Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua

Myths of Modernity: Peonage and Patriarchy in Nicaragua. Elizabeth Dore. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 252 pp.

DAVID GREENAWALT

University of Georgia

Myths of Modernity is a superbly crafted work that will appeal to scholars of gender and class relationships in Latin American history. Combining theories of capitalism, class, gender, and ethnicity, Elizabeth Dore provides a well-researched history of social and economic transformation in the rural coffee-growing community Diriomo, Nicaragua, that challenges traditional academic views regarding Latin America's transition to a capitalist economy. By focusing on a single community, Dore does not attempt to revise national history, only to demonstrate that interpretations of history are not universal and not all Latin American socioeconomic transformations led to capitalism.

In Myths of Modernity, Dore's central thesis is that governmental efforts to encourage expansion of Nicaragua's coffee industry through land privatization and social transformation led to the development of systems of patriarchy and peonage that inhibited the transition to capitalism. Informed by oral histories, life histories, and archival documents, Dore disputes theories that systems of patriarchy and peonage in Central America were forms of incipient wage labor. Conversely, coffee plantations established noncapitalist systems of labor...