) suggests the number of crisis emigrants to be as high as 500,000, at a time when Ecuador’s population totaled less than thirteen million. Pribilsky (2012: 327) estimates that as many as 900,000 left the country between 1993 and 2006. 2. As hacendados, the Bonifaz family were known to have “mastered paternalistic administrative methods” of control, such as their participation with workers in the “fictive kinship compadrazgo (godparent) system to keep open dissent in check” (Becker 2008: 105). 3. See Krupa (2010) for an analysis of how Cayambe’s cut-­flower plantations have operated as privatized forces of statecraft. 4. I retain the word “indio” when it is used in these texts to signal that we are dealing not with actual Indigenous peoples but with “a cultural archetype constructed out of fragments of Indigenous reality, reorganized according to the preoccupations of the dominant culture” (Arcos 1986: 312). 5. I employ the conventional masculinization of the category “indio” here and elsewhere when that category implies attachment to a hacienda, given that concertaje arrangements and later huasipunguero contracts were generally made with men, the work of their wives and families considered part of the package. Indigenous women were targeted as productive sites of intervention in their own way, generally considered vectors through which the engineering of domestic spaces and family relations could be advanced (see Prieto 2015). On views of women under Ecuadorian liberalism more generally see Ochoa Antich (1987). 6. This focus on Indigenous “protection” included the creation of an Indigenous Race Protectorate Board and an article in the 1906 constitution outlining the state’s commitment to the protection of the “raza india,” the latter of which, Prieto (2004: 43–45) argues, remained on the books until 1945.



Notes to Pages 135–199

293

7. The wide appeal of Jaramillo’s text and views can be gleaned from its ceremonial re-­ presentation at a special session held in the elite Sociedad Juridico-­Literario (Juridical-­Literary Society) of Quito in April of that year to celebrate the national Día del Indio, or Day of the Indio (Jaramillo Alvarado 1993: 455).

Chapter 5 1. Santi produces fifty flowers per square meter, which take 100 days to grow. TerraNova, in the Guachalá sector, produces sixty-­five flowers per square meter, which take eighty days to grow. Primavera, the lowest altitude of Casagrande’s plantations, in the Guayllabamba basin, produces seventy-­five to eighty flowers per square meter, which reach maturity in seventy days. 2. The archived copy of this circular appears to be a draft, with the stricken text penned over with what follows. 3. “Información al Pueblo Cayambe.” Archive of the offices of UNOPAC, no date. 4. “Información al Pueblo Cayambe,” UNOPAC archives. No date. 5. “[TERRANOVA] Proyecto Cayambe: Estudio Impacto Ambiental y Plan de Manejo Ambiental,” authored by Federico Duque Moya. UNOPAC archives. No date. 6. This and ensuing references come from “Resoluciones Tomadas por el Comité de Desarrollo Comunal ‘Nuevos Horizontes’ de San Esteban.” UNOPAC archives. No date, bold text in original. 7. Prepared June 4, 1998. UNOPAC archives. 8. This substitution has become common in contemporary scholarship, often made with the intention of highlighting the centrality of primitive accumulation to capitalist expansion in the present. I credit this convention to David Harvey’s (2003: 144) quip, in The New Imperialism, that “since it seems peculiar to call an ongoing process ‘primitive’ or ‘original,’ I shall . . . substitute these terms by the concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession.’”

Chapter 6 1. See Pratt (1986) for a discussion of the classic ethnographic arrival scene and its flirtations with the colonial “first contact” image. Her scrutiny of how this arrival trope bolstered both the narrative potency and scientific claims of early ethnography will be pertinent to the examination of plantation expertise in this chapter. 2. My old habit of translating my name as “Cristóbal” was generally rejected by Ecuadorian elites, the professional-­managerial class, or anyone identifying with urban spaces. To them, it seemed too archaic and at odds with the image of transnational modernity they associated with white North American men and so took it upon themselves to rename me in ways that better fit their image of the location I represented. I was told this directly, several times—a gringo cannot be named Cristóbal. Alexandra’s choice of “Cristian” was common, as was “Cris,” “Cristofer,” and a few other variations. The only exception to this was when my out-­of-­placeness was made an object of jest by calling me, with a few snickers, “Cristóbal Lanchimba,” allowing the old-­style first name to stand when placed alongside the family name of the Indigenous family with whom I lived, folding me into the allochronic drama fossilizing indigeneity. 3. I have no basis to endorse or refute the human figure test’s ability to meet the goals plantation psychologists set out for it. Nevertheless, on two occasions, I managed to speak with an applicant who drew a figure they identified as bearing the age of a child. Both told me of some recent domestic situation that left them preoccupied with one of their own children, whose well-­being was in many ways bound up in their decision to apply for work, who they were

294

Notes to Pages 199–226

thinking about throughout the interview and who they drew. On both occasions, I asked the applicant why they didn’t mention that in the interview, when discussing the drawing. Both said something equivalent to “because I wasn’t asked” and noted shyness about bringing up personal, domestic events during a job interview.

Chapter 7 1. Emilio Bonifaz inherited one-­quarter of the original Hacienda Guachalá in 1952, the rest being divided among his three siblings (Bonifaz 1970: 348). 2. “I have lived for days, weeks, and even years with many highland groupings, over the course of 45 years, without encountering fundamental differences, except in degree, among them” (Bonifaz 1979: 8). 3. The servicias, in Bonifaz’s (1979: 71) words, are “indigenous women who serve in the hacienda manors, with pay, generally of a higher order than the milkers.” 4. Lavater was a theologian whose widely influential physiognomic texts were designed to assist readers in their ability to assess their and others’ holiness by “reading” facial and bodily features in relation to those of Christ. Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy, Bantum (2014: 51) argues, “articulates a theological vision of an ideal Christian body, a saint, as a male white male body. In doing so, Lavater’s work displays how whiteness will function in the modern world, not simply through the academic claims of philosophers, scientists, and politicians, but through the disciplining, the formation of the layman’s gaze.” 5. Similar to “the phrenologists and physiognomists, who read an individual’s moral character and personality from the visible surface of the body, the scientists proposed to decipher an individual’s race by looking at visible (and measurable) cranial coordinates” (Poole 1997: 134). 6. “Instinctively, traditionally, the indio is glued [pegado] to the soil, the land. He feels an incomparable attachment for his plot. He cultivates and works it with dedication, with care. With love, we could say. A piece of land is his wealth, his sustenance, his greatest longing: for it he fights and struggles, for it he could kill or be killed. Care, love, or whatever other elevated sentiment that could penetrate the savage soul of the indigene, lies hidden, turned off, for the greed and desire to possess land” (Garcés 1932: 150). Notably, Garcés’s study is conducted in the province of Imbabura, which, in the 1930s, had a somewhat unusual property structure for the central Andes. Despite the large number of public and private haciendas housed in the province, there remained a relatively large number of free communities. Focusing on Imbabura allowed him to theorize Indigenous people’s purportedly primordial attachment to land through a focus on those who actually had some (a situation very different from Cayambe; see Ramón Valarezo 2003). The idea, however, is consensual, expressed in virtually all writing about Indigenous people at this time, including that of foreign researchers like Mexican anthropologist Moisés Saénz (1933: 116), who argued that “land is for the indigene a symbol of his right to life, the unity of material life with divine existence.” And, later, Emilio Bonifaz (1979: 133): “I am inclined to think that the love of his land, on the indio’s part, has to have ancestral roots that are semi-­religious or, perhaps, innate of another origin.” 7. See as well Prieto and Paez’s study of the Programa Indigenista Andina (PIA), an international development program working in Andean Indigenous communities from the 1950s to the 1970s. “The initial sense of the PIA was the integration of the native indigenous people. The missionaries’ desires for integration appear as a field defining itself around the enunciation of the problems of the native population, which are coming together around [the notion of] segregation (apartness), translated as well as isolation. This last notion is contained in all the



Notes to Pages 226–271

295

characteristics and scarcities that define the otherness of Andean [Indigenous] societies” (Prieto and Paez 2017: 27). 8. These interpretations—the direct link with hypothyroidism and the racial differences of test populations—are Bonifaz’s. The authors of the report make no direct correlations, putting greater emphasis on the nutritional deficiencies of Indigenous communities and their extreme poverty. 9. For a discussion of Indigenous people’s legal status as minors in the early republic, see O’Connor (2007).

Chapter 8 1. I want to stress that the idea that highland Indigenous people, categorically, have no experience with wage labor is just that, an idea or fantasy of white-­mestizo society, rooted in the racializing perceptions of territory and personhood discussed throughout this book, which associate capitalism with progress and Indigenous people as historically exterior to that. The idea is central to the work of capitalist expansion in the highlands and its justification by plantation managers and owners as a progressive and liberating force for Indigenous society. It is also completely false. Hernán Ibarra (1992) has shown that capitalist industry in the highlands, since its inception, has employed Indigenous workers, primarily in the textile and agrarian processing centers that sprang up around highland cities in the early 1900s. While rife with racial tensions between Indigenous and mestizo workers and stratifying labor processes along racial lines, wage work in the cities provided Indigenous people with an important escape from hacienda bondage after the ban on debt peonage in 1918. Scholars have also documented the importance of temporary and circular labor migration for Indigenous peasants throughout the twentieth century, especially after the agrarian reforms of 1964 and 1973, showing how vital wage work was to the reproduction of peasant households and rural economies of the highlands (Korovkin 1997; Peek 1982; Schroder 1987; Waters and Buttel 1987; Waters 1997). The conclusion reached by scholars of this period is that capitalist wage relations were anything but transformative experiences for the Indigenous peasantry. Wages were routinely invested back into agrarian household systems, in many ways necessary for their reproduction, and the experiences of Indigenous workers in urban waged settings were so rife with racist discrimination that, rather than undoing their racialized identities, solidified them, something Amalia Pallares (2002) credits with playing a key role in the emergence of the Indigenous movement in the late 1990s. In other words, throughout the twentieth century, the more peasants engaged in proletarian labor, the more they reproduced themselves as peasants. And while Indians were expected to be de-­Indianized by wage labor, the labor processes they entered affirmed their Indian-­ness. 2. TerraNova, for example has an average year-­round output of 85 to 90 boxes of roses (around 11,000 flowers) per day. This jumps to 250 to 300 boxes (around 35,000 flowers) per day in the period leading up to Valentine’s Day. 3. A sales representative for all three of Castellano’s farms told me in mid-­2001 that, on average, roses forty centimeters long sold for between $0.20 and $0.26 each, roses fifty centimeters long sold for between $0.32 and $0.38 each, and roses seventy centimeters long sold for around $0.40 each. 4. See Andrade Almeida (1994), Lara Flores and Quitana (1995), Salamea and Waters (1995), Meier (1999), Mena (1999), Lara Flores (2001), and Wehner (2003a, 2003b). 5. See Salzinger (2003) and Ong (1987). 6. I am borrowing the terms “residual,” “dominant,” and “emergent” from Williams (1977: 121–127).

296

Notes to Page 284

Chapter 9 1. We might compare this approach to rural schooling with that of the colonial and republican periods, when Dominican instruction to the children of Indigenous nobility produced “an enormous distancing between Indigenous elites and their bases,” tying the former into the colonial machinery undermining Indigenous political systems throughout the highlands. From the early 1800s to the 1960s, in turn, “hacendados and town powers impeded the schooling of Indigenous people” and used illiteracy as a tool in racial domination (Ramón Valarezo 1993: 17, 101), prompting clandestine Indigenous-­to-­Indigenous education networks to form in the hidden corners of haciendas (Ulcuongo 2000: 21).

R EFER ENCES

Acosta, Alberto. 1990. La deuda eterna: una historia de la deuda externa ecuatoriana. Quito: Ediduende. Adams, Patricia. 1991. Odious Debts: Loose Lending, Corruption, and the Third World’s Environmental Legacy. London: Earthscan. Adkins, Lisa. 2012. “Out of Work or Out of Time? Rethinking Labor After the Financial Crisis.” South Atlantic Quarterly 111 (4): 621–641. ———. 2008. “From Retroactivity to Futurity: The End of the Sexual Contract?” NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 16 (3): 182–201. Althusser, Louis. 1971. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press. Andrade, Patricio, and Shila Enriquez. 2000. “Efectos de la crisis bancaria en el sector empresarial ecuatoriano en 1999.” Disertación de Grado, Universidad Católica. Andrade Almeida, Gladys. 1994. “Incidencia de la producción de flores en la economía campesina y el trabajo femenino: los casos Checa y Cotacachi.” Disertación de Grado, Universidad Católica. Arcos, Carlos. 1986. “El espíritu del progreso: los hacendados en el Ecuador del 1900. In Clase y región en el agro ecuatoriano, ed. Miguel Murmis, 269–317. Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional. Arosemena, Guillermo. 1999. “La banca ecuatoriana: origen histórico de la crisis actual.” In Bancos y banqueros: de Urbina Jado a Aspiazu, ed. Jorge Núñez, 43–65. Quito: Editorial El Conejo. Baker, Dean. 2013. “Speculation and Asset Bubbles.” In The Handbook of the Political Economy of Financial Crises, ed. Martin H. Wolfson and Gerald A. Epstein, 47–60. New York: Oxford University Press. Bantum, Brian. 2014. “The Threefold Man: Lavater, Physiognomy, and the Rise of the Western Icon.” In Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh, ed. Molly H. Bassett and Vincent W. Lloyd, 45–65. New York: Routledge. Baritz, Loren. 1960. The Servants of Power: A History of the Use of Social Science in American Industry. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Barsky, Osvaldo. 1988. La reforma agraria ecuatoriana. 2nd ed. Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional. Barsky, Osvaldo, Alex Barril, Gustavo Cosse, Jorge Morandi, and Humberto Vinuez. 1980. El proceso de transformación de la producción lechera serrana y el aparato de generación transferencia en Ecuador. Documento PROTAAL no. 40. Quito: FLACSO. Becker, Gary S. 1964. Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

298 References Becker, Marc. 2008. Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador’s Modern Indigenous Movements. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 1999. “Comunas and Indigenous Protest in Cayambe, Ecuador.” Americas 55 (4): 531–559. ———. 1997. “Class and Ethnicity in the Canton of Cayambe: The Roots of Ecuador’s Modern Indian Movement.” PhD diss., University of Kansas. Beckerman, Paul. 2002. “Long-­Term Origins of Ecuador’s ‘Predollarization’ Crisis.” In Crisis and Dollarization in Ecuador: Stability, Growth, and Social Equity, ed. Paul Beckerman and Andrés Solimano, 17–80. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. ———. 2001. Dollarization and Semi-­Dollarization in Ecuador. Policy Research Working Paper No. 2643. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Bello, Walden. 2005. Dilemmas of Domination: The Unmaking of the American Empire. London: Zed Books. Barreno Carranza, Yessenia Maribel. 2000. “Los efectos del crédito en la dinamización de las exportaciones agrícolas ecuatorianas: el caso del programa global de crédito multisectoral de la Corporación Financiera Nacional 93–98.” Disertación de Grado, Universidad Católica. Bonifaz, Emilio. 1979. Los indígenas de altura del Ecuador. 3rd ed. Quito: Publitecnica. Bonifaz, Emilio. 1970. “Origen y evolución de una hacienda histórica: ‘Guachalá.’” Boletín de la academia nacional de historia LIII (116): 338–350. Bonifaz Andrade, Diego. 1995. Guachalá: historia de una hacienda en Cayambe. Quito: Ediciones Abya-­Yala. Braverman, Harry. 1998 [1974]. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press. Brown, Elspeth H. 2005. The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–1929. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Brown, Richard Harvey. 1992. “Poetics, Politics and Professionalism in the Rise of American Psychology.” History of the Human Sciences 5 (1): 47–61. Buchmann, Stephen. 2015. The Reason for Flowers: Their History, Culture, Biology, and How They Change Our Lives. New York: Scribner. Burawoy, Michael. 1979. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. 2013. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. CAF (Corporación Andina de Fomento). 1996. “Informe anual.” Caracas: CAF. Campaña Apolo, Belén. 2004. “Alternativas de financiamiento para el sector florícola ecuatoriano en una economía dolorizada: caso producción de lirios en la provincia de Pichincha periodo 2000–2003, Ecuador.” Disertación de Grado, Universidad Católica. Carr, H. A. and Kingsbury, F. A. 1939. “The Concept of the Individual.” Psychological Review 46 (4): 359–382. CEAS (Centro de Estudios y Asesoría en Salud). 1998. El impacto de las condiciones destructivas de la floricultura en la salud de las trabajadoras y trabajadores de la zona de Cayambe. Quito: Colectivo CEAS. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Chiriboga Cordovéz, Hernán. 2003. “Ecuador’s Flowers.” New York Times, March 3.

References 299 Chiriboga Moncayo, Jorge A. 1978. “Financiamiento de la inversión y el desarrollo económico del Ecuador.” Disertación de Grado, Universidad Católica. Clark, A. Kim. 1998. The Redemptive Work: Railway and Nation in Ecuador, 1895–1930. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books. Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. 2000. “Millennial Capitalism: First Thoughts on a Second Coming.” Public Culture 12 (2): 291–343. Comisión de la Verdad. 2010. Informe de la Comisión de la Verdad. Quito: Ediecuatorial. Conefrey, Mick. 2015. “Roses with Latitude: Why Ecuador’s Flower Industry Stands Out.” Financial Times, April 10. Coulthard, Glen. 2014. “From Wards of the State to Subjects of Recognition? Marx, Indigenous Peoples, and the Politics of Dispossession in Denendeh.” In Theorizing Native Studies, ed. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, 56–98. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Cueva, Agustín. 1973. El proceso de dominación política en Ecuador. Quito: Crítica. ———. 1926. “La Liga de las Naciones Americanas y el problema de las razas,” In Congreso Pan-­ Americano Conmemorativo del de Bolívar 1826–1926, 391–399. Panama: Imprenta Nacional. Dávalos, Pablo. 2001. “Grupos financieros y crisis en el Ecuador.” América Latina en movimiento 338: 8–10. De la Torre Friere, Francisco José. 2000. “El carácter especulativo del capital financiero en el Ecuador. Periodo: 1980–1999.” Disertación de Grado, Universidad Católica. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Devlin, Robert. 1989. Debt and Crisis in Latin America: The Supply Side of the Story. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Devlin, Robert, and Ricardo Ffrench-­Davis. 1995. “The Great Latin American Debt Crisis: A Decade of Asymmetric Adjustment.” Revista de economía política 15, no. 3 (59): 117–142. Donham, Donald L. 2011. Violence in a Time of Liberation: Murder and Ethnicity at a South African Goldmine, 1994. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Droin, G. 2005. “Endemic Goiter and Cretinism in Alps: Evolution of Science and Treatments, Transformations of the Pathology and Its Representations.” International Journal of Anthropology 20 (3–4): 307–324. Dudley, Kathryn Marie. 1994. The End of the Line: Lost Jobs, New Lives in Postindustrial America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Eiseley, Loren. 1969. The Unexpected Universe. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. Epstein, Gerald A. and Pierre Habbard. 2013. “Speculation and Sovereign Debt: An Insidious Interaction.” In The Handbook of the Political Economy of Financial Crises, ed. Martin H. Wolfson and Gerald A. Epstein, 326–356. New York: Oxford University Press. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. Berkeley: University of California Press. Federici, Silvia. 2014. Caliban and The Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Feher, Michel. 2009. “Self-­Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital.” Public Culture 21 (1): 21–41. Fischer, Stanley. 2000. “Ecuador and the IMF.” Address to the Hoover Institution conference on Currency Unions, May 19. https://​www​.imf​.org​/en​/News​/Articles​/2015​/09​/28​/04​/53​ /sp051900.

300 References Flachier, Jorge. 1973. Psicodiagnostico de la pintura. Quito: s.n. Forgacs, David, ed. 2000. The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916–1935. New York: New York University Press. Forrester, Viviane. 1999. The Economic Horror. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Foucault, Michel. 2009: Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977– 1978, trans. Graham Burchell. London: Picador. ———. 1978. The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage. Franklin, Albert B. 1943. Ecuador: Portrait of a People. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, and Company. Garcés, Victor Gabriel. 1932. Condiciones psíquico-­sociales del indio en la provincia de Imbabura: el indio, factor de nuestra nacionalidad. Quito: Anales de la Universidad Central. Gibson-­Graham, J. K. 1996. The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It). Oxford: Blackwell. Goody, Jack. 1993. The Culture of Flowers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gowan, Peter. 1999. The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Domination. New York: Verso. Guerrero, Andrés. 2003. “The Administration of Dominated Populations Under a Regime of Customary Citizenship: The Case of Postcolonial Ecuador.” In After Spanish Rule: Post-­ Colonial Predicaments of the Americas, ed. Mark Thurner and Andrés Guerrero, 272–309. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 1997. “The Construction of a Ventriloquist’s Image: Liberal Discourse and the ‘Miserable Indian Race’ in Late 19th-­Century Ecuador.” Journal of Latin American Studies 29 (3): 555–590. ———. 1994. Los oligarcas de cacao: ensayo sobre la acumulación originaria: hacendados, cacoteros, banqueros, exportadoras y comerciantes de Guayaquil (1890–1910). Quito: Editorial El Conejo. ———. 1991. La semántica de la dominación: El concertaje de indios. Quito: Ediciones Libri Mundi. ———. 1975. La hacienda precapitalista y la clase terrateniente. Quito: Universidad Central. Guha, Ranajit. 1988. “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India.” In Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 37–43. Delhi: Oxford University Press. Gwynne, S. C. 1986. Selling Money. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Hall, Stuart, Dorren Massey, and Michael Rustin. 2013. After Neoliberalism: Analysing the Present (The Kilburn Manifesto). http://​www​.lwbooks​.co​.uk​/journals​/soundings​/manifesto​.html Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harvey, David. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Heinze, Andrew R. 2003. “Schizophrenia Americana: Aliens, Alienists and the ‘Personality Shift’ of Twentieth-­Century Culture.” American Quarterly 55 (2): 227–256. Hernández, Iván, Nathalie Cely, Francisco González, Ernesto Muñoz, and Iván Prieto. 2010. The Discovery of New Export Products in Ecuador. IDB Working Paper Series No. IDB-­WP-­165. Inter-­American Development Bank. https://​issuu​.com​/idb​_publications​/docs​/working​_en​ _6525​/61

References 301 Herrera Román, Néstor Enrique. 2012. “La crisis financiera de 1998–99 y el relevo de los grupos financieros en el Ecuador.” Tesis de Grado, FLACSO. Ho, Karen. 2009. Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ibarra, Hernán. 1992. Indios y cholos: orígenes de la clase trabajadora ecuatoriana. Quito: Editorial El Conejo. INEC (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Censos). 2001.Censo de población: provincia de Pichincha, VI. Quito: INEC. Jacome H., Luis I. 2004. The Late 1990s Financial Crisis in Ecuador: Institutional Weaknesses, Fiscal Rigidities, and Financial Dollarization at Work. IMF Working Paper. Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund. Jácome M., Rodrigo. 1944. “Cultura indígena.” El Día, September 24, 3. Jameson, Fredric. 1997. “Culture and Finance Capital.” Critical Inquiry 24 (1): 246–265. Jaramillo Alvarado, Pio. 1997 [1922]. El indio ecuatoriano: contribución al estudio de la sociología indoamericana. Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional. ———. 1993. “Situación política, económica y jurídica del indio en el Ecuador.” In Indianistas, indianofilos, indigenistas. Entre el enigma y la fascinación: una antología de textos sobe el “problema” indígena, ed. Jorge Trujillo, 453–493. Quito: Ediciones Abya-­Yala. Joyce, Joseph P. 2013. The IMF and Global Financial Crises: Phoenix Rising? Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Kauanui, J. Kehaulani (Kanaka Maoli), and Patrick Wolfe. 2012. “Settler Colonialism Then and Now.” Politica & Societa 2: 235–258. Kincaid, Jamaica. 1999. My Garden (Book). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Korovkin, Tanya. 2003. “Cut-­Flower Exports, Female Labor, and Community Participation in Highland Ecuador.” Latin American Perspectives 30 (4): 18–42. ———. 1997. “Taming Capitalism: The Evolution of the Indigenous Peasant Economy in Northern Ecuador.” Latin American Research Review 32 (3): 89–110. Koselleck, Reinhardt. 2002. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Presner, Kertin Behke, and Jobst Welge. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Krupa, Christopher. 2015. “Cadastral Politics: Property Wars and State Realism in Highland Ecuador.” In State Theory and Andean Politics: New Approaches to the Study of Rule, ed. Christopher Krupa and David Nugent, 99–125. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2013. “Neoliberal Reckoning: Ecuador’s Truth Commission and the Mythopoetics of Political Violence.” In Neoliberalism, Interrupted: Social Change and Contested Governance in Latin America, ed. Mark Goodale and Nancy Postero, 169–194. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2011. “Mestizo Mainstream: Reaffirmations of Natural Citizenship in Ecuador.” In Subalternity and Difference: Investigations from the North and the South, ed. Gyandendra Pandey, 149–166. New York: Routledge. ———. 2010. “State by Proxy: Privatized Government in the Andes.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52 (2): 319–350. ———. 2009. “Histories in Red: Ways of Seeing Lynching in Ecuador.” American Ethnologist 36 (1): 20–39. Lara Flores, Sara. 2001. “Análisis del mercado de trabajo rural en México en un contexto de flexibilización.” In ¿Una nueva ruralidad en América Latina? ed. Norma Giarracca, 363–382. Buenos Aires: CLACSO.

302 References Lara Flores, Sara, and Ofelia Becerril Quintana. 1995. “Reestructuración productiva y mercado trabajo rural: el caso de la floricultura de exportación en el estado de México.” In Globalización, deterio ambiental y reorganización social en el campo, ed. Hubert Carton Grammont, 59–77. México City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Lavater, Johann Caspar. 1862. Essays on Physiognomy: Designed to Promote the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind, trans. Thomas Holcroft. 12th ed. London: William Tegg. Lemov, Rebecca. 2015. Database of Dreams: The Lost Quest to Catalog Humanity. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. LiPuma, Edward, and Benjamin Lee. 2004. Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lucero, José Antonio. 2003. “Locating the ‘Indian Problem’: Community, Nationality, and Contradiction in Ecuadorian Indigenous Politics.” Latin American Perspectives 30 (1): 23–48. Lussier, Kara. 2018. “Temperamental Workers: Psychology, Business, and the Humm-­Wadsworth Temperament Scale in Interwar America.” History of Psychology 21 (2): 79–99. Luxemburg, Rosa. 2003 [1913]. The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to an Economic Explanation of Imperialism. London: Taylor & Francis. Lyotard, Jean-­Francois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Theory and History of Literature). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Machover, Karen. 1949. Personality Projection in the Drawing of the Human Figure (A Method of Personality Investigation). Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas. Maharaj, Niala, and Gaston Dorren. 1995. The Game of the Rose: The Third World in the Global Flower Trade. Amsterdam: Institute for Development Research. Malo, Simon E. 1999. El Zamorano: Meeting the Challenge of Tropical America. New York: Simbad Books. Mandel, Ernest. 1975. Late Capitalism. London: Verso. Marazzi, Christian. 2010. “The Violence of Financial Capitalism.” In Crisis in the Global Economy: Financial Markets, Social Struggles, and New Political Scenarios, ed. Andrea Fumagalli and Sandro Mezzadra, trans. Jason Francis McGimsey, 17–60. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books. ———. 1973. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus. London: Penguin Books. McCarthy, Christine. 2005. “Toward a Definition of Interiority.” Space and Culture 8 (2): 112–125. Meier, V. 1999. “Cut Flower Production in Colombia: A Major Development Success Story for Women?” Environment and Planning 31: 273–289. Mena, Norma. 1999. Impacto de la floricultura en los campesinos de Cayambe. Quito: IEDECA. Merke, F. (Franz). 1984. History and Iconography of Endemic Goiter. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mezzadra, Sandro. 2010. “Introduction.” In Crisis in the Global Economy: Financial Markets, Social Struggles, and New Political Scenarios, ed. Andrea Fumagalli and Sandro Mezzadra, trans. Jason Francis McGimsey, 7–16. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Miño Grijalva, Wilson. 2008. Breve historia bancaria del Ecuador. Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional. Mitchell, Lawrence E. 2007. The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed over Industry. San Francisco: Berrett-­Koehler Publishers.

References 303 Mohum, Simon. 1991. “Labour Process.” In A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore, 297–301. 2nd ed. London: Blackwell. Montiel, Peter J. 2014. Ten Crises. New York: Routledge. Montúfar, César. 2000. La reconstrucción neoliberal: Febres Cordero o la estatización del neoliberalismo en al Ecuador 1984–1988. Quito: Edicones Abya-­Yala. Moraña, Mabel, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos Jáuregui. 2008. Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Moreiras, Alberto. 2000. “Ten Notes on Primitive Imperial Accumulation: Ginés de Sepúlveda, Las Casas, Fernández de Oviedo.” Interventions 2 (3): 343–363. Münsterberg, Hugo. 1913. Psychology and Industrial Efficiency. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Nazmi, Nader. 2001. “Failed Reforms and Economic Collapse in Ecuador.” Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance 41: 727–735. Nicholson, Ian A. M. 2003. Inventing Personality: Gordon Allport and the Science of Selfhood. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association. Ochoa Antich, Nancy. 1987. La mujer en el pensamiento liberal. Quito: Editorial El Conejo. O’Connor, Erin. 2007. Gender, Indian, Nation: The Contradictions of Making Ecuador, 1830– 1925. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Ohnuki-­Tierney, Emiko. 2015. Flowers That Kill: Communicative Opacity in Political Spaces. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ong, Aihwa. 1987. Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press. Oweiss, Ibrahim M. 1974. “Petrodollars: Problems and Prospects.” Address before the Conference on the World Monetary Crisis Arden House, Harriman Campus, Columbia University, March 1–3, 1974. https://​wikispooks​.com​/wiki​/Petrodollar​/Recycling Pacheco Toro, Santiago. 2001. “Mercado mundial de flores ecuatorianas.” El Agro 60 (May): 22–23. Pallares, Amalia. 2002. From Peasant Struggles to Indian Resistance: The Ecuadorian Andes in the Late Twentieth Century. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Pandey, Gyanendra. 2011. “Introduction: The Difference of Subalternity.” In Subalternity and Difference: Investigations from the North and the South, ed. Gyanendra Pandey, 1–19. London: Routledge. Panitch, Leo, and Sam Gindin. 2005. “Finance and American Empire.” Socialist Register 41: 46–81. Peek, Peter. 1982. “Agrarian Change and Labour Migration in the Sierra of Ecuador.” In State Policies and Migration: Studies in Latin America and the Caribbean, ed. Peter Peek and Guy Standing, 121–145. London: Croom Helm. Peet, Richard. 2003. Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank, and WTO. London: Zed Books. Perelman, Michael. 2000. The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Peterson, Kristen. 2014. Speculative Markets: Drug Circuits and Derivative Life in Nigeria. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pinker, Steven. 1997. How the Mind Works. New York: Norton. ———. 2012. “Why Do We Love Flowers?” In Not a Rose, ed. Heide Hatry, 94. Milan: Edizioni Charta. Pollan, Michael. 2001. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World. New York: Random House.

304 References Poole, Deborah. 1997. Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Portuondo, Juan. 2010. La figura humana: test proyectivo de Karen Machover. Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva. Pratt, Mary-­Louise. 1986. “Fieldwork in Common Places.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 27–50. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pribilsky, Jason. 2012. “Consumption Dilemmas: Tracking Masculinity, Money and Transnational Fatherhood Between the Ecuadorian Andes and New York City.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 38 (2): 323–343. Prieto, Mercedes. 2015. “The State and Indigenous Women in Ecuador, 1925–1975.” In State Theory and Andean Politics: New Approaches to the Study of Rule, ed. Christopher Krupa and David Nugent, 142–164. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. ———. 2004. Liberalismo y temor: imaginando los sujetos indígenas en el Ecuador postcolonial, 1895–1980. Quito: FLACSO and Abya-­Yala. Prieto, Mercedes, and Carolina Paez. 2017. “El Programa Indigenista Andino: integración— desarrollo, estado y mujeres indígenas.” In El Programa Indigenista Andino 1951–1973: Las Mujeres en los Ensambles Estatales del Desarrollo, ed. Mercedes Prieto, 5–49. Quito: FLACSO. Proyecto Andino de Competitividad. 2001. Diagnóstico de la agrotecnología en Ecuador. Documento de trabajo. La Garita: Instituto Centroamericano de Administración de Empresas. Quispe-­Agnoli, Myriam, and Elena Whistler. 2006. “Official Dollarization and the Banking System in Ecuador and El Salvador.” Economic Review 91 (3): 55–71. Ramón Valarezo, Galo. 2003. “Relaciones interétnicas en la sierra norte: la diversa evolución de Cayambe y Otavalo en el tránsito a la república.” ProcesoS: revista ecuatoriana de historia 19: 24–48. ———. 1993. El regreso de los runas: la potencialidad del proyecto indio en el Ecuador contemporáneo. Quito: Comunidec-­Fundación Interamericana. Rao, Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli. 2014. “Speculation, Now.” In Speculation, Now, ed. Vyjayanthi Venuturupalli Rao with Prem Krishnamurthy and Carin Kuoni, 14–25. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rifkin, Jeremy. 1995. The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-­Market Era. New York: G. P. Putnam. Robinson, William I. 2008. Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rodriguez Torres, Jorge. 1999. “Ratas, rateros, y banqueros.” In Bancos y banqueros: de Urbina Jado a Aspiazu, ed. Jorge Núñez, 93–103. Quito: Editorial El Conejo. Saber, Nasser. 1999. Speculative Capital: The Invisible Hand of Global Finance. London: Pearson. Sachs, Jeffrey, and Harry Huizinga. 1987. “U.S. Commercial Banks and the Developing-­Country Debt Crisis.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2: 555–606. Salvatore, Ricardo D. 2010. “The Postcolonial in Latin America and the Concept of Coloniality: A Historian’s Point of View.” A contracorriente: una revista de historia social y literatura de América Latina 8 (1): 332–348. Saenz, Moíses. 1933. Sobre el indio ecuatoriano y su incorporación al medio nacional. Mexico City: Publicaciones de la Secretaria de Educación Pública. Salamea, Lucia, and William F. Waters. 1995. “La cuestión de género en la reestructuración de la agricultura ecuatoriana.” In Jornaleras temporeras y bóias-­frias: el rostro femenino del

References 305 mercado de trabajo en América Latina, ed. Sara Lara Flores, 35–47. Caracas: UNRISD, Editorial Nueva Sociedad. Salz, Beate R. 1955. The Human Element in Industrialization: A Hypothetical Case Study of Ecuadorean Indians. American Anthropological Association Memoirs No. 85. Chicago: American Anthropological Association. Salzinger, Leslie. 2003. Genders in Production: Making Workers in Mexico’s Global Factories. Berkeley: University of California Press. Santiana, Antonio. 1966. Nuevo panorama ecuatoriano del indio, tomo I. Quito: Editorial Universitaria. ———. 1960. “Los indios de la región andina ecuatoriana y su aspecto físico.” Boletín de informaciones científicas nacionales 92: 164–175. ———. 1941. La distribución pilosa como carácter racial: su modalidad en los indios de Imbabura, Ecuador. Quito: Universidad Central. Sanyal, Kalyan. 2007. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality, & Post-­Colonial Capitalism. New Delhi: Routledge. Sartre, Jean Paul. 2004 [1960]. The Critique of Dialectical Reason: Volume 1. Theory of Practical Ensembles, ed. Jonathan Reé, trans. Alan Sheridan-­Smith. London: Verso. Sawers, Larry. 2005. “Nontraditional or New Traditional Exports: Ecuador’s Flower Boom.” Latin American Research Review 40 (3): 40–66. Schroder, Barbara. 1987. “Ethnic Identity and Non-­Capitalist Relations of Production in Chimborazo, Ecuador.” In Perspectives in U.S. Marxist Anthropology, ed. David Hakken and Hanna Lessinger, 123–139. Boulder, CO: Westview. Sims, Jocelyn, and Jessie Romero. n.d. “Latin American Debt Crisis of the 1980s.” Federal Reserve History. https://​www​.federalreservehistory​.org​/essays​/latin​_american​_debt​_crisis Smith, Adam. 1776. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell. Solimano, Andrés. 2002. “Crisis and Dollarization: An Overview.” In Crisis and Dollarization in Ecuador: Stability, Growth, and Social Equity, ed. Paul Beckerman and Andrés Solimano, 1–16. Washington, D.C.: World Bank. Staheli, Urs. 2013. Spectacular Speculation: Thrills, The Economy, and Popular Discourse, trans. Eric Savoth. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stephenson, Lisa. 2014. Life Beside Itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. Berkeley: University of California Press. Striffler, Steve. 2002. In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900–1995. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Susman, Warren I. 1984. Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century. New York: Pantheon. Taylor, Charles. 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tett, Gillian, 2009. Fool’s Gold: The Inside Story of J. P. Morgan and How Wall Street Greed Corrupted Its Bold Dream and Created a Financial Catastrophe. New York: Free Press. Thomspon, Dennis N. 1990. “Florence Laura Goodenough (1886–1959).” In Women in Psychology: A Bibliographic Sourcebook, ed. Agnes N. O’Connell and Nancy Filipe Russo, 125–133. New York: Greenwood. Thompson, E. P. 1967. “Time, Work-­Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present 38: 56–97.

306 References Thompson, Ginger. 2003. “Behind Roses’ Beauty, Poor and Ill Workers.” New York Times February 13. Thurner, Mark, and Andrés Guerrero. 2003. After Spanish Rule: Postcolonial Predicaments of the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tiffin, Joseph. 1942. Industrial Psychology. New York: Prentice-­Hall. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1982. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper Colophon. Tsing, Anna. 2012. “Empire’s Salvage Heart: Why Diversity Matters in the Global Political Economy.” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 64: 36–50. Ulcuango, Neptali. 2000. “Antecedentes a la Organización Indígena en la Provincia de Pichincha.” In Historia de la Organización Indígena de Pichincha. Quito: Federación Indígena Pichincha Rucacunapac Riccharimui. van Uffelen, Ruud L. M., and Nico S. P. de Groot. 2003. Floriculture World Wide: Production, Trade and Consumption Patterns Show Market Opportunities and Challenges. The Hague: LEI Wagenigen. Varea Terán, Marco, and José Varea Terán, ed. 1974. Nutrición y desarrollo en los andes ecuatorianos. Quito: Investigaciones Medico-­Sociales del Ecuador. Vega, Henry. 2009. “2009 Ecuador Fresh Flower Industry Situation.” Global Agricultural Information Network, GAIN Report Number EC 9006. Quito: USDA Foreign Informational Service. Velastegui Rodriguez, Alberto. 1989. “Diagnostico del sector floricultor y su incidencia en las exportaciones agrícolas de la sierra.” Disertación de Grado, Universidad Católica. Viera Salazar, Jonathan. 2002. “Análisis sectorial y financiero de las actividades más representativas de la agricultura exportable del Ecuador, 1991–2000. Los casos del banano, camarón, café, cacao, flores, piña, brócoli y espárrago.” Disertación de Grado, Universidad Católica. Waters, William. 2000. “El Desarrollo de las agroexportaciones en el Ecuador: la primera respuesta empresarial.” In Antología de estudios rurales, ed. Luciano Martinez, 291–306. Quito: FLACSO. ———. 1997. “The Road of Many Returns: Rural Bases of the Informal Urban Economy in Ecuador.” Latin American Perspectives 24 (3): 50–64. Waters, William, and Frederick H. Buttel. 1987. “Diferenciación sin descapmesinacion: acceso a la tierra y persistencia del campesinado andino ecuatoriano.” Estudios rurales latinoamericanos 10 (3): 355–381. Wehner, Ross. 2003a. “Deflowering Ecuador: The Bloom Is Off the Rose in the Cayambe Valley, Homeland of Your Valentine Bouquet.” Mother Jones 28 (1): 24–27. ———. 2003b. “Valentine’s Day, and All Is Not Rosy: Ecuadorian Flower Workers’ Health Failing from Regular Use of Pesticides on Roses for U.S.” San Francisco Chronicle February 13, A2. Welch, Henry J., and George H. Mills. 1932. Industrial Psychology in Practice. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons. Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolf, Eric R., and Sidney W. Mintz. 1957. “Haciendas and Plantations in Middle America and the Antilles.” Social and Economic Studies 6 (3): 380–412. Wong, Yvonne. 2012. Sovereign Finance and the Poverty of Nations: Odious Debt in International Law. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

References 307 Yanez del Pozo, José. 1988. Yo declaro con franqueza (cashnami causashcanchic): memoria oral de Pesillo-­Cayambe. 2nd ed. Quito: Ediciones Abya-­Yala. Yépez Urbano, Daniel Gerardo. 1997. “El diamante de competitividad del sector florícola ecuatoriano.” Disertación de Grado, Universidad Católica. Zaloom, Caitlin. 2006. Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Zambrano Pasquel, Alfonso. 1990. Ran Gazit: La sombra tras el poder. Guayaquil: EDINO.

INDEX

adaptation: and Indigenous subjectivity, 214–215, 221, 230–233, 236, 245, 247; to industrial labor, 180, 183, 187, 210, 252, 255 agrarian reforms, 14–15, 36, 37, 67, 69, 93, 95, 156–161, 164, 217, 232–233, 247, 295n1 agriculture, 9, 11, 13, 34, 36, 90, 93, 270–271: changing social function of, 35–36, 40, 46, 58, 66, 96; flower growers’ training in, 38, 41–43, 45, 57, 63, 83, 89–90, 113, 169, 178; peasant, 11, 114, 122, 127, 177, 247, 252, 255, 257, 270, 273, 278, 285–286. See also National Society of Agriculture agro-industrialism, 9, 45, 59, 247–248, 268, 270 aptitude, 185–186, 193,193–194, 235, 246. See also personnel selection tests Banco del Pacifico, 38, 62, 63, 65, 67, 73, 84, 85 banking system, Ecuador: collapse, 83–95, 292n6, 292n7; growth during debt crisis, 53–55, 62, 66, 79, 81; lending to flower growers, 18, 24, 25, 42, 44–45, 59, 62–74, 83–84, 87–95, 99, 103, 113, 169; links with global finance, 53, 56, 59–61, 65, 76, 96; speculative practices of, 75–78, 86: with “two floors,” 59–62. See also National Financing Corporation (CAF) banking system, international, 8, 47, 97; credit peddling to Global South, 30, 48–52, 76, 291n1, 291n2 body: capitalist investment in 108–110, 153, 183, 198, 204; capitalist system as, 172–177, 198; as expression of interiority,

176–177, 190, 193–195, 197, 206, 213, 220–221; in labor process 249–250, 252, 260–261, 264–265, 268; and racial sciences, 223–224, 229, 232, 235. See also human figure test Bonifaz, Emilio, 37, 217–219, 227–233, 294n6 Bonifaz, Neptalí, 37–41, 43, 58, 62, 69, 71, 91–95, 96, 117–120 Borja, Rodrigo, 70, 74 Butler, Judith, 281, 283 capitalism: and biopower, 108–110; conversational, 151–155; ethnography of, 17–19, 27; expansionary practices of, 27, 141, 150, 155, 161, 162, 168, 169, 174–176, 178, 180, 210–212, 215–216, 234–236, 244, 252, 271, 286; as gift economy, 100, 120, 121, 139, 148, 150, 153–154; global restructuring of 3–5, 9, 27–34, 40, 52, 82, 96–98, 243; as organism, 172–177, 198; postcolonial, 16, 19, 162–164, 287–288; as solution to racial injustice, 14, 15, 43, 125, 129–132, 137–138, 153, 233, 245, 257, 289, 295n1; and subjectification, 192, 281–283. See also finance; primitive accumulation capitalist morality, 76–81, 83, 105, 117, 120, 132, 287. See also speculation Cayambe, 1, 12, 13, 17, 36, 44, 105, 115–116, 119, 136, 155, 156, 168, 170, 208–209, 212, 244, 246, 253, 256, 268, 273, 274, 277, 291n3, 292n5; agricultural conditions, 23–24, 45, 71, 156; municipal government, 20, 92, 148, 150, 153 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 140, 160 Citibank, 41, 42, 48, 50, 76, 291n 1, 291n2 Colombia, 3, 23, 42, 43, 69

310 Index coloniality, 8, 13, 14, 19, 35, 124, 130, 135, 162–163, 215, 219, 220, 222, 223, 288–293n1, 296n1, concertaje, 14, 126–129, 130, 134, 153, 219, 232, 292n5, 295n1 conocido, 44, 46, 64, 68, 92, 168 contratistas (contract workers), 274–275 Corporación Andina de Fomento (CAF), 60, 65, 66 credit: boom in Ecuador, 25–26, 30–31, 46, 52, 54–55, 65–66, 72, 79, 80, 87, 89, 92, 96, 291n2; to flower industry, 5, 24, 44, 47, 57–58, 62–70, 71–72, 74–75, 81, 83–85, 86, 88, 92–96, 98, 103, 104, 117; global peddling of, 34, 48–49, 51, 59, 61, 96–97, 169; infrastructure in Ecuador, 56, 59–61, 75–80, 85–87. See also banks; debt; finance; National Financing Corporation (CFN) crisis: Ecuador (1999–2000), 67, 83–99, 103–105, 140, 149, 292n1; financial (2008–2009), 31–32; of global capitalism (1970s–1980s), 27–29, 31. See also debt crisis Cueva, Agustín, 125 Currency: demand for dollars in Ecuador, 26, 58–59, 62, 149–150; devaluations, 51, 74–75, 76–77, 81–82, 85–88, 95, 97–99, 103–104. See also speculation Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 6–7 Dávalos, Mauricio, 11, 41–44, 45, 57–58, 66, 69, 87, 115–116, 120–122 debt (sovereign), 5, 34, 47–51, 53–55, 59, 65–66, 75–76, 80, 86–87, 96–97. See also credit debt bondage: See concertaje debt crisis, 5, 18, 30, 47–54, 56, 58, 79 degeneration (as marker of indigeneity), 129, 223–224, 226–227, 229, 232, 287 desire: postcolonial, 13–14, 170; and interiority, 183, 190, 193, 211, 226, 234, 236, 294n6 discipline: on flower plantations, 208, 247–248, 250–252, 253–255, 261–263, 265–267, 270–272, 276–285; industrial labor, 108–110, 122–123 dispossession, 7, 123–124, 150, 153, 161– 164, 174, 225, 232–233, 287–288, 293n8 dollarization, 85–87, 95, 99–100, 292n6

economic equivalence, 78–79, 207 education. See schooling efficiency, 27, 30, 99–100, 104–105, 122, 180–182, 184, 186, 188, 201, 242, 257 expertise, 9, 15, 83, 168, 169, 178, 179, 214, 216, 224, 227, 233, 293n1 exports: as focus of neoliberal economic policy, 3, 4, 5, 10–11, 15, 26, 29, 51, 52, 54, 57–59, 60–61, 66, 72, 80, 83, 96; “nontraditional,” 3, 40, 74, 103 export-led development (ELD), 3, 51 exteriority, 175, 176, 178, 193, 208, 210, 211, 215, 220–221, 225–226, 234, 244, 288 Febres Cordero, León, 26, 38, 39, 42, 62, 70, 74, 76, 77 Feudalism, 129, 133, 135, 136, 137 finance capital, 5, 30–34, 48–53, 56, 60–62, 65–66, 72, 76, 78–81, 86, 95–98, 243. See also banks; credit; debt; speculation flowers: eating, 9–11; growing, technical aspects 15, 23–24, 40, 71, 96, 104, 140, 164, 246, 248–250, 254, 258–259, 261, 265, 293n1, 295n2; meaning, 3–4, 5–8, 10, 35, 96, 152, 268, 270–273, 278 flower industry, Ecuador: image, 12–13, 15, 115–117, 164, 169; preconditions for, 26, 29, 30, 34–36, 57–58, 156–159, 161; production costs, 57, 63, 69, 71, 73, 74, 82, 87, 96, 90–91, 94, 96, 99–100, 164, 207, 256, 291n1; protests against, 140, 147–157; sales, 2, 39, 61, 72–74, 253, 265–267, 276; statistics (Cayambe), 291n3, 292n5 flower growers, 18, 24–25, 26, 58, 62–65, 66, 69, 70, 71, 84, 87–94, 97, 120, 122–123, 125, 138, 184, 233, 267, 282; class profile, 44–45, 64, 68, 83; pioneers, 37–46, 57, 91–95, 113, 115–119; response to crisis, 87, 88–89, 90, 92, 95, 98–100, 103–104 Fordism, 28, 97–98, 184, 212, 235, 236, 243–244. See also Taylorism Garcés, Victor Gabriel, 221–226, 236, 294n6 Global Multi-Sectoral Credit Program (PGCM), 60–63, 65, 74, 75 goiter, 223, 227, 229–232 Goodenough, Florence, 189, 229–230 Goody, Jack, 4, 6–7, 11, 272, 273, 278 Guachalá (hacienda), 37, 42, 94, 113, 117–118, 130, 156, 217–219, 294n1

Index 311 Guerrero, Andrés, 13, 14, 124, 125, 126, 127–130, 219 Guha, Ranajit: 141 hacer patria, 13, 80 hacienda system, 34–35, 57, 111, 112, 244, 252, 295n1; in Cayambe, 36, 114, 156–157, 291n2; as colonial anachronism, 13–14, 16, 130, 135–136, 225, 232; and hacendados, 35–37, 39, 40, 45, 67–70, 71, 88, 89, 92, 117–119, 126, 130–133, 142, 156, 217–219, 227–228, 292n2, 296n1; legacy of, 15, 26, 38, 40, 43, 71, 95, 105, 117–122, 156, 169, 175, 212, 215–216, 225, 245, 247; memories of, 142–148, 150, 154, 157–158; and race, 14, 124–129, 131–132, 133–138, 163, 215–216, 219, 225, 232, 288, 292n5; regulation of, 14, 125, 127–129, 131–132, 133–138 , 224, 233 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri, 28, 167, 173, 175–176, 234 Harvey, David, 28, 173, 293n8 health and illness, 12, 114–116, 120–121, 144, 251–252, 163. See also goiter historical failure, 141–142, 148, 154–161 historicity, 16, 29, 57, 73, 80, 100, 104–112, 118, 121–123, 124, 135, 140–142, 148, 153–163, 175, 176, 209, 222, 224, 269–271, 286, 288, 295n1 human capital, 239–241, 243 human figure test, 177, 189–190, 192–215, 220, 229–230, 234, 270, 278, 280, 293n3 humanitarianism, 12, 15, 105, 120, 139, 242. See also salvation improvement, 12–13, 43, 106, 114–123, 128, 129, 132, 134, 141, 216, 222, 224, 226, 232–233, 235, 288; self-improvement, 105, 244, 236, 240–241, 244, 245, 277, 281–282, 285 “Indian problem,” 13–14, 133, 135, 138, 232 indigenismo, 132–135, 221, 224–225, 294n7 Indigenous communities, 9, 12, 14, 15, 17, 19–20, 29, 43, 111, 114, 117–119, 122, 131, 140, 148–150, 152–154, 155–160, 170–171, 211, 229, 232, 244–245, 247, 268, 273, 274, 279–280, 285–286, 291n2, 291n3, 294n6, 294n7, 295n8

indio (archetype), 14, 16, 124, 126–129, 131–135, 138, 163–164, 215–216, 217–219, 221–232, 235–236, 287–288, 292n4, 292n5, 293n7, 294n6 industrial psychology. See psychology inflation, 50, 75, 77, 85, 151 Inter-American Development Bank, 60 interiority: capitalist, 46, 172–177, 178, 211, 215, 245; psychic, 132, 176, 183, 184, 188, 190–191, 193–194, 198, 204, 208–209, 211–215, 216, 217, 219–222, 224–226, 233–234, 245, 278 interiorization, 175, 176, 215, 244 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 48, 50–51, 52, 54, 85, 292n6 Israel, 38, 39, 40, 43, 62, 69, 89, 91 Jaramillo Alvarado, Pio 133–135, 225, 293n7 Kincaid, Jamaica, 5–8, 11 Koselleck, Reinhardt, 108, 159–160 labor: class formation of, 106–108, 109, 175, 178, 180–181, 183, 184, 186, 212, 235, 243–244, 281, 283; feminized, 267–273; in flower industry (general), 15, 29–30, 82, 100, 104–105, 174–175, 200, 201, 207; freedom of, 16, 127–128, 133–134, 138, 219; global restructuring of, 28–30, 33, 82, 97, 267, 287–288; and Indigenous people, 14, 17, 118, 120–123, 127–129, 133–134, 138, 153–154, 157, 162–164, 175, 211–212, 217–218, 240, 244–245, 248, 269–271, 274, 278, 282, 285, 289, 295n1; optimization of, 104, 108, 109, 141, 242, 248; and rural transformation, 12, 39, 43, 80, 105, 120, 150, 153, 161, 208, 240–241, 275, 277, 278, 280, 285, 288; subsumption of, 252; theory of value, 81–82, 243. See also discipline; primitive accumulation labor process: in flower industry, 204, 206, 244, 246–267; as transformative, 241–242, 246 land: disparity, 36, 133, 135, 162, 230, 232; under flower production, 17, 26, 39, 42, 44, 45, 63, 64, 67–72, 80, 88, 89, 92, 100, 140, 164, 233, 291n3; as idiom of historicity, 122, 145–146, 158–159; and Indigenous psyche, 133, 135, 225, 232, 247, 294n6; mortgaging, 44, 68,

312 Index land (continued) 71, 89; seizures by banks, 88, 90, 92, 94, 113; struggles over, 37, 40, 70, 147–150, 152–154, 155–159; values, 36, 43, 67, 69–72, 90, 292n5. See also agrarian reform; dispossession Liberal Revolution, 16, 124, 128, 129 liberalism, 13, 14, 37, 107, 125, 128–131, 133, 137, 215, 223 Machover, Karen, 189–190, 192, 193, 195–197, 199, 203, 205, 213, 230. See also human figure test management: of emotions, 188, 198–199; principles of, 175–176, 178, 184, 186, 198, 199, 208, 210, 235, 242, 244–245, 248, 252, 257, 262, 265, 269, 271–274; professionals on flower plantations, 13, 15, 23, 42, 63, 103–105, 110–115, 139, 164, 168, 168, 179, 192, 203, 205, 208, 241, 244–247, 251, 266–267, 286–287, 276–279, 281, 282–283, 285, 293n2, 295n1; scientific, 181–183 Marx, Karl, 15, 81, 82, 99, 106, 121, 123, 140, 160, 162, 164, 176, 241, 242, 246, 252 Münsterburg, Hugo, 180–183, 185, 188, 212 National Financing Corporation (CFN), 56–62, 65, 66, 70, 74, 87, 292n7. See also Global Multi-Sectoral Credit Program (PGCM) National Society of Agriculture (SNA), 130–132 nontraditional exports, 3, 4, 5, 40, 57, 59, 72, 74, 96, 103 oil, 47–49, 53, 57, 85, 200, 253 personality, 182, 187 192, 222, 225, 234, 245, 247; personality tests, 179, 186, 188, 189–190, 193–194, 197–200, 201, 203–205, 208, 211, 215, 219–221, 230, 294n5. See also human figure tests personnel selection tests, 185–189, 200, 207 petrodollars, 48–49 physiognomy, 219–221, 226, 234, 294n4, 294n5 postcolonial, 19, 124, 126, 219; capitalism, 15–16, 19, 162–163, 233, 244, 287–289; Cayambe, 36; citizenship, 13, 124; desire,

13; indigeneity, 128–129, 163–164, 215, 222, 236, 244 potentiality, 16, 43, 68, 108, 109, 182, 233, 236, 239, 241–242, 243–245, 278, 281, 284 Prieto, Mercedes, 126, 128, 129, 221, 224, 225, 292n5, 292n6, 294n7 primitive accumulation, 15–16, 28–29, 33, 43, 46, 106, 122–123, 160–161, 162, 172, 176, 234, 252, 293n8; and indigeneity, 161–165; as narrative form, 105–110, 112, 120–121, 123–124, 138, 140–141, 154, 155, 174, 209, 286; postcolonial, 16, 124, 163, 287–288 profit: of finance capital, 31, 32, 47, 50–51, 52, 63, 75–79, 86, 88, 243; of flower growers, 2, 13, 23, 29–30, 39, 40, 56, 66–67, 71, 72–75, 80–82, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95, 96–97, 99, 100, 103–105, 119, 175, 206, 212, 240, 250, 262, 263; Marx on, 82, 99 projection, 176–177, 188–189, 192–193, 195–199, 206–207, 213; projective realism, 196. See also interiority; personality projective tests, 179, 188–213, 230, 234, 280. See also human figure test psychological individual, 181, 184, 206, 211–212 psychology: clinical, 189, 190; experimental, 181–182, 183, 234; Indigenous, 126, 133, 218, 219, 222, 224–225, 230; industrial, 179–186, 188–189, 192–194, 200, 205, 210, 212, 214, 220, 221, 230, 233, 235, 239, 268–269, 280 psychotechnics, 182, 185, 189, 197, 211, 233 race: Ecuadorian theories of, 13–16, 125, 128–129, 216, 219, 223, 227, 235, 242, 270; links with economy, 44, 123, 125– 128, 132, 133–135, 137, 162–163, 188, 212, 217, 244, 257, 288, 295n1; sciences in Ecuador, 221–227, 229–233, 234–235; and scientific racism, 13, 220 redemption, 3, 4, 16, 39, 133, 287, 289 retrospective teleology, 16, 105, 107, 112, 140, 141, 143, 154, 209. See also primitive accumulation Robinson, William, 3, 29, 30, 40 rurality: as personality type, 180, 212–216, 229–230, 244–246, 247, 252, 270, 273, 275, 278, 280–281, 285; as racialized space, 14, 15, 19, 118, 124, 132, 133, 169, 212,

Index 313 215–216, 226, 230–232, 246–247, 251, 257, 269, 288, 271, 274, 285, 288; as zone of intervention, 11–13, 15, 16, 19, 35, 39, 43, 45, 111, 114, 117, 122, 124, 127, 131–132, 168, 169, 170, 184, 209, 212, 216, 222, 226–227, 233, 235, 244–245, 285–286 salvation, 3, 15, 43, 120–121, 124–125, 127–129, 134, 138, 140, 152–154, 157, 161, 164, 169, 175, 178, 212, 222, 225, 245, 288, 289 Santiana, Antonio, 224, 226–227 schooling, 12, 108, 112, 113, 114–116, 120– 122, 131, 147, 171, 172, 192, 269–270, 281, 282–284, 296n1 Sieck, Claymore, 39–40 slavery, 14, 16, 107, 127–128, 133 sloth (war on), 107–109, 112 speculation: critiques of, 32, 51, 76–80, 83; as a distinct form of capitalism, 4, 31–33, 51, 243; financial, 32–34, 54, 56, 66, 75–76, 78–80, 85–87, 98; flowers and,

4, 8; by flower growers, 5, 71–72, 74–75, 80–81, 97–98, 104; popular forms of, 76–78 subsumption. See labor surveillance (of labor). See discipline sympathy, 117–120, 127, 134, 215, 223, 248, 288 syndicated lending, 48 Tabacundo, 24, 41–43, 113, 115, 119, 120, 122 Taylorism, 29, 181–183, 234, 235 tercerización, 207, 256–257 totality, 173–174, 176–177, 182, 197, 198, 204, 206, 226, 230, 244 tribute, 13, 124, 162 USAID, 59 World Bank, 8, 52, 60, 65, 66, 85 Zamorano (school), 62, 63, 113

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book starts with a story of debt—debt as a mode of imperial aggression, financial extraction, global dependency, and voracious capitalist expansion. Behind this book lie other sorts of debts, ones premised on the debt of blood and flesh anthropology owes the colonized world, which also, alongside that (I like to imagine), have managed to generate the kind that structure long-­term social bonds, enduring interpersonal commitments, political solidarities, vital bidirectional intellectual exchanges, and shared ethical investments. I am thinking primarily of the debts I maintain with that ever-­growing number of people, families, communities, organizations, political federations, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in highland Ecuador with whom I have lived, planted fields, harvested crops, eaten meals, attended meetings, talked and listened and argued, forged kin relations, occupied roads and buildings, dug irrigation trenches, danced, drank, celebrated, mourned, and cried with since first ending up in the Indigenous highlands of Cayambe in 1995. The bulk of my gratitude goes to the two families who have allowed me to live in their homes for years on end and who leave their doors open for my regular returns. In Carrera, this means Gerónimo Lanchimba and Rosa Pilca and their extended family of Segundo, Rosario, Diego, Jhon, Elvia, and Iván. In Eugenio Espejo de Cajas, this means Mesias Bautista and Isabél Perugachi and their children Edwin, Nancy, Nellie, and Wilington. There are hundreds of people throughout the broader Cayambe region who I owe much to, but I want to give special focus to a cadre of intellectual-­activists who, slowly and patently, taught me much of what I know about the groundwork of Indigenous politics in this region. At the top of this list are Ricardo Ulcuango, Gerardo Villalba, Silvia and Olga Tutillo, Cesar Pilataxi, and Fernando Farinango, as well as the organizations COINCCA, Pueblo Kayambi, Pachakutik Cayambe, and the Junta de Aguas Guangulquí-­Porotoq. I would also include in this list the leaders of Cayambe’s municipal council who let me constantly

316 Acknowledgments

poke my nose into their business during the riotous first years of my fieldwork, especially mayor Diego Bonifaz and councilors Pedro Lanchimba and Juliana Ulcuango, as well as Norma Mena, Iván Cisneros, Osvaldo Sánchez, and Mauricio Cisneros of IEDECA for letting me do the same with them. I would also like to thank the Centro de Estudios y Asesoría en Salud and the Juventud Obrero Cristiano for letting me tag along during their investigations in Cayambe, and for the friendships these accompaniments forged with Jaime Breilh, Doris Sanchez, Arturo Campaña, and Francisco Hidalgo. When, in 2001, I started the fifteen-­plus year research project that led to this book, I had no intention of studying the plantation economy from the inside. The plantations’ effects on the world around them were so dramatic that it seemed possible to do a study of export expansionism entirely from the perspective of the world being overtaken by it. Besides, everybody told me I’d never get inside a plantation anyway unless I was working for one (and who would mistake my intentions for that)—none of the NGO workers or local researchers or foreign academics I knew to be working on issues related to the flower economy in Cayambe, at the time, had ever actually set foot inside a plantation. This book, which gives central focus to the inner workings of a plantation-­based capitalist system and the people guiding it, was only possible because those initial assessments proved incorrect. Defying expectations, many business owners, managers, and professional workers allowed me into their world, and I regret not being able to thank each of them personally, having given pseudonyms to several of the main plantations and spokespeople of the flower industry I refer to in this book. Those I can name and thank are Neptalí Bonifaz, Claire Nicklin, Andrew Reitz, Ramiro Peñaherrera, Peter Fenichell, Erwin Pasmiño, Darwin Campoverde, Mauricio Dávalos, Alex Bustos, Paul Piedra, Carlos Ponce, Ana Luz de Bueno, Fabián Ávila, Hector Cueva, Rodrigo Carillo, Wilfrido Morilla, Julio Hidalgo, Jimena Barragán, and Daniel Yepez. A most special acknowledgment is owed to Serena Bonifaz for her hospitality, generosity, and openness. Most of the financial information about banks and the cut-­flower sector that I draw on in Part I of this book is unpublished and inaccessible to the public. I want to give special credit to the students at Quito’s Universidad Católica, whose excellent theses I mined for data from the 1980s–2000s that I would never have been able to find otherwise. The thinking and writing that went into this book owe a lot to the training I received at the University of California, Davis; the postdoctoral fellowship I

Acknowledgments 317

held at Emory University; and the brilliant and generous colleagues and students I am now surrounded by in Toronto. At Davis, my teachers include Carol A. Smith, Roger Rouse, Donald Donham, Benjamin Orlove, Aram Yengoyan, Miriam Wells, and Neil Larsen. At Emory, I thank Bruce Knauft, David Nugent, Gyanendra Pandey, and Ruby Lal. And in Toronto, I thank especially the colleagues who discussed the material and arguments presented in this book or labored over drafts of its chapters—Gavin Smith (whose encouragement and critique has been integral to this project since before its beginning), Jesook Song, Valentina Napolitana, Andrea Muehlebach, Michael Lambek, Tania Li, Stephen Campbell, and Liisa North—and the many graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who did the same—George Mantzios, Shozab Raza, Hadia Akhtar Khan, Nicholas Abrams, Morganne Blais-­McPherson, and Alejandra Gonzalez Jimenez. A special thanks goes to Gloria Perez, Angus Lyall, and Jessica Torres, who served as research assistants, translation improvers, and number crunchers at various stages of this book’s completion. Chunks of this book were worked over the coals at too many conferences, workshops, and seminars to mention. But special thanks are due to Partha Chatterjee and Eduardo Javier Romero Dianderas for the invitation to examine, in detail, a large section of this book at Columbia University’s South Seminar; to Jim Scott, Jessica Cattelino, and Lauren Baker, for the spirited discussion of material from Parts I and IV circulated for Yale’s Agrarian Studies Colloquium series; to Kim Clark and the faculty and graduate students at Western University for pushing me on notions of psychological interiority and projection following the keynote at their intimate “Confronting Categories” conference; and to Jan-­Otmar Hesse and Patrick Neveling for hosting me through the Global Value Chains in Modern Economic History seminar at the University of Bayreuth. For ongoing intellectual engagement, help locating sources, and shared discussion of writings, I owe unlimited thanks to Mercedes Prieto and Lesley Gill. And my deepest appreciation goes to this book’s first editor, Peter Agree, who encouraged me to bring this book to Penn, and to my final editor, Walter Biggins, for allowing me the freedom to develop the book according to a path he himself did not set in motion. There is a final set of debts to honor here, and for which I am not well equipped to do so with words. These begin with those owed to my father, Melvin, who died during the completion of the book’s first draft; my mother, Deborah; and sister, Hilary, who together were the shelter under which each phase of this project was completed. And to Christina and Oliver, who are

318 Acknowledgments

everything, and whose arrival in my life in many ways mark its beginning. Any good that went into this book and any to derive from it is only because of you.

* * * I wish to acknowledge this land on which the majority of this book was written. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-­ Wendat, the Seneca, and the Mississaugas of the Credit. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island and I am grateful to have the opportunity to work on this land. I also recognize that acknowledgments of stolen land make poor substitutes for restitution or justice and, as I document in this book, have often served the interests of colonial expansion and dispossession.