Panama's Poor
Victims, Agents, and Historymakers
by
Gloria Rudolf
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Examining the impact of global
economic forces on a small rural community in the rugged
mountains of central Panama, Panama’s Poor
illustrates peasant survival strategies and their
cumulative effects on patterns of change throughout Latin
America.
When Gloria Rudolf began visiting Loma Bonita 25 years
ago, most residents lived as poor but relatively
independent subsistence farmers. Today, most are paid
workers who experience greater economic insecurity,
dependence, and inequality than before. Nonetheless,
Rudolf says, they are agents of their own destiny as well
as victims, an argument that challenges the commonly held
view of peasants as passive victims of history. Although
they have not been able to reverse their general course
of poverty, they sometimes have managed to improve their
immediate life circumstances by undertaking small-scale,
undramatic actions in the course of their daily lives.
Over time, the cumulative effects of these actions
occasionally have influenced larger historical
developments—sometimes to their benefit. Throughout,
Rudolf shows how economic and gender differences within
the community play a critical role in determining
people’s choices for action and the course of short-
and long-term change.
In writing that is both lucid and sophisticated, Rudolf
describes the four generations she came to know during
frequent visits to Panama, from elders who were raised as
farmers to their great-grandchildren who live today in
squatter settlements near Panama City--conveying respect
for the complex lives of the poor and a sense of their
successes and failures.
In one of the few existing studies of a non-indigenous
peasant community in Panama, Rudolf sets her work in the
context of national and global political and economic
history. Her 25 years of research in a single community
enable her to trace how people have responded to and
shaped the major events that have characterized Latin
American society during this time: population explosion,
rural-urban migration, colonization of new regions, debt
crisis, U.S. economic and political involvement,
liberation theology and "reformed Catholicism,"
trends in development, the rise of large-scale industrial
agriculture, and structural adjustment policies.
Gloria Rudolf teaches anthropology and development
studies at the School for International Training in
Brattleboro, Vermont. She is the author of articles on
economic development and political and religious
movements in Panama and rural Latin America in journals
including Urban Anthropology and Cultural
Survival Quarterly.
1999. 224pp. 6 X 9.
15 b&w photos, 3 maps, 17 tables, appendix,
bibliography, index.
ISBN 0-8130-1680-0 Cloth, $49.95s
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"One of a very small
number of studies on the history of survival strategies
in peasant communities in Latin America. . . . The
transformations Rudolf has witnessed as they occurred
in the course of the many visits she has made to Loma
Bonita . . . [provide] a window onto the social,
political, and economic dynamics in the community and
their relation to national and global processes."--Hans
C. Buechler, Syracuse University
"An excellent long-term, in-depth study of a rural
community in Panama. It is essential reading for scholars
interested in rural Latin America and the forces which
shape it."--John R. Bort, East Carolina
University
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