Peasants under siege: Political economy of conservation and state control in the Cordillera Central, Dominican Republic

This study documents the historical and material processes that have led to the transformation of peasant lifeways in the highlands of the Cordillera Central mountain range in the Dominican Republic. The traditional peasant survival strategies of the region required free access to natural resources and significant autonomy from the state. These two elements provided the foundation for a time that elderly farmers nostalgically remember as a peasant golden age.; The multiple forms of state intervention that were initiated during the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, including the passage of forestry laws and the formation of protected areas, signaled the end of the golden age. In the years after Trujillo, conservation policies evolved in conjunction with central state development strategies that responded to the interests of international and urban power holders. Along with other forms of state intervention, conservation laws changed the rules governing access to and use of resources, systematically alienated peasants from the factors of production and transferred control over forest resources to powerful stakeholders.; This study rejects Marxist assumptions regarding the inevitability of the proletarianization of the peasantry and builds instead on the notion that human subsistence strategies and social-structural configurations are responsive and adaptive. Peasant activities have surged and retracted in line with state presence. But in the absence of a breakdown of the state, statistical and ethnographic evidence suggests that the remaining peasants in the Cordillera are the final generations of a dying subculture. The traditional institutions around which peasant life in the past was organized have either disappeared or been transformed.; The population of the remote Cordillera is declining. People are rapidly abandoning the area. Farmers—uneducated themselves—make special efforts to provide their children with a formal education, something that facilitates survival in urban areas, signaling an effective end to any aspiration for the intergenerational transmissions of their own rural lifeways. Changes in dependency on household production, which provoked a shift in the demand for male versus female labor, have given way to unusual patterns of outmigration characterized by a significantly more rapid exodus of females.