On the trail of Latin American bandits: a reexamination of peasant resistance

Abstract

This essay examines the prevailing critique of "social banditry' in Latin American studies, reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of the recent literature. It suggests that focusing too narrowly on Hobsbawm's model, individual bandits, or bandit phenomena per se tends to remove Latin Americanists from broader, fresher discussions of peasant social action and mentality now underway for Europe, Latin America, and other Third World areas. By focusing on the internal organization of the rural sector and its links with external loci of power, the best revisionist work demonstrates how an interest in bandits contributes to a better understanding of rural communities and vice versa. For example, in addition to documenting a rather diverse set of social backgrounds for the region's most visible bandit chieftains, scholars are beginning to reassess the social composition of brigand gangs. Ethnohistorical research on the social fabric and political culture of village and hacienda communities in Mexico and the Andes has begun to reveal the active participation of older smallholding peasants with dependents in a variety of bandit operations. Such studies have also raised new questions about the role of women, families, gender relations, and wider networks of kinship and patronage in banditry. -from Author