NO ALTERNATIVE: PARTICIPATION, INEQUALITY, AND THE MEANINGS OF
FAIR TRADE IN NICARAGUA
by
JOSHUA B. FISHER
A DISSERTATION
Presented to the Department ofAnthropology
and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
March 2010
11
University of Oregon Graduate School
Confirmation of Approval and Acceptance of Dissertation prepared by:
Joshua Fisher
Title:
"No Alternative: Participation, Inequality, and the Meanings of Fair Trade in Nicaragua"
This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for
the degree in the Department of Anthropology by:
Lynn Stephen, Chairperson, Anthropology
Philip Scher, Member, Anthropology
Aletta Biersack, Member, Anthropology
Lise Nelson, Outside Member, Geography
and Richard Linton, Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies/Dean of the Graduate
School for the University of Oregon.
March 20, 2010
Original approval signatures are on file with the Graduate School and the University of Oregon
Libraries.
© 2010 Joshua Bryan Fisher
iii
An Abstract of the Dissertation of
Joshua B. Fisher for the degree of
in the Department of Anthropology to be taken
IV
Doctor of Philosophy
March 2010
Title: NO ALTERNATIVE: PARTICIPATION, INEQUALITY, AND THE MEANINGS
OF FAIR TRADE IN NICARAGUA
Approved:
Dr. Lynn Stephen
This dissertation research takes an ethnographic perspective on competing notions
of "fairness" in the first vertically-integrated garment production chain in the world that
is certified as fair trade. In sharp contrast to the straightforward images of social justice
that are so common on the consumer end of fair trade, the dissertation demonstrates that
relations of fair trade production, distribution, and consumption are complicated by
ideological disjunctures, by different experiences of work and labor, by unequal access to
capital and political opportunity, by asymmetrical power, and ultimately by disparate
concepts of economic justice.
Organized as a commodity chain analysis, this dissertation is based on sixteen
months of multi-sited, ethnographic research in Nicaragua, funded by the National
vScience Foundation (NSF), with four separate fair trade organizations: a faith-based NGO
from North Carolina called the Center for Sustainable Development, a well-known
Michigan-based fair trade retailer called Clean Clothes Organics, and two Nicaraguan
producer organizations, including a women's industrial sewing cooperative (The Fair
Trade Zone, which is the first worker-owned organization in the world to gain free trade
zone customs certification), and an industrial cotton spinning plant called Genesis. The
research shows that, from the standpoint of production and distribution, conflicts
frequently emerge over the terms, conditions, and meanings of labor, business contracts,
extra-contractual relations, participation in decision-making, and the definition of roles.
Producers, moreover, often have no alternative but to accept the terms of more powerful
groups under duress of poverty.
Theoretically speaking, this dissertation contributes to an understanding of
alternative economic formations, including fair trade and cooperatives. In this vein, I
argue that the idea of fair trade as an "alternative" to conventional trade is a problematic
rhetorical move that tends to obscure the fact that all aspects of trade-production,
distribution, and consumption-are not only inherently political, they are also riven with
the complications of mediating between disparate cultural meanings, social
positionalities, and political, economic, and social inequality. I recommend revisioning
the relationship between the economy, the state, and various spheres of society in light of
the insights of substantivist economics, feminist political economy, and ethnography.
Vi
CURRICULUM VITAE
NAME OF AUTHOR: Joshua Bryan Fisher
PLACE OF BIRTH: Anchorage, Alaska
DATE OF BIRTH: October 29, 1981
GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED:
University of Oregon
Bucknell University
DEGREES AWARDED:
Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology, 2010, University of Oregon
Master of Science in Anthropology, 2006, University of Oregon
Bachelor ofArts in Physics and Anthropology, 2004, Bucknell University
AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST:
Economic and Political Anthropology
Development
Cooperatives
Feminist Theories and Methodologies
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:
Adjunct Professor, Department of Anthropology, Northwest Christian University,
2010
Research and Administrative Coordinator, The Americas in a Globalized World:
Linking Diversity and Internationalization (Big Idea), University of
Oregon, 2009-10
Vll
Instructor/Graduate Teaching Fellow, Department ofAnthropology, University of
Oregon, 2009
Instructor/Graduate Teaching Fellow, Department ofAnthropology, University of
Oregon, 2008
Technical Director, Laboratorio Organizacional del Terreno, Vientos de Paz, 2007
Graduate Teaching Fellow, Department ofAnthropology, University of Oregon,
2005-07
Research Coordinator, Center for Development in Central America, Ciudad
Sandino, Nicaragua, 2004-05
GRANTS, AWARDS AND HONORS:
St. Clair Drake Travel Award, Society for the Anthropology of North America,
American Anthropological Association, 2009
Doctoral Research Fellowship, University of Oregon, 2008-09
Cressman Prize, Department ofAnthropology, University of Oregon, 2009
Malcolm McFee Award, Department ofAnthropology, University of Oregon,
2008
National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant, "Participation,
Inequality, and the Making of Fair Trade as a Social Movement in the U.S.
and Nicaragua, National Science Foundation, 2008-09
Sasakawa Young Leader Graduate Fellowship for International Research, Oregon
University System, The Nippon Foundation, 2006-07
Conference Travel Award, Department ofAnthropology, 2006-07
Conference Travel Award, Department ofAnthropology, 2004-05
Graduate Research Award, Department ofAnthropology, University of Oregon,
2005-06
Graduate Student Research Support Grant, Center for the Study of Women in
Society, University of Oregon, 2004-05
Meerwarth Research Award, Department of Sociology and Anthropology,
Bucknell University, 2003-04
Bucknell University Prize in Anthropology, Department of Sociology and
Anthropology, 2003-04
PUBLICATIONS:
Fisher, Joshua
In press Building Consciousness: The Organization Workshop Comes to
Nicaragua. The Anthropology of Work Review.
viii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The nature of anthropological knowledge is such that it always reflects the
intellectual labor of so many that have gone before, not just the thinkers of the
anthropological discipline but also those whose knowledge we seek to represent. For
making this dissertation a reality, I want to express my sincere appreciation to those who
shared their stories, who helped me think through difficult concepts, and who gave me
much needed council and direction.
I would first like to thank all of the cooperative members from The Fair Trade
Zone and Genesis cooperatives, without which this dissertation would not exist. Your
persistence in the face of so much adversity has been a constant source of inspiration in
my work, and I can only hope to have done justice to the story. I would also like to thank
the Center for Sustainable Development and Clean Clothes Organics: your desire to do
good by strangers and to dedicate your lives to the ongoing project of social justice is
truly a model for living in this world, and I am truly humbled for having the opportunity
to work with you.
I would also like to thank my committee for their help in making this dissertation
a reality and for instilling in me a respect not only for the pursuit of knowledge but also
for working to build ethical relationships in the process. Lynn Stephen deserves a great
deal of credit for the example that she has provided for me and for the important course
corrections in my development as a scholar. To Aletta Biersack, as well, I owe much
more than I can ever repay. Your keen insight and the sheer amount of time and effort
that you gave over to me are far more than I deserve.
Finally, I would like to thank the National Science Foundation, the Tokyo
Foundation, and the Center for the Study of Women in Society at the University of
Oregon for grant support during the fieldwork portion of this dissertation.
IX
xFather Oscar Romero wrote:
Es una caricatura de amor cuando se quiere apafiar con limosnas 10 que ya se debe
por justicia, apafiar con apariencias de beneficencia cuando se estafallando en la
justicia social. El verdadero amor comienza por exigir entre las relaciones de los que
se aman 10 justo.
It is a caricature of love to try to cover over with alms what is lacking in justice, to
patch over with an appearance of benevolence when social justice is missing. True
love begins by demanding what is just in the relations of those who love.
The following is dedicated to the women and men of The Fair Trade Zone and
Genesis cooperatives, as well as the many people who have dedicated their lives to
seeking true justice.
Xl
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. INTRODUCTION 1
Commodity Chain Analysis................................................................................... 5
Methodology and Fieldwork........... 10
Chapter Summary.................................................................................................. 14
Notes 17
II. THE THREE-LEGGED STOOL 18
Forming an "Intentional" Community.......................................... 23
The Move to Nicaragua 44
Sustainable and Participatory Development.......................................................... 48
The Hurricane '" 55
Delegations 58
Building the Three-Legged Stool 64
Fair Trade.. 73
Conclusions 82
Notes 85
Chapter
Xll
Page
III. DIGNIFIED WORK, MOTHERWORK, AND THE LOGIC OF SWEAT
IN TIlE FAIR TRADE ZOJ\TE 87
Trabajo digno / "Fair Trade" '" 94
La Obra Madre / "Motherwork" 101
The Origins of The Fair Trade Zone 115
Learning the Business............................................................................................ 122
Becoming a Free Trade Zone 138
The Logic of Sweat 142
Commodifying Sweat............................................................................................ 147
Dignified Work, Not Fair Trade 152
Notes 156
IV. FAIR / COMPETITION AND THE FRICTION OF FAIR TRADE 159
Two Roads 165
Not All Equity is the Same.................................................................................... 169
The Meltdown........................................................................................................ 175
The Memo, the Catch-22, and the Strike 180
Being Competitive in a Market of Fairness 183
The Vacation 188
Re-Visioning Fair Trade Partnerships 196
----------_._._._------ ----- ----- _._ ..
X11l
Chapter Page
Partnership as a Contact Zone 198
Contractual Exchange as a (Mis)communicative Event........................................ 204
Gift and Commodity Economies: A False Distinction 220
Notes 229
V. BUILDING CONSCIOUSNESS: THE ORGANIZATION WORKSHOP
COMES TO NICARAGUA 232
Background: Consciousness and Organizational Consciousness 239
Theory and Method in the Organization Workshop............................................... 244
The OW in Action.. 250
The Origins of Genesis.......................................................................................... 264
Organizing the Organizers: Constructing a "Model" Workshop 274
Unexpected Consequences........ 282
Conclusions 288
Notes 300
VI. FAIR TRADE AND TRANSLATION 304
Solidarity with Whom? Fair Trade Knowledge and Power 307
The Collaboration................................................................................................... 314
The Website Goes Up 325
Conclusions............................................................................................................ 336
Chapter
XIV
Page
Notes 341
VII. CONCLUSION: RE-VISIONING FAIR TRADE 342
Fair Trade and Neoliberalism 343
The Moral Economy. 345
Feminist Economics and the Ethnography of Fair Trade 350
Notes 352
APPENDIX: PROFILES OF GENESIS SOCIAS 354
Leiza 354
Kassia 355
Joaquina 356
Jenifer 359
Oliver 362
Yasmin 363
Ascension 364
Elizabeth 366
Eugenio 367
Hernan 368
Chapter
xv
Page
REFERENCES 371
XVI
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1. Clearing the land. 319
2. Beginning the roof................................................................................................. 319
3. The cotton gin 320
4. Signing the Acta Constitutiva 320
5. An early organizational meeting with CSD 321
6. A junta directiva meeting 321
7. A general assembly meeting 322
8. Map ofCiudad Sandino in relation to Managua 324
9. Map of Ciudad Sandino 324
10. Photo of Zona 8, Barrio Bello Cruz 326
11. Photo of typical house in Nueva Vida, Ciudad Sandino 326
12. Photo of houses near Mosatepe 327
13. Photo of a house in Villa Soberana 327
14. Photo of the Cone Denim facility near Villa Soberana 328
15. Volunteers working with losetas on the outer wall of the Genesis facility.. 332
16. Map of Nicaragua appearing on the Genesis website 332
17. Photo of Lake Managua......................................................................................... 333
18. Photo of burning trash in Nueva Vida 333
19. Photo of a coastal resort......................................................................................... 334
20. Photo of Nueva Vida in 1998, shortly after Hurricane Mitch 334
1CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The making of an alternative, economic imaginary appears to be underway with
fair trade. Emerging from a critique of free trade ideology and its human consequences,
fair trade has over the past twenty years gained a significant consumer presence in
markets in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Australia. In the global North, at least, fair
trade appears to alter the unjust terms of transnational trade by re-connecting consumers
and producers in relationships of solidarity (as opposed to exploitation), by re-aligning
consumption patterns with an ethic of compassion and care (rather than indifference or
ignorance), by re-balancing trade relationships between the North and the South, and by
re-embedding production and distribution in equitable, democratic, and participatory
social relations. In practical terms, the fair trade system accomplishes this by making the
trading chain shorter and more personal, by eliminating middlemen who take a cut at
each step, by returning a larger percentage of the final purchase price to producers, and
by ensuring that the products themselves corne from democratically-run organizations
like cooperatives. What has emerged, in short, is an image of the fair trade movement as
an alternative to "mainstream," often identified as a solution to globalization's ills.
At the heart of fair trade, however, there also lie contradictions. Foremost among
them, perhaps, is the somewhat ironic fact that fair trade's notable consumer presence and
its alternativeness within consumer markets are not at all matched in the realm of
2production. Firstly, as a increasingly iconic and mainstream manifestation of social
justice, fair trade is not and cannot be a solution to globalization's ills. Although it is a
four billion dollar industry that is growing at an unparalleled rate, in the long shot, fair
trade also represents much less than a hundredth of a percent of goods traded globally
and largely ignores the service sector and heavy industry in favor of consumables with
high supermarket visibility like coffee, tea, chocolate, fruits and vegetables, and clothing.
Second, for producers of these goods, the tangible effects of fair trade-economic
stability, food security, access to education, empowerment in the workplace, and
democratized trading relationships with (typically Northern) distributors-are far more
complicated than the received image lets on. To be sure, price premiums paid for fair
trade goods may prove economically advantageous to producers, but, realistically, those
prices do not suddenly make producers' working lives "fair" so much as allow producers
the flexibility to experience and articulate their own, new meanings of fair that might
otherwise be impossible in conventional arrangements of trade and labor. Fair trade, that
is, does not really map out an alternative pathway within globalization or global
capitalism so much as utilize already existing market mechanisms to reconfigure (and, to
some extent, to reproduce) race, gender, and class inequalities.
With the goal of moving beyond the limited, consumer-oriented imaginary, then,
this dissertation explores the tensions, contradictions, and frictions of fair trade that, in an
ethnographic lens, substantially make up the interactions, relationships, and experiences
involved in a fair trade garment production chain in Nicaragua. While framing fair trade
3as an alternative is useful for pointing out that there is something wrong with
conventional trade, the largely rhetorical move also tends to reinforce the problematic
assumption that there exists some coherent, context-free "mainstream" capitalism that
fair trade is, in effect, on the outside of and toward which fair trade practices are opposed.
The extension of what is ultimately a very circumscribed political, economic, and social
imaginary of fair trade to the realm ofproduction, moreover, tends to obscure recognition
of the many points of overlap, connection, and continuity of the trading strategy with the
so-called mainstream. The production side of fair trade, I argue, can instead be
illuminated by an understanding of the commodity chain through which goods are
produced and distributed.
While the majority of fair trade research thus far has arguably been concerned
with theorizing fair trade consumption patterns as well as the supposed challenge that fair
trade represents to conventional trade, this dissertation locates itself within the slowly
growing field of research that seeks instead to bring production and producers' meanings
and experiences to the foreground of the discussion, to pull back the shroud of
consumerism---or what Marx refers to as the "fetishism" of the commodity-and to
reveal the actual social relationships concealed behind it. The dissertation takes as a case
study the transnational network involved in the finance, production, distribution, and
marketing of garments in a vertically-integrated, fair trade commodity chain in
Nicaragua, extending into the U.S. via a transnational network of financial, legal, and
political support. By network, I am referring to a number of discrete yet interrelated
4groups, including (l) a small, faith-based sustainable development non-government
organization O'IJGO) from North Carolina called the Center for Sustainable Development
(CSD), which has provided financing and on the ground legal support to the projects; (2)
a Michigan-based fair trade retailer called Clean Clothes Organics, which is the
production chain's primary client; (3) a women's sewing cooperative, called The Fair
Trade Zone, in the urban community of Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua; and (4) a organic
cotton spinning cooperative, called Genesis, also in Ciudad Sandino, which is currently in
the construction and legal formalization stages and, as of this writing, is scheduled to start
production in January of 201 O. Notably, in September of 2009, this production chain
received fair trade certification by Scientific Certification Systems (SCS), a sustainability
and standards developer and certifier that, in cooperation with National Sanitation
Foundation O'IJSF) International and the International Labor Rights Fund, recently
developed a garment certification system called Fair Labor Practices and Community
Benefits, making it the first garment production chain in the world to be certified, from
field to factory, as fair trade.
The dissertation follows the conceptual model of the commodity chain, starting
with financier, distributor, and marketer and moving backwards from factory to field.
Instead of simply accounting for the function of each link in the chain as a function of the
whole garment production process, however, I instead track at each stage the social
relations of production as they are structured, shaped, negotiated, and sustained within
both disparate and shared frameworks of ideology, meaning, and power. I therefore
5foreground the complexity of dynamic relationships, the imperfect connection between
actors, as well as the tension, miscommunication, conflict, and asymmetrical power that
are central to fair trade and that often reproduce well-trodden race, class, and gender
inequalities. At the same time, I argue that the economic and social organization of fair
trade in producer communities functions more to clear space for producers to articulate
and experience new meanings of fair than to enable those producers to suddenly
experience fairness in their lives and work. In so doing, I also argue that an ethnographic
perspective on fair trade requires that we ultimately to do away with a strictly economic
understanding of fairness, measured in the narrow terms of higher wages or increased
profits, and return to some ofthe fundamental and long-standing questions that
anthropologists have posed about human life. As Robert Redfield (1956) frames it, What
do people desire for themselves and for their children? To what kind of life do they
attach highest esteem?
COMMODITY CHAIN ANALYSIS
Originating with world-systems theory, commodity chain analysis is a useful
approach for organizing observations about the many connections involved in production
and consumption within the context of specific, political economic structures.!
Commodity chain analysis also performs the important task of unsettling commonsense
understandings of trade, especially when trade is simplistically depicted as a single kind
of social dynamic playing out, such as market forces or even social solidarity (Collins
62003). In the case of fair trade-which is, following Gary Gereffi's (1994) terminology,
a "buyer-driven" chain, meaning that it is primarily concerned with the production of
consumer goods-commodity chain analysis is also useful for bringing into sharp, critical
focus the many different transactions, social relationships, and experiences that exist
before those fair trade relationships become either hidden from view by the anonymous
nature or the market or before they are stylized in advertising to meet the expectations,
desires, and needs of consumers. Commodity chain analysis, in other words, challenges
the misplaced concreteness not only of fair trade as an identifiable set of alternative
trading practices but also of the so-called "mainstream" trade to which it is opposed.
At the same time, however, there are some pitfalls to the commodity chain
approach that must be acknowledged and addressed. To begin with, commodity chain
analysis tends to oversimplify each step in the production process by representing each as
an identifiable set of activities, by ignoring the recursive effects of finance and capital in
the "connection" between actors, and thus by abstracting the chain itself from the
particulars of those activities and connections from geography, history, and cultural and
social relations (Williams 2000). In other words, the commodity "chain" is a metaphor,
and though it may capture the interconnections between different elements of production
and consumption systems, it may also sever those elements from the full range of
complex determinations (Bair 2008, Jackson et al 2006). As a way of organizing
observations about and understandings ofthose connections and nothing more, it is
7important to resist reification of the commodity chain and to instead rely on empirical
(i.e. ethnographic) data.
With the goal of understanding economic connections as imperfect and laden with
asymmetrical power while at the same time bringing into consideration putatively non-
economic factors, my ethnographic approach to this Nicaragua-based commodity chain
draws on the theoretical work of Timothy Mitchell (2002, 1998), J.K. Gibson-Graham
(2006, 1998), and Anna Tsing (2005), each of whom have unsettled in their own ways the
perceived stability of categories like the economy, economic activity, and transnational
connection. Mitchell (1998:85), for one, challenges the contemporary idea of "the
economy" as a separate, closed, and self-regulating system with distinct physical
dynamics (i.e. equilibrium, stability, elasticity, and inflation), showing it to be
discursively co-emergent with physics as a coherent scientific discipline in the late
nineteenth century. He instead identifies two discursive processes through which, over
the years, the self-contained sphere of the economy has come to appear fixed and self-
evident: (1) the exclusion of what does not belong to the economy (the household and the
state), thereby defining certain areas oflife as "non-economic" (Mitchell 1998:92), and
(2) the quantification and measurement of that which happens to fall within the
"economic" sphere, such as monetarized exchange. In fair trade, likewise, understanding
alternative economies as well as the mainstream economy as discursively constructed,
rather than positively existing, clears space not only for problematizing the demarcation
between fair trade and regular trade but also for reconsidering those non-economic
interactions, relationships, and experiences that appear to be outside of the purely
economic consideration. These seemingly non-economic elements are very much
experienced as part of "fair" relationships of exchange but are not often accounted for in
terms of the profits returned to producers.
Of course, Mitchell was not the first to challenge the boundary between what is
considered economic and non-economic. Feminist economists and social scientists have
for some time now sought to broaden the scope of "the economic," often by proposing
strategies for counting in activities that have largely been ignored. Mackenzie and Rose
(1983), for example, suggested that the focus on the "sphere of production," of market
production and exchange, misses the importance of the "sphere of reproduction," of
unpaid domestic labor. They argue that understanding the co-existence of the public
sphere with the domestic sphere is crucial for a more complete understanding of the
capitalist economy. Nancy Folbre (2001), likewise, argues that market economies are
sustained by relatively invisible activities of care and suggests that the solution is to stop
assuming that norms and preferences for caring are somehow "outside" of the economic
system. Marylyn Waring (1988) extends this basic argument by proposing that women's
unpaid work be counted by assigning it monetary value and including it as part of a
country's gross domestic product (GDP). She estimates that, in Australia, for example,
the value of household labor of unpaid, domestic workers would be almost equivalent to
the total value of goods and services in the market. By re-conceptualizing the economy
and extending its mechanisms for measurement to new spheres of activities--domestic
8
9production, reproduction, the economy of care, and the gift economy---{)ne may come to
a better understanding of the relative value of work and, even more to the point, effect a
kind of political transformation of society.
Yet, as Gibson-Graham (1998) argue, it may be the case that strategies of counting
in those heretofore unrecognized spheres might fall short of a fully transformational
politics. While they certainly add to the picture, they do not help us think differently
about the economy. In fact, though the added sectors may be recognized and counted,
they nevertheless remain locked in the subordinate position of the binary vis-a.-vis the
"core" economy. At the same time, compartmentalizing economic activities obscures the
fact that market-based production might, in some circumstances, contain features of
worth, and non-economic sectors might produce inequitable relationships. Gibson-
Graham (1998) argue that, instead of pursuing a platform of making "the economy"
complete and whole, what is instead needed is its total deconstruction, especially in
consideration of its inextricable embeddedness within the full range of social processes.
In the study of fair trade, what Mitchell's (1998) and Gibson-Graham's (1998)
insights open up is not just a more complete understanding of "fairness" in fair trade,
extending analysis beyond the quantifiable data of profits to non-economic phenomena
like the experiences of producers, participatory relationships with trading partners, and
equitable interactions with other members of the network. Rather, deconstructing the fair
trade economy in ethnographic terms means dissolving the rigid opposition between the
economic and the non-economic. It also means understanding the transnational
10
connections that fair trade enables-not just in economic exchange but also in patterned
social relations and everyday interactions-to be riven with the disruptions and
malfunctions of wholly unfair power dynamics and strategies of resistance.
Drawing on the work ofAnna Tsing (2005), in particular, I argue that the
"frictions" of fair trade, which often produce unexpected and unintended consequences,
are crucial for re-conceptualizing a commodity chain analysis that unproblematically
implies continuity and collaboration between actors. Rather than focusing on the perfect
connection in the production of fair trade, Tsing's (2005) approach suggests that we must
shift the margin to the center and focus on de facto differences and disjunctures in order
to generate a more complete picture of not only how fair trade networks "work" but also
how they often fail to do so, unintentionally reproducing inequality rather than
challenging it.
METHODOLOGY AND FIELDWORK
This dissertation is based on approximately 16 months of ethnographic research in
Nicaragua and employs a scaled down version of "multi-sited ethnography" (Marcus
1995), which is especially well suited for commodity chain research. Although the scope
of the project will in the future be expanded to include the agricultural end of the
production chain, (a) El Porvenir, an agricultural cooperative community of 25 families
in the mountains of Chinandega, Nicaragua, and (b) COPROEXNIC, a small-producer
federation cooperative of about two-thousand producers in the Matagalpa region, which
11
are both making the transition to the production of cotton, the research I present thus far
is based on ethnographic data from Nueva Vida and Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua. These
sites are very much transnational sites, as they are home to not only The Fair Trade Zone
and Genesis cooperatives but also the sustainable development NGO, CSD. Moreover,
they are frequented by the primary fair trade retailer involved in the production chain,
Clean Clothes Organics, as well as representatives from a number of church and
university delegations in the U.S. who form part of the larger transnational network.
Multi-sited ethnography, in this respect, dovetails with "global
ethnography" (Burawoy 2000) as a way of shedding light on translocal phenomena via
place-based ethnographic research. Global ethnography uses multiple sites and broader
social movements and removes them from the hard-and-fast local in order to embed them
in broader systems. Situated action can therefore be seen as transnational action and vice
versa, as transnational forces may come to be understood as rooted in or having effect on
historical and cultural contexts. In the case of fair trade, global ethnography is useful for
focusing the connections that inevitably occur between transnational actors while at the
same time reflecting on questions and concerns that extend to the international
community.
For the purposes of data collection, this research project has been divided up into
three broad approaches: (1) Participant observation, unstructured interviews, and
secondary or archival data collection, (2) semi-structured and focus group interviews with
each research population, and (3) life history interviews. Participant observation involves
12
observing, recording, and participating in daily activities and public conversations of
research participants (e.g. Schensul et al 1999). Because what people say, what they
believe, and what they do are often at odds with each of the others, the purpose of
participant observation is to observe unanticipated patterns of thought and behavior
within a naturalist setting, as well as to contextualize information collected through other
methods, such as archival data, unstructured or structured, individual and group
interviews, and life history accounts (Dewalt et aI1998). Participant observation requires
taking part in the work process, attending informal or formal community gathers, trips to
the store, meals at restaurant, and ceremonies and holiday celebrations. In the context of
fair trade, this methodology is central to the project of dissolving the distinction between
economic and non-economic phenomena, functioning to make clear that, on a day to day
level, economic activities cannot be understood apart from their various purposes,
conditions, and historical, cultural, and social contexts. In this dissertation, archival and
secondary data collection involving newspapers, magazines, websites, and demographic
and other documents further contextualizes the lived experience of research participants
(Bernard and Ryan 1998, Farnell and Graham 1998). Second, unstructured and semi-
structured, individual and group interviews function to explore in greater depth the
factors and sub-factors that are most important to research participants (Morgan 1988).
And third, while recognizing that accounts of the past are always given in the present, life
history interviews function to give historical depth, especially with regard to the
construction of the network and the production chain and with the broader goal of
13
identifying patterns of unequal power and structures of inequality in fair trade as they are
continuous with past experiences.
I do not wish to perpetuate the problematic idea that these methodologies, even
the rapport that a researcher develops with research participants (read: subjects), merely
enable the researcher to "gain access" to the field site, to engage with "the field" and
return with knowledge. However often ethnographic research may be framed in such
terms, I do not conceptualize rapport-or, more specifically, the relationships and
friendships that I sought with research participants-as directed toward the purpose of
gaining greater depth of perspective or knowledge. In fact, I find the idea insidious and
objectionable, having the distinct aftertaste of manipulation and domination. I also find it
misrepresentative of the dialogical manner in which the basic framework and central
research questions of this project were originally formulated. Instead, I understand
relationships, friendships, and rapport not as a tool for gaining knowledge but as the
precondition of knowledge production and engagement. Drawing on feminist research
methodologies as well as the advice of research participants in The Fair Trade Zone,
Genesis, and CSD, I seek a mode of engagement that does not stop with a consideration
of the scientific veracity of those methods, but brings to the fore the logics and ethics of
those relationships. As a relational mode of engagement, in other words, I seek to go
beyond explanation to evocation and translation, and I identify my own participation in
this research as not simply "on" but "with" and "alongside" (Abu-Lughod 1990, Behar
1993, Casas-Cortes 2008, Latour 2005, Strathern 1991, Tsing 2005).
14
CHAPTER SUMMARY
Chapter II, "The Three-Legged Stool," focuses on the two North American
organizations, CSD and Clean Clothes Organics, as well as the emergence of the
transnational fair trade network through relationships of collaboration and conflict.
Based largely on participant observation and life history interviews, I give an account of
the emergence ofCSD in 1979 in North Carolina as an intentional community working
with homeless shelters. I chart CSD's progressive formalization, or NGO-ization, its
eventual move to Nicaragua in 1994, and the initial formulation of the network in 1999
with the NGO's connection to Clean Clothes. Yet, instead of representing CSD's NGO-
ization and its role in financing this network as the inevitable consequence of the
neoliberal shift that occurred circa 1990 in Nicaragua, I seek, as E. P. Thompson put it, to
rescue an account of CSD from the "enormous condescension of posterity" (1980: 12). I
instead focus on the contradictions that exist between the CSD community's ethical and
moral ideals, the political economic circumstances of their actions, and what they
perceive to be practical, realistic, and sustainable, suggesting the notion of reluctant
consciousness as a way of demonstrating that the NGO's actions and ideals are not
isomorphic. Given this historical and ethnographic context, the main goal of this chapter
is to highlight the conceptual differences between charity, sustainable development,
ethical business, and social justice, as they inform the economic strategies of CSD and
Clean Clothes Organics.
15
In Chapter III, "Dignified Work, Motherwork, and the Logic of Sweat," I give a
historical account of the formation of The Fair Trade Zone, the first worker-owned
cooperative in the world that also has free trade zone (zonajranca) status. I give an
ethnographic account of workers' labor in building the cooperative by appeal to the idiom
of "sweat" (sudor) and its relationship to the identity of mothers, and I explore
cooperative members ideas of fair trade in terms of the concept of "dignified
work" (trabajo digno) as opposed to "fair trade" (comercio justo). As such, I explore the
differences between ideologies of abstract labor and membership imposed by CSD and
Clean Clothes, on the one hand, and the concrete experiences of labor, on the other. I
recommend a phenomenological approach to labor, which brings to the fore the not-yet-
coded and not-yet-quantified "lived experience" of labor, for understanding the tension
that emerges between The Fair Trade Zone, on the one hand, and CSD and Clean Clothes,
on the other.
In Chapter IV, "Fair / Competition and the Friction of Fair Trade," I critique the
idea of "partnerships" in fair trade as a way of representing how groups with different
backgrounds and agendas manage to work together with a common purpose. I suggest
that partnership is not always the best characterization of the concrete relations of fair
trade networks, as the term has tended to curtail, rather than amplify, the recognition of
specific instances of disjuncture, difference and differential power amid so-called
"grassroots" actors. Drawing explicitly on Tsing's (2005) concept of "friction," I attempt
to illuminate the imperfect quality of interactions, conflicts between disparate
16
frameworks of meaning and ideology, and divergent understandings of "fairness" in fair
trade by recounting a story of conflict that emerged between CSD, Clean Clothes, and
The Fair Trade Zone over issues of labor and membership in the cooperative. At the
center of this conflict are divergent understandings of the business contract, the analysis
of which registers a challenge to some of the basic assumptions of voluntaristic economic
exchange.
Chapter V, "Building Consciousness from the Ground Up," moves on to an
account of the early stages of the Genesis cooperative's construction and formalization.
Based on research conducted during the implementation of Clodomir Santos de Morais'
Organization Workshop OW), a large-scale enterprise-building and employment
generation workshop originally from Brazil, I analyze the OW's concept and strategy of
"organizational conscientization," which harkens back to Paulo Freire's famous method,
and examine the implementation of the workshop's consciousness-raising technique
within the social, cultural, organizational, political, and economic context of Genesis.
Using consciousness as a starting point for thinking about the formation of a cooperative
and the development of equitable social relations, I explore cooperative members' ideas
about "fairness" in their working relationships with one another.
Finally, Chapter VI, "Fair Trade and Translation," is based on a collaborative
research project, alongside a committee of Genesis cooperative members, and reports on
an attempt to build a website that more accurately represented the cooperative, its history,
its structure, and its various challenges. Genesis cooperative members ultimately handed
17
the project over to CSD for editing, however, and so, as a window to the micro-politics of
representation in fair trade, I examine the choices that CSD made in order to "market" the
cooperative to donors. I conclude by reflecting on the distinction between se1f-
representation and self-determination.
NOTES
J The term commodity chain, defined as "a network of labour and production processes whose end result is
a finished commodity," comes from Hopkins and Wallerstein (1986, 1994), where it is used to discuss the
variety of international chains for agricultural and timber products.
18
CHAPTER II
THE THREE-LEGGED STOOL
For many scholars, the professionalization, or "NGO-ization," of social
movements has represented one of the most important social, political, and economic
shifts of the last twenty years, ushering in a new kind of transnational political strategy to
respond to the spread of democratization, discourses of cultural citizenship, as well as the
near global spread ofneoliberalism (Alvarez 1998, 2009). As David Harvey writes:
The rise of advocacy groups and NGOs has, like rights discourses more generally,
accompanied the neoliberal turn and increased spectacularly since 1980 or so.
The NGOs have in many instances stepped into the vacuum of social provision
left by the withdrawal of the state from such activities. This amounts to
privatization by NGO. [2007: 177]
The proliferation ofNGOs, in other words, is a direct consequence of political economic
change. Accompanied by the (perceived) democratization of authoritarian state regimes,
the (alleged) disappearance of counter-political movements, and the rolling back of the
state in the areas of welfare and the provision of social services, neoliberalism has
demanded the professionalization and formalization of former grassroots movements,
which have been forced to stake out their territory by transforming into legally
recognized organizations with budgets, hired staff, and well-defined projects or areas of
expertise. Further empowered by a new generation of individual and identity-based
rights discourses, Harvey argues, NGOs have in fact accelerated the process of neoliberal
privatization rather than cushioned its impact in society, thus functioning, in a way, as
19
"Trojan horses for global neoliberalism" (Harvey 2007: 177). Perhaps the farthest
reaching critique ofthe proliferation ofNGOs and the NGO-ization of now-muted,
counter-political social movements has been based on the impression that the NGO
sector, as well as micro-lending development initiatives such as the Grameen Bank, hand
in hand with market reforms and liberal democracy initiatives pushed by the IMF, the
World Bank, and the U.N., effectively amount to a new brand of imperialism that
circumvents and undermines the authority of the state (Edwards and Hulme 1995:4,
Karim 2008, Petras 1997, Pons Cortes 2001).
From a more optimistic perspective, another set of scholars and activists have
preferred to characterize the NGO phenomenon as a "quiet" revolution that has helped to
build a more vital and democratic civil society, to broaden popular participation and
disseminate alternative perspectives such as sustainable, community, and participatory
development (Fisher 1997:40, Esteva 1987, Escobar 1995), and to liberate poverty
alleviation strategies and disaster relief measures from the ineffectuality of the state
(Rocha and Cristoplos 1999). These scholars also commend the NGO's expansion
internationally, as the new alliances between actors have helped to forge a vibrant
international civil society that connects networks of activists through their globally
shared concerns (Nash 2004, Keck and Sikkink 1998, Korey 1998). Moreover, the NGO-
ization of social movements-such as Alvarez (1998, 2009) describes in the case of
feminist organizations across Latin America-has resulted from vanishing need for or
viability of spontaneous counter-political movements operating outside of established
20
legal structures. While this increased access to political and civil society, moreover, has
allowed for a greater range of interests to be expressed, already well-established groups
have also reasserted their influence.
This chapter is based on ethnographic research with the Center for Sustainable
Development, an intentional, faith-based community that emerged in the late 1970s in
North Carolina that sought to address issues of homelessness and disappearing social
welfare systems in the U.S. during the 1980s and that became part of the Central
American solidarity movement, reformed as an NOD, and moved to Nicaragua following
the country's neoliberal structural adjustments in the early 1990s. While acknowledging,
as Harvey points out, the structural conditions that have allowed for NODs in the late
1990s, I argue that it is also important to understand that neither NODs nor the actors that
in turn compose those organizations can be neatly categorized as a single type of actor
(Fisher 1997:441). Though they may occupy similar social positions in society, these
organizations vary greatly in size, structure, politics, histories, sources of funding, and
relationships to the state, and they have undertaken an enormously varied range of
activities, including provisioning of welfare services, implementing grassroots
development, promoting human rights, protesting environmental degradation, engaging
voter literacy, and even pursuing right-wing or conservative issues (Berthoud 2001,
Fisher 1997, Leve and Karim 2001, Mencher 1999). Members of these organizations,
likewise, may have their own ideas, ideals, and identities, which do not necessary mesh
with the concrete practices of the NOD. To simplify NODs to either panaceas of
21
neo1ibera1ism or handmaidens to it is to miss the real substance of their local-global
dynamics and the particular effect they have had in shaping things like development
strategies, the How of transnational capital, and the relationship between non-
governmental actors and the state. Likewise, to identify members of these organizations
with articulated policies, strategies, or goals of the organization is to miss the tension that
often exists between what people think is right or just, on the one hand, and, on the other
what is practical and effective, given political, social and economic circumstance.
In the case of the Center for Sustainable Development (CSD), I therefore seek to
problematize the connection between beliefs and practice, arguing that, in a discussion
that is oftentimes replete with sweeping generalizations-not the least of which is
glossing all types of mobilizations as "civil society" or "grassroots"-anthropo10gists
may make an enhanced contribution by engaging the structures of neoliberal capitalism in
the concrete, ethnographic terms of local-global dynamics. In the first part, I offer an
ethnographic account of the NGO's own professionalization over thirty years, focusing in
particular on the emergence, construction, and narration of specific kinds of political
subjectivities among political actors, the emergent forms of social consciousness
regarding structures of race, class, gender, and politics in North Carolina in the 1970s and
1980s, coupled with the imperative in historically progressive forms of Christianity to
"do justice" rather than to merely speak, think, preach, or write about it. As is abundantly
clear in a historical account of the formation of CSD as a theologically radical, faith-
based community in 1979 and its subsequent reconfiguration into an NGO in the 1990s,
22
political transformations of actors are based in specific sociocultural and historical
contexts, not generalized "epochs."
Yet, CSD's case also shows that political subjectivities and, indeed,
"consciousness," may not always translate into practice, but rather may exist in tension
with ideas of what is practical, given political and economic conditions. Thus, in the
second part of this chapter, I give an ethnographic account ofthe conceptual difference
between charity, on the one hand, and sustainable development and community
empowerment, on the other, that CSD developed over the years as well as the many
compromises that CSD begrudgingly makes on a daily basis. One of these compromises,
as it turns out, is fair trade. Since the late 1990s, CSD has been instrumental in
coordinating the construction of a vertically-integrated, garment production chain of
cooperatives and in linking that chain with a fair trade market in the U.S., the largest
component of which is the fair trade retailer Clean Clothes Organics. While CSD pursues
fair trade as a marketing strategy for these garment production cooperatives, they are
under no pretense that fair trade is an optimal, or even good, solution to the problems
presented by corporatism and neoliberalism. Thus, against the perspective that NGOs
embrace fair trade as a strategy and thus are colluders in extending neoliberallogics and
devolving regulation of the economy to the market, I point out that, in this case at least,
fair trade is better thought of as a compromise than a solution. From CSD's point of
view, fair trade is not the structural or systematic change required for truly realizing
social justice, yet there there really is no alternative.
--------------
23
FORNIING AN "INTENTIONAL" COMMUNITY
Although the exact year in which the idea of forming what would later be called
the Center for Sustainable Development came about is a matter of some debate, Carolyn,
Vanessa, and Roger-the three college friends and founding members of the organization
-vividly recall that it all started sometime during a hot summer in the 1970s. After
college, Roger and Vanessa had just graduated from seminary in Indiana and returned to
their home town of Statesville, North Carolina, where Carolyn was teaching high school
social studies. In order to make ends meet while they were working with their local
presbytery's summer youth group program, they decided to move in together and share
resources. Carolyn describes the moment in which the idea of putting their efforts to
"something good" first came up:
Literally we're sitting around watching the evening news, going, the world is
going to hell in a hand-basket, and why isn't anybody doing anything? And we
went, you know, we're not doing anything either. It was at that moment the three
of us started to think seriously about what we should be doing.
CSD effectively started in the house in which they shared rent. The ill-defined
notion of doing something good began to take shape as they realized that, in order to do
anything at all, really, they needed to share expenses and pool their resources. Given
their common social, political, and religious visions, the three eventually adopted the
model of an "intentional community," a term of Quaker origin that denotes the active
choice to collaborate and work together for a common spiritual, social, or political goal
(Brown 2002). They then began to think about how their meager, shared resources could
be put to use as the basis of community projects. Of course, they did not yet have a clear
24
idea of what those projects would be, and so they decided to start by surveying the local
community. Roger and Carolyn visited local hospitals, the salvation army, social
services, and local pastors with the goal of determining what community needs were and
were not being met with the current allotment of resources, space, and staff. As Carolyn
recalls, the survey ultimately generated an ambitious list of more than fifteen basic needs
in the Statesville community, "none of which we were equipped to meet and all of which
cost lots of money."
Meanwhile, Vanessa had discovered that in the south end of Statesville there was
an old, dilapidated church that had been abandoned by the congregation when, as part of
a larger "white flight" trend, the formerly white neighborhood was become progressively
black, and white people were instead moving into the recently built suburbs to the north.
Roger and Vanessa, identifying themselves as seminary graduates, decided to approach
the congregation with the proposition of turning the space into a shelter for the homeless,
which they had identified as one of the major needs in the city. Though the church
leadership did not immediately turn them away, neither were they cooperative. Carolyn
describes it:
They kept going, oh, you nice idealistic young people, you don't know what
you're getting into. Which was true, and it's probably good that we didn't, or we
never would have tried. But nevertheless, they would say go forth and do a
geographical what do you call it when you do a people survey, and come back.
And so we would go away and we'd come back, and we would answer the next
set of questions, and they would say, oh you nice young people, but you still don't
know, so go away and do this. And then we would come back. We were
persistent, until finally they really were left with the choice of either giving us the
building or saying no, they didn't want to help the poor. I mean, we left them
with no other alternative, so they gave us the building.
25
Carolyn, Vanessa and Roger gave up their house and sold their cars and much oftheir
belongings to start the first homeless shelter in Statesville. Thankfully, the church was
grandfathered in so that would not have to meet housing regulations, and Roger found a
job in order to provide some income for the community for food and for making
improvements to the building. Meanwhile, Vanessa and Carolyn pulled old mattresses
and bed frames off the curb, or bought them cheap at yard sales, and went door to door in
asking for donations of old linens and pillows.
Their shelter formally opened on October 15 in 1979 and named itself after the
concept of ''jubilee'' in the Old Testament book of Leviticus 25:9, the ancient Hebrew
practice in which every fifty years (i.e. the year of the Jubilee, the end of seven cycles of
Sabbadical years) debts are forgiven, land is returned to its original owner, and
indentured slaves are released so that that communities tom by inequality may be
restored. 2 To spread the news of their opening, they returned to those local churches,
social services and hospitals with whom they had done their initial survey. Though the
three were reluctant to work with police, whom they perceived to be agents in the
reinforcement of inequality rather than protectors of rights, that quickly changed.
Carolyn recalls:
Lo and behold, the police called us on October 15 to say that they had a stranded
hitchhiker. C'mon over, obviously we're open. He'll have to put his bed
together, but c'mon over. And we started the shelters.
Until almost 1981 Vanessa, Roger, and Carolyn funded the project entirely out of
pocket. Though Roger kept his job, the other two did not have the time to work and run
26
the shelter, and so the did odd jobs or solicited donations from a network of supporters in
the community that was slowly growing in size. They gathered leftover corn from fields
that had been harvested to feed people in the shelter. They canned tomatoes that were
given to them by the basket and were about to go bad. And they picked up leftovers
people were going to throw out from their freezers or from church catered events. They
washed linens, cooked, cleaned without outside help and slowly made improvements to
the shelter.
Eventually, even though they still thought of themselves as an intentional, faith-
based community, it became clear that they needed to formally incorporate into a legally-
recognized non-profit organization so that they could receive monetary donations.
Carolyn explains:
We were all Christians, but the point was to be an ecumenical, non-exclusive, and
no-nose-stuck-up-in-the-air, community. As long as you really want to do justice,
fine. C'mon. You know, we really don't care past that...that was in 1979, and we
haven't known farther than our nose what we were doing the next month since
then ...We literally have lived month to month trying to do whatever needed to be
done with whatever money we had as far as we could make it stretch.
The formalization of the organization, in other words, came slowly and oftentimes by
trial and error. As time passed, it became clear that, while networking was of course a
useful way of reducing the burden on their community to try to coordinate everything by
themselves, the professionalization of the organization as a distinct entity allowed them to
increase the effectiveness of their work in the broader Statesville community.
We didn't know how to keep the books, we didn't know how to file the
government forms, we started doing public speaking because we figured out that
Rotarians and Sivitans always needed people for their Thursday noon things, and
27
we volunteered. And we began taking slides to illustrate our work, so that we did
an interesting twenty minutes instead of a boring twenty minutes .. .Ten years later,
just doing it the nickel dime one step at a time, we had a mailing list of several
thousand people, we had a budget of a hundred thousand dollars with guaranteed
funding sources from church commitments, individuals. So anything that we do
here in our project is all grassroots foundation organizing, and all stuff that we
never knew how to do before, we just built on what worked. Somebody needs to
learn how to do this because obviously we have to do this.
By 1984, five years after the intentional community's initial formation, CSD had
expanded to three shelters: an emergency shelter for stranded or evicted people, a
battered women's shelter for their county and five surrounding counties, and a winter
shelter for the permanent homeless population to escape freezing temperatures of the
winter. They also ran a separate soup kitchen and had achieved important victories in
existing public service systems, such as initiating medical advocacy system for the poor
at hospital emergency rooms and legal advocacy for those who cannot afford adequate
representation.
Of course, this is not to say that Roger, Vanessa, and Carolyn did not also have to
work against the Statesville community in many ways. They often had to deal with a
social climate that frequently ignored social problems such as violence against women or
homelessness. They attained "consciousness" of those problems, as Vanessa says, by
working in the thick of it and opening their eyes to the injustices around them and the
many issues presented to people who may just be down on their luck. "If you come in for
ajob smelling and looking dirty, or even if you have bad teeth," says Vanessa, "you don't
get the same shake as if you come in clean and tidy." For this reason, the shelters
provided important basic services like a shower and an mailing address for when a person
28
decides to apply for ajob. Yet, even so, their efforts were often met with a great deal of
resistance. Prevailing attitudes about homelessness or domestic violence, explains
Carolyn, basically fell into one of two categories: blame the victim or turn a blind eye.
The first [complaint] was why are you keeping the bums in town. Then the
second one was why are you breaking up the family. Then the third one was why
are you encouraging people to be drunks. People didn't like to think about the
idea that family violence existed, and it's just that the poor people were the ones
who had no options, and that stranded people were out there even if you didn't see
them on your way to the mall ...People could not believe at first that that kind of
poor existed in their community, and when they became comfortable with that,
then it was that domestic violence doesn't exist here. And when they became
comfortable with that, it wasn't that people were freezing to death on the steps of
our church because they're drunks. Because those people lived in the woods.
They didn't see them, and the people that died on the church steps were gone by
the time the church opened at ten o'clock. You know, so they didn't see them.
And the ones that they passed by they chose to be invisible.
Making people aware that poverty or domestic violence did, in fact, exist in Statesville, in
other words, was an important part of their organization's work because it would
ultimately lead to an entire community, rather than just an series of shelters, accepting
responsibility for dealing with their own community's problems.
Vanessa, Carolyn and Roger did not, however, limit their analysis of social
problems to Statesville. Rather, they saw problems in Statesville as reflective of ongoing,
national-level politics, especially with regard to the domestic policies of the Reagan
administration and issues of homelessness, mental health, and public housing. Indeed,
from the view of the shelters all of these things were very clearly connected. Continuing
a project that he had started as governor of California, in his first year as president
Reagan halved the budget for public housing and Section 8 (housing voucher
29
subsidization) programs to about $17.5 billion. Simultaneously deinstitutionalizing
mental health, he also cut aid to federally-funded mental health programs and sought over
the next few years to eliminate federal housing assistance to the poor altogether.
Believing that the responsibility of care instead fell to the individual or the family, he
further stigmatized people who utilized need-tested programs like welfare as lazy or even
criminal. Though in the White House this might have appeared to be a war against the
paternalism of "big government," from the view of the shelters it became very clear that
mental health, the availability of low-cost housing, homelessness, and even domestic
violence were very clearly connected. Nationally, the homeless population swelled
during Reagan's presidency from around 200,000 to between 600,000 and 1.2 million
(Dear and Wolch 1987, Jencks 1994, Wright 1989). Approximately one third of those
people suffered from some kind of mental illness (Rossi 1989). And about half of
homeless women during that time were victims of domestic violence (NCH 2008). As
Roger remarked, the Reagan ideology was something that the shelters dealt with every
day, as the Statesville community's financial ability to deal with these problems shrunk
every day, so that greater and greater numbers relied on private sector initiatives like their
own:
People in need of mental health care were a large part of who we helped, many of
them Vietnam veterans, and whatever we could do to get some of them back on
their feet, more kept on showing up; they would be prosecuted for vagrancy, sent
through the so-called justice system, and eventually be back on the street in much
worse condition that they were at the start of the cycle.
30
The three of them eventually came to see the virtue of working with police on matters of
domestic violence and vagrancy, but it was increasingly the case that, with disappearing
public sector support, it fell to law enforcement, rather than specialists, to deal with
systemic issues of homeless, mental illness, and substance abuse.
The building of the "intentional" community, then, and sustaining it in the face of
so much resistance, was not only about the formation of close friendships and material
interdependence. It was also about generating a consciousness of systematic social
problems. As Vanessa explains:
It meant examining our own personalities, our strengths and weaknesses, and
calling bullshit on each other. ..We were on the front lines of Reagan's war on the
homeless, and we testified to the carnage of its effects on innocent people. Our
ethical resolve to help the poor was one thing, but the experience, of coming to
political consciousness, of understanding how all these things are interconnected
-and continuing to do that to this day-was and is the foundation of what would
eventually be called CSD.
Though their intentional community provided them with a source of strength, at
the same time, they were each drawn to the work they were doing by intensely personal
narratives. Carolyn, for example, is the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, and she is
exceedingly proud of the work that her parents did. Her father was a pastor and her
mother was an educator, and early in Carolyn's life they were invited by the Presbyterian
church in Taiwan to serve, where they worked in different areas and in different positions
-as a university chaplain, in rural churches, teaching in seminary-for over fifteen
years. During that time, Carolyn learned to speak Mandarin as a second language but
also, she says, to learn to live in the heat and in difficult and unfamiliar environments.
31
When she moved to North Carolina for college she remembers realizing that she was one
of the privileged ones not only in Taiwan but in the U.S. as well:
When I went to the campus physician one day he had a black waiting room and a
white waiting room. And I just walked in the door that was closest to the dorm,
and then they ushered me through to this other waiting room, and I didn't know
why, and I found out that I had sat down in the black waiting room, and I found
out that there were water fountains for coloreds and water fountains for whites,
and I had never experienced that. And I hit college which was pretty much a
white school with, like, a handful of black students you could count on either
hand ... I realized that [when I was in Taiwan] I was in the minority population and
I was always treated with utmost courtesy, and here I was finding people around
me in the U.S. being treated with disrespect because of their skin, or their faith, or
they didn't have the right language, or they didn't wear the right clothes, or
whatever, and I was horrified...So, then, it was only when I was 18, 19,20 years
old when I discovered racism, prejudice, and race riots in the US, and it was in
my face.
Because her family did not speak openly about politics at home, for Carolyn the fact that
racism was at the foreground of discussions of social justice in the late 1960s and early
1970s in North Carolina served as a catalyst for her political transformation. The
guidance she received from her parents and the college, and the eventual choice to
recognize racism as a broader issue of social justice, Carolyn says, was a formative
moment in her life:
My whole world changed, and a lot of my classmates pretty much did one or two
extremes. We either stayed in very little, tight, conservative religious boxes,
where everything was just right, and towed the line, or we leapt off the deep end.
And I was very fortunate to be going to a school where we had excellent bible
staff and professors who asked, why do you believe what you believe? Look at it.
Don't throw it out the window, but don't accept it at face value, study it. Look at
it. See. They encouraged you to explore. It was really hard for me, but I did and
what I found out was that God was a lot bigger than I thought. And a lot more
inclusive and a lot more adventuresome, and that's not a dish on anything that I
grew up with, it's just to say that I found that I liked this inclusive creator a whole
lot more than the boxes one. And so when I got over the shell shock of expanding
32
my theological horizons, I grew up a lot. And then the whole thing of shelters and
all that, you see, for me came out of that expanded awareness.
Before becoming part of the intentional community, Carolyn earned her Master's in
Education and pursued a career in teaching high school social studies, where she reveled
in the opportunity to play "devil's advocate" and challenge students' preconceptions,
especially in the task of teaching U.S. history. The most important part of that job, she
said, was to teach the students not just the facts but how to be part of a world community:
"The world is not a huge place where what you do doesn't matter. The world's a small
place and different parts are related to each other. It all matters."
Close friends with Roger and Carolyn from college, and just as Roger was about
to graduate, Veronica decided to follow in her own father's footsteps and attend seminary
as well. For Veronica, the ability to make hard decisions and accomplish difficult tasks in
the face of adversity is something that she credits to her parents, who, even late in life,
decided to pursue non-traditional life courses, foregoing retirement to take up positions in
a Presbyterian church in China. And although the religious upbringing that Veronica's
parents instilled in her was predominantly pre-Vatican II in character-that is, tending
toward apologetics for the status quo of Church and society-the experience of being the
only woman emolled in seminary, when it was uncommon for women to seek that kind of
religious education, radicalized her future religiosity. Male students, with whom she
found little camaraderie, frequently derided her beliefs about gender equality as naIve,
challenged that she had a "calling," and even argued that her role should instead be as a
mother. While she found some support in professors, Veronica increasingly discovered
33
herself on the outskirts of orthodoxy and supporting the idea of a God not limited by the
human folly to draw distinctions between genders as well as religious denominations,
both in and outside of the Christian tradition. It was about the time that she, Carolyn, and
Roger decided to start an intentional community that Veronica parted ways with the
formal church:
I found myself setting higher standards for myself than I had for those around
me .. J was incredibly sensitive to the rhetoric ofthose who speak about loving
their brothers and sisters and the hypocrisy of their daily actions. So I spent a
great deal of anger or rage toward the higher being-who can of course take it,
being higher-and also toward the institution of the church, to which I was
feeling more and more estranged.
In fact, she conceptualized herself as moving beyond the limitations of a Christian
identity and started observing Jewish holidays like Yom Kippur, Hanukkah, and Purim,
which the others supported and eventually participated in as well. At the core of her
spirituality, Veronica says, was the idea of doing social justice despite whatever petty
differences. Yet, because what the organization does is often at odds with what she
believes, she says, she is also often compelled to "throw cold water on the unreality of
[their] work" and point out the hypocrisy of others:
I didn't believe in throwing folks out of the shelter, even if they broke the rules
and they were being pains in the ass," she explains, "or saying no, you can't have
food, you have to go to the soup kitchen for that, because those are the rules.
Treating people like brothers and sisters means loving them and caring for them,
despite them being assholes and despite the rules that are made for our
convenience or comfort.
The work of the shelters, like the work in Nicaragua with CSD, has been an up and down
experience for Veronica, one that has been a constant tension between what is right and
------_._--
34
what is actually doable. Veronica eventually married Roger, whom she terms her
"stability" for his ability to see the balance between the two.
Yet, Roger, too, is deeply ambivalent about the balance between the ideal and real.
For him, the experiences of growing up in the South led him to theology rather than the
other way around. Born in northern Florida, he remembers his family was neither rich
nor poor, but rather lived comfortably in the means that they had. Always reticent to
speak in more personal or terms, Roger recounts that one of the most transformative
moments of his early life was when he was nineteen and his father suddenly became
seriously ill. Because he did not have adequate health insurance, neither did he receive
adequate treatment, meaning that "By the time he died, he had not a penny to his name."
The experience sparked in him the realization that the status quo can be terribly unjust, a
sentiment that only grew with time. The term he uses today to describe the type of
transformation one undergoes in such an experience, which comes from his seminary
days, is kairos. 3 "In Greek," he explains,
there are two terms for time, chronos and kairos ...Chronos means linear time, like
days and weeks, and kairos means the opportune moment that intervenes in the
human consciousness, that directs the human mind through its own intentionality.
This is what Dr. King meant when he talked about an oppressed people waiting
for justice, then the flashpoint comes along and moves history forward ...So kairos
is revelation, in biblical terms, it's when injustice is shown to you and also shows
you the way forward. It is the roots of consciousness, revolution, and change for
individual people and groups.
For Roger, social awakening and spiritual awakening came hand in hand. In large part it
was this fact that contributed to his decision to enter the seminary after graduating from
college. While at seminary, however, he was disappointed to find that many of his fellow
35
students did not share his passion for contemplating issues largely outside of church
doctrine, preferring to think in narrowly institutional terms. It was then that he was first
drawn to the ideas of a radical southern preacher named Will Campbell.
A Baptist minister, an outspoken opponent of the war in Vietnam who helped draft
resisters find sanctuary in Canada, the only white supporter of civil rights who was
present at the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr. King,
and the author of the autobiographical books Brother to a Dragonfly (1977) and Forty
Acres and a Goat (1986), Will Campbell never considered himself an activist, and thus
purported to keep his distance from political movements. To Roger, Campbell's ideas
were appealing for a number of reasons. First, Campbell thought that racism was more
than a legal problem based in securing the legal rights of equality in the eyes of the
government. It stemmed from the nature of humanity, and even though many elements
within the institutional church did not support civil rights, he believed that the Church is
positioned to intervene: "for surely we are created to love one another" (Campbell
1986:270). And since the church was not always in the right, this meant acting as a
person of faith rather than a political activist, by reaching out to black communities as
well as white communities. In Forty Acres and a Goat (1986) Campbell details his close,
lifelong friendship with a black man and the eventual humbling recognition that there
were irrevocable and insurmountable differences between the two, differences based on
life experience, racial profiling, economic strife, and so forth. In light of that, how could
they ever really know one another? The solution, he concluded, was also to attend to
36
those poor white communities from which the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) often drew its
members, with the goal of building a worldview in which souls were no longer thought of
in terms of race but as a common humanity. He argued, "anyone who is not concerned
with the dispossessor as he is with the suffering of the dispossessed is being something
less than Christian" (Campbell 1977:201). This activity was of course not without social
resistance. While he received death threats when at the University of Mississippi as a
supporter of integration, he was also criticized for ministering to members of the KKK, to
which he reportedly responded by saying, "Mr. Jesus died for the bigots as well."
Campbell thought that it was the segregationists and other racists who needed perhaps the
most council, because their limited views on the nature of God and humanity was nothing
less than tragic: "One who understands the nature of God can never takes
sides" (Campbell 1977:226).
Second, Roger liked the idea that Campbell's theology was rooted in the idea of
ethical action rather than the institution of the Church. A redeemed community, as
Campbell understood the concept, existed not within the boundaries of the Church but in
ethical actions. Since the actions of the institutional church were not always ethical,
moreover, then the redeemed community was not always the Church. Forty Acres and a
Goat also describes Campbell's eventual disillusionment with conventional religious
groups, and in it he paraphrases the doctrine of the Church held by Carlyle Marney,
another Southern Baptist, who often said "Church is a verb" (1986: 148).4 By the end of
his career, Campbell had not rejected the church but rather the "institution" of the church,
37
calling for a number of reforms, including to increase the number of female bishops, to
open churches to the homeless, and to require that ten percent of all corporate donations
to church affiliated colleges be used for poverty relief. The only other option, he said,
was "to walk away sorrowfully, for behold...we are very rich (1986: 122).
While Roger often felt frustrated by what he perceived to be the narrow scope of
the church's concerns--often focusing on things like worship, ritual, and ultimately its
own perpetuation-he found in Campbell's ideas comfort that one could indeed pursue an
independent spiritual path without rejecting the church outright. Given the draw that
social concerns had for him as well, he was invigorated by the idea that ethical action
might indeed be more spiritually fulfilling. When he had finished seminary, then, Roger
did not pursue a position within the church but rather became involved with a number of
issues, including the Carolina Interfaith Task Force on Central America (CITGA, the
organization from which Witness for Peace emerged) and the formation of CSD. Much
of the time, Roger chooses to express his dissatisfaction with the institution of the church
with humor. One of his favorite jokes, in fact, reflects on the narrow idea of spirituality
involved in sectarian church politics:
A Catholic, a Presbyterian, and a Methodist all die. The three find themselves
standing outside of the gates of heaven waiting in line to speak to Saint Peter.
The Catholic walks up and Peter tells him, "You have been a good man, enter into
heaven and walk down to Door Number 4. However, be very quiet when you
pass Door Number 1. Peter then calls the Presbyterian up telling him the same
thing, "You have been a good man, enter into heaven and walk down to Door
Number 3. However, be very quiet as you're passing Door Number 1. Finally,
the Methodist walks up and hears the same message from Peter that he told the
Catholic and Presbyterian. "You have been a good man, enter into heaven and
walk down to Door Number 2. However, be very quiet as you pass Door Number
38
1." The Methodist is curious and asks Peter, "Why do I need to be quiet as I walk
by Door Number 1?" Peter relies, "Oh, that's where the Baptists are, and they
think they're the only ones here."
For Roger, the aversion to institutionalization does not stop at the church, it was also
forefront among his concerns as the shelters slowly formalized and professionalized,
moving toward being an NGO. In fact, Roger explained, the shelters and later CSD
would sometime become an institution-that the organization's purpose would be its own
perpetuation at the cost of ethical action and the social good, just as he perceived to be
the main failing of institutionalized religion-was one of his biggest fears. As early as
the 1980s, Roger resisted the idea of formalizing the shelters as a non-profit, though he
ultimately recognized the practical necessity to do so.
The transformations that Carolyn, Veronica, and Roger underwent in their lives,
leading up to and including the experiences of starting the shelters, were not impelled by
anyone thing and, indeed, did not find expression in any single term. For Carolyn, it was
an "expanded awareness" of social issues. For Veronica, it was the "consciousness" that
came from finding herself on the outside of the Church looking in on the status quo. And
for Roger, it was the kairos of perceiving himself to be in a historical moment in which
he should act. Yet, in each case, the logical conclusion was not simply to speak, think,
write, or preach about justice, but rather to do justice in their daily lives and work. This
unorthodox theology did not, of course, come without resistance from those closest to
them. Carolyn remembers:
My parents were very proud of what we were doing, but kept wanting us to have
bible study with everybody on the front porch, and we just wouldn't do that. We
39
would not do 'you have to worship the way we do' in order to earn your dinner.
That bothered them, and it bothered Roger's and Veronica's families too. And,
my response became, mother, I am doing ministry the way God wants me to do it
the best I can. You're going to have to leave that one up to God. If God wants me
to do bible study on the front porch, God's going to have to hit me upside the head
and get my attention and explain to me that I'm supposed to be doing bible study
on the front porch instead of doing what I'm doing.
They did not expect it to be an easy journey, and in fact sometimes reveled in, as Carolyn
says, "going bleary-eyed, brain-dead burnt out because we worked non-stop for seven
days a week for months at a time." For Roger and Veronica, in fact, the resistance that
they often encountered from the institution of the church, or those who perceived
themselves to be agents of it, reassured them that they were on the right track and even
compelled them to redouble their efforts. They found a community of similarly minded
individuals in the Carolina Interfaith Task Force on Central America (CITCA), which led
them to expand the scope of their activism outside of the u.s. Between 1982 and 1985,
all three of them went on short-term delegations to Nicaragua with Witness for Peace.
Roger returned in 1984 as an election witness for the Sandinista victory, and even went
with Witness for Peace (which emerged out ofCITCA) to Iraq before the Gulf War in
1990.
In July of 1987, the intentional community expanded to include Jill and Lisa, two
sisters from Chicago who had replied to a listing in the "Communities of Communities"
section of Sojourner Magazine. For Lisa, the desire to become part of a community first
grew out of her participation in a long-term delegation in Nicaragua with Witness for
Peace, in which she had lived as part of a community of like-minded individuals, shared
40
resources, and, in her words, "felt the power of what a solidarity community can do in
terms ofjustice work and a justice lifestyle." When she returned, she and Jill-who had
gone to graduate school for social work and was employed as a counselor-felt that they
were at a crossroads with regard to where they would go next in their lives. As Lisa
explains, "We felt like we had been going in certain directions, you know, trying to have
less impact on the earth, trying to work for justice, and that we were at the end of what
two individual people could do. We decided that we really needed to be part of a
community." As it turned out, however, joining a community is not as straightforward a
matter as looking for a job. She describes the process of first coming to hear about the
intentional community:
As we were reading through the list of communities [in Sojourner Magazine], the
description jumped right out at us, and we said, wow, these sound like great
people, but, you know, it's in North Carolina, and we were trying to make our
community search process be a spiritual journey, we felt like God was calling us
in this direction and probably had a place for us, and we were willing to be used.
But, at the same time, we were asking as a favor, please not the big cities on the
east cost, you know, Boston, Washington, please no suburbs at all, and we don't
want to go to the South. So it didn't meet that requirement, so we finished
looking looking over the list and we sent out fourteen letters of introduction, and
as long as we were doing that many we sent one to North Carolina, you know.
Maybe North Carolina wasn't as south as some Carolinas, you know. And they
were the first ones to get back to us. Roger called us and we talked for about an
hour, long distance on Christmas day, 1985...We talked for a long time, and we
really enjoyed talking to him, and the community sounded great. It was definitely
in the South, though. [laughs] He signed off the conversation by saying, '1 have to
go now, we're taking photos at a Ku Klux Klan rally downtown, and 1was like,
noooo, I don't think so. A couple months later, Jill happened to run across a travel
agent who had a really good flight to Charlotte, so we said, alright, let's go visit.
So we flew there and only with the greatest difficulty did we resist the temptation
to call up our third housemate and say 'send our stuff,' we're home. This is it.
41
When they visited the shelters for the first time, they experienced a kind of homecoming.
The calling to this organization was even further heightened for Lisa by the serendipity
that she had actually met all three of CSD's community members~Roger,Veronica, and
Carolyn-on separate occasions while in Nicaragua.
For Jill, however, the course of coming to feel like part of the intentional
community was quite different and not so evident a course as it was for Lisa. Jill
received her undergraduate degree in mathematics, but what she realized that she really
wanted to do by the time she graduated was to become a family therapist. Not having the
background, she went about to get life experience that would then qualify her to receive
professional training as a family therapist, ending up working for the American Friends
Service Committee, where she recalls that she was "radicalized" and "conscientized."
Though that experience, she says she developed a greater political awareness than she
had previously as well as a sensitivity to people that eventually led her to the method of
"accompaniment," rather than coming in as the expert.
While the intentional community'S attitude was that "We take who God sends," as
a Quaker she was accustomed to a different style of consensus building. She explains her
process of coming to feel that the community was the right choice:
The Quakers do a group consensus process that Presbyterians don't know
anything about. And, so, the way Quakers do things is, individuals get clear
within themselves, and if they need help, they will call a clearness committee
within the worship community to help them get clear. When that group is clear,
they will go to the monthly meeting and see if the whole monthly meeting can
unite in consensus about whatever, in this case, my sense of call. So that, what
Quakers believe is that you discern a call by if people hear God the same, then,
it's a better chance that it really is. Well [CSD] didn't do that. [CSD's]
42
philosophy was that we take who God sends. And I really felt cut off, because I
as a Quaker needed to do a consensus process with them, and they didn't do that.
I mean, they made decisions by consensus, but not, I mean they would have said,
it's your life, it's your relationship with God. What do we have to do with that?
You know, we take who God sends. Urn, and so Lisa and I did our discernment
process, and I included my meeting, and we got clear, and called up Roger to tell
him that we were coming. And Carolyn answered the phone and said, you know
it's really funny because just the day before yesterday I was showing a group of
visitors around, and they said, how many people are there in the community? And
she said five. And then she stopped and said, wait a minute, there's not that many
of us, where did I get that number, where did that number fall out of my mouth?
And she said I realized that I was counting you two already as part of the
community. And to me it was real clear that God had spoken there, and that was
my group affirmation of our consensus call, even though they didn't do that, even
though Carolyn didn't have a clue what she was doing.
When Jill and Lisa arrived, CSD had an annual budget of a hundred thousand
dollars with guaranteed funding sources from church groups and with a mailing list of
several thousand people. The two sisters therefore found themselves trying to work
within an already well-established set of practices that to some extent defined their roles
as community members. With previous office experience, Lisa, for example, coordinated
the day-to-day financial components of the shelters, Jill readily moved into the role of a
counselor at the battered women shelter. Yet, the now expanded community did not
emerge organically. Jill explains:
Lisa and I had experimented with the idea of community for some time, and so
when we first moved into the community I thought we knew what we were talking
about. Urn, I think what community is not about is a bunch of people earnestly
struggling together and trying to be one, working in unity and harmony and,
certainly some kind of a family, but not a great big happy ideal, Brady Bunch kind
of family.
Conflicts and miscommunications, some petty and others not, made the sisters reconsider
their expectations of the group and come to a more realistic point of view regarding the
43
others who were part of the community. Jill argues that, despite the differences that
existed between them, the key point about the social dynamics which emerged thereafter
was that it really was an "intentional" community:
A lot of our community has to do with a lot of people with a lot of shared history
and shared values, who are living together and struggling together, committed to
each other, and committed to our common work. For me, one of the biggest most
important aspects of community has to do with living with people who are very
different than I, and have very different goals for community than I have. While I
am the one of all of us that values processing things, personal sharing, I thought
that when I moved into community we were going to know each other, and be
intimate and pour our hearts out to each other, and in this community we do that
in sub-groups. We don't do that as a whole big group. And there are people in
this community that have no patience at all for processing, and, in fact, it's
difficult when a problem comes up to even sit down and directly talk about it.
And so, the community includes all of us, and I've got a commitment to the
people whose personal styles are very different,just as they have a commitment to
me. The challenge is how to be who we are, and get done what we've all
committed to getting done together. So the process of learning mutual respect,
and learning boundaries and spaces, and the dance of what we really do have to
do together, and what we really do have to respect. The struggle is solving both
the work-related problems and the personal problems where the whole community
is involved. Those very much overlap, because our work has always been an
extension of community...We started out calling ourselves an intentional Christian
community, we've tended to drop the Christian over the years, but to me the word
that has become key is the word "intentional." Intentional means that we've
decided to do it. And damn it we're going to do it. And that plays out by in large
in the work that we do, the projects that we're pursuing.
Rather than simply existing, or being drawn together by forces outside of each of the
constituting members control-which is to say, common histories, common identities, or
even common ideas about community-from Jill's perspective the type of community
that they have collectively and intentionally built has been by virtue of active choices,
oftentimes despite differences.
44
THE MOVE TO NICARAGUA
On the tenth anniversary of the shelters in 1989, the community decided to
undergo an intentional re-evaluation process to determine the future of the community.
As Lisa explains, "Part of being a community involves occasionally reasserting the desire
and collective purpose of being part of one." Thus, for two months on end they took
what they called a "week middle"-they could not take weekends because they were too
busy-to have a mental retreat and hammer out the details of what the next ten years
might look like. Eventually, as a group they converged on the conclusion that, if they
were able to find a group willing to take ownership of running the shelters, they would
actively seek the opportunity to expand their efforts beyond Statesville, North Carolina.
Not surprisingly, Central America was the focus of these discussions. The
relations between the U.S. and Central America during the 1980s were, to say the very
least, troublesome. The Reagan administration's support for repressive regimes in EI
Salvador and Guatemala, its sponsorship of illicit paramilitary organizations such as the
Contras, and, simultaneously, the White House's ironic tagging of the Sandinistas as
"terrorists," "genocidal," "Murder, Inc.," a "cancer," "hardline communists," people who
"hijacked" their own country and brought to the region a "Central American gulag," a
"communist reign of terror," and a "totalitarian dungeon," were offensive, much as they
were to the vast majority of the u.S.-Central American peace movement (including
CITGA and Witness for Peace) with whom they had become closely linked (e.g. Smith
1996). Like many others who, in addition to protest in the U.S., also traveled to the
45
region, the reality of injustice in Nicaragua was made all the more real to Roger,
Veronica, Carolyn, and Lisa, who each experienced firsthand the smoldering wreckage of
villages, scattered mortar shells, wounded and shellshocked survivors of Contra
offensives, the fear of landmines every time they drove down a road, and all of the other
carnage and suffering wrought by the ideologically motivated "Cold War psychosis," in
Veronica's phrasing, that Nicaragua was of "vital interest" to U.S. security.
This firsthand experience ofthe U.S. 's actions in Nicaragua was also vital for
laying bare the connection not only between the Reagan administration's policies and
homelessness in Statesville, North Carolina, but also between homelessness and war in
Central America. As Roger said,
When you think about it long enough, Reagan's war on the homeless was
essentially the same as the war in Nicaragua. Not only could the billions of
dollars spent on the Contras and in aid to military regimes throughout Central
America have been spent on social programs in the U.S., it is also all based on the
same, interconnected logic and key players, thatAyn Rand kind of juck you, we
don't need you to the world.
At the same time, Veronica added, though the issues may appear to be disparate, one does
not need to think about them in political terms to see them connected by the common
thread of injustice.
What eventually sealed the deal that the focus of their work would be Nicaragua
was the fact that, when Roger was in Nicaragua in 1984 as an election witness, he
established connections with Father Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, a Maryknoll priest and
liberation theology adherent who served as the Foreign Minister to the Sandinista
government (as of this writing, d'Escoto is also President of the 63rd U.S. General
46
Assembly). After the 1990 transition in Nicaragua in which the Sandinistas lost power,
yet promised to "govern from below," d'Escoto focused his energy on revitalizing a
sustainable development organization called Fundaci6n de Desarrollo Social Integral
(FUNDESI) that had originally been founded during the 1972 earthquake. In 1992,
d'Escoto and Roger reconnected, out of which came the invitation to work with
FUNDESI, solidifYing the intentional community's decision to move their organization to
Nicaragua.
Changing their name to the Center for Sustainable Development (CSD), with the
aid ofFU1\TDESI they felt that it was in Nicaragua that they could make the greatest
contribution to the root of socio-economic problems as opposed to their work in the
shelter. CSD turned toward the poor Nicaragua, in other words, because it was there that
they could respond to the frustrations of enacting social change in the U.S. by throwing in
their lot with an apparently more feasible project in Nicaragua. Working with homeless
shelters in the U.S., Lisa argues, "was more like putting band-aids on society's wounds."
In Nicaragua, the need was much more enormous, in no small part because of the
interventionist politics that the U.S. had been practicing there. At the same time, the
existing level of organization was so much higher in Nicaragua because of the revolution.
In fact, Nicaragua is considered to be one of the most NGO-ized countries in the world,
with more than four thousand in operation in the country, channeling 70 percent of the
foreign aid, which amounts to a little over 20 percent of Nicaragua's GDP (Briones 2004,
CAPRI 1996). For those who had been to Nicaragua previously, the connection to the
47
country was also an emotional and spiritual one based on the perception that, despite the
difficulties that Nicaraguans had experienced, as Lisa says, "they had somehow managed
to hold onto their faith in situations that to us just looked hopeless."
In 1993 CSD formally handed over the operations of the three Statesville shelters
to a new group (who is still running them), turned the Statesville houses in which they
were living into low-income rentals, and began the process of moving to Nicaragua with
enough money to live on for about a month. The move involved a month-long caravan
trip through Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, before eventually reaching Ciudad
Sandino in Nicaragua, where they had arranged through FUNDESI to buy a ranch style
house from a cooperative that had gone under shortly after the 1990 transition in which
subsidies disappeared. Little did they know, at that point, that the history of the house ran
even deeper: it was the former residence of Lillian Somoza Debayle, sister ofAnastasio
Somoza Debayle, who was the president of Nicaragua from 1974 to 1979 and who was
overthrown during the revolution. The fact that the NGO moved into the house on the
15th anniversary of the revolution was for CSD an unintentional symbolic gesture, but
one that they interpreted as a sharp break from the troublesome past of U.S.-Nicaragua
relations, a new beginning rather than a continuation of it.
Indeed, CSD's partnership with FUNDESI, the direction and support that they
received from the Nicaraguan sustainable development organization, helped. Six months
after arriving, in fact, Theodor Mejia, then the FUNDESI representative given the task of
working with CSD, was able to take the CSD representatives to every neighborhood in
48
Ciudad Sandino and Roberto Clemente (then a satellite of Ciudad Sandino, not a barrio),
where elected community representatives to deliver written proposals containing
prioritized lists of what needed to be accomplished in the barrio, what resources were
available, and the potential benefits of each project-a clear sign to CSD, at least, that the
community was willing take some ownership over the projects. CSD's current doctrine
matured through extensive discussions and of course collaborative practice with
FUNDESI. It is worth a brief discussion of the two concepts so formative to the
organizations' practices on the ground.
SUSTAINABLE AND PARTICIPATORY DEVELOPMENT
As a critique of conventional development practices in the 1950s and 1960s-
which were organized around either modernization theory-driven, macro-level strategies
such as technology transfer and agricultural extension or dependency theory-driven,
macro-level strategies such as import substitution-the idea of "sustainable"
development emerged as early as the 1970s with the goal of factoring into the industry's
heretofore narrow concept of economics important environmental concerns such as the
idea of "equilibrium with basic ecological support systems" (Stivers 1976). Many of
these critiques were based in the observations of non-economists and included the rather
Malthusian point that infinite growth (the tacit assumption of development thus far) was
very much an impossibility. A great number of variables inevitably intervene, such as
carrying capacities for the world population, extra-economic consequences of
49
industrialization and pollution, the limitations of food production, and of course resource
depletion (Meadows et aI1972). In the 1980s, the sustainable development approach
became a mainstream alternative, culminating with the Bruntland report, prepared by the
D.N.'s World Commission on Environment and Development, which declared that
"Humanity's inability to fit its doings into [the patterns of Earth] is changing planetary
systems, fundamentally" (World Commission 1987: 1). The new vision of development,
Arturo Escobar argues, has been premised on a "distinct vision ofthe world as a global
system where all the parts are interrelated" and in which the relationship between
"humankind" and "nature" must be reconciled, even transformed into a relationship
between society and environment (1994:193-4). Moreover, in order to accomplish such a
task, sustainable development must call to its aid successful, scientific planning and
management.
In more recent discussions, sustainable development has expanded the scope of
"sustainability" to include sociopolitical, economic, and environmental equilibriums,
known as the "triple bottom line" (Hasna 2007). In addition to the concern for
environmental impacts, that is, sustainable development projects also seek to make their
benefits self-sustainable, enduring without input of outside organizations and institutions.
This means that in addressing the needs of communities, economic advancements, in
particular, should not be made at the cost of depleting environmental resources because
those too are integral components of human well-being. Likewise, environmental
initiatives must also take into account allegedly "external" considerations like the
50
economic implications for communities. A cutting-edge green energy source, for
example, is untenable if maintenance costs are higher than the financial resources
available to that community, much in the same way that bankruptcy is less sustainable
than financial solubility.
The older, ecologically-driven model of sustainability, that is to say,
problematized the sustainability of the global ecosystem, often at the cost of
understanding the sustainability of local cultures and realities. As Escobar writes, it was
a model that
believed that because all people are passengers of spaceship Earth, all are equally
responsible for environmental degradation. They rarely see that there are great
differences and inequities in resource problems between countries, regions,
communities, and classes; and they usually fail to recognize that the responsibility
is far from equally shared (1994: 195).
Many sustainable development scholars and practitioners have perceived that the
economic activities of the poor have been quite detrimental to the environment and have
"[admonished them] for their 'irrationality' and their lack of environmental
consciousness" (1994:195). Yet, in so doing, they have failed to realize that increased
pressure on the environment is often rooted in larger sociopolitical and economic forces,
such as displacement from land or the disruption of proven subsistence habits and
strategies, as well as the comparative impact of industrialized nations.
While the "triple bottom line" approach to sustainable development may take into
consideration some of those limitations-challenging, for example, certain aspects of the
economism of developmentalist visions that ultimately measure progress myopically in
51
terms of economic benchmarks-whatever the variables at hand, the common thread
nevertheless continues to be that the implementation of these strategies requires
successful scientific management (Escobar 1992). Whether it is the management of the
human-environmental relationship or the more complex sociopolitical-economic-
environmental relationship, the "we" in the idea that 'we' "need to move peoples and
nations towards sustainability by effecting a change in values and institutions that
parallels the agricultural or industrial revolutions of the past" is inevitably the "familiar
figure of the Western scientist turned manager" (Escobar 1994:193). Likewise, as
Escobar points out in a 1989 Scientific American special issue on "managing planet
Earth," it also becomes the responsibility of the "ahistorical young dark woman" (ibid) to
absorb and carry out that management, informed as it is by the ideologies of scientific
management. Escobar writes, "It is still assumed that the benevolent (white) hand of the
West will save the Earth" (ibid).
In addition to the imperial flavor that discourses about development continue to
carry, I argue that it is also important to understand that such discourses exist within, and
are underpinned by, a deeply historical moral imaginary. Autonomy and self-sufficiency,
in particular, are presumed ideals within many development frameworks (e.g. Carmen
1996, Escobar 1994), but the reasons for this almost always remain unarticulated. At
root, however, the value of autonomy seems to be grounded less in a purely economic
model than moral thought, particularly, in Western history, Kant's notion of moral
autonomy and Adam Smith's (1853) moral philosophy (Schneewind 1998). The latter
52
provides perhaps the clearest insight into the value of autonomous economic activity and
still resonates with the practices of many sustainable developers and social service
providers. As Smith argued in The Theory ofMoral Sentiments (1759 [1853]), a treatise
that preceded The Wealth ofNations (1776), the pursuit of individual interest, and being
capable to do so, is morally correct because it means that one does not place the burden
of pursuing one's interests on family, community, or society instead.
As Adam Smith pointed out in The Theory ofMoral Sentiments (1853), which
articulates his moral philosophy-in sharp contrast, of course, to the way in which neo-
conservatives and human behavioral ecologists have represented Smith-pursuing one's
individual interests (and being capable to do so) is morally correct because it means that
one does not place the burden on family, community, or society to do so instead. The
ideal of autonomy in community development, in many respects, follows a similar logic:
overcome historical, political, economic inequities, rather than seek retribution.
For FUNDESI as well as CSD, one solution to this problematic arrangement of
power has been "community" or "participatory" development. Preferring "people-
centered" approaches, such as in the idea of "putting people first" (Cernea 1985,
Chambers 1983), community development, for one, is organized conceptually around the
idea of providing groups of people with the skills that they need to effect change in their
own communities. Rather than transferring technology or creating industry, that is,
community development suggests that development may occur by building political and
economic power in communities, particularly through the formation of large social
53
groups working for a common agenda. Community development in this sense is not a
commitment to infinite growth, but rather collective action for social and environmental
justice and with the generation of structures of political and economic power that may be
mobilized on behalf of the equality and justice (e.g. Ledwith and Campling 2005). The
approach of community development, like participatory development but in sharp
contrast to institutionalized development projects, begins in the everyday lives of local
people and is founded on the principle of their democratic participation in projects that
they collaboratively define. 5
Working with FUNDESI and taking cue from the organization's language and
ideologies, CSD refined a basic five area program of operation based on the principles of
participatory, community development: (1) sustainable agriculture, (2) appropriate
technology, (3) primary health care, (4) education, and (5) sustainable economic
development. Yet, in conversations with d'Escoto, in particular, CSD also came to see
some basic affinities between the approach of sustainable development and their own
ideas of social justice. As Vanessa explains, it is especially important to make the
distinction between sustainable development and charity, much in the same way that
deprivation or lack of resources should be distinguished from injustice. In the world of
charitable aid, that is, poverty and hunger are uncritically represented as isolated
instances of misfortune, thus allowing for the gift giver, in the guise of empathy, to
express moral superiority. Conversely, injustice, in its structural and distributive form,
communicates that society has denied the rightful entitlements or basic necessities of
54
dignified, human existence, thus revealing an embedded power differential of domination
and oppression. Citing Paul Farmer's book Pathologies ofPower: Health, Human
Rights, and the New War on the Poor (2004), Vanessa suggests that, on a very basic level,
"charity is something that white liberals do so that they don't have to acknowledge their
own historical culpability or, really, give up any of the privilege that they have enjoyed in
a broken system."
In this light, for Roger in particular, it follows that institutions that are concerned
rather narrowly with works of mercy, such as feeding the hungry or sheltering the
homeless, mayor may not be concerned with fixing the system that keeps appropriate
nourishment and shelter from billions every day. In fact, those institutions may on some
level prefer that the system is not fixed so that they may continue to fulfill their roles as
the providers of surcease from hunger pangs, through which, as institutions and as
individuals, they find they are monetarily, emotionally, ethically, or even existentially
rewarded. While charity, in this sense reinforces inequality in transfers from the rich to
the poor by symbolically and politically objectifying the receiver in a non-reciprocal
exchange, sustainable development, by contrast, attempts to address on a community-by-
community level those very structures that produce inequality. A quotation of Father
Oscar Romero, Lisa maintains, summarizes CSD's approach to ethical action, which is
informed by a progressive Christian ethic of care combined with a liberation theology
message about injustice:
Es una caricatura de amor cuando se quiere apafiar con limosnas 10 que ya se
debe por justicia, apafiar con apariencias de beneficencia cuando se esta fallando
55
en la justicia social. El verdadero amor comienza por exigir entre las relaciones
de los que se aman 10 justo .
It is a caricature of love to try to cover over with alms what is lacking in justice,
to patch over with an appearance of benevolence when social justice is missing.
True love begins by demanding what is just in the relations of those who love.
A central principle of community development is therefore autonomy, in the sense
that achievements of projects should be thought of in terms of local social ownership. By
handing over the instruments of power to community members, who take ownership of
the project, that is, autonomy enables communities to pursue their own interests and
depend less on external structures to sustain them.
THE HURRICANE
Between 1994 and 1998, CSD and FUNDESI collaborated on community
projects, mostly having to do with city infrastructure (sanitation, water drainage, etc.) in
Ciudad Sandino, but also ventured into larger scale projects intended to assist small
farmers and generate employment. In conceptualizing the organization's role, CSD
almost always took their cue from FUNDESI, which they assumed as a Nicaraguan
organization had a better relationship to the local community. Perhaps the majority of
their collective efforts during these four years went to organizing a grower-owned
agricultural cooperative COPROEXJ\JIC (Cooperativa de Productores Organicos y
Tradicionales y Exportadores de Nicaragua), a loosely based network of about two
thousand organic (i.e. no pesticides by choice) and traditional (i.e. no pesticides by
default) small farmers, for whom the cooperative functioned as a strategic bloc by means
56
of which they could bypass coyotes (middlemen) and collectively bargain for higher
pnces.
In October of 1998, however, Hurricane Mitch made landfall and dropped over
six feet of rain in four consecutive days, flooding farmland all over the country and
making Lake Managua, on the northern border of the capital, Managua, swell to over a
kilometer inland from its normal shoreline. In most cases the Nicaraguan national
government's response fell very short and was limited to providing buses to move people
around and leaving them without any additional aid. For example, during a memorial for
the nearly two thousand people killed in a mudslide in the mountain village of Posohega,
President Arnoldo Aleman, a former official of the Somoza government who ran in 1996
on a strong anti-Sandinista platform and won, announced that his government would
transport the newly homeless or bankrupt farmers to nearby plantations in Jinotega and
Matagalpa so that they could "earn some money picking coffee" (Equipo Nitlapan-Envio
1998). Corruption, furthermore, reached a new height. International funds and relief
materials poured into the country, but with little accountability they were often pilfered
and sold, only to appear on supermarket shelves. In 1999, again, the Nicaraguan
government comptroller exposed a rampant misuse of funds, suggesting that President
Aleman had personally skimmed money from the treasury and used it to purchase large
amounts of property from farmers bankrupted by crop loss during the storm. 6
Meanwhile, CSD's focus consequently shifted to the critical needs of the refugee
community that was quickly forming a little over a kilometer west of CSD's compound,
57
where the national government had decided to relocate the displaced population. CSD
worked side by side with national and international efforts in Nueva Vida, as the
community came to be called, like OxFam International, USAID, Doctors Without
Borders, and the United Nations. USAID, for example, had plenty of emergency shelters
to donate to the community but did not have the human resources to put them up, and so
CSD took ownership of that task. At the same time, however, the NGO sought long-term
solutions for improving conditions in the community, but did not know where to start.
One of their first community organizing projects was in fact to arrange the block-by-
block election of community leaders, and, having identified them, they proceeded to
develop a prioritized list of projects.
It was also during this turbulent time in Nicaragua that Melissa joined the CSD
community. Melissa, who identifies as a Quaker, first became aware of CSD when Lisa
and Jill visited Earlham College on a speaking tour, where she was receiving a degree in
Peace Studies and Spanish and where, as a Quaker college, service work is required as
part of the diplona. After her junior year in 1998, she decided to volunteer with CSD in
Nicaragua during the summer and fall. When Mitch hit, she witnessed farmers in the
throes oflosing all of their crops and thousands displaced from their their homes. "I
really felt that I was called to come down," said Melissa, who spent the majority of her
time building provisional housing in Nueva Vida. She had initially decided to stay for
only three months as a volunteer, since she still had requirements to fulfill before
graduation. But after graduation, she returned with the goal of working as a volunteer
58
and did not leave. "At some point in time I decided that I wanted to work to change the
world," Melissa comments, "but what you eventually learn, and what I did, is that you
have to focus on changing the world by focusing on one area, and this is where I live now
and this is where I'm going to focus on changing."
DELEGATIONS
International news of Hurricane Mitch, in fact, inspired many church and
university groups, most of whom CSD had first made contact with during their annual
speaking tours in the U.S., to rush to the aid ofCSD. They began to organize their own
donations drives for clothes, medicine, and other emergency relief supplies for the people
ofNueva Vida. Yet, practically speaking, the problem presented to these groups was that
there still did not exist a reliable and cost effective way to deliver these groups without
actually doing so in person. It was for that reason that, starting in 1999, CSD began
hosting delegations of short term volunteers from the U.S. and Canada.
The hosting of delegations (or "brigades") is a strategy originally pioneered in
Nicaragua by Witness for Peace and, historically speaking, has connected communities in
the U.S. with Nicaragua in relationships of political, financial, and material support.
More recently, delegations have become a feasible strategy for many NGO for building
networks of support in order to implement their own development projects. Currently,
the budgets ofNGOs large and small in Nicaragua-such as the Council of Protestant
Churches, the Center for Global Education, and even the for-profit fair trade corporation
59
Equal Exchange- are often dependent, to various degrees, on the contributions of such
civil society groups (Fogarty 2009). For CSD, in fact, the delivery of donations has
consequently tended to map onto their hosting of service trips to the country in which
delegates may simultaneously gain a better idea of the needs of service-providing NGOs
and even enjoy the satisfaction of witnessing their donated materials being put to use. As
an organization, in fact, with a mailing list of more than ten thousand individuals, more
than seventy percent of their annual operating budget comes from the approximately ten
percent of whom make annual donations. CSD credits the delegations for that high
percentage of independent donations, as the experience of traveling to Nicaragua and
witnessing the work of the NGO, if only for a week, has provided them with a
transformative, educational experience and a concrete way of thinking about the value of
their continuing donations.
After Hurricane Mitch in 1998, specifically, with desperate need of medical
supplies to administer in a very rudimentary free clinic they had set up as well as manual
labor for constructing temporary housing, latrines, and other basic infrastructure, CSD
began hosting delegations of up to twenty people, sometimes as frequently as two or
three times a month, in a one-room addition to their own house that contained
rudimentary, metal bunk beds. To be sure, this was a major imposition on members of
the CSD community. Every time a delegation arrived, their living space quickly became
communal, filled with dozens of well-intentioned but ultimately extremely high-
maintenance individuals, unfamiliar with Nicaragua and often lacking basic Spanish-
60
speaking skills. One of the first of these delegations was a student and faculty group
from Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, of which I was a part in December
of 2000. Over the next three years, the Bucknell Brigades, as they were called,
established a close relationship with CSD and continues to send two groups of
approximately twenty people per year while also making an annual contribution of about
300 thousand dollars. The major project of Bucknell Brigades over the first ten years of
their existence has been to build and fund CSD's free health clinic in Nueva Vida. At the
same time, they have provided Bucknell University students with powerful service-
learning experiences as they work closely with the NGO in community defined projects
(Susman 2009).
More recently, recognizing that delegations are a necessary but ultimately
insufficient condition for the implementation of their projects, CSD has needed to limit
the number of delegations to one per month (hosting twelve per year on a rotating basis)
and to construct separate quarters for volunteers, which they euphemistically refer to as
their International Training Center (lTC). A two-story, concrete building, unadorned
except for the ornamental tiles bearing the names of donors who contributed to its
construction, the lTC, CSD staff remark, is a matter of the CSD community's sanity.
Having their personal space so frequently invaded, they often remark, is psychologically
"unsustainable," detracting focus not only from their own rest and relaxation at the end of
the work day but also from their work on other projects. Apart from the donations that
they provide during the trip itself, the most important function of delegations, from
61
CSD's point of view, is the work that the groups do when they return to the U.S.,
invigorated by their experience in Nicaragua. Since 2000, CSD's network has grown
significantly, in large part because of delegations to include more than 100 churches and
more than 50 college and university groups. Even when these groups are not in
Nicaragua, that is, they work for CSD's causes and remit monetary donations.
The other dimension of hosting delegations, for CSD, is to provide the North
American groups with an educational experience. While many church groups who visit
refer to CSD as "missionaries," the CSD community actually rejects that label, arguing
that, if they are missionaries, they are missionaries when they are in the U.S. on behalfof
Nicaragua. When it comes to delegations, they see their job as not merely convincing
them to support the NGO's projects but also as providing delegates with a transformative
experience. For that reason, in an old school bus that was donated by a North Carolina
church in 1999, they take delegates on trips to witness where people live in intense
poverty (for example, the Managua dump, home to about 1,500 people of all ages) as
well as great wealth (gated communities and fancy shopping malls). They take delegates
to the countryside, where they learn about coffee production in a cooperative to which
CSD supports. They give delegates construction projects where they work side by side
with Nicaraguans, so that, by the end of the week, they may also come away with a sense
of achievement and accomplishment. And they bring in speakers, who present delegates
with information about politics and economics in Nicaragua at large. Delegates
themselves are, of course, of all political stripes, and so CSD staff often relish the
62
opportunity to confront social or economic conservatives, albeit indirectly, with
information that challenges their ideologies. Carolyn recounts an example of a
conservative, ex-Air Force officer who flew missions in Nicaragua during the Contra War
and who was visiting from his Michigan-based church:
When I found out about this guy being in the Air Force, and even having flown
during the Contra War-because, you know, it wasn't just economic support that
Reagan was providing, the actual U.S. military was here also, and many people
don't know that-I was like, 'Oooh, I have someone you have to meet!' I ran
over to the cooperative over there and got Rosa. I said, all cheerfully, 'Meet
Rosa, Rosa was in the anti-aircraft brigade of the Sandinista army during the
Contra War. You'll have a lot to talk about!' The guy just turned bright red, but
you know, he worked harder than anyone else that week. He drank more than
anyone else, but he also worked hard.
Of course, for CSD, the story of the hurricane was always compulsory education
regarding the cascading effects of poverty and the structural vulnerability of the poor
throughout Nicaragua. At the same time, however, hosting these delegations, especially
conservative ones, has often been an emotional, intellectual, and political compromise for
the CSD staff. Feeling that they have needed to cater to the expectations of delegates, or
to not reveal their own political stripes so as to avoid losing their donations, has meant
that hosting has turned into a kind of performance. Roger remembers one instance, in
particular, in which he had to bite his tongue in front of a group from a wealthy Virginia
church:
We had just gotten back from a tour of Nueva Vida, and the group got off the bus
for a little bit to wander around near the clinic. You know, look at the shacks and
so forth. Some guy got his sunglasses stolen, his 200 dollar sunglasses. Well,
anyways, later that evening the group came back to the dorm, and they were doing
the group reflection like they always do in order to process the events of the day.
And, one woman, when, you know, it got to her, starting telling the group about
63
her experience talking to a young kid who walked up to her and smiled, you
know, probably asking for un cordoba. She said, and I remember it vividly
because there I was drinking my beer, you know, and it almost sent me over the
edge. She said, 'that moment was so powerful, I just knew that God had put that
child on earth for me to have that experience [laughs] I mean, how narcissistic can
you get?
Roger attempted to intervene in the conversation, but felt that he had to reserve himself
because the church typically did well bringing donations down to Nicaragua. Without
challenging the person's faith directly, he instead attempted to engage the group on a
theological level, specifically regarding the thought that God might put a Nicaraguan
child on earth and make him suffer, to paraphrase Roger, "so that some rich, white
woman can have a transformative experience."
An understanding of the roles of U.S.-based delegations in Nicaragua, facilitated
as they almost always are by NGOs, requires a sustained focus that is outside of the scope
of this dissertation (see Fogarty 2005). To be sure, though, as a kind of mix between
solidaristic action and tourism-i.e. "voluntourism" (Fogarty 2009)-the development
activities of delegates and of the interlocutor NGOs are powerfully shaped by neoliberal
policies as well as the particular class positions that delimit the kind of projects these
groups take up, if for no other reason than the narrow time frames within which
delegations are willing and able to work. From the perspective of CSD, at least, who are
mindful of the limitations of making their community development projects dependent on
the input of a kind of volunteer tourism, delegations are an imperfect solution to
generating networks of transnational support.
64
BUILDING THE THREE-LEGGED STOOL
In the wake of Hurricane Mitch, perhaps the most pressing issue presented to the
community of Nueva Vida, as CSD identified it, was unemployment rates topping eighty
percent while at the same time state responsibility for social welfare in the post-
Sandinista era continued to decline. Concurrently, during the Aleman and Bolafios
administrations (between 1997 and 2007), opposition to state-supported cooperatives
heightened in favor of microenterprises, which quickly became icons of the free market
model (Babb 1997: 163). Though the logic of market-based development was not entirely
persuasive to CSD, the microenterprise model nevertheless seemed to be an inevitable
conclusion. Practically speaking, with a set of firmly neoliberal economic policies
enforced on a national level, it is perhaps needless to say that there existed no real
political course of action for effecting redistribution on a significant scale, no economic
resources in the form of land or capital to develop a subsistence base, nor a market for
consumer goods (i.e. clothing, food, household items) within Nicaragua. Indeed, the
Nicaraguan consumer goods market was already severely undercut by the glut of second-
hand donations funneled into the country through charity organizations or by pre-
CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement) concessions, especially in the areas of
garment and agricultural commodities, first granted in the region with the passage of the
Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) in 1982, affecting Nicaragua specifically after the 1990
changeover. For CSD, as for most NGOs in Nicaragua during the 1990s, it would seem,
65
there was no alternative but market-based development and poverty alleviation,
particularly via relatively small-scale, export-oriented microenterprises.
Meanwhile in the u.s. in the 1990s, large-scale apparel producers and distributors
were increasingly coming under close scrutiny, as the public attention to sweatshops as
well as the anti-sweatshop movement grew sharply, particularly because of the airtime
provided by newfound celebrity interest (Bonacich and Appelbaum 2000, Klein
2000: 129). Concern over the violations of labor laws, health and safety laws, low wages,
as well as child labor threw into sharp relief the complicity of garment manufacturers,
insulated by the globalization of production by their lack of legal responsibility, distance,
and anonymity. In this context, the anti-sweatshop movement sought to create
monitoring systems that would hold the real profit-makers (manufacturers and retailers)
accountable for the conditions under which their producers are made. Yet, at the same
time, limited national enforcement capacity and the absence of effective international
regulatory regimes created a regulatory vacuum. In that newfound space, however, what
emerged was a market niche centering around the production of goods produced in sweat
free conditions (Ross 1997, Renard 2003).
As CSD was considering its employment generation and poverty alleviation
options, Clean Clothes Organics, in 1995 a relatively small-scale "sweat free" clothing
company from Ypsilanti, Michigan, had just expanded its own market share into organic
cotton garments by earning its first major contract with Ben & Jerry's, an ice cream
company that saw the anti-sweatshop movement as consistent with the company's ethics
66
and wished to offer employees of its growing chain of stores, as well as visitors of its
factory tour, with non-sweatshop T-shirts. Accommodating the new scale of production
required Clean Clothes to subcontract the sewing process for the first time to sew shops
in southern U.S. states (see Collins 2003).
For Emilia Poissant, the owner of Clean Clothes, keeping production jobs within
the U.S., where labor laws were much more stringent, is perhaps the most straightforward
way to run a sweat-free business, which was always a mix of profitability and ethics. On
the one hand, Emilia said, her business sense allowed her to recognize the fact that the
technical, legal, and financial costs of moving production overseas outweighed any
marginal savings that a company as small as hers might enjoy in overhead. At the same
time, the ability for her company to affix to her garments labels like "sweat-free" also
gave her an edge in an already saturated apparel market. On the other hand, Emilia
continued, is the fact that working-class issues have always been close to her heart,
deriving, no doubt, from the experience of growing up in a blue-collar family and
witnessing members of her family lose their jobs to outsourcing. It was because of this
class alignment, ultimately, and of working in an organic food cooperative early in her
life that Emilia eventually became aware of the horrors of maquiladoras (sweatshops), of
their treatment of workers, especially women, and of their disregard for environmental
concerns in the pursuit of profit. At the same time, however, Emilia is also charged by
the desire to make her business, which she has built from the ground up, to be a success.
In fact, Emilia remarks that, as a business owner, there is often an uneasy connection
67
between one's ethical principles and the desire to succeed. Frequently feeling as if she
were left with no alternative except to weigh one against the other, she describes herself
as a business woman first and an activist second.
The political economic climate of the apparel industry in the mid-1990s, however,
soon had its own say in the matter, as emerging trade agreements known as "Super 807s,"
precursors to more expansive free trade measures that would allow apparel companies to
locate production facilities in the Caribbean and Central America without having to pay
import tariffs, were beginning to put U.S.-based garment assembly plants out of
business. 7 From Emilia's point of view, these free trade agreements were detrimental not
only to smaller apparel companies like hers, who experienced great difficulty finding a
stable production facility to process their relatively small batches, but also to workers, for
whom, she recalled, "the need for a sew shop to stay competitive made working
conditions all the worse." In dealing directly with these sew shops, Emilia encountered
"disenfranchised" working-class women and single mothers who had been doing the
same job for so long that they had developed chronic neck and back problems or carpel
tunnel syndrome. Paid by the unit or required to meet unreasonably high quotas,
moreover, the workers cared very little about the quality of anyone garment.
Over the next few years, Emilia began to think of the problem as less a technical
or management problem and more of a problem of her company's business model. "Poor
working conditions and poor pay would always mean poor products," says Emilia, "the
change that needs to happen is on the much more fundamental level of the relationship
68
between workers and owners." She began to see the commercial success of her organic
garments, in other words, as intimately linked to the ethical treatment of workers. She
referred to this idea-that all workers should have a stake in their labor and should be
able to see the product's success as their own success-as "ethical business." Ethical
business is not only an improvement for workers' lives, she explains, it is also a better all
around business model because both the quality and efficiency of production improve
when workers are not disenfranchised.
The event that eventually tipped the scales and made her change the entire
direction of her business, Emilia recounts, was actually the day that Hurricane Mitch
made landfall in Central America. In a rainy week in late October of 1998, with
frustration over the delays caused by sew shop closures coming to a head, an order of
about 17 thousand of Clean Clothes t-shirts were scheduled for production in an Alabama
facility when she received a phone call from the sew shop owner. Several months before,
London Fog, a U.S.-based raincoat company, had moved their entire assembly line to
Honduras, but now one of the main facilities had been badly flooded by the hurricane's
rains. Because the company temporarily needed to move production back to the U.S., the
Alabama facility had taken Emilia's garments off the line and put London Fog's much
larger order on. Flabbergasted, Emilia took the sew shop owner to task for bending to the
will of a corporation that had shown no loyalty to the sew shop, its owners, or its
employees. "It's money," he replied, "I have to do what I can't keep the machines
going."
69
A few months later, while attending a conference on organic certification in her
home state of New York, Emilia struck up a casual conversation with a bearded, silver-
haired man named Roger, who was in attendance representing CSD and a Nicaraguan
agricultural cooperative pursuing organic certification. Emilia remembers this
conversation vividly, because out of it the idea of a sewing cooperative was borne.
"So what are you doing these days?" asked Emilia.
"Right now," responded Roger after a breath of deliberation over where to begin,
"Trying to find employment for a population of about fifteen thousand refugees of
Hurricane Mitch who are living in a muddy cow pasture."
Emilia brightened, "Oh yeah? Can they sew?"
At first glance, it may seem an unlikely partnership, given the fundamental
differences of agenda between the two. As Tsing (2005) points out, however, difference
does not necessarily mean antagonism, and their imperfect connection, in fact, drew them
into a common project at the same time that it allowed them to maintain separate
agendas, ideologies, and goals. While for CSD the project provided needed employment
for the Nueva Vida community, for Emilia it provided a viable offshore, yet still non-
exploitative, solution to her company's sew shop problem. And while the democratic
organizational structure of the cooperative largely derived from the CSD's and
FUNDESI's templates, Emilia contributed to a sensibility of profitability, market
dynamics, and competitiveness in specific market niches.
70
This is, of course, not to say that their interactions were perfectly harmonious.
Roger and Emilia recall phone calls in the early stages of the project in which the two
frequently talked past each other with industry-specific jargon, and conversations
sometimes turned into arguments about who was more of an expert on what. As time
wore on, however, they began to learn from one another's ideas and expertise and to see
their roles in the network as different but complementary. Roger and Emilia eventually
learned to diffuse tensions that arose between them with humor. Emilia would joke, "It's
a true wonder that a man wanting to do economic development hadn't the least sense
when it came to running a business," to which Roger would normally reply that at least
he wasn't a "greedy capitalist."
Along with the group of individuals who would eventually come to operate the
cooperative, CSD and Clean Clothes developed a metaphor of a "three-legged stool" for
the network, mention of which frequently appeared in CSD newsletters to potential
donors as well as in the organics company's own press releases, advertising, and
presentations to the public. In the words of Vanessa, it symbolized "the principles of
equality, solidarity, and partnership, despite differences," much like the metaphor of the
three-legged stool in theology (scripture, tradition, and reason) as well as in religious life
(family, church, and community). In this case, however, the first of the legs was the
NGO, who secured grants and donations for the project, established the broad structures
of a democratic, cooperative structure, and provided constant support and direction in
helping the cooperative to its feet. The second leg was Clean Clothes Organics, which,
71
following a commitment to ethical business, used connections with defunct sew shops to
purchase machinery for the cooperative, shared technical knowledge and business
knowledge about garment production, and dedicated sewing contracts to the cooperative
for years to come. The third leg was of course the Nicaraguan women who founded the
cooperative themselves, whose creative efforts and sacrifices-eoncrete contributions
that they referred to as "sweat"-made the cooperative a material reality.
By 2004, collaboration between CSD and Clean Clothes led to the idea of starting
another worker-owned cooperative, a cotton spinning plant, using The Fair Trade Zone as
a model. Roger, of course, had bigger plans. Following the business model ofAmerican
Apparel in Los Angeles, Genesis, as the spinning plant would later be named by its
cooperative members, would function as the second link in a vertically-integrated,
garment production chain operating entirely within Nicaragua. With financial, technical,
and legal support from CSD-and with Clean Clothes as a guaranteed client-this
production chain would originate with organic cotton, grown by agricultural cooperatives
like COPROEXNIC and EI Porvenir, which would in turn be ginned and woven into
cloth by Genesis. This cloth would then be cut and sewn into garments by The Fair Trade
Zone. From field to factory, in other words, the vertically integrated chain would draw
on a cooperative organization of labor from beginning to end and would operate
completely separate from, or parallel to, the conventional garments market. "The goal is
to put the maquiladoras [sweatshops] out of business," explains Roger.
72
Practically speaking, however, the history of this production chain has been
riddled with compromises. In 2007 and 2008, for example, because of delays in the
construction of the Genesis cotton spinning plant and a shortage of funds for building
materials due to a downturn in contributions-something called "compassion fatigue" in
NGO lingo-CSD was forced to make a provisional "deal with the devil" on behalf of
The Fair Trade Zone. In 2007, Cone Mills-a major, textile production company and
partner of Levi Strauss originally hailing from Greensboro, North Carolina that has
aggressively moved production offshore over the last twenty years-set up a massive
facility in Ciudad Sandino employing almost ten thousand workers. In the same year, in
dire need of an inexpensive source of cloth to complete a string of time-sensitive orders,
CSD, acting on behalf of The Fair Trade Zone, reluctantly approached Cone Mills with
an offer to purchase a small percentage of the facility's cotton, at least until the Genesis
plant was up and running. Since then, The Fair Trade Zone has continued to rely on this
discounted cloth to complete orders. While it might seem ironic that The Fair Trade Zone
is frequently represented as independent from, even parallel to, the maquiladora system,
in reality, the influx of inexpensive cloth into The Fair Trade Zone has in many ways
allowed the cooperative to pad its profit margins and stay afloat amid the economic
downturns of2007-09.
73
FAIR TRADE
Many NGOs like CSD first emerged from religious organizations, for whom the
model of the NGO provided political access while at the same allowing them to maintain
their unique religious visions (Wuthnow 2009). In the U.S., religious charities and social
service organizations have picked up the slack after the dismantling of the mental health
system in the 1980s and of the federal welfare system in the 1990s. Elsewhere,
especially in countries under the constraints of neoliberal structural adjustment policies,
faith-based NGOs have articulated with existing political or social movements,
conservative as well as progressive, integrating faith, humanitarianism, and political
conviction and pressing for social change based on their particular visions of social
justice.
Historically, fair trade can be understood at the nexus of a similar set of
"political" influences: progressive, solidarity campaigns concerned with changing the
terms of world trade on a very fundamental level, as well as faith-based initiatives, the
starting point of which was instead the more philanthropic mission for a better world
(Barrientos et al. 2007). In the United Kingdom, for example, Oxfam-the Oxford
Community for Famine Relief, a confederation of Quakers, social activists, and Oxford
academics-built the first "worldshop" in 1959, which sold the handmade crafts of
Chinese refugees who had escaped the Communist revolution to Hong Kong.
Remarkably successful even in its early incarnations, similar stores retailing imported
Third World goods like cane sugar started popping up elsewhere. The fair trade
74
movement that emerged eventually developed a synergy with the cooperative movement,
particularly the Co-operative Retail Group, which has been instrumental in developing
more than 300 thousand cooperatives in Europe with an estimated 83.5 million members
(Barrientos 2007:52). Eventually, a set of initiatives, including Max Havelaar and the
European Fair Trade Association (EFTA), emerged to track the origin of fair trade goods
and to confirm that the producers received a certain percentage of profits.
In the U.S., likewise, fair trade can also trace its roots back to faith-based
organizations like Traidcraft, Christian Aid, the Quaker movement, and the Mennonite
and Brethren, whose organizations act as both an outlet for fair trade products as well as
an educational resource for revealing the "unfairness" of the world trade system (Barratt
Brown 1993). Today, fair trade has grown sharply in U.S. markets in no small part
because proliferation of fair trade certification systems such as Transfair and Fairtrade
Labeling Organizations International (FLO), which bring fair trade goods into
mainstream channels of consumption, as well as fair trade NGOs, both secular and faith-
based, who on a much smaller scale seek to bring specific causes or groups to the
attention of their supporters. Equal Exchange, for example, which has been historically
strong in natural food stores and food co-ops, has enjoyed a great deal of retail success
recently in mass markets such as Stop & Shop on the East Coast of the U.S. and
Albertson's on the West Coast. At the same time, the company has drawn on strong
alliances and partnerships with faith-based organizations such as Catholic Relief
Services, the Mennonite Central Committee, the Unitarian Universalists, Lutheran World
75
Relief, and the American Friends Service Committee, allowing them to capture a
sympathetic niche market. In fact, Equal Exchange sales to faith-based organizations
reached 2.6. million in 2003, or 20 percent of total sales (Nicholls and Opal 2005:86).
There seems to be a natural affinity between fair trade and faith-based organizations
generally in fair trade, as market-based businesses team up with organizations seeking to
do market-based development.
Until recently, however, garment production has not been eligible for fair trade
certification in the same way that agricultural products have been. This is because unlike
coffee, tea, chocolate, and fruits and vegetables, products with a very limited post-harvest
production process, garments are produced in multiple stages and typically in multiple
production facilities. In order to certify garments· as fair trade, that is, distributors, sew
shops, ginning and spinning plants, as well as cotton grower organizations would need to
be certified individually, which is often too costly a process given the small scale. For
this reason, perhaps the majority of small-producers have instead chosen to participate in
the fair trade movement without use of the fair trade certification seal. Usually operating
on a much smaller scale than producer communities whose products are fair trade
certified, these groups instead choose to make information about production transparent,
thus relying on the democratic structure of the cooperative, decision-making practices, as
well as promises about the distribution of profits to tell the story of "fairness" itself.
In 2008, however, this changed as, seeking in the long term to expand the
production capacity of their network, CSD and Clean Clothes initiated a "beta project"
76
with the Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International (FLO), one of many certifier
organizations in the U.S., to pursue certification for the vertically-integrated production
chain. In September of2009, after several months of bureaucratic management and a two
week examination of the facilities by Scientific Certification Systems, an independent
third party certifier, the production chain received certification as "Fair Labor" under a
new auditing process. Fair Labor Practices and Community Benefits, as the program is
called, claims to validate socially responsible practices in the various stages of garment
and other production, from agricultural production through all stages of the post-harvest
process: growing, harvesting, ginning, spinning, knitting, finishing, cutting, sewing,
screen printing, and distribution. The certification system covers equitable hiring and
employment, safe workplace conditions, worker and family access to health, education,
local and regional impacts, community engagement, and demonstrated economic
stability. In anticipation of the Genesis cooperative starting production in January of
2010, as of this writing, the first of Clean Clothes' products to be offered under this new
certification will be scarves made with 100 percent certified organic cotton available
nationally in the U.S. at Whole Foods Market.
Up to this recent certification victory, imagining the production chain as very
much part of the fair trade movement, CSD and Clean Clothes have chosen to use the
language of fair trade in the absence of a certifying mark, using labels like "sweat free,"
"100 percent worker owned," or "fair trade." In the case of many of the cooperatives
with which they work, including The Fair Trade Zone and El Porvenir, the coffee and,
77
more recently, cotton production cooperative, the scale of operations has made
certification financially unfeasible. Firstly, certification can cost as much as three to five
thousand dollars annually, meaning that, given the size of the cooperative, a significant
portion of the cooperative's profits from whatever price premium they received would be
paid back immediately in certification fees. Second, the relatively small scale of El
Porvenir's production typically means that those who buy their coffee are already
familiar with the cooperative and do not need assurance in the form of a seal. Many of El
Porvenir's customers have, in fact, traveled to Nicaragua as a delegation that CSD hosted,
and thus are familiar with (in some cases, might have even traveled to) El Porvenir. And
third, the current arrangement between El Porvenir and the two major U.S.-based
roasters, who between the two buy the crop every year, frequently guarantees the
cooperative an above fair trade price premium. In fact, a Pennsylvania-based roaster
pays El Porvenir $2.50 per pound up front for approximately two thirds of the co-op's
annual crop of green coffee, compared to the market minimum for fair trade coffee of
$1.26. The other roaster-a non-profit confederation of wealthy, conservative
businesspersons in South Carolina who have organized through a church group and sell
the coffee in each of their stores-pay El Porvenir $2.00 up front for green coffee and
remit all profits after roasting and packaging costs back to the producers. As many
scholars have noted, the bureaucracy and costs of fair trade certification, while beneficial
to large plantation style cooperatives, are often not feasible for smaller producers (Jaffee
2007, Raynolds et al 2007, Fride1l2007).
78
Roger remembers that pursuing organics certification for COPROEXNIC, who
was marketing sesame at the time, first soured him on the idea of certification:
The certification processes are very difficult to figure out, and nothing if not
complicated and convoluted. The forms to fill out, and that you have to continue
to fill out, are completely ridiculous. One time, we were pursuing certification for
a section of COPROEXNIC, you know, and finally got all the paperwork done
and then they lost it! Apparently, after several months, they realized that they
accidentally certified the wrong farms based on a technical error, and the certified
ones were not the CSD co-ops. So, the organics promoter [certifier] asked me to
get maps of the farms that were supposed to be certified so that she could award
our co-ops the certification. Go down to the county office and get them, she said.
And I was like, 'there is no office to go to! That information does not exist!
There's no collection of maps!' This was, of course, before Google Earth, which
you know has changed everything. But anyways, after months of paperwork that
involved details down to like, soil composition and stuff, and literally thousands
of dollars in fees that we paid, she kept insisting that we needed those maps in
order to get any certification at all. Now imagine that you were a producer and
you didn't have the help of an NGO in all this!
Roger's biggest complaint about fair trade is that it is an institution, and as an institution
it is interested in perpetuating itself, through paperwork and bureaucracy as well as
financially, often at the cost of the change that it is attempting to effect. In lieu of
certification, then, CSD has instead relied on close links between producers and
distributors, who are encouraged to visit the cooperatives with whom they work
frequently. In the marketing of those products, moreover, CSD and the distributors use
the tactic of "full disclosure." As Melissa explains, "There's no label to stick on that,
there's no third party that comes in and checks on it...We just tell everybody everything,
and let them make that decision for themselves about where we stand. And I think that as
long as you can get as much of the story as possible to the consumers then you've got
some kind of chance in keeping that happening."
--------------------------- ------ ---------
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A frank discussion with CSD community members reveals that, despite their
utilization of the strategies of fair trade-if not, until very recently, the certification
system-by no means do they think of fair trade as an optimal solution to poverty
alleviation, community development, and, perhaps least of all, social injustice. Rather, at
its best, it is an acceptable solution in significantly less than optimal conditions. At the
core of its shortfalls is the dependency of Southerners on Northerners as well as the
market that fair trade is complicit in fortifying, rather than challenging and in order to
encourage the the autonomous development of producers. Vanessa explains:
I mean, let's look at it. You have a bunch of wealthy, typically white people, with
comfortable lives who want to help support the poor, brown people but-and
here's the kicker-they don't want to give up their own privilege in any
way...What's not completely anti-progressive about that?
For Roger, by contrast, the matter at hand is instead that, whatever profit fair trade
remits to producers, not everybody in a community may be involved in fair trade
production. Those profits therefore do not go toward the development of community
resources, infrastructure, or any kind of industry that is not dependent on a "fickle,
international market." Rather, fair trade reproduces and reinforces inequalities within
those communities, leading to sharp divisions between those who have access to the
market and capital by virtue of fair trade and those who do not. While fair trade may be
an improvement on equitable exchange between the consumer and the producer, it does
not take into account the broader context in which producers, specifically, live. It does
not encourage progressive change on the level of the community so much as create
tensions, conflicts, and jealousy. Roger comments:
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Of all the social justice issues in the world that need to be addressed, you know,
you would have to be crazy to think that social justice coffee was some kind of
salve .. .! mean, everybody thought that fair trade coffee was a great idea about 10
years ago, and so they invested a bunch of money in coffee production. Then that
tanked, and they said, oops, well I guess we'll have to try something different. So
then they started to certify fruits and vegetables and peanuts and shit, never really
seeing the big picture. It's not a solution to rope people into the international
market, when it's the international market that's the problem, really. As a
systematic solution, you have to encourage growth from the ground up, growth
that builds sewage systems and wells and all of the basic infrastructure of
communities. If you just send money a little bit at a time, that doesn't work
because then you're dependent on people continuing to send money.
This is all to say that CSD expresses a real ambivalence about fair trade. It is a
compromise of their ideals that is made in the absence of state resources and in which the
only option is market- and donor-driven development. On the one hand, fair trade
appeals to a notion of co-responsibility on the part of the buyers for the situation of the
producers, and thus, in many ways, escapes purely mercantile considerations. Relative to
other conventional small producers, in turn, fair trade producers benefit greatly from the
strategy's conventions and conditions, such as a minimum, above market price guarantee,
direct dealing with distributors, and oftentimes prepayment for the harvest in the case of
agricultural co-ops. However, the fact that fair trade products ultimately respond to a
commercial logic from the moment of their insertion into the market has its negative side
as well. For Veronica, in particular, the simple act of buying implies that the consumer
has enough power to change the state of things for the producer, yet producers still do not
have the power to change things for themselves. For Roger, in turn, the strictly
commercial aspect of fair trade is problematic as a development strategy because what is
often a matter of survival for producers continues to be beholden to the demands of the
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marketplace, including the need to satisfY business-minded individuals whose
participation in the network is not necessarily driven by ideological or ethical conviction
at all but rather convenience and profit. At the same time, in Roger's view, consumers
are often encouraged by fair trade to sacrifice their own ethical principles by buying a
clear conscience and forgetting about ethical ideals:
One way to think about fair trade is as a kind of indulgence like the Catholic
Church offered. In exchange from absolution from sin, the sinner confesses and
offers some kind of money payment. You know, by selling indulgences, the
Catholic Church enriched itself off of these "donations" ...when the point of
confession to sin, strictly speaking, was supposed to be contrition, sincere
remorse. That the real thing that changed a person's behavior and saved their
soul. Fair trade doesn't really encourage that kind of ethical transformation,
seriously recognizing one's complicity in injustice, it only gives people the
illusion that they are clear.
In a sense, then, as a compromise, fair trade involves the dilution of ethical principles by
the market, and it is under these circumstances that CSD expresses doubts about fair
trade's role in inducing social change.
The real reason why CSD uses fair trade as an approach is because, at this point at
least, practically speaking it is the only market in which cooperatives like The Fair Trade
Zone can even remotely succeed. Sacrificing ideals, then, is a necessary evil because
organizations like CSD, whose only option, really, is to work within the limitations of the
marketplace, do not often have the luxury of purist positions. Neolibera1 economic
policy in Nicaragua since 1990 is of course one of the primary reasons for the
proliferation ofNGOs in the country, but it is also the reason for the absence of initiatives
directed at the improvement of infrastructure like sanitation, transportation, and access to
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adequate health care. CSD is dependent on a market of donors for its budget, as,
inevitably, the projects that the NGO supports are dependent on the market for their
successes.
CONCLUSIONS
There is no denying the strong linkages between the emergence ofNGOs and the
transformation of capitalism in the late twentieth century, a realization that has led many
scholars either to demonize them as handmaidens to neoliberalism or to lionize them as
bearers of democratized civil society. Yet, in this context, the conceptualization of the
great variety of organizations as agents of neoliberalism has led to a problematic
oversimplification of the equally great variety of their roles, activities, and intentions and
the reasons for taking up projects like micro-enterprise development, international
solidarity campaigns, or fair trade. What the case of the CSD demonstrates is that NGOs
may in fact be deeply ambivalent about their own strategies, about the constraints of
political and economic structures, and about the necessity or utility of compromising
what are oftentimes well-developed ideals of social justice for reasons of practicality. In
the case of CSD, the uneasy relationship between ideal and real is perhaps most visible in
the progressive institutionalization ofCSD as a faith-based community into a non-profit
and later as an NGO, replete with budgets, staff, and achievable project goals.
In this respect, anthropologists may make an enhanced contribution to the
understanding of transnational political economic structures such as neoliberalism by
83
making those transformations particular and by understanding the emergence,
construction, and narration of the resulting social forms within specific groups. As the
case of CSD shows, it is possible to separate out the activities and intentions ofNGOs
from a set of political economic structures, responsible for enabling their existence, and
therefore to see the actors as something other than mere functions of systems that are not
of their making. At the root of this important realization-which amounts in many ways
to an ethnographically-grounded resistance to the overdetermination of subjectivity-is
that human consciousness is never isomorphic with the things upon which it fastens.
Indeed, the selves which social structures and social interaction construct do not become
seamless monads, encapsulated by skin and possessed of conceptual unity. People deal
with those structures rather than become them. Quite capable of holding in their heads at
the same time the seemingly contradictory ideas of social justice through structural
change, on the one hand, and what is reasonable, practical, or achievable, on the other,
CSD, to paraphrase Marx, are agents of their own history, but not in circumstances of
their own making. Looking back on the intentional community's thirty year process of
social, political and religious radicalization and, simultaneously, professionalization,
CSD's ambivalence stems from a context that disallows the luxury of purist positions.
On the one hand, CSD community members understand their political and social
consciousness as powerfully shaped by what have often been painful realizations about
their own privilege, the connections between structures of race, class, and gender, the
contradictions between ethical action and religious practice, and the consequences of
84
Washington D.C. as close to horne as Statesville, North Carolina, and as distant as
Nicaragua. Yet, simultaneously, CSD's NGO-ization has not entirely been a co-optation
of those ethical convictions, even ifit is sometimes a de-politicization of their agendas.
As Roger puts it:
I was as reluctant as anyone about making CSD an institution. But we have not
become an NGG, it is a tool that we've acquired. Sure, it's not an ideal situation,
but the real world is not like that. What we've learned is that-what we've
become conscious of over the years-is that in order to cause real change, you
have to learn how to do things like write grants with words like sustainability this
and accountability that. It doesn't mean that you have to believe it. It just means
that you have to be conscious of those things in order to get money from people
like, say the Inter-American Development Bank.
The utility of the language of "subjectivities" in this context is to communicate
that identities and the related sets of actions are not given, but made, bracketed, reshaped,
and unmade, oftentimes existing in tension with one another and without resolution, even
within the self. If we understand consciousness, then, as the interrelationship between
those multiple subjectivities as well as the objects upon which the subject focuses, then it
becomes possible to challenge the all-too-easy conflation of action constrained by
structural limitations with the perpetuation of that structure.
At the same time, CSD's understanding of fair trade, in particular, as a practical
solution to poverty alleviation is itself revealing of a deeply rooted hegemony.
Positioning fair trade (as a form of market-based redistribution and development) as a
reasonable strategy for empowering producers by appealing to the ethical concerns of
well-intentioned individuals is also to define the limitations of what is impractical and
impossible, inhibiting alternative (perhaps even more effective) strategies for more fully
85
realizing economic justice. At the same time that CSD is displeased with the options
around them, it is also true that the constellation of ideas-fair trade, micro-enterprise
development, and the form of the NGO-becomes taken-for-granted and
commonsensical, thus entering the realm of hegemony so eloquently discussed by
Antonio Gramsci (1971). This hegemony, however, is not the dissolving of the subjective
in the unity of discourse ("A face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea," as Foucault
[1979:387] put it), nor the collapse of the subjective into habitus (Bourdieu and Wacquant
1992: 127), nor the intrusion of the public world of cultural symbols upon the subjective,
synonymous with inwardness and affect (Geertz 1973). Rather, it exists in the very
conditions of possibility, in the case of CSD manifesting in that uneasy space between
what real economic justice looks like and what is practical and reasonable, given
significantly less than ideal circumstances.
NOTES
2 The concept of Jubilee was used occasionally in the U.S. by abolitionists (Timpson 1834). More recently,
it spawned Jubilee 2000 movement, which was an international coalition in over 40 countries that called for
the cancellation of third world debt by the year 2000, a date that coincided with the "Great Jubilee" in the
Catholic Church. After 2001, the movement split into a number of national and regional organizations,
coordinating their activities through a loose global confederation.
3 Carolyn Miller (1992) argues that "kairos appears as a critical occasion for decision or action (or
revelation, as in the biblical uses of the term), an occasion that is objectively presented or divinely
ordained." In this sense, kairos is more than responding to an immediate occasion, it is also a tool for
social change. Similarly, Isocrates civic notion of kairos is rooted in social exigencies and fuses popular
beliefs and knowledge to the demands of a civic problem, such as when one draws on the common value of
"fairness" in order to critique unjust laws and make a case for revision (Poulakos 1997)
4 One of many implications of the focus on ethical action was that he believed that the work of the Church
is often done by those who do not acknowledge the Christian faith.
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5 Community Development Exchange, a community development NGO, defines the approach as:
The process of developing active and sustainable communities based on social justice and mutual respect.
It is about influencing power structure to remove the barriers that prevent people from participating in the
issues that affect their lives. Community workers (officers) facilitate the participation of people in this
process. They enable connections to be made between communities and with the development of wider
policies and programmes. Community development expresses values of fairness, equality, accountability,
opportunity, choice, participation, mutuality, reciprocity and continuous learning. Educating, enabling and
empowering are at the core of Community Development. [FCDL 2009]
6 In 2002, these charges of corruption came to a dramatic climax, and Aleman was [mally tried and
convicted for stealing a total of 100 million from the country's treasury. On December 7,2003 he was
sentenced to a 20 year prison term for money laundering embezzlement and corruption. On December 20,
2003, due to health problems, he began serving his term under house arrest. In June, 2005, house arrest
became "municipality arrest." And on January 16,2009, Nicaragua's Supreme Court overturned the 20-
year corruption sentence ofAleman, who had been named by Transparency International as the ninth most
corrupt leader in recent history.
7 Super 807s, Emilia explained, were initiated by the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI), a unilateral and
temporary U.S. program initiated in 1983 by the "Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act" (CBERA) and
were made permanent and expanded to certain Central American countries by the "Caribbean Basin
Economic Recovery Expansion Act" (CBI II), which was passed in 1990. Once the U.S. entered into the
NAFTA agreement in 1994, however, Mexico's textile and apparel industry gained a comparative
advantage over other countries enjoying CBI status, and so in 2000 President Bill Clinton signed into law
the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act (CBTPA) as part of the Trade and Development Act of2000.
CBTPA extended preferential tariff treatment specifically for textile and apparel products assembled from
U.S. fabric (USTR 2008), and proliferating export processing zone (EPZ) legislation functioned to
eliminate many tariffs and taxes for foreign owned companies on Caribbean and Central American side
(Robinson 2003).
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CHAPTER III
DIGNIFIED WORK, MOTHERWORK,
AND THE LOGIC OF SWEAT IN THE FAIR TRADE ZONE
One question that has consistently vexed fair trade scholars, as well as developers,
experts, and advocates who traffic daily in the industry, is whether or not fair trade is
capable of affecting social change by transforming global consumption patterns (Simpson
and Rapone 2000). For practitioners, on the one hand, this question has hinged on fair
trade's ability to create a market niche by appealing to the ethical concerns of
"conscientious consumers," to effectively direct the power of the market toward social
justice. For scholars, on the other, interest in this question has often revolved around the
theoretical matter of the commodity fetish, the peculiar, anonymous nature of the market
system and the vast rupture between the factories in which the commodity is produced
and the private homes in which they are finally consumed-as if revealing that inequality
would itself generate new forms of equality. Stemming from the broader project of
gauging the extent to which fair trade challenges existing capitalist market structures, the
deliberation over the commodity fetish is essentially about whether fair trade, in addition
to providing producers with a premium for their goods, has the power to shape
consumers' consciousness, to reveal otherwise hidden relations of production, and to
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enable consumers to recognize their complicity in forms of social and environmental
destruction.
Regardless of where one lands on this issue, the commodity fetish question,
though theoretically provocative, exemplifies the unfortunate tendency to weight fair
trade research toward the "consumer-oriented" perspective, to use Veblen's (1973) term
(see also Tugwell 1927, Patten and Tugwell 1924). From a survey of the fair trade
literature, that is to say, one could easily come away with the impression that the ongoing
social process of commoditization, which fair trade scholars have puzzled over for some
time now, impresses only upon the consciousness of consumers, that it is the fair trade
consumer who (ideally) may be liberated from the mystification of production, and that it
is ultimately that consumer who is capable of affecting social change by modifying their
consumption choices. This fixation on the consumer end of the commodity chain, while
revealing a great deal about the way in which people factor ethical concerns into their
consumption choices, has also had the negative side effect of short-circuiting the same
level of insight into other, equally important aspects of the commodity chain-for
example, those that lay beyond consumption in the realms of distribution, marketing, and
production.
As anthropologist Sarah Lyon (2006:459) has observed, the lack of research
concerning fair trade production, in particular, continues to be this body of research's
most glaring weakness: How do producers conceptualize fair trade differently from
consumers and retailers? Do their experiences mesh with the claims of the movement,
89
both generally and in the specific advertising of products? What are the real costs and
benefits of fair trade, apart from the premiums that producers receive? Market access
(Tallontoire 2000: 175)? Capital (Schreck 2002)?
Based on a research platform similar to Lyon's (2006), this chapter's goal is to
shift the empirical and analytical approach to fair trade production. This standpoint, I
argue, while of course shedding light on an underreported dimension in fair trade
scholarship, demonstrates that production and consumption, far from being separate
spheres of intellectual or economic activity, are in fact intimately (if not always
harmoniously) connected. The activities of fair trade producers, that is to say, are
constrained by market structures and the social institutions that back them at the same
time that they are capable of affecting incremental change within their immediate
circumstances, within the fair trade movement, in consumption patterns.
As a way to understand the relationship between structure and agency among fair
trade producers, one possible entry point might be to reformulate the question of the
commodity fetish in recognition of the fact that, despite its conventional application to
consumer products, the social processes of commoditization and fetishization often
manifests every bit as much in labor as in the final product of labor that is circulated and
exchanged. Like the product of fair trade labor, that is, labor itself is submitted to a
social process of commoditization: it is homogenized and reconfigured into as an
abstraction. And like that commodity, labor is also fetishized: it gains a value that
appears as if it were inherent in itself, seemingly independent of any particular set of
90
social relations. Yet, at the same time, it is also true that the meaning of labor for those
whose labor it is is laden with with a whole range of values apart from either its use value
for production or exchange value in a labor market.
The focus of this chapter is fair trade production instead of the meaning of fair
trade consumption. As such, the question becomes, is fair trade capable of challenging
for producers the anonymous nature of the market and the vast rupture between them and
distant others who consume the products of their labor? From this view, it may become
apparent that fair trade is not as revolutionary as it might first appear. Though
consumption may be invigorated by a humanization of the economy, for producers, the
activities of work may continue to be projected back to them as if through camera
obscura, as a strangely alienating, even uncanny, externality.
Continuing the broad, conceptual approach of the "commodity chain," this
chapter tracks the social, political, and economic relations involved in the production and
distribution of fair trade garments to The Fair Trade Zone, a sewing cooperative in
Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua that was founded in 2000 by twelve women from the former
refugee community of Nueva Vida. Driven by semi-structured individual and group
interviews as well as life history interviews conducted in three separate field seasons
between 2005 and 2008, I seek to bring into ethnographic focus the labor of these twelve
founding cooperative members (socias) in their efforts to construct the cooperative from
the ground up as well as in their subsequent work as the owners of the first worker-owned
free trade zone (zona franca) in the world. Taking a page from the substantivist school of
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economic anthropology, my approach to the ethnography of labor brackets labor itself, or
at least the activity that is so termed in microeconomics. Instead, I begin with essentially
non-economic norms, rights, obligations, institutions, and meanings, all of which are
inextricable from economic phenomena-a position that reflect the field's and my own
opposition, in theory as well as method, to the impulse to make all forms of behavior
appear as self-interested calculations of efficiency and gain (Frerejohn 1991 :279, Booth
1993:653).
In order to understand these many dimensions and values of labor, I argue-the
meanings and motivations that emerge from labor as a situated human activity as well as
the social processes that produce the commodity fetish or that tend to reduce the concept
to a single dimension, measured in the favored terms of discrete tasks, hours, and
ultimately exchange value (Simmel 1907)-it is necessary to take the flexible approach
of ethnography. As anthropologist Daniel Miller (1998) has lucidly demonstrated in his
material culture studies, while commodification is surely a noteworthy aspect of things
that are produced, traded in markets, and consumed, to be sure, it is also only one
dimension of the wider social world in which they exist (see also Appadurai 1986,
Kopytoff 1986, Douglas and Isherwood). While an item may at points be transacted
through the market, integrating that item into a system of exchange values, people also
grow attached to things, imbue them with sentimental value, use them to express
identities, and sometimes even make them into containers for ethical significance. The
same insight, I argue, can be applied to human economic activities. Far from an abstract
- ---- ..... ---------
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concept, labor is at once valued for its exchange and made meaningful by personal
experience and socioculturally constructed and historically particular ideas about, for
example, one's obligations to other people (including children, family, community, or
strangers) or one's rights to a certain quality oflife, standard ofliving, or degree of
ownership of the fruits of one's toil.
In this expanded view-in which the term labor may in and of itself be a
mystifying concept, sustained by the illusion that it is may be separated out from other
social activities (Graeber 2001 :45-6)-productive activities are structured simultaneously
by local, national, and transnational forces, enacted by multiple actors within both
disparate and shared frameworks of meaning. 8 While labor is a matter of the ideas and
experiences of laborers themselves, so too is it shaped by the broader context, such as
reigning ideologies about capital, exchange, formality and informality or even, in this
case especially, ideas of "fairness" persisting among transnational fair trade practitioners
and sustainable developers, or even those encoded in Nicaraguan law. The ethnographic
approach to labor finds enlightenment in these "actual experiences," rather than the a
priori categories with which they are often confused, as Lila Abu-Lughod (1991) puts it,
imbued by the particular social processes and practices of particular people in particular
settings.
Situating the labor of the twelve poor and working-class women and mothers who
became the founding members (socias) of The Fair Trade Zone within its meaningful
context is certainly no easy task, and I make no claim to "capturing" that experience in
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anything that I write here. The reason for this is very much along the lines of the politics
of location that postmodern and feminist anthropologists have drawn our attention to:
social location shapes knowledge production, and ethnographic representations are
necessarily partial, constructed, and situated (Abu-Lughod 1990, Behar 1993, Clifford
1986, Visweswaran 1994). In my research, the process of conducting fieldwork has very
much involved my own social and cultural biography-"the processes of identification
(and lack thereof) that inform description" (Visweswaran 1994:74)-and has been
intimately involved in the negotiation of power relationships while in the so-called
"field." Drawing on the insight of feminist ethnographers, especially, it is within the
framework of my situated knowledge of socias' (cooperative members') narrative
accounts-by in large as a listener, not a participant in the history and labor of the
cooperative's construction-that I seek instead to provide only one of many possible
perspectives on the meaning of labor (Haraway 1988).
I attempt to do so by unpacking three interconnected idioms that socias draw on to
refer to their own activities and experiences of labor. The first, trabajo digno (dignified
work), refers to the standards by which cooperative members measure the "fairness" of
fair trade from a producer-bound frame of reference. The second, la obra madre-a
phrase that I choose to translate as "motherwork" (c.f. Collins 1994, Collins 2006: 131)-
points to the constellation of identities, relationships, ideas, and desires that socias
identify as central to their work in the cooperative in the capacity of mothers. The third,
sudor (sweat), refers to the shared, embodied experience of working to build the
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cooperative and ultimately the criterion for becoming a member of the cooperative.
Because "sweat," as I will show, communicates a social struggle as much as a physical
exertion, the analysis of it reinforces another important project in feminist ethnography,
one that Visweswaran (1994:76) articulates as the relationships that women have to
women, including the power differences between women.
Understanding these often overlooked, and sometimes suppressed, dimensions of
labor is a critical part of overcoming our own fetishization of the concept of labor, of
coming to terms with the meanings and motivations that often lie hidden, and, ultimately,
of rescuing from the dismal science those whom it has described in such dismal terms.
Or to put it slightly different, when we translate the activities of people into the
vocabulary of "economizing"-a translation that relies on converting the non-market
idioms, such as care for one's children, into market idioms-it may happen that, as
Clifford Geertz (1983:10) has said, "things get lost," perhaps some very important things.
TRABAJO DIGNO / "FAIR TRADE"
When I first approached the topic of producers' understandings of "fair trade"
during field research with The Fair Trade Zone in 2005, it seemed unproblematic to me
that I also use the conventional translation of the term used by Spanish-speaking
members of the fair trade industry, comercio justa. While socias were of course very
familiar with the term and its intended referent, I eventually realized something that I
probably should have known all along: that the language of comercio justo on its own, as
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well as the list of prepared questions ultimately sought an answer to prompt "What makes
fair trade [comercio justo] fair?", would only get me so far. Frustrated that the interviews
I conducted in my first field season were only producing, time and time again, the same
prosaic statements-that fair trade is a particular system of exchange whereby as
producers they are guaranteed an above-market price for their goods-I eventually
dropped interviewing altogether.
Ironically, however guilty I felt for no longer doing "work," it was probably the
best thing that I could have done for myself (c.f. Roberts 2008). My way of thinking
about fair trade had admittedly been dominated by non-fieldwork-related activities-i.e.
reading literature that detailed the legal and institutional ins and outs of the movement, on
the one hand, or positioned fair trade within the grand theoretical treatises about a
challenge to a "global" system of capitalism-that I had nearly forgotten the central role
of ethnographic research in the matter. That is, ethnographic fieldwork is not about
validating theoretical conceptions-and, by extension, the language that theory brings to
bear on real-world situations-but rather amplifying the many forms of knowledge that
are subjugated to and hidden behind official knowledge (Hesse-Biber and Leavy 2006:ix,
Hesse-Biber 2008:359). When I finally arrived at that realization, I found that beneath
the surface of those terse responses to my questions about fair trade lingered at least two
meanings distinct from that of the movement itself.
The first, comercio justo-also referred to around the cooperative as comercio
alternativo (alternative trade) and comercio solidario (solidarity trade)-refers in a much
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broader sense to the buying and seIling of goods in relationships of more or less equal
exchange. As Jacinta, a Fair Trade Zone socia, explained when I accompanied her on an
errand to the local Ciudad Sandino market, it is a quid pro quo that, apart from the
movement of "fair trade," one could witness all around us. In this market, transactions
are often far from anonymous, buyers and sellers in fact know one another, and are in
some cases even capable of heeding the other's needs. Thus, if you want to buy corn, and
one seller is having a hard time this month, you buy from that person as opposed to the
person who is doing fine. Likewise, from the seller's point of view, if a buyer is out of
work this month, you would do well to discount the price or perhaps even give them
some credit, in light of the fact that you know when the time comes around it will be
repaid in turn.
Making use of the concrete, social context that Jacinta had just established for me,
I decided to ask once again, "What, then, makes fair trade [comercio justo] fair?" This
time, she responded, "Comercio justo refers to a kind of clean [limpio] and balanced
[balanceado] trade. I mean, in the cooperative, we also work in fair trade. What it means
there is that we aren't against trade, we're against unfair trade." When I pressed Jacinta
further on the meaning of "unfair trade," Jacinta responded that it was perhaps best
exemplified by capitalismo salvaje (savage capitalism)-a term, it is commonly thought,
that was popularized in Nicaraguan parlance by Pope John Paul II's use of it in his 1996
visit to the country.9 Wholly unbalanced, as Jacinta framed it, capitalismo salvage is in
many ways comercio justo's opposite. Instead of the kind of trade that is mediated by
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considerations for one another's needs, she said, capitalismo salvaje refers to "the giant
corporations who set up shop in Nicaragua and exploit workers in order to make
astronomical profits." She continued, "In the Fair Trade Zone [Zona de Comercio Justo],
we fight against these companies because they exploit, they steal, create suffering, and
leave nothing behind."
Even though I had just experienced a threefold increase in my conceptual
vocabulary for fair trade, I nevertheless felt as though something were missing from the
full range of ideas that one might consider to fall under the heading of fair trade. While
the meaning of comercio justo takes the standpoint of exchange and is fleshed
significantly out by metaphors of balance-the equitable distribution of profit and power
in transactions-I returned in a second field season in 2006 to discover that there was yet
another way of talking about producers' ideas and experiences of fair trade: trabajo digno
(dignified/decent work). If comercio justo is about the fairness and balance, for lack of a
better phrase, of economic transactions and of the social relationships that those
transactions imply, trabajo digno is instead about the many private moments of
commerce, the ones that only secondarily factor into those transactions and that require
the additional understanding of the emotional, psychological, and material satisfaction
achieved through work.
Sharing a lunch of rice and beans and tostones con queso [fried plantains and
farmer's cheese] with Andrea, another Fair Trade Zone socia, one afternoon in July of
2006, I decided to find out where a discussion of trabajo digno might instead lead.
._.__ ....._._----------
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Andrea paused to think, her tostone in mid-air, and proceeded to tell me about how her
mother had worked all her life, ever since she was a little girl, trying to make ends meet
when her father left. She took in extra laundry when she had free time at home, she
cleaned other people's houses, she sold candies on the bus, and she even worked picking
beans during part of the year, all with her two children in tow. On Andrea's fifteenth
birthday, a coming of age celebration in Latin America called the quinceanera, her
mother had gone out to see about buying a cake for her daughter, even though money was
short, and did not return. Andrea and her brother received news several days later of her
heart attack, brought on by stress, and her subsequent death. Telling this story, Andrea
teared up, and I followed in suit. Her voice cracked as she explained:
So when I think about decent work [trabajo digno] of course I think about that.
There are certain things that a person deserves in life. A person deserves to be
able to take care of her children, to make sure they have a better future than she
did. And she also deserves to see that child grow up to be the person that their
love and care made them into.
If comercio justo is about the fair distribution of resources, then trabajo digno is about the
purpose of those resources within a particular person's life. The resources achieved
through work, and how equitable that distribution is, is of course a core matter in any
discussion of fair trade. Frequently overlooked, however, is that the purposes of those
resources and the context in which they are acquired are by no means a superficial matter.
For Jacinta, dignified work is no simple matter of being able to meet her
responsibilities as a mother, such as having the time and resources to fulfill their material
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and emotional needs. It is also a matter of doing so in such a way that she may continue
to be a role model for her children:
You know as a mother what you have to do. You have to make sure your children
do not go hungry, and you have to be there to make sure that they grow up to be
good human beings. But, you know, sometimes it's hard to do both of those
things all by yourself...Many mothers are so desperate that they will walk the
streets in order to get that extra bit of money, then they go home to face their kids.
Some people don't have sympathy for these women, they say it's sinful, but I do.
They're desperate, and it's either this or their children go hungry. But then, you
know, they have to face their kids when they go home.
Jacinta later continued, explaining what dignified work means:
The sin is not that fact that some people do immoral things. The sin is when these
people are put in positions of desperation, so that they are forced to debase
themselves by doing something that is beneath their own ethical standards....For
example, a person can almost always find money, maybe you steal, or because
you are with a man for money, or, maybe you destroy the environment in order to
make that money. Dignified work, to me, means that you should be able to feed
your children and also be able to be a good role model and do good things.
Dignified work, in other words, is not merely work that allows one to make ends meet. It
is work that also allows a person to maintain her moral values or be a good example to
her children, while also working to maintain the conditions for them to have a good life
as well.
Comercio justo and trabajo digno are both normative statements about what
"should" be in economic life. In contrast to certain ideologies which excuse or even
valorize the pursuit of self-interest as the proper organization of economic relationships,
the concept of comercio justo suggests that they may instead run a gamut-in this case,
as Jacinta put it, from "balanced" and "clean," on the one hand, to "savage" [salvaje] and
exploitative, on the other. There are, of course, many possible ways to think about this
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rendition of fair trade, each of which may do well to shed light on the fair or unfair
conditions under which producers exchange their labor with fair trade retailers or
consumers in the global North-a topic which I explore in greater detail in Chapter IV.
Perhaps a bit closer to home for most producers, however, is the matter of
producers' fair or unfair experiences of work, a matter of what goes on behind the scenes
of the fair trade transaction, particularly among those producers who, by virtue of fair
trade, are imagined to experience fairness in their lives and work. This concept oftrabajo
digno can also be thought of as a normative statement about the "should" of economic
life, deeply entangled with moral principles and often intractable dilemmas. It is, in other
. words, a statement not about work in and of itself, but about the purposes of work, the
possibility of a better way of life, and the idea that the qualities and conditions of that
work is intimately connected to visions ofjust such a good life for not only oneself but
also others.
As British social anthropologists have been wont to point out, the task of
translation is of course a very provisional way of coming to terms with not only the
foreignness of words, sentences, and languages but also concepts (Leach 1973 :772, Asad
1986). Fair trade is of course not immune from those complications, as the difference
between the terms comercio justo and trabajo digno is perhaps something that is too
often lost. Nevertheless, it is a terminological distinction that reveals a conceptual gulf. I
am hesitant to apply the terms "public sphere" and "private sphere" to the concepts of
comercio justo and trabajo digno, respectively, because the public and private, like
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exchange and labor, are so intimately connected. As Nancy Fraser (1990: 14) puts it,
"there are no naturally given, a priori boundaries" between matters that are generally
conceived of as private and those that are labeled as "common concern."IO Yet, there
should also be no doubt that the trabajo digno and comercio justo communicate
recognizably different, if interpenetrating, ideas about social relations: the first having to
do with relationships with, and perhaps even responsibilities toward, strangers, distant
others, the community, neighbors and acquaintances in the domain of exchange, and the
second having to do with friends, family, children, and the self in the domain of work. In
order to further flesh out the meaning of the latter within the immediate historical, social,
and cultural context of The Fair Trade Zone, it is necessary to turn to the concept of
"motherwork."
LA OBRA MADRE / "MOTHERWORK"
In Latin America the image of a suffering and powerful mother has been at the
center of a gendered political and economic discourse for some time. This discourse has
of course had historically particular consequences in Nicaragua, shaping the perception of
women's participation in the political and social transformation of the country as a whole.
Yet, given that there exists no single set of experiences for either women or mothers, it
stands to reason that the discourse has also functioned to shut down alternative
considerations of the roles and positions of either group. Before turning to the meaning
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of motherwork within The Fair Trade Zone, it is useful to first establish historical context
of this image.
In Nicaragua, the formalized women's movement is usually traced back to the
Asociacion de Mujeres frente a la Problemdtica Nacional (AMPRONAC), which was
founded in 1977. Premised on the demand for basic human rights in the years leading up
to the revolution, AMPRONAC mobilized thousands to demonstrate in the streets of
Managua with aprons and pots, thus utilizing the moral authority of motherhood to
protest the Somoza regime's corruption and violence under the slogan "Our children go
hungry." The repression and brutality of the Somozas, the argument goes, threatened
their children, and it was this matter that first provided women with a firm basis for their
participation in politics (Chinchilla 1990, Randall 1981). By 1979, AMPRONAC had
forged formal ties with the FSLN and joined the revolutionary organization's
condemnation of the Somoza regime. It also grew sharply to include people from many
different walks oflife: urban workers, bourgeois intellectuals, homemakers, and
campesinas (Chinchilla 1990, Maier 1985:70-1). Certainly a milestone in Nicaragua's
women's movement, AMPRONAC was instrumental in clearing space for the expanded
role of women in political struggle as well as in registering a general challenge to the
gender ideology embedded in Somocista discourses of traditional Catholicism while of
course also perpetuating them: the man as the master ofthe home, exerting authority over
a dutiful and, above all, compliant woman.
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One of the political roles that this alternative gender ideology supported was
military action. Nicaraguan women actually came to represent twenty-five percent of the
insurrectionary forces that eventually deposed the Somoza dictatorship. As many
scholars argue, however, this massive and historically unprecedented degree of
participation should not be simplistically thought of as an epochal shift or sudden break
with the past that ushered a heretofore apolitical group into Nicaragua's political realm
(Chinchilla 1990:423, Chuchryk 1991: 145, Collinson 1990:154). Rather, change
occurred incrementally as the routines ofdaily life were disrupted, women left the home
to train in militias, fought on battlefields, or kept late hours attending clandestine
organizational meetings. Little by little, they carved out political space for themselves-
however temporary-{)ften despite a recalcitrant, male-dominated political elite. While
the majority of course suffered from the hardening of gender roles at the excuse of war, in
so doing, the way that some women understood themselves and the possibilities afforded
to them in their lives slowly changed as well. A few chose to forego motherhood entirely
and pursue alternative life courses. Others gave up domestic roles in order to become
community leaders or political office. And still others chose to invest their energies in
children and in teaching these future generations different ideas about men and women
and the possibility of alternative identifications. As one Nicaraguan woman explains in
Margaret Randall's Sandino sDaughters, one ofthe implications of this transformation
was to frame the image of the SUffering, yet demure, mother figure as only one of many
possible configurations of identity:
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We don't see ourselves simply as housewives, caring for our children, attending to
the duties of the home and subordinating ourselves to our husbands. Women are
the centers of their families-emotionally, ideologically, and economically. This
is particularly the case for working class and peasant women. [1985:20]
To the extent that women broke gender stereotypes as combatants, commanders,
and revolutionary cadres within the FSLN, so too did they clear the way for their
increased participation in the male-dominated political apparatus of the revolutionary
government. Specifically, it became possible for the first time to raise women's issues as
revolutionary issues with the formation of a formal revolutionary organization within the
FSLN, the well-known AMNLAE (Asociaci6n de Mujeres Nicaraguenses 'Luis Amanda
Espinoza,' named for the first female to die in the struggle to overthrow Somoza).
Closely tied to the FSLN, AMNLAE pursued gendered, revolutionary interests using
revolutionary language and concepts (Kampwirth 2004). They did not, however, always
cow to the revolutionary elite. In fact, seeking to challenge many of the historical
discourses of motherhood propagated by FSLN officials, AMNLAE leaders frequently
challenged the overwhelmingly male-dominated vanguard, who, in the context of the
Contra War, frequently placed the notion of women's equality on the back burner
(Metoyer 2000:4).
In response to ANINLAE's challenges, FSLN officials reasserted their own vision
for the role of the women's organization and for women in general in the task of
preserving the revolution. In 1984, for example, Daniel Ortega, president of the
Sandinista leadership, made a statement to an audience ofAMNLAE members that, in
order to "defend the revolution," women's roles were to be regarded as much less active
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than during the revolution. For him and others of the Sandinista vanguard, AMNLAE
would function to "strengthen the consciousness of the mothers who in a very egoistic
way oppose the defense and hinder the integration of their sons in the revolution
work" (Somas 1984). Women, in turn, would no longer be included in the standing
Sandinista army, but would instead give higher priority to motherhood. Fighting for the
country, in other words, to which the Sandinista government gave its highest praise, was
to be considered a predominantly male phenomenon. Women were to be praised only in
terms of their auxiliary function to nurture and to sacrifice themselves, to birth (male)
children and then to send them off to war.
Official rhetoric, it is perhaps needless to say, was far from supportive of gender
equity. Discourse tended instead to reify the role of women as "Sandinista mothers"- an
official term that most frequently referred to poor women who lost their children during
the insurrection or the ensuing Contra War. Sandinista mothers experienced a
transformation of status with the death of their son or daughter, and their contribution to
the revolution was acknowledged in precisely those terms. They were not valued for
their own activity or agency, but rather in terms of their sacrifice to the national cause. In
Sandinista discourse, mothers were first and foremost categorically altruistic and self-
sacrificing, and when they spoke publicly it was only with the authenticity of el dolor de
una madre (a mother's pain). Second, they were praised as reproducers insofar as they
fulfilled their duty to replenish the great losses of war. I I
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Though the revolution had of course opened up a new space for women,
AlVINLAE became split over the most effective way to pursue the organizations goals.
Some believed that the best route was to continue to support the FSLN. Others saw the
need to break away from the party that was now only hindering the feminist
organization's growth and its ability to address many issues central to the feminist cause
like abortion. As a result, while some chose to lobby for greater autonomy within
AMNLAE, splinter groups emerged from AMNLAE in the mid to late 1980s, such as a
smaller group of women who called themselves the Partido de la Izquierda Erotica (PIE)
and whose goal was to address many issues that were excluded from AMNLAE's agenda:
violence against women, voluntary maternity and abortion, sexuality, freedom of sexual
choice, and the right to political participation (Stephen 1997:60).
AMNLAE and other Nicaraguan feminist groups of course resisted the roles given
to them by the FSLN elite, and they oftentimes suffered politically for it. In September
1987, for example, at the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the founding of
AMNLAE, as thousands of women gathered in Managua, President Ortega spoke with
shocking enmity about many of the concerns expressed by AMNLAE over the past few
years, claiming that in the context of U.S. military aggression "one way of depleting our
youth is to promote the sterilization of women in Nicaragua...or to promote the policy of
abortion." In a rather divisive tactic, he claimed that some women in the crowd who
were "aspiring to be liberated"-meaning the middle-class Managuans who had decided
107
not to bear children-negated their roles in ensuring the "continuity of the human
species" (The Militant 1987).
AMNLAE responded to this antagonism by renewing its efforts to return to the
grassroots, formulating a new and independent agenda based on the needs and interests
expressed by grassroots women, and asserting their independence by establishing
pathways of power that bypassed the FSLN leadership (Bickham Mendez 2005).
AMNLAE representatives held town meetings in order to encourage women to express
their concerns and demands, and, not surprisingly, these women raised important issues
beyond working in support of the FSLN and war, such as discrimination in the
workplace, access to birth control, women's unpaid labor, and domestic violence (Isbester
2001:77). Seemingly the final straw, in 1989 the FSLN leadership abruptly removed the
AMNLAE's national leadership, ignored demands for a democratic process, appointed
their own candidate, Comandante Doris Tijerno, who was at the time the national police
chief and whom, as a staunch party loyalist, they perceived would hold a more traditional
view regarding AMr\TLAE's relationship to the party.
In 2008 I sat down for a brief interview with Dora Maria Tellez, a commander of
the Sandinista army during the revolution and founder of the Sandinista Reform
Movement (MRS), and asked her about this event and about the image of the Sandinista
mother that many FSLN leaders supported. Tellez tied this early rejection of elections
with the reluctance today to accept renovation of the party today, and thus the need for
Nicaraguan women to stake out their own, independent territory. Tellez explained:
108
AMNLAE was there, and still is there, to make sure that the benefits ofthe
revolution were shared by women. What [the removal of the leadership] looked
like from within the FSLN organization-which was, you know, huge-was, you
know, something we were very used to by this point in time. A certain group
forcing through its agenda. And, you know, to the many of us who were not just
mothers of revolutionaries, who were in fact active in the revolution, we knew
that it was always something that we had to fight against ...I was 23 at the
revolution's triumph, and I thought we would have eliminated poverty in ten
years. If they told me that it couldn't be solved in 40 years, I wouldn't have
believed them. The same is true for the women's movement. We are still fighting
for our causes. The way that I have gone about it is to continue to support the
ideals of the revolution, but rejecting the Leninist approach, caudillismo [the
strong-man phenomenon], in favor of representative democracy.
In Tellez's view, it is perhaps fair to say, the image of the suffering mother is
symptomatic of the male-dominated FSLN vanguard's perception of their own central
role in the revolution and in Nicaraguan history in general.
The year after the FSLN removed AMNLAE's leadership, the FSLN met its own
electoral demise, losing to the opposition party leader, Violetta Chamorro, who many
have argued played the role of "matriarch of Nicaragua" during the election. It was a
watershed moment, as Florence Babb (1997) writes, that set the stage for the emergence
of an independent women's movement, which had "clearly staked their ground and
claimed a new social space in which to build a movement" (1997:59). Generally
speaking, linked so closely for so long with the FSLN, that is to say, AMNLAE as well as
other feminist organizations sought not to simply redefine maternity and reproduction in
positive terms, but rather to break away from that image entirely and even challenge the
rigid dichotomy that, as Jean Franco (1988:506) puts it, associates masculinity with the
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mobile, active, productive, and political and femininity with the immobile, passive,
reproductive, and apolitical (Criquill6n 1995:224).
Ironically, Chamorro's own attempts to break with the Sandinista past,
particularly to reactivate the country's economy by moving from the mixed economy
model to an export-model based on neoliberal principles, placed a heavy burden on
Nicaraguan women. Chamorro agreed to International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural
adjustment programs in 1991, and by initiating a broad reduction in the public sector
based on the notion of shifting the responsibility for survival (ideologically speaking)
from the state to the individual, the policies, in reality, placed the burden on the
household instead. Cutbacks in social spending supporting things like education and
healthcare, that is, coupled with the repeal of price controls on basic goods, required
households to assume a greater share of the cost ofliving. Within Nicaraguan
households, women-rather than men, children, elderly, or the rich-have by in large
taken upon themselves the responsibility of picking up the slack. In this context, it is not
surprising that the image of the suffering mother has had a great deal of staying power.
Though no longer training in militias, women in Nicaragua, as elsewhere, are said to bear
the "double burden" of work both inside and outside of the household, caring for
children, maintaining and cleaning of houses, preparing food, while also generating extra
household income (Chuchryk 1991, Hochschild 1989, Elson 1991, Babb 1996, Beneria
and Feldman 1992, Afshar and Dennis 1992). Moreover, their strategies for doing so by
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in large involve "individual belt-tightening" (Stephen 2005:253), the tendency to
confront hardship alone through self-sacrifice.
As many scholars have pointed out, however, the trope of the suffering mother
also tends to perpetuate universalizing, homogenizing, and ethnocentric assumptions
about women and the actual roles that they play in family and in society (Mohanty 1991,
Kaplan 1994, Ragone and Twine 2000). Not the least ofthese oversights is the equation
of women with mothers. On the one hand, this assumption problematically charts a
predetermined life course for women that forecloses on the possibility of women playing
other roles. On the other, the notion that maternal practices are something that all women
have in common, as Alison Bailey (1994) suggests, has not only silenced discussion of
the diversity of maternal practices but also marginalized theoretical questions that emerge
from differences among mothers. U.S.-based black feminist scholarship, for example,
has challenged "traditional" definitions of mothering (i.e. those that derive from white,
middle-class perspectives), aiming instead to place the maternal experience ofAfrican-
American women at the center of feminist analysis and research. According to Patricia
Hill Collins (2000), for example, the field of reproduction and the experience of
mothering for many of these women is a space for survival, identity, and empowerment.
She asserts that, in contrast to white middle-class children, the survival of non-white
children cannot be taken for granted. Motherhood thus means mediating on behalf of
one's child in a hostile society and helping children to develop meaningful identities
despite a society that devalues them. Latin American scholarship, by contrast, has instead
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tended to emphasize the role of mothers in the political sphere. Though of course
motherhood takes a great variety of forms, the social action of mothers has been
intimately linked with guerilla movements, church-linked women's groups, and human
rights movements to protest over public services (Lobao 1990, Nash and Safa 1986,
Alvarez 1990, Westwood and Radcliffe 1993).
Economic perspectives on the role of women and mothers in the transformation of
Latin American societies have unfortunately lagged far behind. Common phrases like
"making ends meet" or "eking out an existence" often make these individuals appear as if
their activities were rooted merely in subsistence. Certainly, many poor and working-
class women and mothers in Latin America have responded to economic crisis with
survival strategies that involve incorporation into the paid workforce or participation in
what has been problematically labeled "the informal economy." And certainly, as Nash
(1990), Safa (1990), and others have additionally shown, many of these women and
mothers have justified their entrance into these formal or informal economies in terms of
their responsibilities as mothers or domestic workers, sometimes even re-articulating
them as the basis for political demands. By organizing on behalf of the survival and
well-being of children and families, they transform domestic space into political space.
Yet, what remains to be fully recognized is the fact that quotidian economic activities are
not just political, they are also creative. As Ruth Behar writes in her critique of the long-
standing trope of Latin American women as "beasts of burden"-the two-dimensional
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figures of mothers, wives, or even guerilla fighters-"Latin American women can emerge
as thinkers, cosmologists, and creators of worlds" (1990:225).
Among twelve founding members of The Fair Trade Zone, the concept of fa obra
madre ("motherwork")-a term that Patricia Hill Collins defines in her own research as
"[consisting] of a cluster of activities that encompass women's unpaid and paid
reproductive labor within families, communities, kin networks, and informal and formal
local economies" (2006: 131)-has emerged as a salient idiom for talking about precisely
this creative potential. As Marilyn Waring (1988, 1990) and other feminist economists
have pointed out, one major shortfall of economics has been the tendency to discount this
domain of activity as contributing to the economic process as a whole-a phenomenon
that is perhaps most visible in the observation that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
counts oil spills and wars as contributors, but deems housework, childcare, and eldercare
as valueless. It is not enough, however, to point out that traditional economics fails to
take into account the value of unpaid, or non-monetarized, work. Rather than "thinking
about the economy as a Weberian 'iron cage' or a Habermasian 'system'-cold, stark,
mechanical, and instrumentally driven" (Nelson 2006: I052), economies are part of social
life and hence influenced through and through by such human factors as sexism, power,
and ingrained perceptions about the value of different kinds of work. Moreover, the idea
that there exists a real relation between economics and human values, and the idea of a
naturally rational, greedy, self-interested human being-a model that continues to lie at
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the center of so much economic analysis-belies a masculine bias (Nelson and Ferber
1993).
As Arturo Escobar poses it, the question is how does one formulate an idea of
labor "in which household survival strategies are part of this creativity?" (1995: 177). In
The Fair Trade Zone, a historical account of which I turn to below, the concept of
motherwork captures this meaning well. More than the one-dimensional trope of
"making ends meet," motherwork brings to the fore some of the most salient meanings
and values of socias' work as they intersect with equally specific changes in circumstance
in emergent and creative ways. Motherwork is not just an economic activity and a source
of subsistence for families. It is a critical metaphor by and through which socias think
about themselves in relation to other people, a foundation for important processes, roles,
identities, and relationships that extend far beyond the purely commercial consequence.
In contrast to the one-dimensional category of work, the values of motherwork-
understood as plural and nested-intersect with and sometimes even override the
narrower commodity value of work insofar as they structure the range of statuses and
obligations of persons, the meaningfulness of relationships, and the sense of self
generated. Yet, at the same time, these values are not always perfectly compatible. As
motherwork also reflects, these multiple and nested values are not always compatible and
often encounter one another in relationships of conflict, not just about more favorable
allocations of resources or about greater material gain, but also about what kind a/value
-security, dignity, hope-should prevail in particular, often changing situations.
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Far too often, political economy, like rational choice theory, allows the notion of
value to remain largely unexamined and underdeveloped, implicitly and uncritically
assuming that "equality" and "exploitation" form the unassailable bedrock of "the
good" (Sayer 1995, 1997, Hodgson 1995,1997,1999). Yet, once given critical thought,
it becomes abundantly clear that political economy's notion of equality, itself, is a value
among values---e.g. dignity-implying the possibility and, indeed, desirability of a better
way of life (Graeber 2001 :222, Robbins 1994). And, recognizing this, it then becomes
necessary to define the dimensions of that equality. Should equality between the work of
men and women, for example, take the form of a "universal breadwinner" model, so that
women take on the social roles of men? Should it take the form ofa "universal
caregiver" model, so that men take on the social roles of women? Or perhaps something
else (Fraser 1997)?
Seen in this light, motherwork is not simply the objective what of economic
activity, like the labor of the two-dimensional suffering mother figure, passively bearing
the burden of circumstance. It is also the creative negotiation of normative questions
about (often conflicting) forms of value, informed as they inevitably are by social roles
and relationships and interpretations of what is good, right, and just: What responsibilities
does a person have to children and future generations? How should one discharge
responsibilities to others, and how should those responsibilities be allocated between men
and women, parents and non-parents, rich and poor? Toward what end should economic
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resources be put? And what standard of living should does a person have the right to
expect?
THE ORIGINS OF THE FAIR TRADE ZONE
For most of the people involved, the history of The Fair Trade Zone starts with the
story of Hurricane Mitch. In October of 1998, Hurricane Mitch lashed Nicaragua as
storms do almost every year. In the narrow, meteorological view, however, this one was
unique as ocean temperatures and wind currents stalled Mitch over the Central American
isthmus, where the storm proceeded to drop over six feet of rain in four consecutive days.
Yet, in a broader view, it is equally true that social, political, and economic conditions
allowed for that disaster to take its toll. By the time that those rains finally abated, almost
four thousand people had died, and nearly a fifth of Nicaragua's most vulnerable were
left homeless.
For a brief moment at least, the depths to which inequality and structural violence
run in Nicaragua were revealed. In the countryside, widespread crop failures devastated
small-scale farmers, a situation that was further complicated by some seventy-five
thousand live land mines remaining from the Contra insurgency of the 1980s that were
uprooted by floodwaters. In the capital city of Managua, Lake Managua (also known as
Xolotlan), which forms the city's northern border, swelled to over a kilometer inland.
Many of the individuals living the shoreline area were already living at the bottom: they
lacked title to the land, they lacked access to health care, education, or other sources of
-~ -~ ~~~--~~~-----------------
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professional training, and they had little in the way of employment and earnings
opportunity or were stuck in cycles of low-wage work. After Mitch, matters were made
significantly worse. They found their homes and all of their possessions suddenly under
water and were sent trudging through the muddy streets with only what they could carry
in their arms.
Ironically, the disaster actually enabled the Aleman government, whose economic
policies were based on the neoliberal model, to proceed with a national tourism
development plan already several years in the making that involved rehabilitating the
waterfront area and relocating the already impoverished population to a site a few
kilometers west of Managua near Ciudad Sandino in a resettlement community called
Nueva Vida. According to the mayor of Ciudad Sandino, this plan also detailed Nueva
Vida's important role as a labor source for a cluster of industrial maquiladoras in the area.
The national government, as the plan went, would eventually build a mass transport
railway to shuttle workers to and from the worksites everyday.
With Hurricane Mitch, however, fifteen hundred families began to set up their
homes with government allotments of black tarp and small plots of muddy pastureland,
measuring about ten feet by fifteen feet each, laid out in grid form such that dirt roads
eventually emerged from the borders. Between 1998 and 2002, with basic infrastructure
in the refugee community like running water, sewage, trash removal, and access to basic
health care still substantially lacking, the Ciudad Sandino mayor's office estimated that
Nueva Vida suffered from above eighty percent unemployment.
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Among the unemployed were the women and mothers who would eventually form
Nueva Vida's first worker-owned free trade zone. Andrea, who lived with her family and
children on the eastern side of the lake near Estell before the hurricane, lost all of her
material possessions to Mitch. "When we came to Nueva Vida, we only had the clothes
we were wearing." Yet, she says, "I thank God that I didn't lose anyone in my family."
Julia, who has six children between the ages of 13 and 25, had left her family on
Managua's shore a year before the hurricane and had gone to find work in Costa Rica as a
cook. Like Andrea, Julia's family lost all of their belongings to Mitch:
When Mitch came I almost died trying to get back to Nicaragua. My son almost
lost a leg, and my mother almost died from cholera. After that, I went one more
time to Costa Rica, but I couldn't continue to live and work there because my
family was here, struggling to build a house with scraps and donated materials.
Although Zulema did not consider herself to be amongst Nicaragua's poorest
before the hurricane-she was in fact studying to be an executive's assistant with the
financial help of her husband, who owned a mechanic's shop-"everything changed
because of Mitch....We lost everything because ofthe hurricane, and came to Nueva Vida
with only clothes and our three children." Like many of those who became residents of
Nueva Vida, the effects of the disaster were emotional as much as they were economic.
As Zulema said, "It was a devastating situation...there was no hope, no work, and no way
out."
For the first year, pickup trucks sporting OxFam International, Doctors Without
Borders, or United Nations logos were commonplace in the emerging community. Their
emergency teams provided important short term solutions for the provisioning of food,
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clean water, shelter, and medicine. But they eventually moved on, and, in the absence of
sustained government action, it was left to more durable presence of local and
international NGOs to pick up the slack. One of these, as I detailed in Chapter 2, was the
non-sectarian, faith-based community originally from North Carolina, the Center for
Sustainable Development (CSD), whose focus, with the landfall of Mitch, shifted
dramatically from sustainable development projects, including cooperative development
to the refugee community that was quickly forming down the road. CSD worked side-
by-side with national and international relief efforts, including in the development of a
free health clinic. Yet, they also actively sought out long-term solutions for more
enduring, structural problems taking root in the community, which eventually
materialized with the idea of organizing a worker-owned sewing cooperative.
For the most part, the laborious task of organizing the project-which involved
learning how to establish a cooperative as a legal entity, defining the framework for the
cooperative's constitution, called the Acta Constitutiva, developing a business plan, and
even drawing up blueprints for the factory itself-was CSD's and Clean Clothes' shared
domain of activity. Their constantly evolving template, recognizing their limited
resources, in turn delegated to the socias (cooperative members) the legwork of building
the cooperative from the ground up, in the process of which they would learn by trial and
error to develop their own administrative, managerial, and decision-making structures.
This also meant that it fell to the partnership between CSD and Clean Clothes to interpret
Nicaraguan cooperative law and to establish the broad guidelines for membership in the
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cooperative, such as the idea that membership would be based on the contribution of a
pre-determined amount of labor-hours ("social capital") toward a "buy~in" of 500 dollars.
While the partnership between CSD and Clean Clothes could aptly be
characterized as collaborative, each recognizing the other's unique contributions to the
project, the same cannot be said oftheir relationship with the women and mothers who
eventually became the founding members of The Fair Trade Zone, to whom, in the
context of this project, the two organizations consistently applied the revealing term
population. In everyday parlance as well as in social scientific discourse, population is
often treated as an empirically existing entity, given to social research or scientific
discovery (Hansen 2007:48, Curtis 2002). In this case, however, it is more useful to say,
as Curtis does, that "Population is not an observable object, but a way of organizing
social observations" (2002:24). The statistical approach to population research, for
example, configures individual, social, or cultural variation in such a way that they are
knowable in quantitative terms. Population, in other words, is a discourse that has its
roots in a historically important development of thought that attributes a shared, abstract
essence to subjects and thus allows for the possibility of imagining a practical
equivalence between otherwise very different people as well as the management or
engineering-type control over those people (Foucault 2007). Intentionally or
unintentionally, application of this term to potential cooperative members has functioned
to define not only the relationship between CSD and Clean Clothes, on the one hand, and
the project's participants, on the other, but also the role of those participants in the
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definition of the project. For CSD, that is, the discursive construction of Nueva Vida
residents as an undifferentiated, depersonalized development population functions also to
determine the role of the development agent as "interpreting" that need (Fraser 1989,
Hansen 2007:246). For Emilia, similarly, the conceptualization and treatment ofthis
population as a "labor force" in the task of sewing garments speaks to a vision in which
participants' roles are essentially to work.
Marx's distinction between "abstract" and "concrete" labor is useful for further
unpacking this imagination of cooperative members as well as the characterization of
their relationship with CSD and Clean Clothes as a "partnership." As Marx writes, "all
labor is, speaking physiologically, an expenditure of human labor power, and in its
character of identical abstract labor, it creates the forms and value of
commodities" (1930). Instances of concrete labor-a category, following from Hegel's
notion of the concrete, that refers to particulars rather than essences-are distinct from
one another by virtue of the specific bodies and minds doing the labor, the specific spatial
attributes of labor (Harvey and Smith 2008: 113), the specific conditions of labor, the
specific, subjective experiences of labor, and the specific value that it has for laborers
(Marcus 1986:173). Yet, at the same time, when they are brought together in the
exchange process of the market, one instance of labor can be made commensurable with
another, an equation that rests on the construction of a single kind of abstract labor and an
assignment of a general form of value. It is this view of labor that allows Emilia to see a
practical equivalence of labor-power (i.e. the ability to do labor) in her idea of a "labor
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force," in CSD's market-based solution to unemployment in Nueva Vida, or, really, any
mode of production in which the concept of "labor" may be separated out from every
other domain of social life. This is not to say that ethical concerns are merely
epiphenomenal. Rather, such concerns may indeed factor in without having to do away
with the basic, organizing principles of development and commerce, either by
personalizing transactions or "humanizing" development strategies (Carmen 1996).
It is worth noting that, after news of CSD's plan to organize a sewing cooperative
circulated through Nueva Vida and over fifty women showed up to the first informational
meeting, the idea of the cooperative was already in the advanced stages of its
formulation. Through their collaboration in these early stages, CSD and Clean Clothes
developed a business model for the cooperative organized around fair trade, a plan for
building the cooperative, an organizational structure for its operation, and a model for
membership based on the idea of the "buy-in." In the process, they also originated the
metaphor of the network as a "three-legged stool," an image which appears dozens of
times in CSD newsletters to potential donors and in the organics company's press
releases, advertising, and presentations to the public. Symbolizing, in the words ofone
CSD staff member "equality, solidarity, and partnership, despite differences," the first of
the legs was the NGO, who secured grants and donations for the project, established the
broad structures of a democratic, cooperative structure, and provided constant support
and direction in helping the cooperative to its feet. The second was Clean Clothes
Organics, which, following a commitment to ethical business, used connections with
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defunct sew shops to purchase machinery for the cooperative, shared technical and
business knowledge about garment production, and dedicated sewing contracts to the
cooperative for years to come. The third was of course the group of twelve founding
cooperative members themselves, whose creative efforts and sacrifices--eoncrete
contributions that they refer to as their "sweat"-belie their one-dimensional role as a
population and in fact made the cooperative a reality.
LEARNING THE BUSINESS
Cooperativa Maquiladora Mujeres de Nueva Vida Internacional
(COMAMNUVI) was officially incorporated three years after Hurricane Mitch in 2001.
While this was a milestone for the entire network of people involved, the moment that
socias recall perhaps even more vividly was the hot, blustery day that the diverse group
of poor and working-class women first sat down together under the shade of a mango tree
in Ciudad Sandino to contemplate the strange and exceedingly unfamiliar task at hand:
having been solicited by a locally-known NGO to be the founding members of an all-
women sewing cooperative, now their job was to find and purchase a plot of land,
construct a factory, learn to operate industrial sewing equipment, and eventually build
from the ground up an international garment export business. "We had little more than
40 Cordobas [two dollars] between us," remembers Lucia, "and yet there we were talking
about hundreds of thousands of dollars."
--------------
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By raising an initial sum of several thousand from church and university groups in
the U.S., CSD enabled the socias to purchase a vacant lot located next to their own
compound in Ciudad Sandino. The rest of the budget, slim as resources were, trickled in
slowly and afforded only the cost of basic building materials, so that nearly all of the
construction work had to be done by the socias themselves. Initially at least, many of the
women claimed inexperience in this kind of labor, as the physically arduous task of
construction is typically something done by men. Nevertheless, the socias knew
themselves to be capable, and so picked up a shovel and immediately broke ground on
the project. "The thing is, we are more entrepreneurial than men," explains Andrea, "If
someone says, 'Look, this has to be done,' then we do it. You have to do anything for
your children." Andrea continued:
In Nueva Vida, we have a phrase for a mother who is the center of her family and
sweats for the good of their family: La roea [the rock]. La roca fights for her
family so that her children grow up healthy, even if nobody will help her...she
does La obra madre [motherwork].
One way of looking at the investment of the socias in the cooperative was that
they worked approximately 640 hours-20 hours per week for two years-without pay,
only the promise that their contribution would count as their "buy-in" for membership.
This work ranged from training sessions in the philosophy of cooperativism (sponsored
by the Center for Sustainable Development and FUNDESI) to more technical training
sessions in industrial sewing (sponsored by Emilia Poissant, from Clean Clothes
Organics), to the arduous manual labor of building the factory itself. In this massive
undertaking they learned not only about construction techniques, the basics of sewing,
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and cooperativism in the abstract, but also how to work together as a cooperative. The
latter involved the much more difficult tasks of coordinating the activities of a large and
diverse group of people, working as a collectivity with a shared goal, and shedding the
individualist mindset that you do what you can (independently) when you can (according
to your own schedule).
Yet, such an account of socias' activities, framed in terms of so many hours, does
little to capture the full experience of the project, which extended into virtually all
domains of life. In fact, the long-term goal of creating stable economic opportunities for
themselves frequently meant short-term sacrifices. "The hardest part was not actually
building the cooperative," says Maria, "it was working without a salary, because
sometimes that meant that we didn't have anything to feed our children." Because all
socias were mothers, and most were in fact single mothers, they typically left their
children in the care of family members or brought them with them while they typically
worked the morning half of the day mixing cement, digging post-holes for structural
supports, or lifting 200 pound slabs of concrete, referred to as losetas, over their heads to
erect the facility's walls. In the afternoon, they would all walk the dirt road back to
Nueva Vida, lunching on mangos picked from trees along the way (oftentimes the only
meal that they ate until dinner), to start the second half of the work day at home. They
would clean and do the wash, and sometimes take in other people's laundry for extra cash
to make ends meet. They would cook for their children or husbands, and sometimes even
prepare extra candies or pastries that they would sell later that afternoon in the market or
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on the street. Some even set up pulper£as (small stores typically run out of a person's
home that sell tortillas, rice, beans, sodas, cigarettes, or other small items) or comedores
(small, informal restaurants run out of one's kitchen) that they managed in between all of
their other tasks.
While the socias learned to view the work they did every morning as their "sweat-
equity" investment in the cooperative, giving them right to partial ownership, the equally
taxing work every afternoon continued, for many, to be in the capacity of women and
mothers. Surely, phrases like self-sacrifice, as they have been applied to the double
burden of women in difficult economic times, do not even begin to capture the onerous
undertakings of this group. They were the primary care givers, emotional supports, and
financial providers of their households, but so too did they become the primary "hope-
givers" of their families as well. They worked to build the cooperative, as they so
frequently professed, in order to secure "a future for our children."
Although strategies for getting by certainly involved the tendency for women to
confront hardship alone through self-sacrifice, they also developed other ways of
decreasing the burden on themselves and others. Close working relationships within the
cooperative quickly turned into friendships, and support for one another, driven by
feelings of solidarity and mutual care, routinely extended beyond the cooperative.
"When compafieras came home to their families having no food at all," recalls Maria,
"we would share, even if we had just a small bite." Or when others were sick or
overburdened, they lent a hand cooking, cleaning, or doing the wash. Some socias even
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struck up creative business arrangements with one another, such as running pulperfas or
comedores jointly. Others came to arrangements where one prepared the food or candies
at home and the other took them to the market to sell, and together they would share
profits and risks. Indeed, "entrepreneurial," as Andrea observed, is a good description for
the resourceful strategies of these women in hard times.
Of course, this is not to say that going to work in the cooperative every day was
not a major source of friction within households. Socias regularly suffered criticism and
ridicule from husbands or other family members who mocked their naivete for not
finding "realistic" sources of income or for believing that the gringos were in the project
without profit to themselves. Lucia, likewise, remembers how skepticism sometimes
crept in, as she occasionally thought to herself, "no one is going to start an NGO ifthey
can't make money on it." In other cases, the disruption of domestic routines or the
perceived reversal of gendered divisions of labor had the potential to escalate to domestic
violence. Asking husbands to fill in by cooking, cleaning, or caring for children, even if
they were otherwise unemployed, proved threatening to some men. In order to avoid that
conflict, a common solution was for the socias to try to take on all the obligations
themselves.
When such conflicts at home could not be resolved, participation in the project
sometimes precipitated the breakup of marriages or other unions. Dora remembers that,
in her case, her decision to leave her husband was a necessary sacrifice for the well-being
of her children:
._----------
127
My husband said to me, 'Look, this is never going to amount to anything, you're
crazy.' Some even left us because they said that we were working for nothing,
that we should be trying to bring a some money into the household instead ...They
said, 'Where have you ever seen someone who goes to work without earning any
money?' In my case he left me because I said that I'm going to see about a future
for my children. You know, a man can be with one woman today, and tomorrow it
might occur to him to leave. But as a mother, your children are always with you.
So one has to look to the future, and this was what I was trying to create with the
cooperative, a future for my children.
For others, the result of conflict was just the opposite. Domestic situations, including
both economic and social pressures, forced them to drop out of the project and find
temporary work elsewhere. Somewhat ironically, these were typically the women who
already had some sewing experience before they entered into the cooperative because
they had a much higher chance of finding work in one of the many maquiladoras around
Ciudad Sandino. Those who did not have such resources to fall back on, on the other
hand, had significantly fewer options and were actually more likely to stay with the
cooperative. For this latter group, having support in their daily routines from parents,
siblings, partners, friends, neighbors, children, or other members of their social networks
was essential for them to continue. In the end, however, even with those relationships of
support, it turned out to be an exceedingly stressful and unstable situation, and the many
obstacles that the socias faced every day both inside and outside of the cooperative were
so formidable and exhausting that, of the fifty women who attended the original meeting,
there remained only twelve by the end of the year.
For these twelve individuals, however, this is certainly not to say that their
collaboration in building the cooperative always went smoothly as well. Conflicts
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emerged consistently over the quality or duration of people's contributions. The
flexibility that socias generally accorded others to deal with unexpected issues that came
up at home, such children getting sick, for others had the tendency to be abused. And
though socias had in the early pre-cooperatives stages designated a junta directiva
(executive board) for the purpose of coordinating the construction process, those
members were also prone to occasionally overstep the roles circumscribed for them,
confusing what were effectively bureaucratic roles with leadership roles. Oftentimes,
these conflicts emerged along the already existing fault lines, such as educational
background. One socia, for example, citing her high school education and her certificate
in accounting, caused problems in the early stages ofthe cooperative by positioning
herself as the overseer of the cooperative's budget and the "manager" of the other socias'
schedules. Ines remembers, "She was always making sure that we didn't take too long
for lunch, that we didn't leave early, and that we didn't waste resources like cement. We
eventually taught her that she was not our boss, and we were not her employees. And
although she is more educated than a lot of us, it took her a long time to understand that."
In the case of these socias, it is clear that dividing different aspects of social life
into separate spheres, such as "the public sphere" or "the private/domestic sphere,"
functions more to obscure than elucidate an ethnographic understanding of how different
kinds of economic and social activity are in fact intimately connected. Though the casa-
calle distinction, as the Nicaraguan idiom for the public-domestic split goes (see Babb
1997), is historically relevant for charting the transformation of roles and the imagination
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of space, for the women who started this cooperative, it is by no means the most
important feature of their participation. Whether non-remunerative or remunerative
work, domestic work or work at the cooperative, or work in paid positions or the informal
economy, the exertions of these socias, as they consistently frame it, have taken place
within the informing context of a commitment to family and children. 12
Likewise, setting aside the political charge associated with inverted "spheres" of
activity, the more ethnographically relevant point, I think, is that socias' involvement in
the cooperative has involved the active adoption of political identities and the re-
conceptualization of oneself as an agent of change. For some socias, of course, this was
not a seismic shift in identity. Rosa, for example, already considered herself a political
actor before coming to the cooperative and found the lucha (i.e. battle, struggle) of the
cooperative to be continuous with the socias' past political experiences. She was 18 years
old when she joined the Sandinista revolutionary army in the fight against the dictator
Anastasio Somoza. During the 1980s she fought on the side of the Sandinistas in the
Contra War and ascended to a leadership position in the anti-aircraft artillery brigade.
Today, Rosa is studying English at the University of Central America while also working
at the cooperative so that she may better communicate with clients. "The lucha," she
says, "is of course a different one today, it is a different one every day. But I like to think
that I exchanged my rifle for a sewing machine and a notebook."
Others, on the other hand, have marked the struggle of building the cooperative as
the motivating force for imagining themselves as capable of affecting real change and for
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thus taking on larger leadership roles in their families, neighborhoods, and communities.
Through activities in the cooperative, that is to say, these women claimed "the right to be
heard" by their families, by their communities, and by society at large (Poole 2007).
They claimed space for articulating visions ofjustice and equality that challenge not only
the validity of certain entrenched institutions in society but also a social status quo that,
up to this point, they had learned to expect even within their own lives. This social,
political, and economic work has often been at the tremendous sacrifice of their own
well-being, but it is a sacrifice, socias argue, that is nonetheless justified by the love
toward children and family that it demonstrates.
Motherwork is not simply a matter of that "cluster of activities," in Collins
phrasing, that encompass women's unpaid and paid labor and the context of familial
obligation toward which resources as subsequently directed. While such a view
expresses many dimensions of the roles that these mothers often take upon themselves,
where it fails is in its inability to capture the agency that these women also possess. As
mothers, socias are also capable of subverting, modifying, or reframing the roles and
responsibilities ascribed to them by choosing to dissolve marriages and unions, by
disrupting domestic routines, and by politicizing those roles as agents of change in wider
communities. In the context of The Fair Trade Zone, the meaning ofmotherwork, fa
obra madre, is as much about being the hope-givers of the family as the primary care
givers, emotional supports, and financial providers. In other words, if we take the
meaning of power to mean something like a reality-creating capacity-recognizing, as
- -------------
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Sapir put it, that "[c]reation is a bending of form to one's will, not a manufacture of will
ex nihilo" (1924 [1949]:321)-being a hope-giver is every bit as much the role of a
mother as a transformative capacity.
By May of2001, the doors of the cooperative's new factory were opened to
business. It was an inspiring moment for the socias, representing the fruition of all their
sweat so far. In Zu1ema's words:
You know what it means to start your own business from nothing, and you know
that it is difficult and requires a lot of work. Now imagine that you are going to
start your own business as a worker-owned cooperative of poor women, only one
of whom has a high school education... women who up until now have been street
vendors or have taken in washing, women who have always had to struggle, daily,
to feed their children. This is the situation that we have lived through in this
cooperative, and now we are the owners of an international export business.
Over the next six months, the socias received their first orders from Clean Clothes
Organics. Emilia also made her first trip to Nicaragua, where she positioned herself in
the production line with a translator from CSD, offering technical advice and
encouragement, chatting with cooperative members, sharing lunch with them, and even
visiting some of them in their homes in Nueva Vida. Doing so, says Emilia, was
important not just because it established a business relationship with the socias but also in
a personal and emotional capacity because, through these interactions, the project in
which she had invested so much mental energy and in which she had risked so much
capital for the first time became real. The socias that up until this point she had only
heard about through CSD likewise became "less abstract figures as [she] was able to put
faces to names."
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Emilia also took this opportunity to teach the socias different technical operations
on the sewing machine in preparation for a new line of Clean Clothes Organics t-shirts
emblazoned with the English translation of the logo and slogan socias had debated for
some time and finally chose for themselves: "Our Sweat, Our Sale, Our Success" in
English, silhouetted with the outline of a woman triumphantly holding a sewing machine
over her head.
Immediately after an initial trial of fifty t-shirts-which took the cooperative a
full month to produce-Emilia gave the socias their "first real challenge," a sizable order
of three thousand, yet this time with an important difference: a hard contractual deadline
of three months. Emilia explained that this deadline was meant to give the socias a
"learning experience...that production schedules are part of contracts, that they typically
carry financial penalties, and that meeting the conditions of a contract is the key to
success in the business world." Though socias certainly did learn from it, this venture
was also wrought with more foul-ups and slowdowns than perhaps any of their other
orders past or present.
None of the socias were yet proficient at cutting cloth, and so they were forced to
hire on their first contracted laborer (referred to as a mano de obra), a young man from
Ciudad Sandino who had worked for many years in a free trade zone (zonajranca) run by
the Levi-Strauss company. The socias were initially very uneasy about the decision to
employ someone who had no stake in the cooperative, and although they eventually
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became accustomed to the idea, the habits that he had developed working for a multi-
national corporation proved very damaging, as he wasted mountains of expensive fabric.
Far behind schedule, out of cloth, and already running in the red, the socias
petitioned CSD to set up a low-interest revolving loan program through the NGO so that
they could purchase more cloth. While they also raised the possibility of hiring more
contracted workers as a way to make up for lost time, CSD did not see a place for these
laborers in the model of the cooperative and so they refused to lend money for those
purposes. All twelve ofthe socias consequently worked the machines for as long as
fifteen hours a day to complete the order, still paying themselves the basic daily wage of
two dollars. In the final forty-eight hours before the deadline, they were joined by a
handful of CSD community members, and the two groups worked continuously, without
sleep, preparing the final stages of the order for shipment to Michigan. Despite those
best efforts, they missed the deadline by nearly a week. When Emilia subsequently
called to congratulate the socias on finishing their first major order as a cooperative,
Roger regaled her with stories of foul-ups and slowdowns. As socias waited in
anticipation of news from Emilia of the financial penalty for missing the deadline,
meanwhile, finger-pointing commenced, provoked by their frustration with one another
and by the damaging effects of the executive board's decision to hire the contracted
worker. Upon hearing that the cooperative had already lost such a substantial sum of
money on the venture, however, Emilia decided to forgive the fine that would inevitably
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come out of socias already meager paycheck-provided, of course, that the socias
"learned their lesson."
While there is frequent talk within the CSD community about how much the
socias learned in these early stages of the cooperative, they seldom mention how much
they learned themselves. Discussions of the cooperative and perceived organizational
difficulties, for example, were frequently framed as "cultural difference," but always with
a sincere and abundant reservoir of respect that they had for "the women," as CSD came
to refer to the socias in shorthand. Not only were CSD community members impressed
by the socias' work ethic, they were also moved by the socias' desire to create a better life
for themselves and their families against so many odds, especially as they came to know
them in more personal terms. CSD also began to see their organization's role more
clearly as guiding the cooperative along the right course, what they saw to be the
"correct" path toward running an economically independent, sustainable, and democratic
enterprise. These cheles (light skinned persons), as the socias called them in reverse,
therefore made a habit of working closely with the cooperative, not only by functioning
as translators for their U.S.-based clients but also by stepping in occasionally for quality
control checks or even helping to organize production.
Despite the disastrous third order, Emilia soon informed the socias that she was
awarding them the contract for her company's line of "Organic Bliss" camisoles, a
sleeveless, tight-fitting garment that requires a soft touch and high quality stitching. This
was actually against the advice of her colleagues in U.S.-based sew shops, who doubted
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that a small, inexperienced cooperative in Nicaragua would be able to pull it off,
especially given their relatively low-tech equipment. Emila remembers rationalizing the
decision, however, by repeating to herself, "If I am eventually going to make this
cooperative my primary sew shop, then eventually they are going to have to learn how to
produce more than just t-shirts." Her "second challenge" to the cooperative, then, which
also represented a significant gamble for herself, was intended to push the limits of the
socias' abilities and have them rise to the challenge. Two months later, when the finished
products arrived in Michigan, Emilia remembers placing her hands on the first of the
boxes, tentatively, her heart racing with apprehension. When she finally forced herself to
open that box, she recalls, she cried. "To see the care and tenderness of each stitch, each
fold," said Emilia, "I realized that the women had actually sewn beyond the capabilities
of their own machines."
In the long view, learning the cooperative business was a series of hang-ups,
miscommunications, conflicts, challenges, and pressures from the outside. From the
perspective of CSD staff and Emilia, on the one hand, these frictions were learning
experiences, empowering socias, as a kind of "rite of passage," as Emilia phrased it, to
become cooperative members and business owners. For socias, on the other hand, the
experiences were of course different, but no less transformational. Learning the business
enabled some to begin to participate in different levels of local, regional, and sometimes
state-level politics (e.g. 1. Castro Apreza 2003 :203-4, Tice 1995;107-8). Others acquired
new decision-making, production, and distribution skills (e.g. 1. Castro Apreza 2003:199,
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Eber and Rosenbaum 1993:169, Grimes and Milgram 2000:5, Nash 1993:147, Tice
1995: 11 0-11) or training in accounting and marketing (e.g. Y. Castro Apreza 2003 :205).
Still others developed more direct links to markets, including other businesses or
suppliers (e.g. Bartra 2003, Eber 2000:53, Eber and Rosenbaum 1993, Ehlers
1993:190-1, Grimes 2000, Lynd 2000, Rosenbaum 2000:96-9, Rice 1995:112-13).
Perhaps for still others, working in the cooperative with some success meant escaping
confinement at home, forming relationships of solidarity, support, and friendship with
others (e.g. 1. Castro Apreza 2003 :205). While socias experienced transformations in
themselves, that is to say, ownership did not yet mean control over the cooperative's
future.
They still very much relied on-and, indeed, yielded to-the input of both CSD
an Emilia. On two separate occasions, in fact, with the cooperative's coffers empty and
socias deadlocked in heated conflict, they turned to CSD, granting the NGO temporary
powers to set things right. To the surprise of many, CSD discovered rampant theft and
product loss occurring within the cooperative population as well as members of the
cooperative leadership who were violating the organization's by-laws by bypassing
established protocol in acting on behalf of the cooperative and even holding secret
meetings to strategize against other voting blocs At one point, CSD identified a
particularly divisive leader and, despite the protests of many, decided to eject her from
the cooperative. Though that socia eventually rejoined, that series of events has been a
source of a great deal of conflict with CSD and the socias who sided with the decision.
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Sodal strains were of course coupled with organizational and technical
complications, especially given the fact that, by the following year, the small cooperative
had transformed into a full fledged sew shop. Newfound financial autonomy from
considerable profit margins allowed the sodas to employ sixty-five contracted laborers in
the production of a full shipping container of twenty-six thousand cotton t-shirts for
Clean Clothes. Newly hired laborers had to be trained from the beginning, however, and
conflict often flared up between sodas and contracted workers as male workers refused
to take the women seriously as bosses and showed up to work at their own convenience.
The sodas also split those workers into two shifts for the first time, requiring that they
take on managerial roles and learn not only about efficiency and streamlined production
but also about delegating authority. Bottlenecks vexed different stages of the production
line, and production therefore came to a standstill as the sodas were still working out
many of the finer points of simultaneously managing an entire workforce, dealing with
payroll, and coordinating seven distinct production stages across multiple shifts. These
personnel issues also fomented conflict among socias, as some had arranged for family
members to be hired on for periods of time, then pled for those family members' retention
when it came time to release those workers, claiming difficult economic times for their
families.
In retrospect, many sodas reflected on this moment as a turning point, for better
or worse, in their project's history. On the one hand, the challenges and learning
experiences aided in the emergence of strong leaders. On the other, conflicting ideas and
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practices, especially with regard to the reliance on contracted labor to meet deadlines,
foreshadowed tension and conflict with other members of the network. From CSD's
perspective, particularly, the progressive abandonment of the idea of worker-ownership
was a situation in which they increasingly saw it fit to intervene.
BECOMING A FREE TRADE ZONE
Until 2003, the Fair Trade Zone functioned mostly as a "cut and sew" shop,
meaning that clients were required to provide materials while the cooperative assembled
them into garments. For the cooperative, lacking the resources to purchase cloth when
there were no pending orders made production irregular and wages unpredictable, as
socias were really only able to work four to five months a year. Months at a time would
pass without a substantial order, while at other points the cooperative had only a month to
sew an entire container. The inflexibility of their general work schedule also meant that
they frequently had to hire on, train, and then release waves of contracted workers. When
the next major order came in, the process would start all over again.
This changed, however, in October of 2003 when CSD received a substantial
grant from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) totaling almost two-hundred
thousand dollars over two years for legal, technical, and administrative support in
establishing the cooperative as the world's first worker-owned fair trade zone (zona
franca). Part of the financial package enabled CSD to increase the size of its revolving
loan system so that the cooperative could instead function as a "full service shop" in
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which they bought their own materials and charged clients for the package. This
arrangement was preferable not only for clients but also for the socias, who enjoyed a
great deal more control over their production schedule.
The other part of the financial package from the IDB grant enabled the
cooperative to work toward free trade zone certification through Nicaraguan customs.
This certification, usually offered to much larger companies such as Nike or Levi-Strauss,
gave the cooperative the same tax-free, tariff-free incentives and preferred rates on
utilities that were enjoyed by these companies. The legal and operational requirements
for gaining this status, however, were many and even included the requirement that CSD
invent a legally recognized shell corporation for the cooperative. When they were finally
met in October 2004, however, the cooperative became the first worker-owned free trade
zone in the world.
CSD actually arrived at the idea that the cooperative become a zonafranca, wrote
the grant, and proceeded to implement it without much discussion with cooperative
members. Immediately, the benefits were clear to the socias. Lower tax overhead
allowed the cooperative to hire on even more waged workers for permanent or semi-
permanent positions. Additionally, because the cooperative now had a constant supply of
fabric, they were no longer forced to release those in whom they had invested time and
effort training with the completion of each order. There were also downsides, however.
First, there was a marked increase in bureaucracy-for example, the Zona Franca
Commission and Nicaraguan customs required extensive documentation of everything
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and everybody that entered or exited the cooperative grounds. Second, socias have also
felt free trade zone status to be an awkward assignment for their cooperative, one that
often groups them with a class of rich businessmen. Ines comments, the downside is
palpable because they oftentimes are not perceived by merchants or other groups to be
poor women in need of a discount:
Now we enter the market as a free trade zone, now they think that we are a zone
that has money ...They think 'free trade zone' and they think we are millionaires.
And we are certainly not millionaires. We are always poor, and we just want to
move forward.
Despite these things, however, free trade zone status has generally been considered a
boon to the cooperative as well as for the Ciudad Sandino community, enabling the
cooperative to eI\ioy lower overhead costs for exporting and to create more jobs for heads
of household.
Apart from those practical considerations, becoming the first free trade zone in the
world to be operated by its workers heralded a new era in prestige and notoriety, and thus
public relations and advertising, for the cooperative. Within the first two years, in fact,
members of the cooperative's executive board appeared on national television three
times, articles about the cooperative appeared in two national newspapers, La Prensa and
El Nuevo Diario, and in 2006 CNN International even produced a segment on the
cooperative, framing the Fair Trade Zone as a new moment in worker's rights.
About the same point in time, The Fair Trade Zone began to be visited by
delegations from the United States, Canada and Europe, typically hosted by one of
Nicaragua's many North American-based NGGs, who were curious to hear the
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cooperative's unique history. Sales for Fair Trade Zone-produced garments spiked as a
consequence, and Emilia encouraged the socias to continue telling their story and to
designate a member as head of public relations. By the next year, The Fair Trade Zone
was visited by delegations at least once or twice per week. As Jamileth, who was in
charge of these meetings for about a year, noted:
I was telling that story about the cooperative so many times a week that I actually
became sick of hearing myself talk about it. And always the same questions from
people: What was the hurricane like? What was being poor like? How has your
life changed because of the cooperative? At first I didn't know how to answer
those questions. How do you describe to someone what it's like not having
enough food, or hearing your children cry from hunger? How do you describe
what it's like being sick, or losing your house? I mean, they're not going to ever
understand anyways, so what's the point.
She later continued:
You know, most of us don't want to talk about the hurricane any more. Those
were tough, painful times, and sometimes it's painful to talk about. But, you
know, we don't know a lot about how the market moves up there in the United
States, but we have learned that some people want to see how a factory works-
we see it every day, but they don't see it very much up there-and they also want
to hear those stories because it makes them feel better about themselves and their
support for the cooperative. We want them to support us, but sometimes we get
fed up with the stories, because, maybe they don't know it, but we've moved on.
Though the cooperative's history has been one in which, as socias often say,
"everyone has their grain of sand"-meaning, that its building and its success very much
reflects the contributions ofa great number of people-becoming the world's first
worker-owned free trade zone also marked the emergence of the cooperative as a
spectacle of sorts, as a site for "industrial tourism," to coin a phrase, in which tourists are
able to witness first hand the production end of familiar products. This, too, did not come
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without significant cost to socias. In Jacinta's case, her own story about the Hurricane
Mitch, finding the cooperative, and becoming the world's first worker-owned free trade
zone, after so many retellings, became unfamiliar to her own ears.
With this disjuncture between representation and reality in mind, in 2007 I
returned to Nicaragua, having translated sections of advertising from CSD's newsletters
and Clean Clothes advertising-iftheir own words might sometimes seem alien to them,
then what about those written by others? Little did I know that I would find myself in the
middle of a heated debate, part of which was about the discrepancies between the rhetoric
of partnership and fair trade, on the one hand, and the reality of it all on the other. Not
wishing to fan any flames, I did not find out what socias thought of the particular content
of their advertising. But, as I recount in Chapter IV, I did bear witness to a conflict
between the socias, CSD, and Clean Clothes that cast into full view the structures of
inequality and a basic imbalance of power.
THE LOGIC OF SWEAT
Beginning, perhaps with Edward Sapir's observations on linguistic relativity and
culminating as a more or less comprehensive method with Geertzian "interpretive
anthropology," language has occupied a privileged position in the understanding of social
reality. Although its role in culture has been taken to pieces and reassembled, relabeled,
and revamped in different ways at different times, the core, methodological principle has
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remained more or less constant: the power of language lies not in the expanse of its
abstractions but in the delicacy of its distinctions.
However indispensable a resource language has been for cultural analysis, it is
also true that anthropologists have not been immune to an indelicate view, tending to
privilege the fully formed word over the unvoiced, perhaps nearly invisible gesture
(Sanjak 1990, Clifford 1986).l3 The consequences of this logocentrism have been many.
Foremost among them, perhaps, is the failure to recognize the ontological gap that exists
between words and and social processes, a gap, moreover, that cannot always be bridged
within language itself. That is, people have experiences that they do not, or perhaps
cannot, articulate perfectly in words. In the case of The Fair Trade Zone and the
"meaning" of socias' labor in the cooperative as poor and working class mothers, it is
clear that no single conversation, no single narrative, and, certainly, no single word or bit
of language alone can establish the full context of their actions, thoughts, emotions,
memories, and experiences. The reason for this is that, for the socias themselves, let
alone for the recording practices of any ethnographer, so much remains beyond
expressibility in words (c.f. Ardener 1989: 180).14
For the socias of The Fair Trade Zone, sweat has come to be a powerful and
polysemous metaphor, but in many ways the exegesis of the category brings us into the
not-yet-coded space of the experience of struggle: sensory knowledge, memory, values,
emotions, motives, as well as wordless experience (Okely 1994). In perhaps the most
literal of senses, sweat references a struggle that has been experienced in and enacted
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through socias' own bodies and minds in the task of constructing the cooperative from the
ground up. Yet, as socias point out, sweat is not only about physical exertion. Sweat also
conjures memories of hardship, conflict, and deprivation experienced in their lives at
horne on account of their choice to pursue activities in the cooperative. In this more
metaphorical sense, sweat is also an emotional and psychological state of being, deeply
imbricated with concepts such as trabajo digno (dignified work) and fa obra madre
(motherwork). And it is not merely a matter of "making ends meet," as is common
parlance in academic discussions of work, but also the work to affect transformation in
their own lives and in the lives of loved ones and future generations.
Marx glosses these various dimensions of labor with the term "concrete labor," to
be contrasted with abstract labor, which is the product of the social process of
commoditization in capitalism. Taking that distinction as a starting point, an
ethnographic understanding of labor has the advantage of drawing out the finer
distinctions within the category of concrete labor as well as in its complicated interplay
with the world of commodities. Once we break free of the idea that there exist only one
or two forms of value-i.e. exchange value (the money one can get for laboring) and use
value (the utility of what ultimately comes out of the activity oflaboring)-it becomes
clear that there always exists a multiplicity of different kinds of values, nested within one
another, oftentimes in relationships of constant tension and contradiction. From a feeling
of ownership that derives from hard work, to the ability to make ends meet for oneself
and one's family, to the personal satisfaction of dignified work, to the social prestige of
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having a respectable job, to the ability to provide hope and security for the future, these
values are not one half of a dichotomy along with the exchange value of labor. Rather,
the many values of concrete labor and abstract or commodified labor exist simultaneously
with one another, and their specific interplay is really an empirical question that cannot
be determined a priori.
Though at first glance, the concept of sweat might appear to be a straightforward
metaphor for shared experience-the empathic understanding and fellow-feeling of the
socias-and thus the main criterion for membership in the cooperative, deriving from the
collective nature oftheir struggle, really, sweat is a matter of transformation. On the one
hand, this transformation is the result of physical labor on the land and later in the factory
to make the cooperative a reality. Yet, sodas frequently point out, it is also the result of
another kind of struggle, psychological, emotional, and interpersonal both at home after a
day's work and within the cooperative with one another. Dora describes the
transformations that they have consequently experienced in themselves:
At first we thought all that talk about the cooperative, the training sessions and
things, were just words rpalabrerfa]. It was very frustrating because we would
come to listen and say 'Whatever everyone else thinks is fine.' This has changed.
Through our sweat, the struggle we have gone through as poor women, at our
meetings today the people who were the weakest are now the strongest. We all
talk and participate, and we make ourselves heard, even if some people don't want
to listen.
They came together as a group of strangers with different political ideologies, educational
backgrounds, family situations, and work experiences. Though camaraderie, solidarity,
and perhaps, to some extent, shared consciousness have been real sentiments that socias
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have felt for one another, allowing them at times to identify as a group based on the
similarity of their goals, socioeconomic positions, and feelings of responsibility to
children and family, this image of socias should by no means be taken at face value.
Beyond that image, in fact, have been power grabs, screaming matches, and hurt feelings
-frictions that I further detail in Chapter IV. Competing interests, undemocratic
decision-making practices, unequal power based on inequalities of education and status,
divergent memories of the past, disparate perspectives on the present, and, ultimately
different experiences in the struggle of building and sustaining the cooperative-filtered
as they always are through the idiosyncrasies of social position, modes of participation,
and even personality-have at the same time undermined those feelings of camaraderie,
solidarity, and even the sense of a shared goal.
Social solidarity does not emerge organically from "shared experience," and not
all forms of social solidarity give birth to lasting social communities. What may begin as
the interpenetration of lives in shared struggle may of course have the potential to foster
more extensive feelings, stronger bonds, and mutual responsibilities, but the
interrelationship of individuals should not be conflated with the social process through
which relations of moral or political obligation are forged. To assume that solidarity
emerges from shared experience-being in the same place at the same time, to put it
plainly-is to ignore that collective experience of struggle may also be an experience of
struggle within the group, provoked by the persistence of inequality, questions about who
"counts" as a member of the group, what is considered consistent action within the
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relations of solidarity, and who is granted the epistemic privilege of speaking on behalf of
the group. Put slightly differently, it is important to distinguish between shared
experience and intersubjectivity. The term intersubjectivity, as Jackson writes, "embraces
centripetal and centrifugal forces, and constructive and destructive extremes without
prejudice" (Jackson 1998:4). Intersubjectivity is the precondition for shared experience,
which requires that people actively interpret and construct their experiences as "shared"
as well as to discursively construct a "we" in place of the "I" (Lutz 1998:86-98).
Sweat is about intersubjectivity, the mutual entanglement of socias of The Fair
Trade Zone with one another. It is about collective struggle, understood in terms of the
complications and contradictions of that entanglement, for better or worse, not the naIve
perception that they have always been united by a common cause. And sweat is as much
about feelings of solidarity and camaraderie and a common reservoir of memories-the
taste of mangos picked form the trees after a day of work without food or water, the ache
of repetitive, heavy lifting, and the sensation of dust and dirt sticking to sweaty skin-as
feelings of enmity, the perception that memories and experiences are divergent, and the
conviction that one must "sweat" to overcome that atomism.
COMMODIFYING SWEAT
At the same time, it would be naIve to suggest that individuals, whose labor is so
concretely multifaceted in its social, cultural, emotional, personal, and interpersonal
content, somehow define their own worlds, absent of the intrusive effects of other
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people's projects. Indeed, the case of The Fair Trade Zone shows that any discussion of
labor-in this case, "sweat"-would be woefully incomplete without also noting that the
participation of socias in this project has been conditioned by a model of cooperativism
taken from the Mondragon system in Spain, interpreted within the historical and
legalcontext of cooperatives in Nicaragua, refracted through the sustainable development
and micro-enterprise models of CSD and other NGOs, and articulated within the ethical
and fair trade business models of Clean Clothes Organics. That is, socias have not done
their labor in some empty space in which they are free to construct what they want, but
have had that labor contextualized, limited, and defined for them by contingencies of land
and capital, ideologies of membership and exchange that are not their own, and a market
ideology that they did not invent. It is the "sweat equity" of socias' labor, the idea that
labor can be quantified, made commensurable with other kinds of labor, and exchanged,
in other words, that forms the basis of a right to membership, rather than the manifold
and multi-dimensional experience of "sweat."
In capitalism, commodification is often linked with the concept of alienation, the
separation of the product of labor from the laborer herself that occurs when the product of
labor, once purchased, becomes the property ofthe capitalist. Yet, as Marx points out,
that alienation is also experienced in the activity of labor itself:
The estrangement is manifested not only in the result but in the act of production
- within the producing activity itself. ...The product is after all but the summary
of the activity, of production. If then the product of labor is alienation, production
itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation.
[1988:73-4]
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From the perspective of the laborer, that is, alienation is witnessed in "the fact that labor
is external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being" (Marx 1988:74).
The individual comes to understand the activity of labor as producing for and as capital,
laboring not for and not as his or her self, but rather in such a way that the activity itself
is conceptualized as belonging to another.
Whether or not alienation is experienced in all productive spheres in capitalism is
a matter of debate, but, to be sure, the socias of The Fair Trade Zone experience some
degree of alienation as they occasionally come to understand their sweat not in its
broadest social significance, but rather in terms of one dimension of that activity,
congealed labor-time. For the original members ofThe Fair Trade Zone, formal
membership was predicated not on the total social process of sweat that they had come to
define for themselves, but rather than a labor theory of value. In a labor theory of value,
the idea of labor-time (i.e. the amount of human productive ability, measured in terms of
time) is understood as the common substance of commodities (which is in contrast to
exchange theory, wherein the value of a commodity is whatever someone will pay for
it).15 From the view of the socias, thus, the "buy-in" system essentially collapsed the full
content of labor onto a single dimension, pegging the total contribution of labor time for
membership (called "sweat equity") at 640 hours.
Both the labor theory of value and the exchange theory of value are reductionist in
the sense that they privilege one form of value over the others. Moreover, defining
"economic value" apart from social values, these theories are also economistic,
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"[claiming] precisely to reduce all the non-economic instances of the social structure
purely and simply to reflections, transpositions, or phenomena of the economic
base" (Balibar and Althusser 1970:306). Economism excises the actual activity oflabor
from its political, cultural, and social context, reducing it to a restricted, even
impoverished, subset. This is not to say, however, that economism is a mere epistemic
error. Whether it is kinship or politics or the economy, reductionism goes hand in hand
with the idea of a social "system," functioning ideologically to emphasize certain relevant
aspects of social life while de-emphasizing others. 16 Those systems in turn inform a
variety of practices, making commodification a real social process that acts upon the
entire experience of labor, having real social and material effects.
What the ethnographic case of The Fair Trade Zone demonstrates is that the labor
value and, by extension, exchange value of socias' labor exists alongside, if in tension
with, the many socially, culturally, and politically defined values encoded in the concepts
of dignified work, motherwork, and sweat. Undergoing a process of commodification,
that labor is certainly homogenized, abstracted into something that resembles little of the
original activity and its many physical, psychological, emotional, and social facets-640
hours or 320 dollars. But that does not mean that the other values disappear. Rather, as
the social convention of measuring labor in terms of hours or the money someone else is
willing to part with imposes itself upon their very bodies and minds, so too do the socias
resist that reduction and define in their own terms the values of sweat.
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By bracketing the pervasive idea of exchange value and amplifying the
significance of the heretofore suppressed values of labor, the ethnographic approach to
labor has the potential to countermand the estranging effects that the language of labor
has in converting labor in its social and cultural significance to an insipid, mechanical
activity that people do because they are part of an "economic system."l? By shifting the
frame away from well-rehearsed discourses of labor in economic thought and
emphasizing instead other forms of knowledge about labor, including the immediate
embodied, emotional, psychological, and physical experience, the ethnography of labor
may understand labor "in the flesh," as Ines puts it. In the case of the poor and working
class women of The Fair Trade Zone, this expanded understanding oflabor is crucial for
coming to terms with the idea that laborers are not rationally self-interested automatons.
They draw on and creatively manipulate ideas about how much inequality should be
tolerated, who one should and should not do business with, what should not be
commodified, who should work and who is entitled to be supported by others, and what
people's obligations to future generations are. They also draw on broader social
imaginaries that inform the relationship between the laborer and other people, the
environment, or the cosmos. As June Nash demonstrates in the case of Bolivian tin
miners, the relationship between workers and the earth, which is typically assumed to be
a subject-object relation, may also be thought of as a subject-subject relation, a vital and
reciprocal relationship felt to exist between human subjects and the earth. As Nash
writes, "Miners talk ofthe mine as though it were a living organism" (1 979:ix). Their
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relationship, in turn is said to be cannibalistic: "We eat the mines and the mines eat us.
For that reason, we have to give these rituals to the spirit of the hills so that he will
continue to reveal the veins of metal to us and so that we can live" (ibid).
In The Fair Trade Zone, I have drawn out only three of these ideas-the idea of
dignified work (What basic conditions do people deserve in their work?), the idea of
motherwork (What responsibilities do mothers have to children and their futures?), and
the idea of sweat (What are the criteria for ownership or membership?). It is eminently
clear that these ideas influence actions. While the pursuit of self-interest is common
enough in economic activities, there is no reason for accepting on faith the dogma that
this is the only motivation involved. Instead, the ethnography of labor can make the
nature of economic motivations into an empirical question.
DIGNIFIED WORK, NOT FAIR TRADE
Is Fair Trade Dignified Work? Another way of asking this question is, does fair
trade really make a difference, not only in the economic terms of livelihood for small
producers and their ability to get by in tough economic times, but also in terms of the
total experience of their work and their ability to achieve the psychological, emotional,
ethical, and social "ends" that labor is intended to achieve? In the case of The Fair Trade
Zone, there is, of course, no single, straightforward way of answering this question, given
the diversity of socias' perspectives on, and experiences of, what counts as "dignified"
work and what does not. Nevertheless, what can be said is that socias' perceptions of fair
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trade's ability to provide that dignified work have been characterized by a great deal of
ambivalence-an ambivalence, it is important to note, that belies what is oftentimes a
totalizing and romanticizing image of fair trade work, broadcast in CSD newsletters and
public presentations, in Clean Clothes' advertisements for Fair Trade Zone-produced
garments, and indeed in the public perception of fair trade as a radical alternative to
conventional trade.
On the one hand, there should be no doubt that being the owners of the first
worker-owned free trade zone in the world has had its benefits: the pay, however
variable, is usually more than double that offered in other free trade zones; socias enjoy
stable employment, knowing that they will not be fired at a whim; they work without
chauvinistic, male bosses, who are at best condescending and at worst abusive to
employees. Indeed, they work without bosses entirely, and thus go to work with the
knowledge that they will reap at least a portion of the benefits of their own labor and that
the success of the business is in fact their own success. In this sense, work in the
cooperative is "dignified" work, but it is also not something that has been somehow
gifted to them by virtue of their participation in fair trade. It is something that they have
had to carve out for themselves by means of their sweat. As Maria remembers, the
achievement of that aspect oftrabajo digno is appreciable, as their work fulfills the ends
they sought for it: "We wanted to be able to send our kids to school, and we wanted
meaningful work for ourselves. And because of the cooperative, because we have
struggled on our own behalf to create it, we have been able to do those things." For Ines,
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likewise, the dignity of their work in the cooperative is measured by their ability to not
just meet the needs of children and family, but also to "provide a future for them" and to
act as an example of virtue in their lives. Connecting her work before the cooperative to
her mother's before her, Ines remembers:
Before I was a socia, I took in washing and ironing to make ends meet, but
sometimes I didn't even have soap to wash the clothes and my children would cry
from hunger. I am still a woman of scarce economic resources, but the difference
is that, because of what we have accomplished, now my children eat, go to school,
and my daughter who is only eleven will have her sixth grade graduation ....When
I told my mother about my work in the cooperative, she cried because she was so
happy comparing her life with my life now. She told me that in life it's not
important what we have, but rather who we are. I have faith in the future because
I have experienced in the flesh all the deprivations that one can have in life, and I
want my children and the children of women like me to become people who will
not just work for their own food. I want them also to do good by themselves, by
their children, by their children's future, and by the world.
Surely, by virtue of the conditions of their work, the resources that work has provided to
them, and the ability of those socias to put those resources to use in creating a better life
for themselves and others outside of the cooperative, Fair Trade Zone work qualifies as
"dignified" work. To put it differently, the market access, capital, labor standards, and
price premiums are not valued in and of themselves, but rather as enabling access to
socias' own socially, culturally, and historically mediated social goods.
That being said, it is perhaps ironic that many of the conditions of their work that
have frustrated socias, that have made them doubt their ownership of the cooperative, and
that have in fact alienated many of them from their work can in many ways be traced
back to a comercio justo (fair trade) organization of trade and labor. In a group interview
in 2008, one socia made the point that, although there have been many problems,
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conflicts, disagreements, and hurt feelings socias have experienced from within their own
group, the most negative aspects have by in large derived from the shortfalls of a fair
trade organization of trade and labor. Listed among them were an unbalanced
distribution of profits (i.e. Clean Clothes, socias had recently found out, makes a profit on
Fair Trade Zone garments ten times that which socias themselves make); the lack of
transparency up the commodity chain (i.e. while the socias feel that they might be "the
most famous poor people in the world," on the whole they have little knowledge about
what goes on in the marketing and distribution of their goods, let alone consumption);
and, perhaps more than anything else, the frequent intervention of CSD and Clean
Clothes in the operations ofthe business (i.e. although the cooperative was
conceptualized and designed by virtue of CSD's and Clean Clothes' efforts and capital,
from the perspectives of socias, the two organizations marginalize or flat out fail to
recognize the contributions of the socias themselves toward realizing the project, the
socias' ownership of the cooperative, and thus grant them little autonomy). Although, as
I pointed out in the beginning of this chapter, there exists a conceptual difference for
socias between comercio justo and trabajo digno, this is not to say that they reference
autonomous separate spheres of activity. While they have created and sustained a space
for themselves to have dignified work, that experience of work is often trespassed upon
by these other members of the Fair Trade Zone network.
Socias, of course, responded in kind, eventually shaping the "buy-in" model for
membership into the cooperative in their own terms, something they referred to as "sweat
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equity." While sweat equity similarly referred to each socia's right to membership in the
cooperative, it also marks a key difference in the process of determining membership that
reflects, one could argue, their own experiences of struggle in becoming members. While
the consequences of socias' practices of granting membership based on the concept of
"sweat equity" are part of a larger series of events that I cover in Chapter IV, it is perhaps
true that their sweat to build the cooperative did not simply transform the socias
themselves and their economic circumstances. The changes that they affected in their
own lives also came to bear on their relationships with others. No small part of that
dimension of their sweat has resulted in socias coming to express more forcefully their
own positions, opinions, ideas, and senses of ownership and individuality in their
relationships with CSD and Clean Clothes Organics, for whom the idea of a "population"
could hardly be sustained.
NOTES
8 As William Sewell (1980) points out in his study of French labor history, the term "labor" is actually a
term that is deeply rooted in the culture and its meaning has changed over time and in specific relation to
political and social changes. Yet, in its wide application to economic activities the world over, it appears
transhistorical, a monad possessed of conceptual unity and continuity through time and space.
9 In popular use today, capitalismo sa/vaje is a term that most closely aligns with the English term
"corporatisim," rather than "neoliberalism." It is not a statement about the proper relationship between the
state, the economy, and society, but rather a kind of "crony capitalism" that generates massive wealth for
corporations, typically multinationals, who extract that wealth from the country, rather than reinvesting in
infrastructure or wages (Davila 2007).
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10 Habennas' book, The Structural Transformation ofthe Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society, has been the basis of many ideas about the public sphere. In Habennas' view the
"public sphere" (Offentlichkeit) implies a spatial concept, an arena within which meanings are articulated,
distributed, and negotiated. Distinct from the state as well as the official economy, Nancy Fraser adds that
it is a "site for the production and circulation of discourses.. .it is not an arena of market relations but rather
one of discursive relations, a theater for debating and deliberating rather than for buying and
selling" (Fraser 1990:57). Thus, the public sphere mediates between a multiplicity of "private spheres,"
and although this appears democratic in its construction of a universal space for debate (Taylor 2004), the
public sphere is also a male bourgeois sphere, which can also be hegemonic in its discrimination against
women, lower social strata of society, and their issues, precisely because they are not be rhetorically
constructed as matters of "common concern" (Fraser 1990; Hauser 1998).
11 One famous Managua mural illustrates, the ideas of "women" and "fertility" were given a new
revolutionary meaning during this time: "Bendita la panza que pari6 un Sandinista" (Holy the womb that
gave birth to a Sandinista).
12 The concept of "the informal economy" is a singularly problematic concept that refers to certain kinds of
economic activity that are "unregulated by the institutions of society, in a legal and social environment in
which similar activities in which similar activities are regulated" (Portes & Haller 2005). Of course,
infonnal economies are, in fact, regulated by institutions, just not the "fonnal" economic institutions that
one would use, for example, to create GDP indexes. The distinction between formal/informal economies is
problematic for many of the same reasons that public and private/domestic spheres are: it belies a
ideological bias that undervalues the latter, suggests a normative model for what "proper" economic
activity is, and excludes domestic work and informal economic work from the category of "real work."
13 Likewise, the recognition that there is no langue for culture that is independent of practice came slowly,
but when it did eventually come, it inspired a number of attempts to deconstruct the idea of a cultural
system, to address the shortfalls of deploying such a limited view of language as a window on culture, and
thus to unify subjectivity, action, and structure: Marshall Sahlins' (1981) historical anthropology, Erving
Goffman's (1959, 1967) "interactionism," Anthony Giddens' (1979) "structuration," and Pierre Bourdieu's
(1978) "practice" are but a few of those attempts.
14 Of course, I do not mean to reiterate the British empiricist argument (after Locke, Hume, and William
James) that suggests that all knowledge must ultimately be traced back to sense data. This position has
implied the very lonely idea that other people are ultimately unknowable and has failed to recognize the
way in which the senses are themselves mediated, interpreted, conceptualized, and translated via
communication (Dewey 1958: 11, Jackson 1996:24). While it is true that the nature of experience is that we
can each experience only our own life, never the lived experience of someone else, as Victor Turner and
Edward Bruner (1986) recommend in their project, the anthropology of experience, this should not prevent
the anthropologist from acknowledging the fact that the lived experience of others may still exist (Hastrup
1994).
15 According to the labor theory of value, if it takes a person an average of one day to make a coat and one
day to make a glove, all other things are taken to be equal and the exchange of one for the other will be an
equal exchange with the common reference being socially necessary labor time. The coat and the glove can
be exchange values because they each have a value. As a theory of value, labor-time is thus a general and
average way of accounting for the amount of human productive ability or labor went into the creation of a
commodity.
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16 Marx provides an analog to the process of reduction that the socias experience in his rendition of the
political economist's favorite example, Robinson Crusoe. Having salvaged ink and a ledger from the ship,
that is, like a "true Briton" Crusoe proceeds to record the labor-time of his many activities on the island,
thus abstracting them from their original contexts and putting them in arbitrary relation of equivalence with
one another. Hunting, fishing, and tool-making are of course very different skill sets and activities from the
perspective of the laborer, as they may also fill different needs. Nevertheless, when the time that each
activity required is observed and put into relation with other activities of various duration, those activities
may then be seen in terms of their various expenditures of labor-time. This, as Marx notes, is by no means
a "natural" or even logical thing to do. In fact, it the very strange and reductive activity of creating a false
distinction between things called "labor," on the one hand, and other social or personal activities, such as
praying, on the other.
17 It is important to note that scholars, too, often participate in reduction oflabor by utilizing the language
of "labor." The language oflabor is so pervasive, in fact, that family labor, casual labor, seasonal labor,
wage labor, bonded labor, manual labor, immaterial labor, sweatshop labor, and even child labor and forced
labor, despite their manifold differences, may often appear in some way to be fundamentally the same. The
psychological, emotional, or physical experiences of labor appear nowhere in the mix, and neither do the
specific social, cultural and historical contexts.
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CHAPTER IV
FAIR / COMPETITION
AND THE FRICTION OF FAIR TRADE
In recent years there has developed considerable excitement among intellectuals
around the world that a growing transnational civil society will become a wellspring for
democratic and emancipatory politics (e.g. Falk 1999, Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004). This
rather optimistic perspective on globalization has been grounded in the supposition that,
with the alleged weakening of state structures, some of the repressive forces of official
political culture have subsided as well. New possibilities for forging transnational
connections will serve as lightning rods for the rapid flow of new and empowering ideas
and deeper collaborations around globally shared interests-an outlook that Raymond
Williams (1989) has called "the resource of hope."
For social researchers, transnational civil society has sparked interest in the many
ways in which grassroots groups from many different nation-states are, as June Nash puts
it, "[finding] common cause in promoting principles of a global nature-such as human
rights, the environment, and indigenous autonomy," in the process sowing the seeds for
intensely diverse, even "hybrid" social forms (2004:438). Under the heading of
"transnational networks," for example, scholars have reported on interdisciplinary
partnerships between scientists and experts that Haas (1992) calls "knowledge-based" or
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"epistemic communities"; cross-border partnerships between activists with shared
principles, ideas, and values that Keck and Sikkink (1998) call "transnational advocacy
networks"; cross-ideological partnerships between activists challenging corporate
globalization (Juris 2008); and even "meshworks" of partnerships in the collective pursuit
of indigenous autonomy and environmental justice (Escobar 2003,2008). In much the
same vein, the fair trade movement has since the 1960s attempted to support
disadvantaged Third World producers by securing for them a "fair price" in the
marketplace. Relying on existing market structures rather than opposing them, fair trade
has claimed to develop transnational networks of allegedly equitable, democratic, and
participatory "partnerships," as the particular fair trade business relationships between
producers and distributors are called, spanning North America, Europe, and the global
South.
Though ethnographic accounts of such networks are necessarily riven with the
complexities of power, conflict, and competition over political ideas, access, supporters
and resources-a realization that implies that, as Juris writes, "networks are fluid
processes, not rigid structures" (2008:5)-the relatively neat and unalloyed terms
involved in the theorization of these particular forms of social relations, by contrast, have
tended to miss some of the darker, knottier roots. When it comes to discussions of the
grassroots, in particular, ready-made concepts like partnership continue to function as the
theoretical connective tissue for a range of possible relationships that actors may have.
Though such networks may frequently appear from the outside as cohesive units, drawn
- ---._ .._--------------
161
together by the centripetal forces of community, common identity, or common goals, it
remains important, as Fox (2000) and others have cautioned, not to take these images at
face value but rather to pay close attention to the inequalities that persist, including the
extent to which actors mayor may not actually engage in mutual support and joint action.
Or as Romi Bhabha puts it, hybridity is not just a "third term that resolves the tension
between two [others]" (1994:113). To put that concept into play without also "[turning]
the gaze back upon the eye of power" (1994:112) is to orphan the form from the relations
that gave it birth.
Arjun Appadurai (2000) provides an example of the general tendency to overlook
the infra-politics of the grassroots in his argument for "grassroots globalization," a term
that does not differentiate between the activities of activist organizations, indigenous
groups, or even non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Based on the presupposition
that grassroots actors naturally gravitate toward partnerships with one another because, as
a whole, they "proceed independently from the actions of corporate capital and the
nation-state system" (2000:4), Appadurai makes the surprising assertion that, unlike
corporations, grassroots actors "do not need to compete with each other" (2000:17).
Indeed, in Appadurai's rendition it appears as ifthe only antagonism in the world were
between the hegemony of the media, corporate capital and its international affiliates and
guarantors, on the one hand, and the grassroots, on the other. Specific explications of
power, conflict, and competition, apart from those that operate "from above" and "from
below," seldom appear.
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When a transnational network is oriented along the axis of the North-South, such
as in the case of fair trade, the peculiar optic of the local-global does little to illuminate
how such networks work and much less, still, how they often fall apart (Edelman 2005).
In the case of fair trade, it is especially important to push through this received image of
partnership between First World consumers, distributors, and disadvantaged Third World
producers and to understand the specific power dynamics and inequalities attendant to
fair trade's simultaneous operation as a strategy of development, a market-based
charitable humanitarianism, and an advertising scheme. As I noted in Chapter III, a good
starting point is to seek understanding of how producers conceptualize the fair trade
movement and how they mayor may not experience different kinds of fairness in their
lives and work. Yet, it is also important to take a critical eye to the relationships between
actors in a fair trade network, because despite its projected image, these might not be
partnerships at all (Fridell 2006).
Drawing on the ethnographic case study of The Fair Trade Zone, a fair trade,
industrial sewing cooperative in Nicaragua that claims the distinction of being the world's
first worker-owned free trade zone (zona franca), my goal in this chapter is to provide a
"de-centered" (Holland et al 2008) view of the particular transnational network that
surrounds it. Instead of assuming coherence, partnership, or even a cornmon cause, I
show how the relationships among the three main groups-a North Carolina, faith-based
development NGO called the Center for Sustainable Development (CSD), a Michigan-
based fair trade retailer called Clean Clothes Organics, and the twelve cooperative
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members (socias) who became the founding members of the fair trade zone sewing
cooperative-are riven with miscommunication, asymmetrical power, and ideological
contention and competition in addition to collaboration.
Many scholars have detailed how commonalities work as centripetal forces for
enabling disparate groups to come together for some cause or concern. McCarthy and
Zald (1997), for example, show that the coincidence of economic interest may provide
the basis for collective action. Touraine (1988) and others (Melucci 1989, Laclau and
Mouffe 1985) have demonstrated the unifying power of identity and shared domains of
meaning in the recognition of common objectives. And Snow and Benford (1998) have
shown how populations need to be "aligned" into collective action through the
construction of common "frames." Few scholars, however, have chosen to focus on the
differences and forms of power that operate within a single mobilization. Fewer have
shed light on the "social process" (Harvey 1996:78) that create discontinuities and
inequalities of meaning and power within those mobilizations. And still fewer have
investigated in any non-teleological way how those processes may either enable or
disable actors to work together with or without common cause. The general approach
that I instead employ in this chapter is well summarized by Anna Tsing's concept of
"friction," which points to the "zones of awkward engagement" (2005:x) between actors
of different backgrounds, agendas, and ideologies and suggests that imperfect interactions
often produce unpredictable outcomes, sometimes collaboration, sometimes devastation.
Perfect complementarity and commonality alone never enable connection. Instead, as
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Tsing writes, for better or worse, "Differences invigorate social
mobilizations" (2005 :245).
In sharp contrast to the image of the "three-legged stool," the actors of The Fair
Trade Zone network have been drawn into a common project even while they maintained
separate agendas, ideologies, strategies, and goals. This is not to say, however, that that
collaboration has been sustainable. Within the broadly defined goal of bringing into
focus the many centrifugal forces at work within this network, the goal of this chapter is
to recount a story of conflict between CSD and Clean Clothes, on the one hand, and
socias, on the other, that first emerged in 2007 and 2008 and has since, for all intents and
purposes, resulted in the dissolution of the network. The story, like the relationships that
it describes, is riven with the complexities of conflict, miscommunication, inequality,
compromise, and asymmetrical power. As it turns out, against Appadurai's (2000)
assertion, grassroots actors do compete with one another: they compete for resources, for
supports and political access, and for sway in the ideological and discursive debates in
which they are constantly embroiled. And much like the marketplace, this competition is
not always productive. In many cases it is wholly unproductive, a fact that, in the case of
The Fair Trade Zone, casts into full view Edelman's point that grassroots networks are in
fact "quite fragile and ephemeral" (2005:29).
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TWO ROADS
Quien da pan a perro ajeno, pierde el pan y pierde el perro.
He who gives bread to another's dog, loses the bread and loses the dog.
-. Zulema
Things began to fall apart in The Fair Trade Zone network in early 2007, a fact
that, although invisible to consumers in the U.S. who continued to purchase Fair Trade
Zone-produced garments, was palpable in the industrial complex known as Masill in
Ciudad Sandino, Nicargaua, where the cooperative and CSD's offices were both located.
Socias and CSD staff actively avoided conversations with one another and sometimes
even passed one another without even making eye contact. Instead, despite the fact that
their buildings were no more than twenty meters away from one another, separated by a
concrete wall and a rusty gate with green-flaked paint that has never, in all its life, been
locked, the two organizations had instead begun to resort to communicating by delivering
memos to one another on their respective letterheads.
At the center ofthis conflict was the central role of contracted labor in the
cooperative's production practices. Since gaining free trade zone certification in 2004,
that is-a project that was funded by a grant through the Inter-American Foundation and
also established a fund so the cooperative could carry in stock a quantity of cloth and thus
continue production even in the absence of outstanding orders-The Fair Trade Zone had
been employing upwards of fifty individuals from the Ciudad Sandino community who
were not members of the cooperative, but rather considered "contracted workers" (manos
de obra). In contrast to the twelve original members of the cooperative, these workers
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did not have the same rights to share in the cooperative's profit or to vote on any
measures that affected the future of the cooperative. Rather, for their daily work, they
received an average wage of 40 cordobas (about $2.00), compared to the average wage
of 54 cordobas (about $2.60) per day for cooperative members.
As Jacinta, the president of the cooperative in 2007, explained to me, the
reasoning for hiring these workers is a simply matter of meeting the production demands
of clients like Clean Clothes while also providing needed employment for the Ciudad
Sandino community. She points out, "We socias do not pay ourselves much more than
the other workers, who earn more here, and are treated much better, than they would in
the maquiladoras." The key difference between socias and workers, Jacinta continued, is
that "workers are not members of the cooperative, and thus do not get a vote in the
cooperative." All workers in The Fair Trade Zone, members as well as contracted
workers, she points out, are signed up for social security and health insurance. While the
worker pays 6.25% of their salary toward the cost of coverage, the cooperative pays 15%,
so that all workers are covered in the case of work injuries or other illnesses, and all
workers receive retirement benefits. Additionally, all workers receive paid maternity
leave (four weeks pre-natal and eight weeks post-partem), thirteen paid legal holidays per
year, one paid vacation day per month, and paid work days for any absence due to family
illness (verified, of course, by a note from a doctor).
It was, however, precisely the matter of the vote that bothered Roger, a CSD staff
member. This was especially the case in 2007 when it became apparent that, despite the
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protocol for membership established in the cooperative's constitutions, socias had no
intentions of ever converting these workers into full members. As Roger points out, the
practice of hiring contracted workers is a violation of the terms of the cooperative's
constitution, which specifies that non-members may only work in the factory for a trial
period of three months. After that, a worker must decide either to become a full member
or leave the factory. Those who opt for membership become presocias (pre-members) for
a year, during which they must undergo training in production, quality control,
administration, as well as in the philosophy of cooperativism. At the end of this initial
year, they are evaluated by the current membership according to a check-list of criteria,
including their attitude towards the cooperative and other members, their participation,
their work ethic, and their willingness to contribute to the cooperative's collective goals.
The third and final step in this process uses the model of a "buy-in," which has
been successfully implemented in the Spanish cooperative system, particularly the
Mondragon Cooperative Corporation (MCC) in the Gipuzkoa province in the Basque
Country of Spain, which is the world's largest worker cooperative and a model for
modern day cooperative enterprises. In the Mondragon buy-in system, potential
cooperative members commit resources toward the cooperative in order to gain
membership.18 The buy-in serves the dual purpose of providing the co-op with access to
capital while also providing the social function of formalizing the inductee's membership.
In the case of The Fair Trade Zone, for whom start-up capital was provided interest-free
from CSD, the buy-in was calculated to be valued at 320 dollars. Ideally, presocias are
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given the option of paying this amount up front or contributing the same amount in labor-
hours, deducted from their monthly paycheck. As Melissa, a CSD staff member,
comments, "it is actually preferable that the incoming member not pay the buy-in up
front, but rather have that amount deducted from their paycheck, because, as the case of
Mondragon has proven, it much more effective for member retention than any upfront
cash payment has been." In any case, the 320 dollar buy-in is no arbitrary amount; it is
meant to represent the total number of labor-hours that the founding socias were
calculated to have contributed-640 hours over two years-calculated at a standard wage
for manual labor of 50 cents per hour. In that way, potential cooperative members who
contribute their own "buy-in" later on can be said to have contributed an equal amount to
the cooperative, thus meriting equal status of membership and profit share. As Roger put
it, "The point of all that is to ensure that, as a matter of principle, in a cooperative there
cannot be workers and owners, there can only be equals."
In reality, however, things have unfolded very differently, as the co-op has yet to
allow anyone in the presocia stage to complete all three stages of this process. Initially,
as Roger views it, the socias could have been said to have been taking advantage of a
loophole in the rules. They were recruiting contracted workers for the purpose of
meeting the conditions of an order, then dismissing them before the trial period was up,
given that, in the absence of orders, it was not financially feasible to keep them on.
When the co-op began working as a full service shop in 2004, however, socias began
hiring groups of contracted workers for longer stretches. In 2005,53 workers had
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employment in the cooperative, and in the end of 2006 a slight drop in orders reduced
that workforce to 46. By 2007, however, these workers still had not been given the
opportunity to become full members. While several pushed to initiate the presocia
process, they did not end up contributing a buy-in because they were denied membership
based on their participation, attitude, or work ethic.
NOT ALL EQUITY IS THE SAME
Although many people involved in one way or another with The Fair Trade Zone
network have speculated about why socias have chosen not to expand the membership of
their cooperative, for me, insight into this did not come until I arrived in Nicaragua in
July of 2007 for a third field season. In the year that had passed since my previous visit,
it is important to note that the cooperative membership itself had gone through a great
deal of internal conflict, leading to the development of two very distinct factions. The
first group consisted of the cooperative's executive board, elected the previous December,
including the president, the vice-president, the secretary, the treasurer, and the director of
public relations. The second group, by contrast, worked floor jobs, which included the
management of day-to-day production activities, and were in large part removed from
decisions about the cooperative as a whole. Much ofthe divisiveness between the two
groups, as it turns out, was related to recent spats with CSD over the status of the
cooperative's land title, which CSD was not willing to sign over to the cooperative until
all loans that CSD had provided over the years had been repaid. While the latter group
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sided with CSD's position on the matter, the first instead interpreted this as a sign of
CSD's intention to continue to intervene in the cooperative.
In February of2007, bad feelings within the cooperative were exacerbated when
the executive board decided to suspend elections for their positions and seal financial
statements. While the intent was of course to keep CSD from obtaining this information
-which they used in newsletters and in monthly reports to the Inter-American
Foundation-the measure quickly expanded to foreclose on sharing financial information
with anyone who sided with CSD, including socias in non-leadership positions within the
cooperative. This matter quickly escalated to such a point that, one afternoon in May of
2007 a group of socias appeared in CSD's main office to entreat Roger and the other staff
to intervene once again in the cooperative, which they felt was slipping out of their
hands. Sympathetic to these socias' disappointment, Roger only responded, "It's your
cooperative, you have to take control yourself."
Though conflicts within the cooperative persisted over the next few months, with
rumors and gossip circulating far and wide through lunchtime conversations and the long
walk home from work, the fact remained that virtually all socias, regardless of what
faction they aligned with in the cooperative, were resistant to the idea of converting
contracted workers into full socias. In a series of interviews conducted in August and
September of 2007, I sought to find out why this was the case, discussing with both
groups the existing process of admitting new members. Both groups, in fact, agreed that
the current "buy-in" model was flawed, mostly because it failed to represent what
--~----
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membership in The Fair Trade Zone is about. An exchange with Andrea, a floor manager,
illustrates these sentiments particularly well:
ANDREA: Given all the pain and sacrifice that we socias endured in the two
years that we worked without pay to build this cooperative, 320 dollars is simply
not the same. When we were building this cooperative, we had no idea what was
going to happen. Nothing like it had ever been done in Ciudad Sandino, and we
went to work every day without knowing if we were working for nothing at all,
whether all of our sweat was going to be in vain [de balde] ...Would new socias
who joined the cooperative today also go through that struggle? Of course not.
JOSH: Is there any number that you can think of, as a buy-in, that would account
for that sweat? If you could change the cooperative's rules? A thousand dollars?
ANDREA: Actually, I don't really think that anything could be the equivalent of
that. Our blood and sweat are in this building, you know. And we are who we are
as members of this cooperative because we struggled, because of our sweat.
In Andrea's view, membership is something more than a number of hours or an
equivalent amount of money. There are, in fact, real, justifiable inequalities between
socias and workers that cannot be resolved in any simple way. I pressed further on the
idea of 640 hours as a representation of their labor. Andrea responded, "I honestly don't
remember where that figure carne from. We might have worked 640 hours, but some of
us also worked other jobs, and almost all of us went horne and were not supported by our
husbands. We struggled there, as well, to build this cooperative."
Marx's distinction between abstract and concrete labor is useful here in fleshing
out Andrea's critiques of the buy-in model. Calculated first in terms of the labor-time
(i.e. the number of hours worked) and second in terms of that labor-time's exchange
value (i.e. the monetary equivalent of those hours in a marketplace in which manual labor
is considered to be essentially the same), the buy-in model constructs an abstract view of
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labor that, many other socias' also argued, does not reflect the experience ofthat labor "in
the flesh." The model ofthe buy-in, in other words, allows for a scenario in which one
person's labor, their buy-in, is equivalent to another's, regardless of the very different
experiences they might have had. While the founding socias are willing to see their
labor, or rather their "sweat," as equivalent to the others'-an idea communicated by
socias' appeal to the term "sweat equity" (equidad de sudor)-the same cannot be said
for workers who would join the cooperative once it is already an established success, or
those whose labor would consist of a number of hours in an already fully operational
cooperative. Not all forms of "equity" are the same, it would seem. And the problem
with the buy-in model could be framed as a quantification, and thus reductive distortion,
of socias' "concrete labor"-the total social experience of building the cooperative,
forming real friendships and real relationships of mutual respect for one another, the
sweat that they have put into the cooperative, and the many battles they have had to fight
not only within the cooperative but also at home. The fact that labor-time is then
converted into a money value at a standard rate of 50 cents per hour only makes the
matter even more absurd. As Rosa joked, 320 dollars is like "a motorcycle, an expensive
television, or six hundred pounds of rice." The real root of the matter, to put it slightly
differently, is the fact that socias do not see their experience of labor as struggle as
commensurable with the world of monetary transactions at all. "Membership," as Dora
succinctly put it, is a matter of "all of us having experienced in the flesh all the
deprivations and sacrifices that we alone have experienced."
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Meanwhile, for CSD, the matter at hand was still really the socias' failure to
follow the guidelines of cooperativism. In Roger's view, the practice of hiring contracted
workers is essentially to deny them the opportunity to have an equal stake in the
cooperative. Perhaps even more to the point, from his organization's sustainable
development perspective, the cooperative is not about its individual members, but rather
about the principles of democracy and sustainability, its present and future role in
providing employment for the Ciudad Sandino community and allowing those individuals
to define their own futures by virtue of their membership in the cooperative. Sitting in
the main office one morning, coffee in hand, I pressed Roger on the topic of membership
in The Fair Trade Zone, particularly how the process of becoming a socia came to be
determined so many years ago. Pushing away from his keyboard and leaning back in a
black office chair that squeaked in protest, he explained that The Fair Trade Zone was
one ofthe first cooperatives that CSD had been involved in organizing from the start.
"We made a lot of mistakes back then," he offered, "mistakes that we hopefully will not
make again." He continued:
There is no part of forming a cooperative that is more important than the initial
organization, this part of the project will set the tone for the entire business in the
future. If there are conflicts among those involved in the project that are left
unresolved during the organizational period, those will continue to haunt the
cooperative once it is formalized. If there are issues that are left undefined, those
will also continue to crop up. You know, the first part of the organizational
process is defining the legal framework of the cooperative, which vary country by
country, but also define the basic principles by which all cooperatives must abide.
The cooperative cannot discriminate on the basis of gender, age, religion, political
views, or anything like that, meaning that, when economically and
organizationally feasible, the cooperative cannot turn anyone down, they must
have as much of a right to join as anyone else. The second part of this, probably
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more important than the legal framework, [is that] it is critical to develop an
organizational structure that reflects and promotes a culture best suited to the
particular business. Once you have met the legal requirements, you build up these
structures in order to define the parameters by which new members gain
admission, how those members are ensured equal say and how the cooperative
stays a democratic organization. Lastly, in cooperatives like The Fair Trade Zone,
that depend on selling a product in a market, you then also have to make sure that
your cooperative has a market for its product...You know, in becoming a
cooperative member. ..it's ultimately the buy-in that counts. I mean, this isn't my
invention, [laughs] it's a meeting of the minds of economists and lawyers. The
only type of buy-in that they think matters is money.
I pressed on to ask if there were anything that Roger, personally would do differently if
he thought it would improve relations between the socias and CSD. After contemplating
for a moment, he responded:
You know, the fact of the matter is that I can't go back in time, but I tell you what.
The next time we organize a cooperative, we're making damn sure that
everybody, I mean everybody, is apprised of all the legal ins and outs. I mean, it's
tough. We aren't lawyers, we learned all this by trial and error, but I suppose the
biggest thing that we did wrong was not making sure that the socias knew all
about this protocol. Thinking about it, the cooperative lawyer was here for like
half a day, and just blew through it all. I guess they didn't get much out of
that...Maybe also, if they were part of the process from the beginning, they'd be
more sympathetic of all the, uh, hoops that we had to jump through in order to get
this thing off the ground ...You know, the fact of the matter is that some of this is
the women's fault, too. Call it what you want, greed ...the women are
consolidating their own positions as employers over and above their
disempowered employees ... [They] are not seeing the big picture, they are
selfishly concerned with getting a head up above everyone else. That happens a
lot, everywhere, and that is not sustainable, it never has been. A community
cannot build a future on twelve people having good jobs.
In November of 2007, CSD held a meeting with The Fair Trade Zone and several
other members of the extended network, including the executive board of the cotton
spinning plant, then a pre-cooperative, and several representatives from small grower
cooperatives to discuss the future of the field to factory, vertically integrated garment
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production chain. What came out of the dialogue for CSD and The Fair Trade Zone,
however, was not a renewed sense of understanding or clarity of purpose, but rather a
tenuous relationship that was quickly approaching a breaking point. Grievances, many
previously unvoiced, began to rise into public view.
THE MELTDOWN
El que paga la mitsica, dicta el son.
He who pays for the music, decides the song.
~Rosa
Melissa and Roger had intended the meeting to look forward to the future, and not
backward to the problems that had plagued the relationship between The Fair Trade Zone
and CSD in the past year or so, but this quickly proved impossible. The Fair Trade Zone
had taken out numerous loans from CSD in order to buy cloth and to meet payroll, and in
two short years it had mounted over fifty thousand dollars in debt with the NGO. From
CSD's point of view, the problem was systematic. Instead of making attempts at paying
down even un chelin (a penny) of that debt, the cooperative relied on CSD's revolving
fund for the continuous inj ection of capital. In this sense, if the cooperative was
eventually going to become the economically autonomous and sustainable organization
that both parties wanted it to be, they needed to find some resolution for the debt that the
co-op had accrued and its problematic borrowing practices thus far.
Finishing up an organizational meeting for a forty-day employment generation
workshop that was entering its final stretch the following week (see Chapter V), I arrived
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late to the commodity chain meeting. I pulled up a plastic chair, with Melissa and Roger
on my right, and The Fair Trade Zone's executive board, the Genesis spinning
cooperative's executive board, and some as of yet unfamiliar faces (who turned out to be
representatives from some agricultural co-ops that CSD worked with) on my left. As I sat
down I realized that the meeting was already in full swing.
Roger was once again explaining CSD's position that it would not forgive The
Fair Trade Zone's still mounting debt. The reason, he said, pointing to the cluster of
chairs where Genesis socias were sitting, was that those funds were in fact earmarked for
the infrastructure of the new cooperative they were sponsoring. Neither would those
funds be gifted to Genesis, he continued. Once they were repaid, they would go toward
the next project, and so forth. "Finance, is not a gift economy. No funds are ever merely
given to you, because we have a responsibility to our donors and grantees to administer
them properly," added Melissa, to whom I turned my head sharply, wondering where the
term "gift economy" (economia del don) had come from and ifit meant what I thought.
As it inevitably did, the conversation then turned to the perennial topic of the title
to the cooperative's land and started to become heated. "It is a barbaridad [shame] that
we are the owners of this cooperative, and yet we do not have legal title to it," protested
Ines. "What happens if you want to kick us off one day?" added another, to whom Roger
explained that CSD would never do that and that, once their debt was paid off, title would
be transferred. No longer was anyone waiting their turn speak, however, and by the
second half of Roger's sentence Jacinta had already begun to plea that the cooperative did
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not even have the money to pay employees, let alone any debt to CSD. Roger, attempting
to regain control by adopting an almost professional tone, reminded the socias of the
history of the project, as he saw it, in which all of this was first established. "I wish I had
a recording of it, we sat right here under this tree and established very clearly that these
are not gifts, these are loans, and you will have to pay them back." He continued, "it's
like everything in this cooperative, you can't seem to remember the constitution either.
It's not okay that you're hiring contracted laborers, the cooperative is not for your profit,
the project is for the community, for the benefit of the community."
Three things then happened at almost exactly the same time. An audible grumble
came from the representatives of Genesis and the agricultural cooperatives, who had for
some time now been listening quietly. Melissa got halfway through a sentence: "We
recognize the contributions you have made, but. .. " And Ines stood up from her red,
plastic chair, knocking it backwards, and yelled: "This is not your cooperative nor the
community's.. .It's ours, you were not out here suffering with us. Our sweat is in this
cooperative, not yours and not anybody else's." Taken aback, Roger stopped, Melissa
stopped, and a very awkward silence ensued.
The discussion continued for two more hours, and apart from the occasional
attempt to bring it back to the topic for which the meeting was originally called-the
vertically integrated commodity chain-it was largely dominated by emotionally charged
issues that affected only CSD and The Fair Trade Zone: who contributed what to the
cooperative, what responsibilities the cooperative has to the community at large, and why
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certain moves-like the decision to pursue free trade certification-were made without
consultation of the cooperative's actual owners. To the surprise of Roger and Melissa, it
became clear that, despite their years working together, socias did not fully trust them. A
common perception seemed to be that CSD was profiting from the cooperative by
continuing to refer to it as "their project" in Nicaragua, taking donations that were
intended for the cooperative and making their own. Attempting to deflect those
accusations, Roger tried to explain again that the NGO had the responsibility to
administer donations effectively. "If we get 1,200 dollars from someone for the
cooperative, we don't just go hand over 100 dollars to each of you. We have to make
sure it goes to building up the cooperative as a business, or in some cases paying down
the debt."
As the steam built, so did Roger's desire not only to refute these accusations but
also to retaliate by claiming that socias were not really running a cooperative at all.
Perhaps it is just a business with twelve bosses and sixty employees. I mean, look.
The fact that the cooperative now has a lock on its gate during working hours and
employs a security guard to check people at the gate in order to ensure that workers
don't steal anything on the way out, means that this is not really a cooperative ...
Cooperative members don't steal from the cooperative, because that would mean that
they are stealing from themselves. It's more like a maquiladora.
Appearing bewildered, Ines quickly rebutted. "Gringo, sos loco, somos pobres (Gringo,
you're crazy, we are poor).19 The statement almost did not need explanation: as poor
women, they could not be owners of a maquiladora because, as everyone knows, poor
people work in maquiladoras. But Melissa responded anyways: "We pay ourselves 200
dollars a month." Unbelieving, Rosa pointed out that, whatever CSD staff earned, they
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did not ever go hungry, they lived a big house with a pool, and a television with satellite.
"These are things we'll never have." It was, in other words, a matter of relative wealth: if
not income, than the living conditions that CSD staff enjoy and that socias bear witness to
everyday they come to work. This, as Rosa later explained to me, was an inevitable and
grinding comparison between the two groups: "the things we lack and the things that they
take for granted."
That conversation, which was "unfortunately public," said Roger, was riven not
only with the friction of miscommunication, but also of divergent recollections of the
past, of emotional charge, of ideological difference, and, as Rosa pointed out, of relative
wealth. For Roger, one of the most disturbing disturbing turns of events was being called
gringo, rather than chele. A derogatory term that draws on a historically significant
discourse of U.S. intervention in Nicaragua and of a North~South organization of power,
control and wealth in Nicaragua, gringo was about the last thing that Roger wanted to be
called by someone with whom he worked closely for almost ten years in Nicaragua.
Having felt as if I were witnessing that I was not supposed to, I sat quietly, trying
to make the action of writing something down as unobtrusively as possible. When the
meeting finally dispersed with the promise of a future one in which they would actually
talk about the vertically integrated commodity chain, I said my goodbyes to the socias
(secretly attempting to reassure everyone involved that I was not on one side or the other)
and walked with Roger and Melissa back toward their office where my things were.
Clearly still processing the event, Melissa suggested that the biggest surprise of all was
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that "the socias had such a wrong-headed idea about cooperativism" and were so
"ignorant" about the roles, procedures, and laws of their own cooperative." For Roger,
on the other hand, it was that "two human beings could be at the same meeting [years
ago] and come away with such different recollections."
THE MEMO, THE CATCH-22, AND THE STRIKE
A week passed, and perhaps out of frustration and perhaps partly out of the
perception that the end was in sight for the productivity of their discussions with the
socias, Roger made the decision to "blunt" CSD's approach a little and to exercise the
leverage that the NGO enjoyed as the funder of the project. A week later, he drafted up a
memo on CSD letterhead and delivered it by hand to the cooperative. Contained within
was the announcement that, henceforth, the availability loans to the co-op would be
contingent upon the socias' following of the protocol regarding membership. In other
words, CSD would release no more funds to the cooperative until they allowed all
contracted workers the opportunity to become full socias. The moment they did that,
Roger offered, CSD would not only forgive the cooperative's debt burden, they would
also take steps toward signing over the title to the land.
Roger later explained to me that the threat was an empty one, a "mere
performance." If it really came down to it, they would bailout the cooperative and the
women who had spent so much oftheir time in building it. "But," Roger continued, "this
kind of leverage is something that might force their hand a little bit, and if that ultimately
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gets them back on the track to becoming a real cooperative, then it will obviously be
worth it." He continued, making clear that his metaphor was not meant to be paternalistic
that he had the greatest of respect for the women, but could not think of another way to
say it: "Sometimes it is like dealing with children, you have to cut them off and make
them realize how much they need you in order to teach them to be independent and grow
on their own."
On the receiving end of the memo, however, the threat was anything but empty.
As one socia explained it, it was essentially coercion:
In Nicaragua, we have a saying. Someone comes up to you, holds a gun to your
head and says, 'run, and I'll shoot you, stay, and I'll murder you.' That's what it
was like, we were left with no good choice.
Not only did the socias openly express their feelings of disempowerment, now believing
that they were on their own, they also interpreted it as an intensely personal challenge to
their historical role in the construction of the cooperative and to the changes that they
have affected in their lives because of the cooperative. Maria's daughter's tuition to
attend the University of Central America, for example, depended on her own employment
in the cooperative. Rosa, who often made her dissatisfaction with the executive board
very public, argued with her fellow socias that there was perhaps enough fault to go
around but also that, CSD was not respecting the authority of socias' ownership. Jacinta,
the president of the executive board, was flat out infuriated by what was essentially a
challenge to socias' "sweat" investment in the cooperative. She sardonically mocked the
irony of the cooperative's slogan, suggesting that perhaps they should all vote to change
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it to "Our Sweat, Our Sale, Their Success." While may other socias decided to keep their
heads down and hope that the conflict would pass, the course of action Jacinta
recommended was to attempt as clean of a break from CSD as possible, freeing The Fair
Trade Zone to pursue its own independent course.
The clean break came in the form of a memo drafted on The Fair Trade Zone's
letterhead that demanded that the NGO take down any mention of the cooperative from
its website. As Jacinta explain to me, this was so that the NGO "would not be able to
collect any more donations using the cooperative's name, and especially using our story."
Though CSD eventually complied, the disconnection that they sought soon proved
impossible because, despite the growing rift, the two organizations were still very much
tied to one another in very basic ways. The entire plot of land called Masili, the site of
CSD's house and office, the spinning cooperative called Genesis, as well as The Fair
Trade Zone, was all titled under CSD's name. Moreover, they shared a single electricity
and water meter, which was paid every month by CSD, meaning that The Fair Trade
Zone would be without utilities.
Things came to a head at the end of September of 2007. Once again running low
on funds, Jacinta was forced to go to a bank in Managua to seek a short term bank loan to
substitute for that which CSD often provided. She quickly discovered, however, that the
fact that the cooperative did not possess the title to the land to put up as collateral
precluded any possibility of getting such a loan-a title, in a sort of Catch-22, that would
not be theirs until they ceded to the CSD's demands of them. The autonomy of the co-op,
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in other words, was very much impossible in this situation, constrained as they inevitably
were by the structural conditions of their relationship to the land and their access to
capital. A bad situation was made worse when the the socias arrived Monday morning of
the first week of October to find that the workers who had yet to be paid had gone on
strike and were picketing just outside the cooperative's fence, one of whom was talking
to ajournalist from La Prensa, one of Nicaragua's national newspapers.
BEING COMPETITIVE IN A MARKET OF FAIRNESS
Meanwhile in Michigan, Emilia surveyed the first of several batches of a new line
of products called "onesies," one-pieces organic cotton baby clothing that had just
shipped in from The Fair Trade Zone in Nicaragua. Her frustration mounted, however, as
she opened box after box and eventually estimated that over half of the garments were
"irregulars," garments below quality control standards to be sold on the market that
ultimately had to be scrapped. There are, of course, irregulars in every order, Emilia
explains, but seldom does one end up with such a high number without something going
wrong at the source. To Emilia, this development was especially surprising because of all
of the producers she had worked with over the years The Fair Trade Zone typically had
high production standards. With the goal of heading the issue off before it became too
costly, Emilia called up CSD.
Melissa and I were enjoying the lazy and hot Saturday afternoon on the screened-
in porch of CSD's main house, her teetering in a wicker and wood rocking chair, and me
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horizontal in a worn, purple hammock, writing up some fieldnotes from the previous day,
when the phone rang. Balancing the book she was reading on the arm of the chair,
Melissa made her way back into the hallway toward the whitewashed dresser that was the
temporary way station for the cordless phones and anything else, really, such as crumpled
bits of paper. She answered, "Hello, oh wait a minute!" almost expecting it not to work
immediately, and carried the cordless, international phone (a.k.a. in CSD-speak, the
"magic phone" for its ability to communicate internationally using an internet
connection) out past the porch into the yard where there was reception, finally
recognizing the voice at the other end to be Emilia's.
The two made made a gesture at small talk before Emilia explained about the state
of the "onesies" she had just received. "Will you be my eyes and ears in Nicaragua again
and tell me what's going on?" asked Emilia. Melissa immediately realized that, although
Emilia had typically been apprised of The Fair Trade Zone's recent debt and land issues
with CSD, she had clearly been left out of the loop as oflate, especially regarding the
debacle that led to the two not being on speaking terms. By way of saying no, Melissa
summarized these new developments, but when she arrived at the topic of the co-op's
employment of contracted workers, Emilia stopped her short. "Wait, what you're saying
is basically that the women didn't make these clothes? And they're employing workers
to do it for them?" I overheard Emilia exclaim in a tinny phone-voice from the hammock
in which I was stationed.
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From Emilia's standpoint in Michigan, there was little sign of these events. In
fact, everything appeared to be going swimmingly in Nicaragua. Socias were taking
larger and more complicated orders and even filling them more or less on time. Yet, to
hear that it was not, in fact, the socias that she thought whose work was going into these
garments was very alarming. Not only was this a plausible explanation for why their
quality was slipping-"Workers without a stake in their work almost always means bad
quality," as Emilia put it-it was also problematic for her company, Clean Clothes,
because selling garments produced in The Fair Trade Zone very much relied on the
ability to (accurately) label and market them as produced in a cooperative that is "One-
Hundred Percent Worker-Owned."
Two weeks later, Emilia, her husband, Greg, and two associates, young women in
their twenties who Emilia had hired as her "eco-friendly product design and quality
control" specialists, arrived at Augusto C. Sandino International Airport in Managua,
where I picked them up in CSD's new Kia SUV and drove them to Ciudad Sandino. We
shared a quick lunch of rice, beans, and an avocado and boiled egg salad, called
guacamole, and the five of us then walked over to the cooperative, myself as a translator.
Emilia introduced her husband and her two associates, whom the socias had not yet met.
Emilia chatted with the socias for a while, and called for a meeting later that afternoon.
As we walked away, she explained, "What I think we need here is for me to talk
businesswoman to businesswomen with them-and what they need is some education in
fair trade marketing."
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In the mean time, Emilia's two associates checked into their hotel rooms-they
insisted on staying in the Best Western near the airport, foregoing the offer of a hospedaje
(inn) in Ciudad Sandino-and then returned to make their initial survey of the
cooperative's production line. Because neither were Spanish speakers, however, and had
as tools only the words that they had written down in their notebooks-cortar (cut), tela
(cloth), medir (measure)-and mimed questions and recommendations to workers. When
they eventually finished, we all settled down with a cup of overly-sweet, instant NesCafe
coffee at a wooden picnic table under the mango tree within the cooperative's fenced in
property. Inaugurating the meeting with an efficiency that the socias were by now quite
accustomed to, Emilia yielded the floor to her assistants, who made their suggestions for
improving the production. As they were quality control specialists, the biggest issue,
logically, was the lack of a responsible party at each stage for quality control.
For the next hour-halting between each sentence to allow me to translate-
Emilia lectured the socias on what needed to change in the production process, the
importance of ensuring consistency, how to make those changes in order to avoid
irregulars. As it turned out, the slip in quality control, she determined, was not the fault
of the workers, but rather the piece of machinery that was responsible for spreading the
cloth evenly before cutting.
Probably the most important step the cooperative needed to take, she continued,
was to maintain communication with Clean Clothes: "Hopefully in the future, in order to
avoid production issues like these, you will keep us apprised of the problems you are
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having, you will discover them earlier in the process, and then you will tell us what
measures you are going to take in order to solve those problems. Communication is key,
and sometimes we wait for weeks before hearing back from you about something."
Without hesitation, she moved on:
I am emotionally invested in this cooperative, I still remember the first order of
camisoles that we got from you, and as Jacinta is fond of saying, I cried when I
saw them, and I still think that you can do anything you wish. But, I know that
there have been difficult times between us, but here we have a big opportunity to
start over, to make a new beginning. The thing is, you mayor may not know, but
our marketplace is getting very competitive, and pricing has been much more
difficult, and margins are down, down, down. And there are other fair trade
cooperatives like yours across the world. Back when we were beginning, we
could go sell our product with you as our partner, and it made a difference in the
market. But now when I go to sell with other competitors, they have people like
you that they're working with, who have a great story that we compete with. So
it's more and more of a global economy of people like you that we compete
against. You know, everyone claims to be fair trade, like I told you last year when
I was here. Whether or not they're telling the truth is not ours to determine, but
the point is that they market themselves like they are fair trade...At the end of the
day, you know-the story is important-but so is quality.
As Emilia saw it, in the business partnership between Clean Clothes Organics and The
Fair Trade Zone, Clean Clothes' job was to attend to the marketing side of the project.
"This means generating product lines, designing packaging, and the ever important task
of writing copy," says Emilia, "but it also means representing the cooperative, telling the
story of the cooperative and its members and Nicaragua." One of the marketing edges
that The Fair Trade Zone has enjoyed, moreover, has been Emilia's ability to emphasize
the difference between "conventional business," on the one hand-which is often
characterized by profit at the cost of human misery-and "ethical business" or "fair
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trade," on the other. This aspect of marketing, that their status as a worker-owned
cooperative gave them their only edge in an already saturated apparel market, was what
she was seeking to give socias insight into in this meeting. She explained:
Right now down the street there is that new Cone Denim factory, and you see the
resources they have. And you compete with them. But the only weapon you have
that they don't is that your business is ethical business. When it comes to t-shirts,
the fact that you are what you are, a cooperative, is what sells. Nowadays, you're
not alone in that any more. Every day that passes there's another cooperative with
an even more tear-jerking story thank your own...and in order for you to remain
competitive, in order for us both to continue to competitive in a market of
fairness, you know, all of those stories of triumph that are being peddled. You
need to be able to say that you're a cooperative and that you're worker-owned.
The socias sat quietly. Emilia pulled out a black, leather-bound notebook from
her backpack, and slid it across the table. "Okay, then, on a happier note, I have a small
token for you all," said Emilia, opening the bound book to reveal pages of colorful photos
of people posing with Fair Trade Zone t-shirts. "I'm very happy that you got to meet
these important people for the first time today, my husband, Greg, my associates," she
said, "These are photos of everyone in Clean Clothes that you have worked and some that
you don't know but who work with your garments up in Michigan. This is just to say
thank you, and that I hope that we make lots of money together in our continuing
partnership."
THE VACATION
Emilia's two associates left the next day, having decided to move up their
departure, and in exchange for the interview that I had been promised all week long, I
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borrowed CSD's car again and drove Emilia and Greg to the beach town of San Juan del
Sur to an all-inclusive hotel in which they had planned to pass the rest of their trip. On
the way, I got my chance to ask some of the questions that had been mulling over in my
head, and Emilia and Greg processed some of the events that had just transpired.
To my surprise, Emilia is not a big fan of fair trade, so many of those questions
went straight out the window. "Nowadays," she explained, "everyone is using the fair
trade label, and it's almost like it's become so diluted now that it has no meaning
anymore." A colleague of hers, in fact, realizing the profit to be made in the market
niche, had apparently marketed a whole line of clothing with the "fair trade" label
attached to it. "People believed the label because, what can you do? There's no real way
to check."
I asked if she thought that certification processes could solve that problem. "Well,
yes and no. Currently, there's no certification process for garments, because, before the
clothing, you have to certify the fabric, then the corton. Garments are more complicated
than coffee, you have to certify all the steps in the process. That's what we're working on
with the FLO [Fair Trade Labeling Organizations] 'beta' project that Roger and I are
involved in. Certification from beginning to end."
She continued, "From a marketing perspective the certification processes are great
because it's a label and a logo that you can just slap on there. Of course, you want to
have other marketing strategies too, with just the label, it's no longer unique and no
longer appeals to customers in the same way as a nice, glossy photo...But, the big
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problem with certification from the producer's standpoint is that it costs so damn much to
do it, literally thousands of dollars, and most of the time the FLO or TransFair won't even
send out a certifier to inspect the plant unless it has a thousand employees or something
like that."
"What is it, specifically, that sells fair trade goods?" I was curious to hear,
gathering that Emilia had given this some thought in the marketing of The Fair Trade
Zone and other businesses. Emilia explained:
Well, of course, everybody in the marketing industry wants to know that, but the
thing is that it's hard to say. From my experience, fair trade appeals to people as
people, you know, as human beings. And so in that sense, fair trade humanizes
the market in the sense that' we are all human beings.' People identify with
producers, and that goes a long way to making them want to also help them
succeed. The second aspect, ironically, is that people also like to hear about and
connect with different cultures and distant things, like Javanese coffee or
whatever. When I hear customers talk about The Fair Trade Zone, part of it's like,
'Wow, their story is so great, I want to support them,' and part of it is 'Wow, their
story is so great, this t-shirt is really authentically Nicaraguan.'
In her experience marketing Fair Trade Zone products, Emilia remarked that, if done
right, the fair trade marketing strategy can actually do good by helping shape the way that
customers make responsible choices:
Although fair trade is only a marketing strategy, the fact that it makes people
consider the implications of their choices, I think, is a good thing. People
generally know very little about the things they buy and where they come from, or
who made them. So I think that anything that contributes to changing that, and
really does it faithfully, and doesn't lie to people like many products do, will
undoubtedly help to change things.
The reason why it is important to be faithful to one's customers when you call
something fair trade, Emilia expanded, is the same reason that it is important for The Fair
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Trade Zone to be able to call itself a cooperative and to call what it produces a fair trade
product. It is not simply a matter of what will sell and what will not sell, it is a matter,
Emilia says, of "ethical business." A business owner has an ethical obligation to not
deceive its customers not because it is more profitable to do so, but because it is the right
thing to do. Likewise, a business' obligation to workers follows very much the same
reasoning. While it may be the case that workers are more productive and more efficient
when they have a stake in their work, the real point of the matter is that, even if it is not
more profitable, it is ethical to ensure that they go to work in safe working conditions,
have fair pay, and have reason to put effort into their work.
As we approached our mid-way point of the trip, which was also our lunch
destination, our conversation turned to the problem of contracted workers being
employed as the primary labor source in The Fair Trade Zone. Emilia's dissatisfaction
over that matter was even more palpable than her dissatisfaction with quality control
issues they had also recently experienced. Two decisions ultimately came out of that
lunch. First, she was going to have to remove mention of the "One-Hundred Percent
Worker-Owned" from the blurb about The Fair Trade Zone on her company's website.
And second, she was going to have to find a way to "get the cooperative back on track."
"Would it be ethical to tie future Clean Clothes orders to structural changes within the
cooperative?" Emilia floated to Greg, "Or would that be interfering?"
I dropped Emilia and Greg off at their resort and made my way back to Managua.
Several weeks later, I discovered what ultimately came of the conversation to which I
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was briefly privy. More forceful action was apparently needed and acceptable, and the
socias were in an uproar over it. Emilia had informed them that additional conditions
would be attached to all future contracts between the two businesses, Clean Clothes and
The Fair Trade Zone. First, some additional percentage of the profits that the cooperative
made from a Clean Clothes order would be reinvested in the cooperative's infrastructure,
rather than taken home by socias in the form of higher pay. Second, with each order, the
cooperative would agree to expand the membership base of the co-op beyond the original
twelve, with the ultimate goal of having all labor in the co-op done by socias themselves
within the year. And third, the cooperative would periodically release financial
information concerning budgets, profits, and pay scales so that the co-op's progress could
be effectively monitored. This, as she called it, was her miniature "structural adjustment
plan" for the cooperative, as she later and not unselfconsciously referred to it.
Emilia, however, did not see this strategy as "interfering" in the cooperative, but
merely extending the conditions that are always included in business contracts:
production timeframes, quality standards, payment. In other words, it is an illusion to
think of contracts as simple agreements or exchanges between parties. There are always
conditions attached, and they vary from situation to situation, based on the needs of both.
If there is something disagreeable about those conditions to one party or the other, then
those conditions can be renegotiated or even rejected. In Emilia's view, this was an
appropriate and effective way to leverage the position that Clean Clothes enjoyed,
especially given that it is The Fair Trade Zone's largest client, in a way that would be
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beneficial to both parties. In effect, this also meant guiding the cooperative toward being
competitive, as she put it, "in a market of fairness." Emilia explained, "We aren't
running a charity here, and the women know that.. .As a business partnership it simply
wouldn't work if our arrangement weren't mutually beneficial. The marketability of the
cooperative is as much our problem as it is theirs."
Socias did not see eye to eye with Emilia on this matter. In fact, when I sat down
with Jacinta, Ines, and Zulema at the picnic table during lunch on the day that the news
came in, the feeling among those three, at least, would most accurately be called
confusion. Their relationship with Emilia-for which they sometimes used the language
of a "business partnership" (sociedad comercial), sometimes an "alliance" (alianza), and
sometimes a "pact" (pacto)-was one in which Emilia had always been someone whom
they almost always could approach for support. Surely, Emilia benefited from their
partnership as much as the socias did, but she nevertheless provided them with technical
support and business advice; she wanted them to succeed. "Would you use the word
solidarity, then?" I asked. Immediately, the tone of the conversation darkened, as Zulema
volunteered and the others agreed, that no, in fact Emilia had not always been on the
socias' side. One event several years ago came to mind.
One month in 2006, short on cash and at a routine low point with regard to orders,
a group of socias decided to gather up the scrap fabric from a recent order from Clean
Clothes. From this fabric, the socias produced a good number of hair scrunchies, which
they then decided to go sell in the Ciudad Sandino city market and in Mercado Oriental,
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the largest open-air market in Managua. This, they thought, was a creative way to use
resources that were only going to clutter the factory floor and would eventually be thrown
away. By word of CSD, Emilia eventually found out about this use of her fabric, and
when she made her next visit to Nicaragua a few months later she claimed that the
women were "stealing" her fabric and, worse, because they were dividing the profits
among themselves as opposed to reinvesting it in the cooperative, they were essentially
stealing from the cooperative as well. Emilia docked the pay from their next order from
Clean Clothes, even after socias pled with her that they had only done it to get by that
month. This was the kind of "callousness" (insensibilidad) that Emilia was capable of,
Zulema submitted.
I honestly could not say that I was shocked by what Zulema had just told me,
mostly because Emilia had actually told me the same story-albeit slightly differently.
As Emilia recounted the events:
When I explained what I was going to do, several of the women pulled me aside and
said, 'we're poor Nicaraguans and our children need shoes to go to school.' And then
I looked them each in the face and said, wait a minute, whose fabric did you use?
And they got real quiet. I said, so not only did you do this, but you stole my fabric
from me. They were totally shocked, because they said it was just little scraps. And I
was like, I don't really give a shit. That fabric is ten dollars a pound, and its my
fabric, and you stole it from me.. J essentially gave them two options. On the one
hand, I would either give you each around 300 dollars, more or less the amount of
money I was going to lose, and we'd call it a day. I'd go home, and I'd never buy
anything else from you ever again because I'm done. Is that what you want?
Because we could do that, that's called charity. I mean, you guys said you want to by
my business partner, stop stealing from me. They were really pissed off, but I think in
the end they learned a really good lesson.
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The lesson, it would seem, was about proper business practices. While the socias
interpreted the scraps as belonging to no one, from Emilia's point of view the scraps were
not scraps at all, but fabric that she had purchased.
Terming the conflict a matter of "theft," however, obscures the fact that the
conflict emerged not over illicit intentions, but rather a legitimate miscommunication and
a legitimate difference of perspective. On the one hand, seeing the scraps as waste,
socias saw what they were doing as a very logical and resourceful strategy for getting by
at the end of a tough month, economically speaking. They were not seeking charity, but
simply making use of resources that were around them. Emilia, on the other hand,
perceived their actions as, at the very least, a solicitation for charity because they were
essentially asking the fabrics to be "gifted" to them. "Ifthey wanted to do something
with that fabric," remarked Emilia, "I would have supported it, but they would have first
had to at least make the gesture of buying it at a nominal price." In this view, the socias
can know the terms of the relationship between Clean Clothes and The Fair Trade Zone
by looking to their work contract, which explains that Clean Clothes retains rights to all
of the raw materials, and the client is paid for the "value-added" services that they render.
The current situation with Clean Clothes, the socias agreed as we each finished up
our lunch, was very similar to what had gone on in the past. Emilia's actions showed her
callousness to their needs and responsibilities as "poor women" and "mothers," and
especially of their real investment, their sweat, in the cooperative. While Emilia might
think of this line of action as an extension of a contract, it was nothing of the sort from
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the cooperative's point of view. In fact, as I gathered from this conversation, socias
wondered ifit was even legal for Emilia to violate in such a way the autonomy of the
cooperative, the socias' rights to determine their own future.
RE-VISIONING FAIR TRADE PARTNERSHIPS
El que parte y comparte, se !leva la mejor parte.
He who divides it and shares it carries away the better part.
-Rosa
The search for some stable meaning of partnership in fair trade, I think, will end
in disappointment, not because the image that commands such a profound and hopeful
emotional charge loses some of its luster upon closer investigation, but rather because
there is actually a kind of emptiness behind it. Like Gertrude Stein (1938) said about
Oakland, 'there is no there there.' There is no 'is' to social relations: whatever form they
take, they are not tangible things, but can only, really, be grasped as ongoing social and
historical processes, forever in flux. The fact that partnership appears to be the governing
feature of fair trade relationships, so constant and so clearly delineated within perceptual
experience, is undoubtedly an important question that bears upon the image of fair trade
as a hopeful, economic alternative in the public imaginary. But it would be a grave error
to lose sight of the fact that, however scholars and practitioners use the term partnership
in fair trade, it is not a real, empirical entity itself, but rather a conceptual means for
corning to terms with the revisions to conventional business practices that fair trade
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claims to make.2o If the goal is to move beyond an uncomplicated, consumerist vision of
fair trade, on the other hand, it is necessary to be mindful of the fact that an equally
uncomplicated notion of partnership encourages that ignorance. Perhaps only in the
abstract space of theory do social relationships function as a kind of "connective tissue"
between social actors. In everyday life, though, "social relations" are instead experienced
and are thus better thought of in terms of a wide range of modes by which human beings
actually relate to one another, for which the term itself is very much a lousy bargain with
ethnographic reality. Although patterns certainly emerge in the observation of these
processes, they never really concretize into the definite sets of statuses, rules, and roles.
In many cases, in fact, it is not the predictability of those social relations but
rather their unpredictability that is socially significant. With the goal of re-visioning fair
trade relationships-a project that consists in large part in challenging the assumptions
that fair trade itself urges us to make-I seek to tie the observations of this chapter
together by showing that it is actually a "de-centered" approach to the understanding of
partnership, focusing on divergent meanings, asymmetrical power, and "friction," that
may reveal a wider spectrum of social interactions among fair trade actors. In so doing, it
also becomes possible to register a challenge to the imagination of fair trade as an
alternative economy, which is often sustained by a false distinction between gift and
commodity economies.
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PARIl~ERSHIPS AS A CONTACT ZONE
The ethnographic account ofThe Fair Trade Zone network, if nothing else,
confounds a straightforward discussion ofpartnership. A large part of this difficulty is
undoubtedly due to the fact that, among the various groups linked through this particular
network, there actually exists no single, shared understanding of "partnership" in the
sense of a common set of ideas about proper roles, responsibilities, and conditions for
exchange. This is perhaps even an understatement, given that their very interactions are
themselves shot through with myriad social, cultural, ideological, and linguistic
differences. Nowhere do these differences manifest more clearly than in the observation
that, beyond what might be accurately termed a facade of harmonious collaboration, fair
trade actors frequently fail to communicate effectively with one another, to act
appropriately in the eyes of others, to act in concert with one another and with share
goals, or even to hold onto, for themselves, a single, consistent understanding oftheir
actual or ideal relationships to others.
Emilia, for example, variously uses the terms "business partnership," "solidarity,"
and "support" in reference to her connection to the cooperative. These words not only
carry very distinct meanings, depending on the contexts in which she uses them, they also
index qualitatively different relationships. Sometimes she is compelled to emphasize the
importance of professionalism and dispassionate, business-mindedness in that
relationship, dwelling on contracts as a basic framework. Sometimes she articulates her
role as pedagogical and acts as a mentor of sorts in the socias' development as business
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owners, seeking to teach them various "lessons" about business ownership, organization,
profitability, and so forth. Yet, sometimes she also personalizes her relationship with
socias, visiting their homes, sharing lunch with them, and allowing herself to have an
emotional attachment to The Fair Trade Zone, very much apart from whatever profit-
driven motives she also might have. To say, then, that her idea of partnership is anyone
thing is to ignore the fact that her own ideas about business and her own moral ambitions
are themselves multi-faceted and even contradictory. It is also to disregard the important
point that Emilia, too, has her own uncertainties and internal conflicts about those
relationships and about what is an appropriate course of action when others fail to meet
her expectations.
Something similar can also be said about CSD staff members, who in many ways
have had an even more fraught relationship with the sodas. Far from single-minded or
strictly ideological about their relationship to the cooperative, CSD staff, too, have an
inveterate, personal interest in the project's success as well as in the success of the
women with whom they have forged friendships and have worked closely for so long.
Because of this, in fact, they often express a profound ambivalence about their own roles
as "sustainable developers" and recognize what is often a paradoxical relationship
between their own ideals, on the one hand, and what is practical, possible, or effective, on
the other. While CSD may often play the role of the NGG patron-i.e. as lenders,
financiers, and administrators of funds-this alone is an artless depiction of the full range
of their actions and intentions. They have also cultivated personal relationships with
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socias and seek to stand with them in solidarity in their struggle, companeros a
companeras (comrades to comrades). Despite that, even, CSD staff at the same time find
themselves weighing their democratic and collaborative approaches to these
relationships, which they value greatly, against their desire for the cooperative to succeed.
As Roger phrases the conundrum:
It is sometimes difficult to discern what level of involvement the NGO should
have in the cooperative and its decision-making process. Liberal purists believe
that grassroots organizations should be left alone to sink or swim... that all
decisions should be made at the grassroots. The reality is that in an economic
movement to empower the poor, like any social movement, the poor don't
necessarily start off with the skills or resources necessarily to make it a success.
For CSD, this is a very awkward situation that can sometimes result in them very
begrudgingly playing a paternalistic role or, worse, exercising leverage in order for them
to accomplish what they see as right or, if not that, effective.
Although often underreported in the study of development projects, it is no secret
in the case of The Fair Trade Zone that socias quite often maintain very different
impressions of their relationships with other members of the network, very different ideas
about the rights, expectations, obligations, and prohibitions that condition their exchange
with these organizations, and even very different ideas about the purpose of the
cooperative and of fair trade-in no small part abetted by undeniably divergent
experiences regarding the historical and present roles ofNGOs, charitable aid
organizations, foreign-owned businesses, and foreign trade in Nicaragua. Socias, in other
words, do not simply absorb and enact the ideologies of the Northerners, passively
playing out the roles ascribed to them through other people's projects, but rather bring to
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the table their own identities, subjectivities, strategies, and goals, asserting their own
influence within a constantly shifting frame. And while some of the frictions that
inevitably emerge manifest as minor, sometimes even comical, misunderstandings, others
flare up into major disagreements, heated arguments, and moral outrage.
How, then, should we conceptualize the relationship between these actors, if they
connect with one another only imperfectly and across so many scales and disjunctures?
Because there exists in this fair trade network no single, durable and identifiable set of
relations that connect actors, I argue that it is more productive to engage the notion of
partnership in terms of a "contact zone" (Pratt 1991, Lomnitz 2001). Defining contact
zones as "the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into
contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of
coercion, radical inequality, and intractably conflict" (1992:6), Pratt highlights the
inequality, imbalance, and asymmetrical power between actors (as opposed to their
presumed equality and commensurability) and invokes "the spatial and temporal co-
presence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and
whose trajectories now intersect" (1991 :6-7). In sharp contrast to the language of
subjugation or partnership, in which people appear connected to one another in well-
traveled patterns, the use of the word 'zone' indicates the importance of seeing the
encounter as productive ofnovelty-new spaces, new languages, new tribes. 21 It also
allows, in that space, for consideration of miscomprehension and incomprehension as
much as productive dialogue, asymmetrical power relations as much as solidarity, and
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resistance as much as collaboration. In this sense, the concept of a "contact zone" is
similar to Anna Tsing's concept of "friction," which points to those "zones of awkward
engagement" (2005:x) in which collaboration, newfound power and agency, and
intercultural hybridity are forged not only across social and cultural difference but across
local, regional, national, and global scales as well. In the interstices of these interactions,
moreover, Tsing points out that we should not naively foreclose on the possibility that
engagement may also be oppositional or (intentionally or unintentionally) have
detrimental effects: "hybridity is not all promise, and neither is agency. Destruction too
requires agency" (2005:26).
Friction is a powerful concept for demonstrating that conflicts and struggles do
not happen in the abstract space of "up there" or "out there," but rather in messy and
complex interaction. Rather than seeking to reveal universals as imperial fictions, Tsing's
concept of friction encourages us to study universals earnestly, detailing how and where
they move, their hybrid forms, and their specific knowledge. In so doing, we may locate
the global in friction, in the everyday disruptions, malfunctions, resistances, and conjured
illusions that are forged through global connections, all while grounding those universals
in their worldly encounters as they 'reattach' and gain traction in the local. Yet, one of
the limitations ofTsing's discussion of friction is that 'the local' is sometimes very ill-
defined. Surely, Tsing overturns the classic mantra of the local and global in which, as
Arturo Escobar frames it, "the global is associated with space, capital, history and agency
while the local, conversely, is linked to place, labor, and tradition-as well as with
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women, minorities, the poor, and, one might add, local cultures" (2001 :155-6, see also
Dirlik 1998, Gibson-Graham 2002, Harcourt 2002). But, as Doreen Massey writes, "it is
no response to globalization to press the case ofthe 10caL.the political meaning of the
local cannot be determined outside of specific contextual reference" (2005: 181).
In the case of The Fair Trade Zone, I argue that Tsing's notion that friction
ultimately manifests in 'the local' may be further honed by rooting those 'zones of
awkward engagement' in the ethnography of communication (Hymes 1962, 1972). Like
friction, the utility of the ethnography of communication is its flexibility for
understanding translocal social phenomena--e.g. roaming ideologies, images, ideas,
languages, capital-within very well-defined contextual frames. Within a frame, that is,
widely recognized communicative acts, genres of speech, norms, or situations, like
Tsing's universals, "engage" specific speech events.22
Although the ethnography of communication is typically described as the study of
the way in which communication within a speech community is patterned and organized
as systems of communicative events-that is, what one needs to know in order to be a
culturally competent member of that speech community-I argue that, for the purposes of
understanding the specific social consequences of friction, the approach may also be used
to frame "incompetencies" and, thus, misunderstandings and conflicts. It is also
significant when people violate cultural norms of behavior or communication because of
a lack of understanding of cultural meanings, norms, and rules. An ethnography of
miscommunication, to coin a phrase, can provide concrete insight into the legitimately
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different ways in which people "see," how they register, among other things, the
significance of communicative action, of geme, of situation, and other paralinguistic
aspects of communication through which interactions are tacitly or explicitly constructed
into relationships. Of course, as some have pointed out, the simple dualism between
competence and incompetence is far too stifling: communication may also be thought
about in terms of various degrees of "effectiveness" (Lustig and Spitzberg 1993).23
(Hymes also points this out, suggesting that the real matter at hand is not the intention of
the sender, but the effect it has, namely, its ability to 'move' the audience.)
Miscommunication, likewise, may also 'move' the audience, albeit by its unintended
effects, and it is there that we may identifY the concretely localized manifestations of
friction.
CONTRACTUAL EXCHANGE AS A (MIS)COMMUJ\TICATIVE EVENT
Take, for example, the contract. The contract has long inhabited center stage, a
kind of uncontested universal, in modem models for commodity exchange if not also in
models of modem, social relations and voluntaristic action-Hobbes's idea of the
transition between nature and society, Locke's treatise on the origin of governance,
Rousseau's idea of the social contract, and Hemy Sumner Maine's (1963 [1861]) vision
of modem society and the "deontic modality" (the move from status to contract)
immediately come to mind. Yet, as many philosophers of language and, more recently,
linguistic anthropologists have pointed out, the contract-indeed, one might say all forms
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of exchange as well as ideas of social and economic value-is fundamentally social and
thus rooted in language (e.g. Kockelman 2006, Volosinov 1986). Though it may appear
to be universal, structuring land ownership in South Africa, stock markets in Japan, and
tourism in Bolivia, it is important to see it as what it really is: a functional variant of
natural language with distinct linguistic norms (phraseology, vocabulary) and specific
morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic features and used in particular social roles
(pleading, claiming, etc.). Contractual language is, in other words, no more a building
block for social relations than legal language can be said to be a building block for all
language. Reversing Fredric Jameson's observation that genre is a kind of "social
contract" (1981: 106), it is useful to understand the contract as a specific (decidedly not
universal) "genre" of communication that is by definition socioculturally constructed and
has the communicative purpose of ritualizing exchange (Kockelman 2007).24 In the
ethnographic case of The Fair Trade Zone, it can therefore be understood to be vulnerable
to the kind of inter-group miscommunication, misunderstanding, and friction that is
possible in all genres, all communicative events, and, arguably, alllanguage.25
First, the concept of genre, which has had a long tradition in rhetorical and literary
analysis (Bakhtin 1986), generally refers to socially recognized types of communicative
action with socially recognized characteristics ofform (Bazerman 1988, Berkenkotter
and Huckin 1995, Brown and Duguid 1991, Miller 1984).26 In the ethnography of
communication, genres serve particular speech communities as institutionalized
templates for social interaction, providing a basic organizing structure that in turn
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influences the ongoing communicative action of members. Genres can therefore be
thought to shape, but not determine, how community members engage in everyday social
interaction. Individuals may draw on existing genre norms out of habit to facilitate a
particular communicative act, or they may deliberately draw on them to accomplish a
specific kind of communicative action (Yates et al 1999). The contract-both the literal
contract used (implicitly and explicitly) in many kinds of exchange and the metaphorical
contract of inter-subjective voluntaristic action-like the content of law, is, if nothing
else, a matter of language. Thus, as a genre, the contract can be understood not as a thing
but as a set of (socially defined) norms for the patterning of social relations. In Emilia's
statement that contracts are the "basic unit of business partnerships," for example, she is
not making an objective statement about what exchange relationships actually consist of
in the world (however true that might appear from her point of view) but rather, drawing
on the genre of contract, mobilizing a normative statement about how they should be
"professionalized" and "formalized," especially with reference to legal discourse and
power (Orliowski and Yates 1994).27
Second, by understanding the contract as a genre, encoding these specific social
norms, it then becomes possible to say that contractual exchanges are ritual events in the
sense that, semiotically speaking, (1) they perform social action, and (2) they are
therefore not fundamentally different from any form of exchange (e.g. gift exchange) that
undergirds circulation. Although the "ritual" may be lacking in the stereotypical sense-
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no incense, no drums, no incantations-the essence of its symbolic action is present. As
Kockelman writes:
[A]ny time I give someone $2 for a coke, I am engaging in a ritual event: such an
event is only appropriate if I had rights to the $2 and they had rights to the coke;
and it is only effective so far as I come to have rights to the coke, and they come
to have rights to the $2-where these rights, qua statuses, are evinced in our
subsequent roles: I drink the coke (thereby demonstrating my right to it); and they
invest the $2 (likewise demonstrating their right to it). [2007:161]
Of course, like variants to legal language and all ritual activities exist, variants to the
contract and contractual exchange exist as well. A person may just tilt their head toward
what they want and slide over their credit card. Or they may bring what they want to the
counter, cash in hand. Or, to use the example of the business partnership between Clean
Clothes and The Fair Trade Zone, one party may construct a multiple-page document,
petitioning the other to sign it, that details in very dense, legalistic language the
conditions of that exchange: what is being exchanged (say, T-shirts for money), how
many T-shirts, how much money, what standard of quality for those T-shirts, what
definition of quality, and what timeframe within which they need to be completed and
delivered.
To equate this kind of exchange with other, more obviously ritualized forms of
exchange may seem to understate the distinction between commodity exchange and other
forms of exchange, but, really, contractual exchange transforms individual "status" much
in the same way that rituals everywhere do. Building on the work of Maine (1963
[1861 D, Ralph Linton (1936) offers a definition of status that is useful here in
conceptualizing the rights and responsibilities attendant upon inhabiting a certain position
._--_ _ _- ---_ _---------
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in the social fabric. Parents, he says, have certain rights and responsibilities, as do
citizens, and as do prisoners.28 The differences between them are essentially of the same
kind: what those rights and responsibilities are. Though it may not immediately appear to
be the case, economic actors-buyers and sellers, creditors and debtors-have statuses,
too, insofar as their social location invokes specific rights and responsibilities attendant to
"owning" property.29 These property rights, as they are so termed, essentially define, by
enforceable authority, actions that individuals can and cannot take in relation to other
individuals regarding some 'thing' (i.e. if one person has a right, someone else has a
commensurate duty to observe that right). These property rights are so well known-and
the exchange of those property rights through contract is so hegemonic-that they
oftentimes appear to be natural, categorically different from other socially defined rights/
responsibilities derived from other positions in the social fabric. Within the field of
economics, even variations on the notion of individual property rights are highlight
contested. For example, as Nobel Prize~winnerOstrom (2007) notes, many economists
have tended to frame private property as superior to common property, which is seen
either as a remnant of the past (Maine 1963 [1861 D, or likely to diappear during the
twenty-first century (Atran 1993), or legally problematic (Ellickson et al 1995).30 Ostrom
demonstrates that, like the many variations on contractual exchange that exist, there exist
a wide and flexible diversity of property regimes, even within so-called "modern"
societies. Against the tragedy of the commons hypothesis, Ostrom's (1990) argument is
that it is indeed possible for communal property and communally contractual exchange
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(what she calls the "right to alienation") to exist absent of government intervention.31
This is precisely because common property rights, like private property rights, are
specific social constructions that refer back to social norms and formal and informal
institutions that manage common property resources, prevent tragedies of the commons,
and govern their exchange.
In any case, if we understand the transfer of rights and responsibilities regarding
property (and the accompanying transfer of statuses of "possession" more generally) to
occur via a ritualized process, then it is also true that norms, rules, and laws of social
action must also be observed. In order for the ritual to be a ritual, for the communicative
event to be a communicative event, and for the exchange to be an actual exchange, as lL.
Austin (2003:14) argues, the proper words must be said, the proper actions must be done,
participants must already hold the proper statuses ("appropriateness"), and must
subsequently hold the intended statuses ("effectiveness"). Even in exchange, that is to
say, the essence of any ritual process or the 'meaning' of any sign event more generally is
that sign events pull contexts behind them and push context before them, making
otherwise ambiguous activities understandable and making the social and cultural
activities effective. In many ways, this view of exchange overturns the common
assumption that exchange is a sort of universal substrate to society.32
How is this approach useful for understanding the conflicts that have arisen in
The Fair Trade Zone network? Contrary to the reified notion of exchange that assumes
that it is everywhere interpreted the same, or at least in capitalist societies, the language-
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oriented understanding suggests that exchange may be thought of as a contact zone
wherein sometimes disparate communicative forms engage one another, potentially
resulting in effective social action and potentially resulting in conflict. In this case, while
it is easy, as Emilia suggests, to chalk up socias' misidentification of the exchange as
something akin to "charity" (and, thus, for Emilia, socias' lack of "professionalism"), it is
actually more subtle a conflict than this leads one to believe. In fact, the ethnographic
evidence points to the fact that socias do not think of fair trade as charity at all and that
they do, in fact, conduct themselves with the self-identification as professionals, albeit in
their own style. The conflict is a legitimate disjuncture of ideas, but not one that can be
so quickly reduced to a conflict between a gift economy and a commodity economy. It is
more complicated than that. Instead, if the exchange between The Fair Trade Zone and
Clean Clothes is also social or symbolic action-as Dell Hymes puts it in his discussion
of the "speech event," the "activities, or aspects of activities, that are directly governed
by rules and norms for the use of speech" (1971 :56)-then it is necessary to understand
the specific, socially defined norms, and rules attendant to not just commodity exchange
or gift exchange, but "fair trade," "ethical business," and "comercio justo." Moreover, it
is also necessary to understand the conflicts and social dramas that emerge in the process
of miscommunication, of differing norms and rules. In a miscommunicative event, to
reverse Austin's appropriateness/effectiveness duo, if unexpected words are said,
unexpected actions are done, and participants hold unexpected statuses, it is not the event
that is "ineffective" in the sense that nothing happens Quite the contrary, the unexpected
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happens, or "friction" as Tsing defines it: "everyday malfunctions" and "unexpected
cataclysms" (2005 :6), as well as "unexpected opportunities" and "alliances" (2005: 12).
The contract is of course a widely recognized genre of communication in
exchange, but it is also surprising flexible. There is plenty of room in everyday life-not
to mention cross-socially, cross-culturally, or cross-linguistically-for variations on the
generic theme, and, thus, there is plenty of room as well for miscommunication (Frade
2002, Bhatia 1993, van Dijk 1984). Anthropologically speaking, this is already very
evident because, as Sharma (2006) points out, for example, inequalities in schooling and
literacy that fall along the lines of gender and class in many countries have often put poor
women in very disadvantaged positions when it comes to understanding and
manipulating legal structures. The highly abstract and technical language of legal
discourse, that is, can often be alienating and even repressive to those who lack access to
formal education. Socias' experiences with Clean Clothes confirm this insight in many
ways, primarily because "contract," as Emilia means it-narrowly conceived as a set of
conditions for de-personalized exchange (cf. Weber 1978:666)-is from socias'
perspectives very unfamiliar, to say the least.
In a sense, the friction between Clean Clothes and The Fair Trade Zone emerges
from the fact that, while the two groups share a very basic framework of contractual
exchange, at the same time they also have different normative expectations for that
exchange. Emilia, on the one hand, believes it appropriate to shift between mutually
exclusive roles in her relationship with the socias: she is a friend and she is a mentor, but
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when she takes on the role of a business partner, she stops being the others. As Emilia
herself puts it, "In a very basic way, it's a bad idea to mix business with personal life ... [if
you do] you set yourself up for being manipulated because someone says, 'oh, but you're
my friend, you can give me a break on this'." She later continued, "A businessperson
doesn't play to your sympathies or tell you a sob story about their life," says Emilia, "a
businessperson voluntarily enters into an agreement understanding the conditions and
consequences." This is, of course, not to say that business has to be survival of the fittest.
Emilia also believes it possible to factor ethical concerns into business relationships,
something she calls "ethical business." However, when it comes down to brass tacks,
Emilia also believes that ethics or fairness should not be considered in this case to be
personal at all. Rather, they should be factored into the conditions of a contract, in the
case ofThe Fair Trade Zone by contractually securing for them an above-market, 'fair'
price for their labor. It is for this reason, perhaps, that Emilia instead chooses to engage
socias stories on the de-personalized level of marketing, situating them in relation to
other stories of more or less the same kind in a "market of fairness." The market logic
extends to the definition of a 'fair' price, too. It is not socias' pay as a total profit on the
item, relative to Clean Clothes, that socias receive that makes the situation fair trade, it is
the pay that they receive relative to all other 'fair' trade in the market.
For socias, on the other hand, 'fair trade' (comercio justo) is not de-personalized
in the sense that all of their social and ethical expectations can be expressed in
contractual terms. Quite the opposite, in fact, the exchange is in many ways intensely
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personalized for these socias. While, at the end of the day, how much money they receive
in that exchange in the form of profits is indeed important-especially in terms of the
various "social goods" toward which that profit may be put, as I discussed in Chapter 3-
there are also social aspects of that relationship that matter greatly as well. First, as
socias point out, comercio justo is in part about trata ("manners"): the decency and
caring that partners in exchange show toward socias. Aside from profits, it matters to
socias if they are treated with respect as human beings, as women and mothers, and as
individuals who have put so much of their sweat into the cooperative. Second, comercio
justo is also about "balance" (equilibria). As the word implies, the equitability of the
exchange cannot be judged by only examining the results of it from one or the other
perspective. Rather, the "balance" of that exchange is decidedly relative insofar as it
connects the two parties. When the social relationship is equitable, profits, power, and
wealth involved in that exchange are also balanced. When the relationship is not
equitable, on the other hand, neither is the exchange balanced. In this case, it is actually
in recognition of the "imbalance" of that social relationship--not, in fact, merely the
profits that socias ultimately receive-that compels many socias on occasion to reject or
criticize the label fair trade, or even to characterize the movement as "unfair."
One dimension of the balance of exchange is the distribution of profits. As I said,
profits are of course important in their own right, but it is the distribution of profits, more
specifically, that reflects upon the relationship itself. Outraged by what she perceived to
be Clean Clothes' intervention in the cooperative, Jacinta, for example, points to the
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distribution of profits between the two as evidence of the relationship's systematic
unfairness:
We have put our sweat and blood into our cooperative, it has been our lives for the
last seven years ...And Emilia and la fundaci6n [CSD] have been profiting off of
our sweat and our story with every T-shirt they sell. For every T-shirt that goes
out this door we get less than three dollars. And you know what she sells them for
in the U.S.? Almost 20 dollars! Is that fair trade [comercio justo]? She has all
the power and we have none.
As Moberg (2005) points out, the relative distribution of profits-the prices paid to
producers, on the one hand, and the prices paid to consumers, on the other-is actually a
common criticism of fair trade. Emilia, on the one hand, disagrees. Not only does this
analysis fail to take into account of the transaction costs for distributors-marketing,
packaging, and payment to employees-nowhere does it say that fair trade profits must
be equitably distributed, only that producers get an above market price: "It's typically the
case that, whether it's coffee, chocolate, or whatever, the 'fairness' is not about how those
profits are split up, but rather how much more producers are getting for their products in
the marketplace than they otherwise would otherwise, if they were not fair trade."
Socias, on the other hand, say that this relative distribution is very much relevant. The
common point of reference is not 'the market,' but rather the relationship of exchange
itself. A 'fair' trading relationship, in other words, is essentially balanced.
A second dimension to balance is the relative distribution of wealth. While wealth
is often discussed as something that people have, irrespective of the wealth of others,
socias find their business partnership with Emilia colored by not only the distribution of
profits but also, to put it rather bluntly, the fact that Emilia lives luxuriously, while they
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do not. This is perhaps one of the most socially significant differences between the
socias, on the one hand, and CSD and The Fair Trade Zone, on the other.. As Appadurai
(1996) notes in his discussion of mediascapes, perceptions of wealth are often
engendered by, for example, the availability of television shows or cinema from other
parts of the world, which present people in distant place with images of impossibly
wealth lifestyles (and which are often applied categorically to people from Europe, the
U.S., and Canada, the common point of reference). In the case of The Fair Trade Zone
network, this perception is also generated by impressions gained through direct contact
with Northerners. The spatial proximity of the cooperative to CSD's offices and living
space, for example, has over time given socias an inside view into staff members'
lifestyles and different levels of consumption, generating envy or resentment at the
relative ease by which the Northerners meet the basic needs of provision and
entertainment. The same, in many ways, goes for Emilia. Although Emilia does not
spend nearly as much time in Nicaragua as CSD staff and socias have little idea of what
her lifestyle is like in the U.S., her ability to buy plane tickets, her mobility to travel
freely between the U.S. and Nicaragua, her treatment ofNicaragua as a vacation
destination (e.g. in expensive resorts to which socias have never been able to travel), and
her desire, in light of all of that, to "make lots of money" with the socias are things that
all contrast sharply with socias' own, more modest experiences, standards ofliving, and
ambitions. As Rosa observes, "These are things we'll never have." Other socias agree,
the relative distribution of wealth is actually quite relevant to the transaction, though the
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contract oftentimes obscures that fact by glossing the relationship as a "partnership."
Importantly, I think, following this line of reasoning in regard to fair trade leads to a
profound conclusion: 'fair' trade (or, rather, 'just' trade, comercio justo) can only be so if
it results in a broad-based redistribution of wealth, not just the remittance of a slightly
larger profit than that which would otherwise be earned in the world market (cf. Sen
1983). Or as Rosa more eloquently put it, "There is no such thing as individual justice,
justice is about all of us."
Profits-even distribution of profits-are of course not everything in fair trade.
Equally important for socias in the balance of trade is the matter of power. 33 While socias
often feel empowered in their communities and their families because of the income they
are able to bring home, they often feel disempowered in their relationship with Clean
Clothes. The fact that they receive a smaller portion of the profits, in this sense, is a
reflection of the larger structures of power. Indeed, having few other clients as large as
Clean Clothes, socias are typically cornered into a position in which they have little
negotiating power to increase their share of profits. Instead, they accept whatever
contract Emilia offers them and can do little to modify that contract. There are, moreover
social consequences to this economic disempowerment, the most obvious being Emilia's
choice to make those contracts with The Fair Trade Zone contingent on social
transformation within the cooperative, particularly with respect to their choice to hire
waged workers instead of admit new socias. Like the macroeconomic structural
adjustment plans that have been implemented widely since the 1990s, Emilia's "micro-
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structural adjustment plan," as she calls it, uses the threat of deprivation (in this case, not
from loans per se, but from Clean Clothes contracts and thus capital) as a pivot. By
means of this pivot, she may in turn exercise disciplinary power upon the cooperative,
shape and normalize the terms of their relationship according to her vision of
"partnership," and practice a kind of "social engineering" according to her view of how
things should be. Neoliberal adjustments use technologies of power to discipline
government spending, to assert economic visions in which price controls and state
subsidies are inimical to the optimal functioning of the market, and to reconfigure on a
national scale the "proper" relationship between the state, the economy, and society.
Emilia's micro-structural adjustment plan, similarly, is based on the assumption that fair
trade is optimally efficient not only in the impersonal play of supply and demand but also
when businesses are themselves organized in "ethical" ways. In this case, for Emilia, this
means that they are organized according to the cooperative model. Confident in the
righteousness of her position, moreover, Emilia does not adapt the actions of Clean
Clothes to meet with socias' views but instead attempts to persuade socias of the fact that
her view is "correct" and "reasonable," thus placing the onus on them for "not
understanding." When that fails, coercion through deprivation typically succeeds. From
socias' perspectives, this "imbalance" of power is one ofthe most compelling arguments
against the 'fairness' of fair trade. As Rosa explained to me, Emilia's plan for the
cooperative-especially the fact that she used the threat of no more contracts for the
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cooperative-may not be the most obvious injustices in the world, but they are injustices
the same:
In life, you know, there is luck and then there is justice....Good or bad, lots of
things happen in life that nobody has control over except for God. You may be
born to a wealth family or you may be born to a poor family, and it is luck which
one it is. You know, Emilia and us socias, we are human beings, there is nothing
different about us because we are all made essentially the same as human beings.
That is really the definition of luck, because whatever you have control over in
life, you do not have control over where you were born into this world, there's
nothing you can do about it. Then, there's justice. Justice is not a matter of who
we are, it is about what we do as human beings and how we choose to live our
lives out. When a person who was born into a rich family walks down the street
and sees people suffering and ignores them, that is an active choice, that is not
luck. That's justice, that's injustice. Watching a person suffer and choosing not to
do anything about it, even though you have the power to, that is as bad as any sin.
That is the definition of injustice.
Power, then, dwells in the contact zone of fair trade partnerships, wherein an actor may,
in pushing through agendas, strategies, and putatively "collective" goals, call to their aid
both economic and political leverage. Some leverage, on the one hand, takes the form of
persuading another that one's own point of view is reasonable and consists in creating
consensus by appealing to expertise. Other leverage, on the other hand, is coercion: by
gun or contract, securing "compliance by threat of deprivation" (Lukes 2004:21).
Unlike Emilia's ideal of de-personalized contractual exchanges and "professional"
comportment within the frame of exchange, the "who" of exchange matters for socias.
Who gets the profits matters. Who has the wealth matters. And who has the power
matters. Balanced or not, socias do not strip exchange of those constituting social
dimensions, revealing some sort of essential basis for exchange beneath, but rather
incorporate the totality of those norms, rules, rights, and responsibilities-from their
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status, in other words, as poor women and mothers to Emilia's status as a wealthy female
from the U.S.-into an idea of what the relationship, indeed the 'partnership,' should be.
In this sense, much like labor as I discussed in Chapter 3, economic exchange cannot be
separated, analytically or otherwise, from the social processes in which they are ultimate
embedded. As Jacinta said of "balanced" exchange in our field trip to the Ciudad
Sandino market:
If I am in the [Ciudad Sandino] market and I have 10 cordobas and I want to buy
a coke, I will buy from Marta, for example, because I know that her child is sick
and that she needs the extra money. Maybe Marta will help me out the next time I
need it, or maybe not. But the point is that it is the right thing to do. As mothers
we know that we have to stick together and support each other, like we have done
in the cooperative ...that's what makes us different from big companies,
corporations, you know, we want profit, but not at any cost. Above all, we want
dignified work, and we don't want to force people to be undignified, either.
As poor and working-class women and mothers whose sweat has gone into the
cooperative, they are not abstract people, and as a wealthy Northerner, but also a
businesswoman, neither is Emilia. Appropriate, or "fair," exchange, likewise, does not
forget or distort that fact, but rather is mindful of relative wealth, power, and solidarity in
their struggle-not just after work hours-and thus factors them into the exchange itself.
To say that the difference between socias' about exchange and Emilia's ideas
about exchange essentially breaks down into a distinction between personalized and de-
personalized, however, is not what I mean to argue. The distinction between the gift and
commodity economies, that is, is a false distinction that relies on arbitrary assessments of,
among other things, tradition and modernity, leading to broad generalizations like the
idea that gift economies are for social relations (i.e. people's motivations are purely
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social, Mauss 1990 [1925]) and commodity or market economies, by sharp contrast, are
for commodities. While this dualism has been especially compelling for moral
economists who have sought to understand encroaching market logic upon traditional
economies that submerge production and exchange in social, political or religious
institutions-and thus to explain the insurgency, rebellion, and "moral outrage" ensues
(Gosner 1992, Scott 1976, Thompson 1981)-fair trade provides a useful location for
observing how the embedded-disembedded conceptual framework obscures the social
composition of even so-called "modern" economies by insisting on too radical a
detachment from the sustaining social, institutional, and historical nexus. Moreover, as
the revised concept of friction that I have developed here shows, things like moral
outrage need not be reserved for that narrow space between the traditional and the
modern when the potential for friction--eollaboration, misunderstanding, asymmetrical
power, coercion or even outrage-exists in the "contact zones" of everyday interaction.
GIFT AND COMMODITY ECONOMIES: A FALSE DISTINCTION
The anthropological hypothesis that reciprocity is the basis of sociality was first
developed by Marcel Mauss (1990 [1925]). Against the Hobbesian portrait of humans as
struggling for survival, Mauss argued that the drive for sociality precedes selfuood and
that only in modern, capitalist (class-based) societies does the impersonal logic of
individual interest triumph (Honneth 1996, Ricoeur 2005).3435 Generally speaking,
Mauss sees the exchange of material goods as fundamental in the process of shaping of
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human personhood (i.e. social life). A gift (i.e. recognition) is given to another, is
received by the other, and the other returns the gesture, thus recognizing the giver. In a
gift economy, that is, exchanges do not have the impersonal qualities of the capitalist
marketplace. What really matters, he says, is instead the relations between people.
Exchange is therefore about creating relationships, working out rivalries, or fulfilling
obligations, and only incidentally about distributing goods. As a result, everything
becomes personally charged, even property, which is to be contrasted with the market
economy in which transactions are simply a way of getting one's hands on useful things
and in which the personal qualities of the buyer and seller should ideally be irrelevant.36
The distinction between gifts and commodities, to put it succinctly, is essentially a
matter of personal relationships (Gregory 1982: 10-28). In gift economies, people come
together to exchange inalienable goods in order to make or reaffirm relations (exchange
for social relations). In commodity economies, however, people come together without
needing to form personal relationships, without attachment to the products of their labor,
and, strictly speaking, with the goal of exchanging and acquiring things (Bell 1991 ).37
Gift exchange creates relations between subjects who are exchanging aspects of
themselves, while the commodity economy only creates relationships between the objects
exchanged. In the 1950s and 1960s, the gift-commodity dichotomy provided
anthropologists with a useful analytical tool, particularly in the theorization of economic
differences between modes of exchange in 'traditional' and 'modern' societies, an
approach that Polanyi (1957) and Sahlins (1972) called substantivism. Polanyi (1957)
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contributed to the discussion of the gift the concept of "embedded" economies, which
contrasts with commodity-oriented economies that may instead be considered
"autonomous." Embedded (typically "ancient" or "primitive") economies submerge
production and exchange value in social, political, or religious institutions, and at the
most basic level Polanyi's claim that pre-market economies are embedded means that the
human interchange with the material world is, likewise, submerged in social relations
(Polanyi 1957:46). Unfolded further, this also means that the provisioning of humans is
located in, or integrated through, these essentially non-economic institutions. 38 Though
specific forms of economic integration vary by quality and degree from society to society,
what they have in common is the fact that each of their modalities and ends are
thoroughly molded by non-economic forces. In fact, the securing of livelihood has no
separateness, no boundary line separating it from the enveloping society's institutions and
values (Polanyi 1977:55).39
The disembedded, or autonomous, economy, by contrast, is visible. Thus, with
modernity was born the concepts of "the economy" and "the economic sciences" (Polanyi
1977:80). The autonomous economy is not enveloped by the non-economic context, but
rather is located "outside" of the cultural context and governed by natural laws of its own.
Having broken free from that context, Polanyi writes, it becomes 'purely economic.' The
embedded economy, in other words, is turned inside out so that it is instead the
autonomous economy that envelops society, pushing inward on it and threatening to
become the dominant logic. This is a society in which the economy is self-regulating and
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the contract, the primary behavioral form of rationalizing economic individuals, becomes
the cement of an otherwise atomized world. Sahlins, likewise, argued that reciprocity is a
continuum and that it ranged from "pure gifts" (where social proximity is intense) to
negative reciprocity (where social actors are not close to one another) (Sahlins 1972).
Reciprocity, in Sahlins' view, and thus so-called primitive societies, could also be
considered "economically rational," a premise that flew in the face ofneo-classical
concepts of the utility of exchange. 40
This is more or less where Marilyn Strathern picked up the distinction between
the gift and the commodity in The Gender ofthe Gift (1972). Strathern argues that the
pair of terms gift and commodity provide "an axis for considering a range of contrasts
between Melanesian societies and the societies of the Western world ... [In in any
commodity economy things and persons assume the social form of things, then in a gift
economy they assume the social form of persons" (1990: 178). Insofar as Melanesia is
positioned as a metonym for all non-Western societies, it would seem that whole cultures
and whole societies may be characterized by this heuristic dichotomy. The West is a
commodity society, and the rest is a gift society. One pursues exchange for the
enhancement of the self and its enterprises without regard for relationships. In the other,
the creation and affirmation of relationships is the key to interaction, and exchange is
carried out in order to foster mutual recognition.
Of course, once reality crowds in, several things become apparent. First, there
are, in fact, profit-seeking commodity exchanges in gift societies, and there are
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relationship-seeking gift exchanges in commodity societies. Second, the characterization
of non-Western societies as one type lapses into a reading that is colored by stereotype
and romantic nostalgia (Godelier 1986:181). Moral economies and embedded
economies, that is, have provided a mirror in which scholars have inadvertently reflected
on their own societies, consequently putting the goal of understanding historical and
institutional context to the side. Third, as Booth (1994) notes, such a sharp distinction
between submerged, premodern economies and modern, autonomous ones blinds us to a
crucial aspect of the market economy: namely, that it, too, is a kind of moral economy.
Contrary to Polanyi-type claims, Booth argues that market economies are never so
autonomous from society that the behavior of actors can be understood as narrowly
rational, and behavior in pre-market societies, likewise is never so embedded that it is
"theoretically indistinct" or "invisible."
More recently, using the terms recognition and redistribution, Nancy Fraser
(1997, Fraser and Honneth 2003) has taken up this basic question once again in her study
of Western social movements. Fraser argues that in the late twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, political struggle in Western democracies ceased to center on economic issues
of distribution organized along class lines and came instead to focus on issues of
recognition in terms of shared cultural identity.41 For her, "the relative decline in claims
for egalitarian redistribution" (Fraser 2000: 107) is problematic because it tends to forget
the central importance of redistribution of wealth in economic domain. As a solution,
Fraser suggests the "perspectival dualist" approach," in which all situations can instead
225
be understood in terms of economic injuries as well as cultural insults (Fraser and
Honneth 2003:217-18). These injustices, Fraser suggests, must be understood in their
own terms, without losing sight of the specificity of the economic domain. To put it
otherwise, in Fraser's opinion, the economy is about distribution, recognition happens
elsewhere.
Responding to Fraser's argument, Honneth (1996) gives an alternative
perspective. Recognition, he says, is not separable from distribution in the same way that
gift exchange has been imagined to be separable from commodity exchange.
Recognition, in fact, affects people in all spheres of action and underlies all issues of
economic distribution in ways that Fraser's dualist model elides. Perhaps the most
obvious evidence is the belief that one's wages, to the person doing the work especially,
often reflect social recognition of one's work. To be under-compensated or unemployed
because your skills are not valued is to fail gain recognition in the economic sphere. In
fact, in struggling for recognition, people oftentimes struggle for better wages. And in
struggling for better wages, people oftentimes rally for better recognition.
While Fraser's argument that the economy is not a sphere ofrecognition is in
many ways a fine rendering of the Western ideology of de-personalized exchange, the
strength of Honneth's (1996) view is that, in rethinking the separateness of recognition
and redistribution one can also rethink the relationship between the gift and commodity
economies. Joel Robbins (2006) points out that one of the long-standing effects of the
debate over gift and commodity societies is that anthropologists have tended to focus
226
primarily on the structures of reciprocity and the way in which they form interlinked
systems of exchange in society. What continues to be missing, he said, is an
understanding of exchange "phenomenologically...as a form of mutuality" (2006:22).
What does reciprocity mean for actors, rather than in terms of the system in which they
allegedly live? The answer, Ricoeur (2005) suggests, is in many ways the missing link in
understanding why mutual recognition might actually be something worthwhile to human
beings in the first place.
Of course, the same question needs to be posed for market/commodity economies
as well. Why is it that self-interest is valorized and exchanges are de-personalized? Fair
trade provides a convenient, interstitial zone for thinking about not only how exchanges
at least appear to be de-personalized but also how, contrary to that rather ideological
portrait of economic activity, moral, ethical, and other subjective concerns are at the same
time projected onto, or factored into, the very same relationships of exchange. The false
distinctions between gift and commodity, embedded and autonomous, that is, lead one to
believe that exchange is either about creating social relationships or not. But, really,
social relationships should be implied in exchange. Exchange cannot and does not
happen without social relations, and the illusion that it can somehow be understood as
something other than a kind of human relationship is an ideological effect that is a
extremely detrimental to social analysis (not to mention social justice). Refocusing that
question, we can instead ask: Why are certain kinds of exchange relationships selected at
certain times and in certain contexts? What meanings, norms, rules, and laws sustain
227
those relations? And how do those relationships produce, sustain, or counteract social
equality or inequality?
As I hope to have shown in my analysis of exchange in The Fair Trade Zone using
the idea of the "communicative event," there exists no "pure" form of exchange that one
may arrive at once one strips away the seemingly superfluous, subjective relations
between people. Even de-personalized, contractual exchange, so often extolled as the
essence of capitalism for its universally objective and rational approach, cannot, really, be
anything but a form of subjectivity that is learned, enacted through specific generic
norms, rules, and laws in communicative events, and enforced by the similar
subjectivities of others. The truly universal subject is, by definition, contentless. And
self-interest, too, is an empty term, until you have defined what a self is and the kinds of
things that it is interested in.42
At the same time, as Honneth (1996) suggests, the ethnographic study of fair
trade, for example, allows us to fill up those empty terms with a complex and intertwined
relationship between profits, wealth, and "recognition." What is at stake in all economic
activity, gift or commodity, in other words, is the ability of people to simultaneously
provision and construct one another as specific kinds of human subjects through mutual
recognition.43 Ifwe take recognition to refer to the validation of selfuood that Hegel
meant, the "recognition of difference" (Fraser 2000: 107), and the whole range of possible
"statuses" (Linton 1936) that derive from all of the possible social locations in the social
fabric-not just identities (gender, race, citizenship) but also achieved statuses (doctor,
228
student, taxadermist), and intentional statuses (mental states), not to mention those having
specifically to do with capitalist economic exchange (buyer, seller, lender, borrower)-
then the idea of exchange is very clearly enriched by the dynamic interplay between
material practices, social relations, institutions, beliefs/values/desires, language, and of
course all of the various kinds of power and conflict that may emerge therein.
If macroeconomics is understood as the aggregated microeconomics of exchange,
by taking into account this expanded view we are left with a picture of "the capitalist
economy," as Gibson-Graham (1996) point out, that is far more diverse that it might at
first appear. Formal markets, wage labor, and capitalist enterprise form but one set of
cells in a complex field of economic relations which are, taken as a whole, inseparable
from an even larger field of, among other things, non-market transactions, unpaid labor,
and non-capitalist enterprise. In fair trade, too, such a de-centered view allows us to not
only bypass the alleged confrontation between non-capitalist exchange and capitalist
exchange, it can allow us to shift the terms by which we discuss the many different
critiques of the capitalist order. It may also allow us to shift the terms in which we
understand conflict arising in the interplay between economy and sociality-i.e. conflict,
rebellion, and moral outrage-which often appear to be the predictable, even mechanical,
consequence of resisting the market. By contrast, Tsing's metaphor of friction
communicates the idea that most conflict is not calamitous collision, but rather the result
of texture, microscopic imperfections coming into contact with microscopic
imperfections, and simply not lining up. The friction of fair trade, likewise, should not be
229
thought of in terms of a conflict between "fair" and ''trade'' but rather in the discord that
results from its various utterances.
NOTES
18 In the Mondragon system, when a new co-op is set up, the cooperative savings bank, the Caja Laboral
Popular, provides 75% of the required capital, repayable over ten years at below-market rates. The state, in
turn, provides 12.5% of the start-up funding as a low-interest loan, and the remaining 12.5% is provided by
worker-owners upon joining the co-op as their buy-in. In this way, financial resources of banks are not
intimately connected with the regional system (Davidmann 1996; Kaswan and Kaswan 1989).
19 It is interesting that Ines uses the verb of sos in this case. She does not say estamos pobres, which also
translates as "we are poor" but which also communicates a temporary or conditional state of affairs. In so
doing, she seems to suggest that no matter how much the socias earned, how much power they wielded as
owners of a business, or how many people worked for them, they would always be, by virtue of an
immutable alignment of class, poor.
20 This tendency is expressed in Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," which consists in
"neglecting the degree of the abstraction involved when an actual entity is considered merely so far as it
exemplifies certain categories of thought" (Whitehead et aI1978:7-8).
21 Pratt takes the term "contact" from linguistics, in which contact languages refer to languages that develop
among speakers of different native languages who need to communicate with each other, usually in the
context of trade. "Pidgins," as they are also called, become "creoles" when they have native speakers of
their own (1992:6).
22 Hymes's (1962, 1972) elements of SPEAKING are: Scene, the physical setting where talk occurs and the
cultural definition of the scene; Participants, the actors in the scene and their role relationships; Ends, the
purpose, outcomes or goals of the talk; Act Sequence, the relationship between what is said and how it is
said; Key, the tone, manner or spirit in which the talk occurs; Instrumentalities, the particular channel,
language, dialect, or speech variety in which the talk occurs; Norms, the normative aspect of the interaction
among the participants and the interpretation of the talk; and Genre, the cultural category for talk.
23 As Lustig and Spitzberg explain, "Appropriate interaction avoids the violation of extant valued rules or
expectancies for a given context. Effective interaction functions to produce relatively valued outcomes or
objectives" (1993: 154).
24 Jameson's argument is that geme is basically a social contract between the writer and the public who
must specify the proper use of a literary work (1981: 106)
25 "Miscommunication" in linguistic anthropology has largely be understood under the rubric of inter-
cultural and male-female misunderstanding (Maltz and Borker 1982). Chick, for example, likens the inter-
cultural encounters to ballroom dances between strangers who "misinterpret one another's signals, struggle
to develop a sequence or theme, or establish a rhythm, quarrel over rights to lead, and, metaphorically
speaking, trample one another's toes" (1990:227)
230
26 In various genres (e.g. memos, meetings, reports, training seminars, resumes, and announcements), form
refers to observable aspects of the communication, such as medium (e.g. pen and paper, telephone, or face
to face), structural features (e.g. text formatting devices such as lists), and linguistic features (e.g. such as
level offormality or specialized vocabulary)
27 Legally speaking, a contract can be "a promise or set ofpromises constituting an agreement between the
parties that gives a legal duty to the other and also the right to seek a remedy for the breach of those
duties" (Black 1990:332)
28 Status is a very flexible category, and can be broken down into many sub-groups: ascribed statuses are
those that one is born into (gender, race, citizenship); achieved statuses are those that are intentionally
habited (doctor, student, taxadermist); intentional statuses (mental states, being angry, believing it will
snow, wanting sushi, fearing cats, etc). But the cannot be inferred directly. It must be signaled and
observed through the enactment of roles, which involve normative ways of speaking and acting according
to the status. If these roles in turn seem particularly important to someone, they are instead called
"identities" (Kockelman 2005).
29 Indeed, as Marx implies, economic value itself may be understood as a reflection of this status as the
quantification and abstraction of "right" (Marx 1967: 136-7; see also Kockelman 2006)
30 Maine concluded that "it is more than likely that joint ownership, and not separate ownership, is the
really archaic institution, and that the forms of property that will afford us instruction will be those that are
associated with the rights offamilies and of groups of kindred" (1963 [1861]:252).
31 According to Schlager and Ostrom (1992: 11), the five collective property rights, not to be confused with
private property rights, may be defined as follows: access ("The right to enter a defmed physical area and
enjoy nonsubtractive benefits [e.g. hike, canoe, sit in the sun]"); withdrawl ("The right to obtain resource
units or products of a resource system [e.g. catch fish, divert water]"); management ("The right to regulate
internal use patterns and transform the resource by making improvements"); exclusion ("The right to
determine who will have access rights and withdrawal rights, and how those rights may be transferred");
alienation ("The right to sell or lease management and exclusion rights").
32 The new institutionalism, for example, suggests a "choice-within-constraints" view of economic activity
that similarly overturns the assumption that exchange processes are somehow separate from social activity.
Pioneered by Max Weber and later by Talcott Parsons, the new institutionalism framework understands an
institution to be "a web ofinterrelated norms-formal and informal-governing social
relationships" (Ingram and Nee 200 I: 19) and suggests that economic action is embedded in interpersonal
relations and subject to informal norms.
33 I mean power in the very conventional (and some would say, limited) sense that Bertrande Russell meant
it: "For individual human beings, power is the ability to get what one wants. The term power is also used,
however, to describe the ability to achieve common ends for families, groups, organizations of all kinds."
34 Ricoeur (2005:227) argues that it is most fruitful to read Mauss's ideas not in terms of the provisioning of
societies, but rather as a part ofa more general theory on the role of mutual recognition in human life
35 In support of this view, Mauss drew on Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit (1979), which theorized that a
person's coming into being as a self-conscious subject requires that he or she recognize another person and
be recognized in return, as well as his Philosophy ofRight (1991), which extends that argument by saying
that exchange of property is one of the most basic ways in which mutual recognition is accomplished
(Honneth 1996, 200 I, Robbins 2003).
231
36 With Malinowski (1923), Mauss analogizes the logic of gift exchange in traditional societies with the
Maori idea of hau, a tenn that expresses obligation to reciprocate. Things were personified by the hau,
enforcing a return of some kind. Levi-Strauss [1987], notably, provided a famous critique of Mauss's
appropriation of the hau as an explanation for why there is an obligation to return, rather than grounding
that obligation in what he sees as the universal, unconscious structures that construct society itself as a
system of exchange. Yet, as Josephides (1985) explained, "For Mauss the obligation to return gifts arose
out of the powerful relation between gift and donor, such that the recipient could not enjoy the fruit of the
gift without making a return to the donor" (1985:107). Reciprocity, however, also created inequality,
though of a different order of inequality than alienation, dominance and control in capitalist societies.
Gifts, in this sense are a form of self-deception and can be a source of pleasure and 'poison' (Mauss
1924:28-31). Thus, as Mauss argued, the root of the problem with gifts is that "society always pays itself in
the counterfeit coin of its dream" (1924:231).
37 Gregory (1982), an economist tum political economic anthropologist, takes the Maussian model to its
limits, stressing the basic antagonism between the gift and the commodity. He writes, "what distinguishes
commodity from gift exchange is the conceptualization of kinship as a method of consumption (ibid:2l2).
A gift implies the intention to develop or maintain a social relationship between parties to the exchange. In
contrast, commodities are exchanged strictly in relation to other commodities without any implied residual
obligations or relationships between the people involved.
38 Similarly, Evans-Pritchard argues that Nuer economic relations "always fonn part of direct social
relations of a general kind" (1940:90).
39 Sahlins writes, "to speak of' the economy' of a primitive society is an exercise in unreality. Structurally,
'the economy' does not exist. Rather than a distinct and specialized oragnization, the 'economy' is
something that generalized social groups and relations, notably kinship groups and relations,
do" (1972:76).
40 Typically, it has been this distinction between gift and commodity economies, embedded and market
economies, that scholar have understood to foment conflict, unrest, and rebellion, the study of which has
usually been taken up under the heading of moral economies. E.P. Thompson's study of English food riots,
James Scott's (1976) analysis of peasant rebellions in early twentieth century Bunna and Vietnam, and
Kevin Gosner's (1992) account ofthe Tzeltal Revolt in Central America, for example, each understand
conflict as flaring up in the contact zone between modem, de-personalized market logic and 'traditional'
moralities. Rejecting the application of the de-contextualized economic rationality favored by the
formalists, moral economies have taken "economies," qua societies, to be the proper unit of analysis.
41 This focus on "identity politics" can be linked to the emergence of new social movements as well. Fraser
offers an incisive critique of the decouple of struggles for cultural recognition from the old social
movement project of redistribution.
42 Rawls (1971) provides a portrait ofthe stripped down, rational subject.
43 Robbins (2003), for example, demonstrates that exchange is communication and sociality. In this case,
people do not believe they can communicate to another person what they are really thinking or feeling, and
so oftentimes the task of communication falls onto the reciprocal gifting of things.
232
CHAPTER V
BUILDING CONSCIOUSNESS:
THE ORGANIZATION WORKSHOP COMES TO NICARAGUA
A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame
many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst
architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in the
imagination before he erects it in reality.
- Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1 (1930: 178)
Roger Durham grabbed his coffee mug, pushed away from his computer, and, for
the second time on this particular October morning, began to navigate the mossy stepping
stones leading away from the three room concrete building that is the Center for
Sustainable Development's (CSD) main office in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua. A blue
sedan pulled through the gate and parked next to an old rust-hulk structure, at one point a
1987 Chevy pickup truck, and a stout, mustachioed man with a large, round face
emerged, clutching a tattered leather briefcase. "Shit," exhaled Roger, coming to a full
stop, "He's early." Starting toward the man and flashing through his white beard a
friendly and suddenly relaxed smile, he bellowed in natural Nicaraguan Spanish, without
a hint ofthe North Carolina accent of his native tongue, "Tobias, ~c6mo te va, amigo?
We're just arranging things in the office for you. Can I organize a cup of coffee for you
in the mean time?"
233
The Organizational Workshop (OW)---or, in Spanish, Laboratorio Organizacional
del Terreno (LOT), the forty day employment generation workshop that was borne in
1960s Brazil, that was heavily influenced by Paulo Freire's radical democratic pedagogy,
and that has been implemented on four continents since-was not Roger's idea, nor his
highest priority, nor even something that he knew very much about. Rather, for him and
his fellow CSD staff, it was one of those distracting side projects that they typically
attempted to avoid and certainly would have in this case, too, if it were not for a favor
collected upon by a colleague. Months before, CSD had reluctantly agreed to turn one of
their main sustainable development initiatives, Genesis, a burgeoning cotton-spinning
pre-cooperative (hilanderia) employing forty-five men and women, into a test case for
the first OW in Nicaragua. Tobias's arrival marked the workshop's imminent
inauguration.
Although the details of what, exactly, the workshop was going to entail had long
been lost amid a sea of emails and a carpet of sticky notes spread across the NGO's
collective desk space, the basic objective was clear enough: to provide training in
cooperativism by dismantling the "artisan consciousness" (conciencia artesanal) of the
cooperative members (socios/as) and equipping them instead with the more sophisticated
worker's "organizational consciousness" (conciencia organizacional), defined as the
communicative, technical, social, and organizational "mentality" necessary to run a
collectively-owned enterprise. On the ground, this basic schematic translates into short-
term, relatively large-scale workshops that emphasize an interactive, "learn by doing"
._- -------------------
234
pedagogy in the building of autonomous and self-sustaining enterprises. The OW's
method of organizational conscientization (i.e. capacitacion or capacitation), proponents
claim, is an allegedly "proven" (Carmen 2000:47) solution for overcoming many of the
obstacles to a cooperative organization of work, including workers' deeply-ingrained
skepticism toward it.44
To say that CSD staff were unenthusiastic about the project is perhaps an
understatement. While the small NGO of only eight permanent members usually
welcomed experimentation with new methods, their collective experiences in organizing
and supporting more than a dozen cooperatives in Nicaragua over the previous 15 years
stirred in them a measure of skepticism toward any approach that promised a magic bullet
as straightforward as "instilling consciousness." Organizing a cooperative is a very
messy task that involves dealing in practical terms with all of the issues that can arise
within a heterogeneous group of people, as well as those that sneak up unexpectedly from
the outside, as they coordinate their efforts to create a competitive, unified, and
democratic enterprise. Perhaps it was for this reason that Roger was particularly hesitant
to put very much stock in this palabreria (hot air), in his words, of consciousness,
conscientization, and capacitation, the terms for the OW's idea of organizational
consciousness-raising. As a sustainable development specialist, it was not that he denied
the importance of an equitable and democratic workplace, only that it was within anyone
person's power to engineer such a thing. His limited time, in his assessment, would be
much better spent on the task of helping to furnish the cooperative with its own
.- . -_. --------
235
productive machinery (i.e. factory walls, a cotton gin), without which the enterprise
would only exist as a shared idea. Thus, it hardly came as a surprise to me when,
pointing to my higher tolerance for "academic" pursuits, Roger soon tracked me down to
do some delegating.
This chapter is based on my experiences working as the gerente tecnico (technical
director) of the Genesis OW in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua during the forty day
workshop in October and November, 2007. In this capacity, I was also solicited to
conduct a formal assessment of the workshop, a task which I chose to approach with the
ethnographic tools of participant-observation and focused individual and group
interviews. One of the consequences of my impromptu involvement was that I could not
go about the project with the kind of research design that many cultural anthropologists
are accustomed to having in place well in advance. My research questions, in fact,
emerged gradually out of the themes of numerous debates and conversations that I
witnessed and participated in, as opposed to the other way around: Is it necessary or even
possible to "instill" social consciousness, as the OW presupposes? What is
consciousness, really, that it could feasibly be imparted, gained through participation in a
social movement, or experienced as part of a class?
My goal in this chapter is not simply to evaluate the workshop, which is a task
that, however needed, lies very much outside of the scope of this dissertation. Instead, I
seek to shift the focus toward the area of interaction and tension between the OW's
approach to organization and conscientization, on the one hand, and the existing
236
meanings and practices among Genesis socias, on the other. The Genesis ow can in this
respect be seen not as a top-down transmission of "organizational consciousness," but
rather, in the conversations and conflicts that it provokes, as a productive tension that has
incited socias to articulate and reassert their own practices of organization of
consciousness. Thus, I challenge the historical understanding of consciousness-raising as
a project of a few, select elites (i.e. "organic intellectuals") and instead locate it in already
existing "social processes" (Harvey 1996:78-9). In the case of the Genesis cooperative,
ongoing and sometimes heated discussions about organization give insight into this
process by touching on the idea of equitable working relationships, how they can be
achieved, as well as the political, social, and material conditions for doing so.
First and foremost, in the case of the Genesis cooperative, it is important to note
that discussions of "social consciousness" (i.e. the objective social phenomenon of a
shared mentality or politicized awareness) are implicitly bound up with normative
discussions of "social conscience," the proper, right, just, fair, or equitable organization
of the social. Lexically speaking, this is because while English speakers may consider
consciousness and conscience to separate concepts, in Spanish they are oftentimes the
same (i.e. conciencia). Thus, the idea of conciencia-at least in the case of Genesis
cooperative, because the concept has had a great deal of currency in Latin America (e.g.
AnzaldUa 2003, Zea 1952, Burdick 1998)-may be understood not only in terms ofa
social process involving the manifestation of a shared mentality or politicized awareness
but also in terms of a shared mentality or awareness of what things (relationships, society,
237
political, economic, and social life) should be like. In the context of this dissertation,
conciencia is therefore a historically mediated term that reflects squarely back on an
image of how social justice is achieved in the workplace.
Of course, to do so it is first necessary to move beyond the powerful, theoretical
constructions of consciousness that have had an enduring effect in political thought and
in the language and praxis of social transformation. Taking as a case study the
discussions of organization and consciousness that arose during the Genesis OW, this
means bracketing the OW's concepts of organizational and artisanal consciousness as
well as the idea that certain "mentalities" of work, the world over, for characteristic sets.
Instead, it is necessary to understand that consciousness is not itself a thing, but rather is
inextricable from particular political and social milieus wherein the word and concept
ultimately gain their purchase. In the case of the Genesis cooperative, socias' discussions
of conciencia do not refer to some universal, abstract category that may be "gained,"
ratcheted up in others, or "born" (e.g. asf me naci6 la conciencia, Menchu 1984). Rather
it is a daily practice of a mentality of organization and a civic ethic of mutual
responsibility, irrespective of class or personal difference, to which one "aligns
oneself' (alinearse). This view of conciencia becomes visible in the wake of the OW and
the imposition of its own concepts and language of consciousness, which a select group
within the cooperative chose to adopt. In the following months, amid accusations of graft
and dishonesty, a large faction of socias mobilized successfully to oust the leadership of
the cooperative. They pointed to the terminology of the OW, particularly "organizational
238
consciousness" in the OW's sense of the phrase, as the wedge by which those holding
official leadership positions rhetorically secured their status over and above the
collectivity.
My goal in this chapter is therefore not to make a case for or against the OW (and
the active role the project gives to consciousness) as "hot air." Rather, it is to contribute
to a better understanding of the social process of organizing among Genesis socias as
well as the meanings of conciencia and consciousness, words that have suffered from an
unfortunate lack of ethnographic documentation and critical inquiry. In so doing, I also
hope to contribute to an understanding of social justice or 'fairness' in the cooperative
workplace. For many scholars, consciousness has enjoyed great explanatory power, yet
has suffered from disproportionately little concrete, critical definition, making it more of
a brickbat than a precision, conceptual tool (Hobsbawm 1971). Opposed to the common,
strictly theoretical understanding of the concept that oftentimes bears little resemblance
to the diversity of social forms to which it lays claim, I argue that an ethnography of
consciousness may instead open up a field of inquiry in which consciousness can be
multivocal and refer to the many ways in which people develop alternative perspectives
on the world, galvanize or become part of particular struggles, narrate personal or social
transformations, use the vocabulary of social transformation for political effect, or
articulate visions about what "should be" in social life.
239
BACKGROUND: CONSCIOUSNESS AND ORGANIZATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS
For development and the broad, interdisciplinary field called "peasant studies,"
one of the most enduring questions over the past forty or fifty years has been whether the
economic development of the world's poor should run its course through individualized,
entrepreneurial activity or the more complex and demanding route of collective
enterprises. It is not a coincidence that the main positions on the matter recapitulate
major cleavages in the academic debate between methodological individualism and
formalism, on the one hand, and holistic institutionalism, substantivism, and Marxism, on
the other (Weber 2007). In micro-finance, it is the individual who, but for lack of credit
could be a successful entrepreneur, much like it is also the individual whose rationality is
the starting point for certain schools of social analysis (Udehn 2002). Likewise, in
sustainable and community development, it is the larger social and political institutions
and industries that form the target of development, much like, for others, it is some of the
very same structures that most directly represent the proper object of social analysis.
One of many ways in which this fundamental methodological, epistemological,
and ontological disagreement has been expressed is in terms of consciousness. In the
individualist perspective, human beings are surely social creatures, as the holist is wont to
point out. But, generally speaking, individualist consciousness carries much the same
meaning as in microeconomics: it is a statement about the human mind and an awareness
of one's needs and desires. Peasants are no different in that basic capacity and should
therefore be understood as a very rational, commonly entrepreneurial, population whose
240
oppression is due to the fact that they are entrapped in political and economic structures
that punish them every time they pose a challenge (e.g. Popkin 1979: 17-8). As Richard
Adams (1964:73) frames it, a person needs only to be shown that change is possible, that
a particular course of action is plausible, rewarding, and will not be met with sanctions, in
order to embrace it with alacrity.
The critique usually lodged against this position is that it oversimplifies power
(Dugger and Sherman 1994; Lukes 1968; 1973). While institutional holism,
substantivism, and Marxism possess distinct explanatory paradigms for politics, one area
of common ground, following from Durkheim's conscience collective and Marx's and
Hegel's critiques of the Cartesian cogito, has been the concept of social consciousness.
Surely, as Marx ([1867] 1930: 169-70) observes, self-consciousness distinguishes humans
from animals. Humans have the imaginative capacity to envision what they produce
before they produce it and, more to the point, to organize and produce their own means of
subsistence (Marx and Engels 1965:31). Yet, the real utility of the concept of
consciousness comes from the observation that human productive activities are almost
always, in one way or another, social (Marx 1904[1859]:11; [1847] 1910:120; [1894]
1966:957). Social consciousness is therefore not an amassing of individual self-
consciousness but rather an objective social phenomenon of its own, rooted in the
"definite relations" (Marx 1904[1859]:11) that exist independent of the wills of
individuals.
241
In contrast to the individualist view, many different modalities of power are
possible within the full range of social relations. Coercion is course indispensable to
domination, but, as Gramsci (1971) points out, there are also those that fall short of the
pure force of domination, that win consent to ruling ideas and the existing social order
through persuasion. In what amounts to a struggle over the social representation of
reality, that is, the bourgeoisie may ultimately call to its aid "hegemony" over ideology
and, indeed, the instruments of consciousness.
It has not been merely submission and something called "false consciousness"
that has drawn all the analytic attention, but also the residue of agency that exists in
things like class consciousness. Popularized as a term by Georg Lukacs ([1920] 1972) as
way to resolve some of the ambiguity in Marx's notion of social class, class
consciousness, Lukacs argues, is not the origin of class but rather something to be
achieved: a vision of the "concrete totality" ([ 1920] 1972:8) of the historical process, "the
ideas, sentiments, etc., which men in a given situation oflife would have, if they were
able to grasp in its entirety this situation" (Hobsbawm 1971: 11). Along the same lines,
arguments have been made in recent years for race consciousness (e.g. Appiah and
Gutmann 1998), gender consciousness (e.g. Gurin 1985), environmental consciousness
(e.g. Hussey and Thompson 2004), mestiza consciousness (Anzaldua 2003, Zea 1952)
and even disability consciousness (e.g. Barnartt 1996). Each designates a pattern of
relations in the world; each, by in large, is meant to be grasped as a kind of historical
project of "total understanding," coupled with action; and each is treated not as a capacity
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but rather as something to be "gained," "attained," "awoken" to, or, in the case of
politicians, labor leaders, and activists, ratcheted up in others.
The task of identifying and representing the actual, observable social phenomenon
to which consciousness refers is substantially more difficult. The reason for this is that
truth and understanding do not work like objects do. To start, knowledge is always
partial, incomplete, and fragmentary. Only in the active, social process of "articulation,"
in Laclau and Mouffe's (1985:105) sense ofthe word, may those fragments of knowledge
and experience of struggle be composed into something more coherent, systematic, or
global. Yet, in so doing, even as they may lead to the construction of an alternative
discourse or worldview, articulation also changes the identities of the knowledge
fragments. For this reason, actual, observable forms of shared consciousness do not
come about as if objects caught in tides of history, but through specific social practices,
making them as layered and multiplex in character as individual behavior.
With the goal of capturing this level of complexity, I argue that an ethnography of
consciousness could feasibly be built upon David Harvey's concept of the "social
process" (1996:78-9). The metaphor of a social phenomenon as an active process, as
opposed to form, Harvey explains, is anti-reductionistic insofar as it compels one to
consider not merely the maze of discursive practices or hard facts of material practices
but rather a range of interconnected "moments" that make up the entirety: social
imaginaries, discourses, social relations, institutions, power, as well as material practices.
Though broadly applicable, the social process works in the case of consciousness to resist
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the facile reification by means of which consciousness becomes an unquestioned
category for explanation, rather than interpretation.
Take, for example, the well-known story of Mondrag6n Cooperative Corporation
(MCC), the 30,000 member cooperative in the Basque region of Spain, for which the
term "participatory consciousness" has been a fixture for explaining both success and
failure (Dickstein 1991; Toth 1995:182). As the mythology goes, in 1940s Spain, Father
Arizmendiarrieta generated a philosophy of cooperation and self-determination that was
able to bridge both the ideological differences and depleted physical infrastructure bought
about by civil war, allowing the community of Mondrag6n to build perhaps the most
successful complex of employee-owned industrial, retail, service, and support
cooperatives in the world (Oakeshott 1975). Closer inspection, however, shows the
history of Mondrag6n to be far from a straightforward triumph of this participatory
consciousness. Instead, Mondrag6n can be seen as forged in the context of political,
economic, and social uncertainty and struggle, not the least of which has been
competition with other firms in the capitalist sector (e.g. Bradley and Gelb 1983, Hacker
1989); Basque nationalism and politics (e.g. Kasmir 1996:171-2); gender stratification
(e.g. Hacker and Elcorobairutia 1987); technological change (e.g. Kasmir 1999); the
tension between the business success and social values of the cooperative (e.g. Cheney
1999, Dow 2003:64, Whyte and Whyte 1991); and feelings of solidarity as well as
competition between workers (Kasmir 1999: 163-5). Surely, mention of participatory
consciousness cannot appear apart from this constellation of exogenous forces, frictions
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and alignments between multiple stakeholders and debt-holders, and internal structures,
strategies, and struggles of membership and management.
One could also add to that list, as lK. Gibson-Graham do, the fact that
Mondragon is what it is today "not only in the light of political and economic
circumstances, but in the face of obstacles posed by economic and political thought about
the viability and sustainability of cooperatives" (2006: 106). Cooperatives, that is to say,
have played a powerful role in the economic imaginary of left politics, serving a
symbolic alternative to the oppressive and exploitative norm of capitalism and even, in
their purest forms, "prefigurative forms of socialist society" (Clarke 1984:117; Gibson-
Graham 2003; Montoya 2007). The problem, as the argument goes, is that cooperatives
have really yet to be successfully implemented as truly participatory organizations, on
any significant scale, or without the economic or political support of the state.
Vulnerable to internal conflicts and inefficiencies, most cooperatives have proven unable
to compete on their own in the external capitalist society (Booth 1987; Cook 1995; Fulton
2001).
THEORY AND METHOD IN THE ORGANIZATION WORKSHOP
It has been as a direct response to this line of thought about cooperatives and as a
reassertion of the viability of large-scale, collectively owned enterprises that the OW's
method of capacitation came about. The roots of the proj ect actually harken back to
Paulo Freire, former prison cellmate during the 1964 Brazilian coup and close friend of
245
the OW's originator, Clodomir Santos de Morais.45 Similar to Freire, whose method
recognized a connection between the socio-historical conditioning of knowledge and
social class, identifying a problematic pedagogy as an oppressive instrument of
consciousness, de Morais argues that one of the central issues in development has been
the practice of depriving the target population of control over the instruments of
organization. Development projects, that is to say, are inscribed in concrete relations of
power, such that these instruments are instead given over to technicians and other
specialists, and, without sustained intervention, these projects commonly fail for the
population's lack of real investment or organizational know-how. The OW suggests that,
when people instead maintain control over their own instruments of organization, they
may critically engage and transform the organizational conditions and limitations of their
lives, undergo a fundamental change in thinking, and experience a renewed sense of
ownership and control over their own futures. This requires, however, a radical re-
conceptualization of the role of the development technician vis-a.-vis the target
population.
While the ideas of capacity building and poverty alleviation, for example, have
given us a clear picture of the "what" of development, for de Morais and the OW, the
question is really "how?" What are the appropriate and effective methodologies by
means of which economic development can and should be accomplished (Carmen
2000:48)? Along the lines of Freire's critique of the "banking concept of education"-
the problematic dynamic in which knowledge is imagined to be transported from one
246
individual to another through a process of extension (Freire 1970:53)-the term
capacitation suggests that real development cannot merely be transfer of skills (i.e.
'learning'), capital (i.e. redistribution), or power (i.e. empowerment) from one party to
another, whether by dint of social assistance or poverty alleviation. These strategies form
a conceptual whole of interventionalist, extensionalist, development-inducing models that
Raff Carmen (1996) refers to as "projectile projects." By contrast, capacitation is the
means by which people may realize their own already, heretofore untapped,
organizational potential and take initiatives toward the solution of their own problems.
Real power, like real development, is about genuine ownership, autonomy, and control,
not only over the means of production but also the instruments of consciousness. How,
one might then ask, does the OW claim to "instill" organizational consciousness via
capacitation? According to OW practitioners, the workshop is only meant to create the
"ideal conditions" (Sobrado 2000:22), which is another way of saying that participants
must gain their own consciousness.
This all makes more sense when one first considers de Morais' view of
consciousness. Far from a historical reading-such as E. P. Thompson's (1966), which
demonstrates the very great degree of contingency attached to the historical construction
of both class and class consciousness-de Morais posits a nearly direct line of causation
between one's class position and one's consciousness. For him, however, both class and
consciousness are less a matter of one's position within a system of property relations
than the specific "mental organizational structures" that are gained during, and brought to
247
bear upon, one's daily work activities. Consciousness, in other words, is socio-
historically conditioned, but only to the extent that people develop certain "habits"
according to their characteristic sets of work activities: Artisans are accustomed to being
self-sufficient and involved in production from beginning to end; workers are accustomed
to living by some form of work that involves a more or less complicated division of
labor; and the lumpen neither work nor have the desire to work. Theoretically speaking,
this typology is informed by the idea of "objective activity" (Deyatel 'nost) first
developed by the Russian social psychology school ofVygotsky, Luria, and Leont'ev,
wherein consciousness is conceptually enclosed within a dynamic envelope of subject-
object interactions with "material reality," i.e. the 'Object' (de Morais 1987; see also
Lave and Wenger 1991; Wertsch 1981).46
Of course, political economic structures such as capitalist industry and
technology, combined with the ideologically motivated drive for "total
marketization" (i.e. neoliberalism, Carmen and Sobrado 2000:5), have created an adverse
environment for artisanal work habits.47 Echoing Josue de Castro's (1952) image of "the
geography of hunger," de Morais sees the world as divided into the Included, "those who
don't eat" because they cannot afford to, and the Excluded, "those who don't sleep"
because they live in permanent fear of the teeming masses at their gates (Carmen and
Sobrado 2000:2). Practically speaking, however, de Morais says that the way forward is
not to attempt transformation of the system from the top down but rather to capacitate
"the Excluded," to enable them to maneuver and even manipulate that system to their
248
own benefit. That is, the the peasant's problem is the very nature of their artisan (i.e.
small producer) activities, the fact that the organization of their work is habitually
"simple" (i.e. non-complex), isolated (i.e. non-social), and self-sufficient (i.e. according
to their own schedules). Their "artisan consciousness," in other words, would preclude
them from running a factory even if they had at their disposal the necessary machinery of
production-a scenario that is lent credence, for de Morais, by the perception that the
history of cooperatives and other collective enterprises is littered by failures due precisely
to the inability oftheir owners to organize. Programs like the OW are therefore
necessary for intentionally modifying the consciousness of the peasant by enabling the
"cross-cultural transition from the artisanal (small producer) to the industrial (complex
'worker') mode" (Sobrado 2000:23).48 On the ground, capacitation translates into a
process of eliminating all tendencies toward the "vices" of individualism, spontaneity,
self-sufficiency, and other artisanal behavioral forms, inimical as they are to efficiency.
Yet, in place of a teacher, it is '''the Object' which teaches" and makes participants
organizationally "literate." In the words of Jacinta Branco Correia, "only in the total
surrender of the bicycle to the learner can the capacitation in bicycle-riding be fully
achieved" (2000:46).
On the one hand, the conscientization argument states that peasants have at their
disposal the tools of their own liberation insofar as they can be enabled to navigate the
multiple dimensions of power always at play around them. In this respect, Freire's work
(and by extension, de Morais') has been in direct conversation with Frantz Fanon's
249
(1967), and conscientization can be thought of as a transition between "being for others"
to "being for oneself' in the process of overcoming the limits of one's thinking, including
the the entrenched idea (and carefully constructed illusion in development discourse) that
stigmatizes beneficiary populations as "underdeveloped" and forces them to internalize
the idea that they are incapable of addressing the problem without outside aid. On the
other, de Morais' argument is also similar to Oscar Lewis' (1966) culture of poverty
thesis: left to their own devices, peasants are also somewhat anti-change, trapped within
their own stubborn "bad habits" of thought and work, thus overdetermining the constrains
upon their behavior, thought, and choice (see Goode and Eames [1966] 2002; Leacock
1971).
How these two claims ultimately play out is not really knowable in theoretical
terms alone. After all, it is not simply a bundle of free-floating ideas, but rather a project
that has for forty years been dedicated to praxis. With what can at best be termed uneven
success, it has been implemented in settings as diverse as Central and South America,
Africa, and Eastern Europe and with the active participation of international development
organizations such as the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the
International Labor Organization (1LO), and the U.N. Development Program (UNDP)
(e.g. Carmen and Sobrado 2000). And like a pendulum, the OW's modus operandi has
swung far from the well-rehearsed approach of the institutionalized development
industry, advocating a radical democratic pedagogy and a total restructuring of power,
only to be pulled back in again, beholden to political maneuvering of funders, experts,
250
and state officials as well as the particular ideas and histories of those whose
"consciousness" is meant to be transformed. As an approach to employment generation
and poverty alleviation, this is not to say that the OW, its typology of consciousness, the
logic of its Marxist cum Soviet-era social psychology methodology have been possessed
of their own internal contradictions, but rather that they been transformed by the frictions
of particular social and cultural contexts, material infrastructures, and political regimes.
Before moving onto an ethnographic account of these tensions in the Genesis OW,
however, it is worth briefly summarizing some of the workshops and the various ways in
which conscientization and capacitation have played out elsewhere, the information for
which I have assembled from organizational reports provided to me by Tobias as well as
the published works of Carmen and Sobrado (2000).
THE OW IN ACTION
Clodomir Santos de Morais pitched the original OW in Bataan, Costa Rica in
1973 when he was in political exile from Brazil and working in the country with the
International Labor Organization (ILO). The immediate goal of the OW, as de Morais
and the ILO envisioned it, was to use the radical democratic pedagogy that de Morais had
learned from Freire, refashioned for his own ends, in order to form several pre-
cooperative groups out of population of unemployed banana plantation workers whose
jobs had recently been made redundant by technological innovation. All told, 80 pre-
cooperative groups and 15 enterprises came out of the experiment. Although the project
251
trained dozens who would eventually move on to stage OWs of their own, including
Tobias, the director of the Genesis OW, the Bataan experiment was afflicted by
something that would continue to plague the OW project for years to come. That is, then
and now, it has been difficult to determine to what extents the successes and failures of
the methodology could be attributed to the OW at all. By its very nature, there existed no
handbook for the OW's pedagogy, no clear metric, or, really, any kind ofreporting
mechanism at all, by means of which the sustainability of those projects could be
evaluated. This was not only the biggest problem for the ILO, who had funded the
project, but also for future funders of the project, however enticed they were by the
philosophy of methodology itself. While the Bataan workshops surely fostered a
movement toward self-management among these banana workers, that is to say, twenty
years on, when the first systematic evaluation took place, only one cooperative,
Coopasilencio was still on operation, the others had dissolved (e.g. Barrantes 1998;
Sobrado 1999).
Two years later in 1975, the OW were staged again in Honduras. Throughout the
twentieth century the heavily agrarian economy of Honduras has suffered from an
alarmingly unequal land tenure system. In 1975, as much as a third of the population had
no access at all to land, 67.5 percent of all small-holders controlled only 12.3 percent of
the total cultivatable land, while a miniscule 0.2 percent of the population, all large
landowners and many foreign, controlled 19.6 percent of the land (Erazo 2000:60).
Readjustments to the agricultural export sector, driven by the emergence of labor-saving
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technologies, complicated matters for both the landless, who found their wage labor
opportunities dramatically diminished, as well as small-holders, who found themselves
having an increasingly precarious hold on what land they had. It was in this context that
many landless peasants and former agricultural laborers came together to form the
Honduran campesino movement, the favored tactic of which was "land invasions."
Thanks to inroads that campesino activists had made with state officials in the 1950s and
60s, in the 1970s campesinos suddenly became able to legitimately reclaim land that had
been left idle by large, foreign-owned agro-industrial export companies. According to
these reforms, if a parcel was left fallow for a certain period of time, it became eligible
for land seizure by those landless and unemployed laborers who sought to occupy and
cultivate it. The catch, of course, was that these groups needed to do so and form legally
recognized collectives within a certain period of time in order for the title to the land to
ultimately be awarded to them, retroactively legitimizing the seizure. Recognizing the
difficulty of campesinos in forming the social and legal structures necessary to meet those
demands, the Campesino Capacitation Program for Land Reform (PROCCARA), a
public turn private sector initiative with whom de Morais was working closely, eventually
decided that OW was an appropriate workshop for generating just those kind of legal and
social structures.49
According to Benjamin Erazo, who was in charge of the Honduran Social
Capacitation Program (the Honduran label for the OW) from 1973 to 1977 and who was
originally trained in the OW method in Bataan, the OW "dealt with precisely the type of
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real-life questions posed by the majority of the new land settlers and...provided an
institutional framework capable of rapidly converting an idea into action and a
force" (Erazo 2000:61). Two-hundred and ten workshops were held in that time period,
involving over seventeen thousand campesinos from three compact zones, which
PROCCARA had identified to have "high agricultural potential" with regard to the
national economy: Guanchias, Guaymas, and Bajo Aguan. The OWs that were staged in
these sectors of the economy generated national and regional political interest and were
thus joined by experts and functionaries of the national public sector, members of
international development organizations, and political representatives from other Latin
American counties. This relatively large scale project-which, as Erazo notes, "was only
possible because participation in the OW learning events does not require preparatory
schooling or a minimum level of literacy" (2000:62)-was organized into fifteen to
twenty day workshops, each structured as a series of courses ranging topics from
technical agricultural training to the organization of an agricultural enterprise, the model
for which was taken from cooperative theory as well as agricultural trade journals.
In Erazo's estimation, the workshop was a success. Participants who came from
enterprises that did not have the luxury of additional support (institutional or otherwise)
were able to improve their organization and management skills. Participants who came
from enterprises that did already benefit from some form of assistance, on the other hand,
functioned as support bases for other cooperative enterprises in nearby regions. While of
course some cooperatives did not stand the test of time-such as the complex ofBajo
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Aguan, which folded years later due to disappearing state support and corruption--
others, such as the 15 thousand hectare complex of Guaymas, became iconic successes.
Thanks to the OW, Erazo says, Guaymas today consists of66 settlements (about 10
thousand people) that have been collective organized into campesino enterprises of
African oil palm. By 1995, in fact, the Guaymas collective was the largest cooperative in
the country, exported over two million dollars worth of product and winning grants from
the Dutch government to do so. As a whole, the Guaymas enterprise has also managed to
maintain a democratic cooperative organization, having organized itself as a general
assembly and an administrative board (with representatives from each community).
Additionally, while cooperative members receive almost three thousand dollars per year,
almost four times the average Honduran income, the enterprise has also chosen to
develop its own social infrastructure by investing 70 thousand dollars in secondary and
higher education scholarships. All of this, Erazo admits, is of course hard to attribute to
the methodology of the OW itself, rather than state support or the particular ingenuity of
its members.
The next stop for the OW was Mexico, where in 1977 and 1978 the OW was
implemented as part of the creation of the New Ejido Population Center (NCPE) of
Velasco Suarez (in Selva Lacandona, Chiapas) and Nueva Tampaon, in the Tamuin
municipality. In Velasco Suarez, de Morais was invited by Mexico's Center for Ecology
and Sustainable Development (CECODES) in order to assist in the creation of a
settlement meant to be a environmental solution to the stress exerted on the land by
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recent displacement of a large population, mostly Tzeltal, from other parts of Chiapas. In
cooperation with the Economic and Social Development Institute for Indigenous
Mexicans (DEMCI), which provided a small grant, the regional government had set aside
400 hectares for a population of about five thousand, and the workshop, which involved
about 800 ejido settlers, was intended to mobilize an ethnically diverse population to find
common solutions to health, production, communication and education on a settlement-
wide basis. Perhaps one of the most important outcomes of the workshop was to give
each settlement a symbolic center by providing the resources for each community to
construct a "people's house." In these buildings, OW participants not only developed
courses in auto mechanics, typing, first aid, woodwork, forestry, accountancy, journalism,
baking and cooking, and even lime production, they also held conununity wide meetings
to discuss social and political problems. These projects, in turn, established permanent
community fixtures, such as a five-ton lime oven, a local newspaper, and a community
bakery. With the passage of time, however, it was again unclear to what extent the OW
was able to create a lasting, community-based organizational apparatus, to form a
sustainable agricultural sector, or to reduce the stress of human impact on the
environment, all of which were articulated as the OW's original goals.
In Tampaon, the OW was by contrast initiated against the politically charged
backdrop as a kind of "no contest" solution to independent peasant organizations'
demands for agrarian reform. Tampaon was, in fact, a New Ejido Population Center
(NCPE) that was created as part of an overall effort to push public land ownership. As
256
part of the deal, hydrological infrastructure, rural credit, and the provision of modern
agricultural machinery were also made available to the ejido inhabitants as part of a
broader plan to create the material conditions with which a new type of "ejido farmer"
could emerge, and it was the OW, in turn, that was meant to create the social, political,
and organizational infrastructure to manage public services, to administer to those means
of production held in common, and, eventually, to provide the foundation for an
integrated community.. In reality, however, the task was more difficult than first
imagined, as settlements were geographically scattered anarchically throughout the area
and were very much segregated from one another according to ethnic difference. Five
hundred individuals from seven different common land ejido settlements inside Tampa6n
eventually agreed to participate in the workshop, which was coordinated by Frederico
Porras, a Nicaraguan agronomist. De Morais separated himself from the day to day
proceedings, which were delegated to Porras and 23 lecturers, and instead chose to
function as an evaluator while reporting to the U.N. and F.A.O., who signed on as
granters for the project. The participants initially voted to set up a commission of seven
directors, one from each ejido, which was called Educational Enterprise New Tampa6n
and formed for the first time a political structure that would connect the diverse
populations for the next forty years. These directors, in turn, selected a number of
courses that they perceived to be most important in the building of a community
infrastructure and created an separate, democratically elected entity that would be
responsible for managing the "common pool resources" (which started as a collection of
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typewriters, cooking implements, medicinal stores, and tools but grew sharply in the
following years).50
The Tampa6n workshop was the first to be systematically evaluated after its initial
evaluation, and twenty years later what researchers found surprised them. Tampa6n had
relatively well-developed urban services and infrastructure such as roads, water, and
electricity, but many of its community-based commissions that managed community
finances, education, forestry, transport, and agriculture, noted as a achievement of the
original OW, were allowed to disintegrate. And though the population was significantly
more integrated than in the past, a civic ethic and overall sense of community had never
really developed. As Herrera (2000) noted, it was ultimately difficult to determine what
could be chalked up to a deficiency of the OW itself and what was instead a matter of the
social process of community organizing that occurs (or fails to occur) organically within
a group of culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse people who are put in the
awkward situation of having to coordinate action and share community resources.
During the 1980s and 1990s, with dozens of new directors having been trained in
OW theory and methodology, OWs proliferated through Central and South America and
beyond. Funded by a range of organizations, these directors largely secured funding and
support by pointing to the success of the "Honduran model" (de Morais 1975b) of rural
development. Based on the common presupposition that "target" populations should be
part of large-scale land settlements and should have the goal of collective ownership of
production, that is, in replicating the Honduran model directors tended to disregard the
258
particular political and economic climates, which eventually proved to be a source of
uncertainty. In Panama, for example, agrarian reform was pushed through by General
Omar Torrijos after the national coup of 1969. 51 Large estates were appropriated and
landless, agricultural laborers settled there, generating, with the guidance of the OW and
the financial support of a government organization, the National Confederation of
Campesino Land Settlements (CONAC), 280 enterprises out of two thousand
participants. Of course, little is known what happened to these enterprises after the
installment of General Manual Noriega in 1983, after the U.S. invasion of Panama in
1989 (and the resulting embargo), or after the Balladares administration's neoliberal
structural reforms, which included the re-privatization of state enterprises nationalized
during the Torrijos era.
In Colombia in the 1980s, four hundred cooperatives emerged out of a partnership
between the Colombian Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje, which sponsored the OW, and
the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation and Agriculture (IlCA). Yet, similar to
Panama's case, few follow up analyses of the OW have been conducted over the
following twenty years, especially regarding these cooperatives' abilities to abide
President Belisario Cuartas' conservative position that associated collective organization
with Marxism, la apertura economica (President Trujillo's and the IMF's experiments
with economic liberalism in the early 1990s), or the formalized IMF agreement in 1999.
However progressive the OW methodology has been, the biggest limitation of its
practical effect, especially with regard to the generation of cooperative enterprises, is its
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tendency to ignore the effect of massive social and technological change and political and
economic disruption that has so often determined the fate of cooperative initiatives,
regardless of any transformed "consciousness." The OW is at its best when it is coupled
with sustained social movements that are, in fact, attentive to political economic
structures and are capable of, for example, providing rural credit to cooperatives in the
sudden absence of state support or changing markets.
A good example of this is the Brazilian OWs (called PROGEIs and SIPGEIs). In
the mid-l 980s, the OW finally returned to Brazil as the power of the military junta had
began to crumble and the country had began to undergo a process of re-democratization.
Many of those who were in forced, political exile over the previous twenty years were
consequently able to return, including de Morais, who was working as a lecturer at the
University of Rostock in East Germany at the time. Returning to Brazil, he set up the
Institute for Technical Support to Third World Countries (IATTERMUND) with the goal
of confronting unemployment, which he saw as the most pressing problem facing the
country due in no small part to inflation and IMF austerity programs. Then mayor of Sao
Paulo and former president of the Republic, the charismatic Janio da Silva Quadros,
joined up with de Morais' cause and broadcast the message ofIATTERMUND by
explicitly linking IMF policies to dictatorial practices, claiming that Brazil was "subject
to a sort of 'hidden civil war of unemployment' with thousands of people killed
(murdered) each day, hundreds of street children summarily executed each year" (????
2000: 175). All of this was the result of a kind of '"epidemic' sweeping all the big cities
260
and imposing a kind of curfew on everyone...Every day, from early evening, families and
citizens were forced to load themselves up in their homes and watch soap operas to keep
themselves from dying of boredom" (ibid).
With da Silva Quadros' support, the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement
(MST, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) soon approached
IATTERMU1\fD to stage 30 self-managing cooperatives and to train MST activists in the
methodology. Working with MST, IATTERMU1\fD officials found themselves in the odd
position of pressuring the movement's leaders to rethink their movement's signature
practice of "invading" unproductive land and then distributing it to the participating
militants. This would all be in vain, they argued, if the MST could not also sustain the
achievements ofthe victorious ex-landless by establishing systems of common ownership
or even collectivist enterprises. While the MST of course continued the practice of land
invasions, to some degree they also heeded IATTERMU1\fD's advice, trained technical
cadres, and eventually even became the driving force behind a number of cooperative
enterprises in Brazil.
Of course, not all of the OW implementations were as grassroots as that which
took place with the MST. Immediately following the MST workshops, in fact,
IATTERMU1\fD initiated a joint project called the Polonoroeste Project with the Ministry
of the Interior, the U1\f Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Banlc, the
Institute for Environmental Protection (IBAMA), the Institute for Land Settlement and
Agrarian Reform (INCRA), and various other international development and aid
261
agencies.52 Thanks to the availability of funding for this project, IATTERMUND was
able to inaugurate projects in Matto Grosso, Rondonia, Ceara, Paraiba, as well as Sao
Paulo. The significant involvement ofthe Brazilian government in these programs, in
collaboration with international NGOs, was something that de Morais did not want to see
disappear, and so he quickly complied with pressure from these organizations to abandon
the collective enterprise model, modifying the approach for job- and income-generation
training programs, collectively called the PROGEls.53
At about the same time as the Brazilian PROGEls, the OW was being adopted by
NGOs in Portuguese-speaking African countries, such as Mozambique and Angola.
Labra and Labra (2000) give a detailed account of the dynamics of the Mozambique
OWs, rooted, for the first time, in an analysis of the sporadic war and violence after
Mozambican Civil War (1977-1992) as well as the public sector cutbacks that followed
from the country's structural adjustment package in 1986. The authors recount the story
of a soup-making enterprise called Sopao during an OW in Polana Canizo in 1991, in
which twenty women with loaner pots and pans sold bowls of soup made from left over
greeneries, vegetables, and meat from the local bazaar. A scant few weeks later the
women were in the position to buy their own cauldrocns and had a queue of people
waiting to buy their lunch. As the directors of the OW, Labra and Labra claim that all of
this is "thanks to the organizational consciousness that they had acquired during the
OW" (2000:95) but make no distinction between the ingenuity, creativity, and already
existing organizational knowledge of the women, on the one hand, and the specific
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contributions of the OW toward mobilizing that knowledge. Elsewhere, Labra and Labra
are more critical of the OW, detailing some of the real obstacles to its effective
implementation. During another OW, called the Caritas Mozambique 'Course' OW, for
example, leaders were caught embezzling money and food from the common resource
pool and the workshop quickly fell into disarray as participants felt cheated by those who
were supposed to be their equals. When the dust eventually settled, this OW did manage
to organize a group of women with experience in a large textile mill to create small-scale
garment production enterprise. The cooperative enjoyed some success when cooperative
members were eventually able to iron out some of the frictions in the groups, but,
ironically, it eventually collapsed when the same organization that had sponsored the
OW in the first place, Caritas, undercut the market by donating to the local community a
large quantity of second hand clothes.
Empirically speaking, political projects do not inscribe themselves on
homogeneous, abstract space any more than they emerge organically from homogeneous,
abstract space. Rather, lodged in dialogic relation within a shifting web of political,
social, and economic circumstance, these projects are beholden to the questions and
concerns of funders, to access to capital and political opportunity, and to the demands of
practicality and sustainability. Of course, this does not mean that said projects do not
also attempt to create such a space in which one method or one approach is universally
applicable. As Henri Lefebvre writes, "abstract space is not homogeneous; it simply has
homogeneity as its goal, its orientation, its 'lens'" (1991 :287), and it is in just such a
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space-the space of "the Excluded," as it were-in which the OW has attempted to
project its own vision of the problems presented to the poor and unemployed across the
world. In practice, however, de Morais' theory of organizational consciousness, the
method of a radical democratic pedagogy, and, ultimately, the idea that the world can be
divided into two parts (i.e. the Included and the Excluded), however successfully they are
framed as "solutions," do not always help the OW to maneuver the concrete particulars of
contexts. In fact, by bringing into sharp focus the issue of consciousness, they oftentimes
obscure recognition of the immediate political and economic structures that impact a
project's success or failure, completely apart from the "mentality" of its participants.
While the odd mention of failure in reporting this far on the OW should not be dismissed,
the purpose of this chapter is not to evaluate the efficacy of the workshop as a whole but
rather to understand the particular social impact of its discourse of organizational
consciousness on the already ongoing social process of organizing in Genesis.
Maintaining the perspective that the OW is but one aspect of organizing in the Genesis
cooperative, it is possible to understand with greater clarity the relationship between
consciousness and the ideal of autonomy as distinct yet interrelated moments in the
historically driven social process of generating new concepts of social justice and fair
trade.
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THE ORIGINS OF GENESIS
Genesis is the second cooperative enterprise project initiated by CSD and based
on the philosophy that the means of production should be democratically held in common
by its workers. From CSD's perspective, the principal and immediate objective of this
project was to generate a sustainable, if relatively small, source of employment for the
municipality of Ciudad Sandino.
When Genesis was formally inaugurated in December 2006, it consisted of a
group of eighteen women from Ciudad Sandino whom CSD had recruited to be the
founding members. Though the sodas, as they are termed, would eventually gain full
administrative control and ownership, the role of the NGO in the early stages of the
enterprise was to provide the necessary training, legal and organizational support, and
start-up capital in the form of low-interest loans. Based on a constantly evolving
template that was first generated in the NGO's original cooperative project, an industrial
sewing cooperative, CSD envisioned that socias as doing the bulk of the legwork in
building the cooperative from the ground up, in the process of which the socias would
learn by trial and error, rather than simulation, to develop effective administrative,
managerial, and decision-making structures for their future cooperative. This meant that,
while the NGO established the broad guidelines and conditions for membership in the
cooperative-for example, that each hour of work would contribute a pre-determined
amount of social capital toward the "buy-in" of 500 dollars-the task of constructing the
spinning plant facility fell to the socias themselves.
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The original members of the cooperative comprised a diverse group of women
ranging in age from 18 to 80 who claimed a diverse range of political and social
identities. They possessed various professional, pre-professional, and other specialized
skills and experiences. And, coming from many different socio-economic and class
situations, they ultimately had many different reasons for wanting to be part of the
project. Even before they were part of Genesis, let alone the Genesis OW, it is certainly
safe to say that they possessed organizational consciousnesses that could only very
awkwardly be described as "artisanal" or "individualistic." For one, "as mothers [and
heads of household]," remarked Jasmine, a Genesis socia,
We know how to organize. We cook, we clean, we manage the kids, and we try to
make ends meet when we need to. You have to be organized in order manage all of
the tasks of the day. Sometimes it's impossible to do it all by yourself, so you also
have find support in other people.
Others gained important organizational and leadership knowledge while in the Sandinista
military during the 1979 revolution or the subsequent Contra War, participating in
workers' unions during the 1990s, or, in the case of one, employment as a lawyer for the
national police.
Adelina, a mother of three and a grandmother of one, considered herself to be
more fortunate than most in Ciudad Sandino when she decided to join the cooperative
because, in contrast many, both her husband and eldest son worked as carpenters and thus
brought money into the house, however episodically. It was only when work was slow
for them, that is to say, that she needed to find temporary work outside of the house, and
even then she could usually rely on her sister for some pay (or at the very least, credit)
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who operated a pulperia (small shop) only a block away. Since moving to Ciudad
Sandino in the early 1990s, Adelina had attempted to work several different jobs in the
capital city of Managua, but, as inter-city bus routes did not develop until the late 1990s,
travel was exceedingly difficult, time intensive, and costly (amounting to as much as half
a day's pay), and so she ultimately had to quit.
Joaquina was also an original member of the Genesis cooperative. Born in the
city of Lean as one of thirteen siblings. Joaquina dedicated 24 years to military life
starting, including with the Sandinista army during the revolution. Although it provided
her with the opportunity to obtain her law degree, military service was also extremely
difficult hostile and abusive toward women, and so in 2000, prompted by mistreatment
and blatant corruption in the ranks, she decided to relinquish her position. Unfortunately,
finding independent work as a lawyer was difficult, and so until 2005 she remained
unemployed, depending on the support of her four children.
The initial months of Genesis' pre-cooperative phase solidified that organizational
knowledge while also creating ample opportunity for new organizational experiences.
While some of these may appear at first glance to involve the navigation of mundane,
bureaucratic activities, all, as Weber (1978:956) point out, are central to the operation of
large-scale enterprises in the political, administrative, and economic realm. The first
steps in long, arduous process occurred during the initial organizational meetings in
January of 2007, which covered the business of electing the provisional executive board
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(junta directiva), the purpose of which was to organize and direct the the general
membership's efforts.54
Recognizing that the cooperative's membership would eventually need to grow
significantly to meet the demands of a full scale cotton spinning plant, the junta's first act
was to canvass for new members in Ciudad Sandino. Lacking a central public forum,
however, doing so required the organization of the group's efforts to go door to door or to
arrange group informational meetings. Although the tools for accomplishing this were
only a white board and a marker, around which they gathered one member's horne, the
act of drawing up a work plan while working around the responsibilities of each socia to
the cooperative and horne life was an immensely complicated undertaking. Moreover,
while the tasks setting up and running meetings and evaluating and screening prospective
members were easy for some, others were forced to deal directly with personal
limitations such as a fear of public speaking. The coordination of the sum of these
endeavors, and the recognition that each was responsible for communicating with the
group instead of making her own way, proved a valuable skill set as the project moved
along.
By the end of the month Genesis had expanded their membership to just under
fifty socias, including a number of men. 55 Although the labor thus far contributed toward
each one's social capital (i.e. "buy-in"), they were nevertheless in the tenuous situation of
working without direct remuneration. Socias therefore voted to form two shifts, each
working half a day, to give individuals the flexibility to be able to tend to other business.
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With this organization of time and with the junta coordinating between the two shifts,
they began the physically intense labor of preparing the grounds for the facility. They cut
down or uprooted trees and bushes using only small hatchets and machetes, hauled off
mounds of trash and rusty scrap metal, and set up a small office and meeting place in the
shade of a Guanacaste tree. An ongoing project during this time was also to produce the
concrete blocks and losetas (long, concrete slabs) for the primary structure of the facility.
This task was significantly aided by the infrastructure left behind by a now-defunct
concrete block-making enterprise (bloquera) that CSD had sponsored. Each of the two
shifts divided up into three teams and established a rudimentary bloquera production line.
With a tractor and trailer loaned by CSD, one team made trips to a dry river bed known as
La Trinidad, dug up sand, and hauled it back to the industrial complex. Another group
mixed the appropriate proportions of sand, concrete, and water to make the block
mixture. And yet another group operated the bloquera, a startlingly loud machine that
compressed the mixture into cinder blocks.
Meanwhile, the junta performed the organizational role of prioritizing tasks,
constructing long and short term work plans, and directing the group's efforts toward
specific goals, making sure that the labor involved was divided up equitably. Yet, power
operated in the other direction as well. In constant dialogue with the general
membership, and upon constant (and publicly broadcast) threat of replacement, the junta
was not allowed to sequester themselves to the "office" and send out directives. Rather,
they were required to worked side by side with everyone else. "It is important to show
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that no one thinks of herself as more important than the others," explained Laya, the
treasurer, "We all do the same work and contribute the same amount."
Of course, Genesis socias were often joined in their labor by monthly delegations
hosted by CSD, mostly church or university groups from the U.S. From CSD's
perspective, having these delegations work alongside socias in the construction of the
cooperative served multiple purposes, including the education of delegates on issues of
concern in Nicaragua, fostering relationships of solidarity between delegates and
Nicaraguans, and galvanizing a fundraising base. By giving delegates the experience of
working closely with specific projects like the Genesis co-op, in other words, the
Northerners often became personally invested in its success and tended to redouble their
funding-raising efforts upon return to the U.S., which would prove useful as the project
moved along.
Building the social structure of the cooperative was a somewhat less
straightforward task. Those who had never before taken on leadership roles-some of
whom, in fact, had never held a "formal" job before-found themselves directing the
activities of forty people. In so doing, they learned how to be assertive without appearing
officious. Others, including the men, found themselves in the unfamiliar position of
taking directions from women in their community, forcing them, to some extent, to cease
treating their coworkers as women and to understand them to possess a common
membership and equal status. A conversation with Victor, a young many of 21 who
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joined the cooperative several months in, illustrates his experience of overcoming gender
as a barrier to cooperativism:
FRANCISCO: At first, I thought it was strange that here we were doing all of this
construction work, you know, man's work, and the six of us men were in the
minority. We didn't hardly have a say over anything that was going on.
JOSH: Did you already know how to make blocks or do this kind of
construction?
FRANCISCO: Well, no. We were just learning then. But this kind of labor is
something that we are used to doing. Now, I think, the difference is that we know
one another as individuals, we trust one another more, and don't really take
instructions from anybody because we work together and organize ourselves as a
group. Nobody gets upset when someone tells him that something needs to be
done.
Of course, the ability to working together as a group did not pan out for everyone
involved. Five members dropped out during the first six months and three more were
ejected for being disruptive and divisive.
While much of the physical labor was done by socias themselves, contributions
also carne from outside of the cooperative, specifically from CSD. One of CSD's
strategies was to stage training sessions to build skills in infra-group politics, including
courses on leadership, administration, and philosophies of cooperativism, as well as
extra-group politics, such as business management, fair trade, and Nicaraguan
cooperative law. Business management, for example, was intended to teaching the basic
skills necessary to think about profits margins and accounting and was offered to all
socias regardless of educational background. Depending on who excelled, socias voted
their next treasurer accordingly. Embroiled in a conflict with The Fair Trade Zone during
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that period of time, it was, of course, the legal dimensions of the cooperative and the
details of their lending practices, rather than, for example, fair trade, that received
perhaps the most attention in their seminars. In fact, during this time, CSD began the
practice of having co-op representatives sign promissory notes when any funds were
dispersed and also had the junta directiva work closely alongside the lawyer that they had
hired to write the Acta Constitutiva (constitution), to receive certification from the
Ministry of Labor (Ministerio del Trabajo) and the National Registry of Cooperatives
(Registro Nacional de Cooperativas) so that they were apprised of all of the legal
requirements of membership. The legal establishment of the cooperative did not of
course stop there. In August and September of2007, CSD organized a three week-long
training session that all socias were required to attend. The goal, as Melissa put it, was
"to enumerate the rights and obligations of members of the cooperative and to make sure
that they understood them and abided by them." By building a "legal consciousness"
among socias, she continued, socias would see their position in the cooperative as bound
by certain regulations that they needed to understand. From socias perspectives, these
three weeks were filled with a great deal of legal language about cooperativism of which
many, save those who had been working on the writing of the constitution, were familiar.
As Merry (1990) and Mertz (1994) point out, however, while legal consciousness may on
the surface appear to be about attaining basic linguistic competence in legalistic
language, the discourse of law also shapes the ways in which people think about
themselves, their rights, and their obligations.
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Coming to understand these rights and obligations, in fact, came to have a
powerful effect on the way that socias conceptualized their membership. Though there
existed no single idiom in everyday parlance for that social transformation, when pressed,
socias often characterized the feelings of mutual respect for one another, regardless of
individual political preferences, religious identities, or interpersonal differences, in terms
of "civic solidarity" (solidaridad cfvica). A group interview with eleven socias during
August of 2007 sheds some light on the idea. Cecilia explained,
The way we treat one another is based on mutual respect and professionalism. We
do not pour our hearts out to one another or bring our problems from home to
work, even though we've all invested our lives in this project.
Dalia responded:
Civic solidarity is how one aligns oneself (alinearse) and one's attitudes toward
the group, recognizing that, regardless of disagreements we might have, a
common thread binds our fates together. Sometimes that thread may be strained
by disagreements or outside factors, but we've learned that in order to make it
strong we need to communicate and respect one another.
Often coupled with mention of consciousness/conscience (conciencia), civil solidarity is,
by contrast with the word's connotations in English, not some individuated substance to
be "gained" or "acquired." Rather, it is a goal, a matter of "aligning oneself' (alinearse)
in the reflexive sense of the word so that one's relationships are built on mutual respect
and one's attitudes and outlooks are harmonious with those of others. As Cecilia pointed
out, "gaining" a collective sense of civic ethic is not enough for solidarity in its own
right. Individuals also have to adopt as part of their conception of themselves, and thus in
terms of their orientation toward the group, a relational identification as a civic person:
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"We each have our individual jobs in the cooperative, but we also have to understand that
part of the job is a responsibility to other people in the cooperative."
For many, the transformation of the landscape served as a symbol for the social
transformation of the group. Out of a tangled, rubble-filled mess appeared a flat, dusty
area bearing the promise of future construction. Alicia summarized some of the views of
her coworkers during a second group interview:
We could visualize where the factory was going to be built. .. [pointing into the
distance] the main entrance over there, and the factory floor over here. We are
poor women, only a handful of us have a high school diploma. Up until now, we
never thought it would possible to achieve such a thing ...a factory that we own .. .in
our lives.
Echoes of Marx's architect abound in Alicia's imagination of the factory as well as their
collective capacity to own and run it. But while an architect, by virtue of self-
consciousness, may erect a building in her imagination, realizing the building, giving it
materiality, is a different matter altogether. The work of construction, in other words, is
an intensely social process that requires a shared idea of what is going on, an effective
and fair division of labor, an equitable scheme for remunerating labor, and a common
understanding of the conditions of possibility, given resources like land and capital.
Apart from the facility itself, the social experience of organizing a cooperative is further
complicated by the drive to construct a democratic and participatory administrative
structure based on an idea of common membership. Although the reality of the matter is
of course infinitely messier than can be easily summarized here, shot through with the
many complexities and inequalities of everyday interaction, the model of cooperativism
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embraced by socias is one that seeks to avoid the systematic alienation from decision-
making and other creative activities that is so common for workers in conventional
enterprises. In effect, part of becoming a cooperative members-in this case, by
contributing the labor required for the membership "buy-in"-is the primary social
process by which each socia comes to understand that she is (sometimes quite literally)
an architect of the project. As Ariela told me in an interview in August of 2007:
As a group, we are building our economic future. Everyone has the right to speak
and be heard and make their opinions known. And as cooperative members it is
important for all of us to listen. We must reach consensus, our visions must be in
harmony with one another.
Given this ethnographic context, the notion that consciousness can be "gained" is no
more germane to the social practice of organizing than the idea that human beings
exercise the capacity for rational choice.
ORGANIZING THE ORGANIZERS: CONSTRUCTING A "MODEL" WORKSHOP
Roger and I greeted Tobias in the largest of the three room in CSD's main office,
where he was carefully arranging his notepad and binder on a wicker table. After some
pleasantries, he jumped right into the prepared lecture intended to prime us on the
workshop's philosophy, its basic set-up, and the highlights of its implementation over the
years, pausing only occasionally for questions. When we resurfaced forty-five minutes
later, it occurred to me that Roger and the other CSD staff member who was in
attendance at the beginning of the meeting had both left the room to accept phone calls
and had failed to return. Tobias and I chatted briefly about my role as the technical
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director, about the differences between the OW and the Grameen Bank micro-credit
model, and about the institutional biases against small producers and individualized
entrepreneurial activity that make them untenable in the open market. He repeated his
position that the more appropriate and effective solution to the structural problem of
unemployment lay in the promise of large-scale enterprises. "The Genesis cooperative,"
he continued, "will provide a model case study for how consciousness-building,
capacitation, is necessary for such an enterprise to succeed."
Our next stop was the introductory meeting with the Genesis socias, which Tobias
titled the "Organizing the Organizers" (Organizar los Organizadores). For reasons still
unknown to me, this meeting invited the participation of only the twelve members of the
junta directiva, rather than the full membership of the cooperative. Under the tin roof of
the bloquera, this group assembled their multi-colored plastic chairs in a semi-circle
opening up toward Tobias, who signaled the beginning ofthe meeting by opening up his
blue notebook and laying out the basic principles of the workshop in much the same
manner as he had done for me: that the organizational reigns would be handed over to the
workshop's participants; that the "objective" of the capacitation was open-ended and was
open to participants' definition; and that the role of the facilitator was only to function as
an intermediary, encouraging the active and critical reflection of the participants.
Though the messages were clear in and of themselves, how they were
communicated seemed quite contradictory to me. During the meeting or afterward,
Tobias asked no questions about the Genesis cooperative or its history, nor about the
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specific organizational experiences or skills that socias may have gained thus far. In
other words, the concepts of organizational consciousness and conscientization were
imparted to the socias, who were in turn positioned as possessing an artisanal
consciousness, a mentality, he explained, that is fundamentally resistant to adapt on its
own to more complicated contexts. In contrast to the message that he was there only to
encourage the participants, moreover, his presumed role as an authority on artisan
consciousness was further solidified when he proceeded to discuss his expertise in
development, providing examples of the 25 years worth of 0 Ws that he had staged as a
facilitator. Taken as a whole, the rhetorical effect of this communicative event was to
subsume all of the various contingencies, particularities, and processes that had thus far
given form to Genesis under a "model OW."
Tobias then continued to explain that, as a matter of precedent, the structures of
model OWs have typically broken down into one of two types. The "course OW," on the
one hand, works best for mass capacitations, including large-scale employment
generation projects in urban communities. The "enterprise OW," on the other hand, is
run in the case of existing communities who seek organizational training. Normal
circumstances for the Genesis OW, given the cooperative's long-term goals, would of
course dictate the enterprise model. The problem, Tobias told the junta-recognizing that
at least one condition of the OW, the timing, was not within the power of the socias to
decide-was that the project was in such an early stage that it did not yet even have the
"bicycle" of production on which they were to be capacitated. In a move that left very
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little room for participants' creative problem solving, he proceeded to indicate that the
course-style OW was the only choice available. The socias complied, and within the next
half hour, hands shooting up in the air one after another like a classroom, the group
decided upon twelve courses to offer as part of the OW and identified family members,
friends, or acquaintances whom they could hire with OW funds to teach brick-making,
electricity, carpentry, cooking, management, accounting, welding, design, beauty, and
English language. These courses, they voted, would not only be open to the general
membership of the cooperative but also to the broader Ciudad Sandino community.
Last but not least, embracing Tobias's entreaty for them to become the
"organizers" of the workshop, the executive board made themselves the de facto leaders
of the OW. It was only when the results of that meeting were reported to the General
Assembly the following day that most socias discovered, first, that the allegedly open-
ended workshop had already been organized, and, second, that they knew almost nothing
about it. The majority of this meeting was then dedicated to answering a handful of
questions on the OW: why certain classes had been chosen and not others, the relevance
of the class to the cooperative, why the junta directiva did not consult the general
membership, and whom was going to be paid to teach these classes.
Over the next forty days, socias and community members, side by side, took
classes of their own choosing. The junta, meanwhile, continued to operate under the now
self-applied title of "organizers," overseeing the implementation of these classes. One of
many consequences of this sudden differentiation roles was that the de facto non-
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organizer socias were now grouped with the Ciudad Sandino community members. They
found themselves in the position of being the recipients oflectures on the "vices" (vicios)
of organization, the artisan mentality (conciencia artesanaf), and of course the idea of
gaining organizational consciousness (conciencia organizacionaf), a now common term
amongst the junta that it was part of their role as organizers to "instill" (inculcar),
"stimulate" (estimular), or "raise up" (levantar)-all in the transitive senses of these
words.
The OW also had disruptive effects in the administrative structure of the
cooperative. Having regarded transparency as an important component of leadership, the
junta had up to this point taken to spending the day working along the other socias, then
retiring to the meeting area at the end of the work day where they would detail a work
plan for the following day or week and discuss finances or any membership issues that
may have arisen since the previous meeting. Sometimes going on for hours, these
meetings were open to the anyone who desired to bring an issue to their attention, check
in on the junta, or simply sit and listen. As one socia put it, "We watch them carefully
because everywhere power breeds generalillos [literally, "little generals"]. ..in our
cooperative, the junta is where they should be, with la asamblea [the general assembly],
not above them." This changed once the junta doubled as organizers of the OW. Per
Tobias's suggestion, organizational meetings were closed to the public in order to avoid,
as he put it, the encumbrance of "every dissenting voice of the whole group." What was
to Tobias a matter of efficiency, however, was to others a sudden lack of transparency.
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Indeed, as Maria put it, comparing the position of the socias to the community members
also taking the OW classes, "We have no more right to know what is going on in our
cooperative than anyone else in Ciudad Sandino."
In an ethnographic view, the discontentment of the socias with the junta directiva
was nowhere more visible than in the whispers of small groups who congregated for
lunch or those who walked home together, talking about their day's encounters with junta
members. For many of these socias term "organizational consciousness" (conciencia
organizacional)-as conciencia in Spanish means both "consciousness" and
"conscience"-was the topic of a great many discussions and jokes. For example, the
end of the OW was celebrated by a work fair (feria del trabajo), in which class-goers
were encouraged to show off their new skills, such as being able to repair an electrical
device, to built a wooden table or chair, or to use a computer. Afterwards, I accompanied
a group to celebrate at the local cantina, and in what turned out to be a late and drunken
night, one socia was inspired to parody the popular radio song, "Conciencia," by the
Bronx-based Bachata band Aventura. The new version, which was widely and
surreptitiously repeated thereafter, reveals a measure disdain for the language of
consciousness and the perceived condescension of its use by the junta during the OW.
The chorus line, Mi conciencia me domina, una voz a mi me dice que tu eres infiel ("My
conscience dominates me, a voice tells me that you are unfaithful") became Mi
conciencia me domina, una voz a mi me dice que somos lentos ("Mi consciousness
dominates me, a voice tells me that we are slow-witted"). Likewise, esa voz tambien me
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dice que mi vida es aburrida que cambie mi forma de ser ("that voice also tells me that
my life is boring, that I should change my way of being") became esa voz tambien me
dice que mi vida es inefectiva, tengo que cambiar mi forma de trabajar ("that voice also
tells me that my life is ineffective, I have to change my way of working").
In the coming weeks, rumors of fraud and theft came to a head. General assembly
meetings resumed with the OW's conclusion, but, instead of being dedicated to planning
construction, most of the discussion revolved around nepotism in selecting and paying
teachers and the lack of transparency in accounting for the OW's funds, which had
amounted to nearly thirty thousand dollars. That discussion, however, was cut short in
early December of 2007 on a note of tension and uncertainty when socias left for their
scheduled holiday vacation (which in Nicaragua is four weeks, covering La Purisima and
Christmas). When they returned to work in January, the junta discovered that the comire
de vigilancia (vigilance committee), a sub-committee within the general assembly, had
mobilized a majority of the socias to vote no confidence in the junta and demand a
financial audit. The accusations of fraud and theft, even though they were never really
substantiated, compelled three members of the original junta to drop out of the
cooperative altogether.
In the months following the OW, trying to come to terms with the difference
between the "model OW' and what had happened at Genesis, I decided to ask many of
the remaining socias what they perceived the goal of the OW to have been and to what
extent they though that it had succeeded or failed. The results, I think, demonstrate the
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great degree to which the socias had actually been dispossessed of the knowledge,
language, and concepts of the workshop, thus empowering others to be its "organizers."
About half understood it to be about generating employment in the Ciudad Sandino
community, the success of which was measured by the ability to take in some extra
money on account ofthe new skills. The rest understood the OW to be a basic
organizational training for the cooperative, but took issue with the distraction that it
represented from the primary goal of getting the cooperative on its feet. Perhaps most
noteworthy was the change in these individuals' attitudes toward the cooperative, given
the recent conflicts. Whereas the general attitude the previous summer had been quite
optimistic, three-quarters of the socias now believed it to be a distinct possibility either
that the cooperatives in general were a doomed model or, if not that, that this cooperative
would fail before even opening its doors-a fear that was only exacerbated by the delay
in the construction schedule for which the OW was responsible.
With food prices on the rise in Nicaragua-a larger event that was later termed the
"world food crisis"-Genesis socias were also feeling the pinch of the temporarily non-
remunerative aspects oftheir cooperative work. In fact, in Ciudad Sandino markets, the
prices of staples like rice and beans had doubled in only a year, forcing many socias with
only one other stable household income to eliminate from their budgets non-essentials
such as vegetables and fruit, laundry soap, or bus fare. In this context, working without
pay in the cooperative was a heavy burden. By May, several more socias dropped out to
search for work, while others decided to pursue outside work simultaneously. For
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example, some decided to outsource their "buy-in" labor to family members, friends, or
neighbors at a fraction of the normal social capital rate while they pursued work
elsewhere, thus allowing them to maintain their membership in the event of its success.
Another group decided to pool resources and draw on some of their newly minted OW
skills to start a small, informal bakery.
For the newly elected junta directiva, this was of course a troubling development.
Arguing that the process of being a cooperative member was as much a social as an
economic, they decided to require all social capital labor to be performed by the person
him or herself. Consequently, socias were torn between wanting to maintain their
membership in the cooperative but, economically speaking, not being able to. In June of
2008, as a solution to that struggle, the junta and the general membership together voted
to petition CSD, the funder of the project, to provide a temporary loan to match, in direct
payment to the socias, any social capital value generated. As Hernan, the new treasurer
of the cooperative, remarked, "Now that people can eat, we can get on with aligning
ourselves (alinearnos) as a cooperative."
UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES
At first glance, it might seem that the topic of sub-prime mortgages that
dominated economic news in the U.S. in late 2007 and 2008 would be unconnected to
sharply rising prices of food in Nicaragua, let alone daily economic difficulties that
nearly forced almost twenty members of the Genesis cooperative to drop out in search of
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extra income. Yet, what started out as a largely isolated financial crisis in developed
industrial countries quickly transformed itself into a generalized crisis, taking center stage
in global financial markets and roiling debt and equity markets in emerging economies as
well. The economic crisis in the U.S. eventually came to be termed a recession, and one
effect of that recession, especially in the wake of the collapse of the financial derivatives
markets, was to compel financial speculators to seek quick returns by reinvesting trillions
of dollars from equities and mortgage bonds in food and raw materials, which tend to
retain a more or less constant demand (Macwhirter 2008). The worldwide impact that
U.S. commodities speculation had on world food prices, in turn, came to be prime
contributing factor to what would later be called the "world food crisis" (Lappe 2008).56
To make matters worse, food commodities speculation in 2007 and 2008
happened to coincide with drop in food reserves due to poor harvests and crop shortfalls
from natural disasters (i.e. extended drought in Australia, heat waves in Californa's San
Joaquin Valley, rains in Kerala), rising oil prices (leading to heightened costs of fertlizers,
in some cases doubling the price within the six months before 2008), as well as the
subsidization ofbiofuel usage (resulting in lower food stocks for human consumption,
especially in the global South, Mitchell 2008). As Martin Khor (2008a, 2008b) of the
Third World Network points out, however, all of these things would have remained
relatively isolated phenomena if it were not for the trade liberalization measures going on
since the 1970s that encouraged food independent countries to become food importing
countries, that opened them up to food imports that are subsidized by Western
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governments and undercut smallholder agriculture, and that made food as a commodity
subject to speculation. The result, of course, was a dramatic increase in price of some of
the most basic international food commodities on international markets. According to the
International Monetary Fund and the u.s. Department ofAgriculture, between March
2007 and March 2008 global food prices increased an average of 43 percent: wheat prices
increased by 146 percent, soybeans by 71 percent, corn by 41 percent, and rice by 29
percent. Of course, globally speaking, of the approximately one billion people who
subsist on less than one dollar a day and the 200 million more who survive on less than
50 cents per day, increasing food prices have had the greatest effect on these food-
insecure populations, who spend on average 50 to 60 percent or more of their income on
food (IFPRI, International Food Policy Research Institute).
In Nicaragua, the systemic effects of this economic storm were felt broadly and
acutely, especially after September of2007 when Hurricane Felix caused severe crop
damage in the North Atlantic region of Nicaragua (called RAAN). Almost immediately,
the average price of white maize and red beans, two cereals that represent more than half
of the diet of Nicaraguans, rose by 20.5% and 80.7% respectively (WFP 2008), and the
cost of the basic food basket (canasta btisica), a figure that is determined by the National
Bank of Nicaragua and that is meant to represent the very basic elements of a family's
diet, increased 33.5% (Envio 2008).57 This increase in basic food costs is significant in
Nicaragua given that the per capita National Gross Income (NGI) is only 980 dollars per
year, 46 percent live in poverty and 15.1 percent live in extreme poverty, which means
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that the median income of the poor before the food crisis in 2001 only covered about 60
percent of the basic food basket per month.58 In 2008, it was calculated to only cover
about 26 percent per month (Observecon 2009).
In Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua, what this meant in everyday terms was that the
price of beans in the marketplace rose from 18 cordobas ($0.90) per pound to over 30
($1.50) cordobas per pound ($1.50). Rice increased from 4 cordobas ($0.20) per pound
to 13 cordobas ($0.65) per pound. Even tortillas, which had cost a single cordoba for as
long as almost anyone could remember, rose to three cordobas each. For many Ciudad
Sandino residents, including Genesis socias, this did not mean that families necessarily
ate less all around. Rather, they and their families often skipped meals (socias often
worked all day at the co-op without food), and eliminated the most costly elements of
meals, such as vegetables, fruit, milk, cheese, and meat, or non-food related items like
clothing. For the majority of socias, the situation was more or less the same. Having, at
best, one wage earner in the family while the other was working without pay in the co-op
meant that the food budget bought less and less every month. Adelina explained that,
since the wage that her husband and son brought in working as carpenters bought less and
less of the family's provisions once Adelina started working without pay in the co-op, one
of her family's strategies was to not only cut out unnecessary elements of the food budget
-meaning that they were eating beans and rice for every meal every day-but also to
use laundry soap for showers as well (however harsh and itchy it was on the skin).
Moreover, Adelina continued, that tortillas cost 3 cordobas and that they frequently were
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not oftentimes considered a luxury was perhaps the most visible sign that something was
wrong in the economy, it was a barbaridad (atrocity) and vergonzoso (shameful) that
someone somewhere was profiting off of the hunger of poor people: "Even during the
1980s, when war was everywhere, you know, there was at least still food.. .It doesn't
matter to rich people how much a tortilla costs-they usually eat bread anyways-but we
eat tortillas, beans and rice, or we go to bed hungry."
For families, the pressure of these rising prices often made working without pay
for even half a day in the co-op even more difficult than it already was. Consequently, in
a general assembly meeting in February of 2008, with with some socias missing even
weeks of their work shifts at a time, it became clear that almost half of the membership
were seriously considering dropping out of the project entirely so that they could pursue
other job opportunities that would at least pay in the interim. This was the case with
Giselle, for example, whose training as an accountant found her ajob rather quickly and
who dropped out of the co-op and has not returned. Several other socias, discovering a
loophole in the rules and regulations regarding their labor-based buy-in for membership,
found outside work during the day and payed unemployed neighbors or friends a small
amount to work their shifts at the co-op. Still other socias, who had started a small
bakery enterprise during the OW, decided to revive the project in order to make ends
meet while maintaining their membership in the co-op. As Sandra explained, it was not
meant to be a long-term project, but rather something to "bring in some money in the
mean time so that [socias] could, in the long term, still work towards building the cotton
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spinning cooperative. By late February, as the socias started to dig the foundation of the
building, complaints began to emerge between socias and non-socias, usually men who
were working as proxies-especially regarding the quality of their work, the men's
treatment of women workers, and disappearing supplies-and other socias, whose
schedules were now saturated with other projects like putting together a bakery or
working other jobs, could no longer find the necessary amount oftime to attend co-op
meetings or participate in a meaningful dialogue about the co-op's progress. Combined
with flagging donations via CSD from the U.S. for materials, the progress quickly came
to a standstill.
In March of 2008, unsettled by the socias' use of proxy labor, contrary to what
they saw as a fundamental part of the social process of becoming a socia, as well as by
the bakery enterprise, almost as much of a distraction from the task at hand as the OW
was, CSD offered the new Genesis junta directiva a deal. If the junta would vote to
disallow socias' use of proxy labor, ensuring that all labor was done by socias themselves,
then the NGO would find a way to match every hour of buy-in labor (valued at 7
cordobas or $0.35) with an equal amount in wage so that socias could return to work at
the co-op yet still have some income. The socias accepted the deal, and although many
complained that the meager wage of about 50 cordobas per day was still insufficient to
cover their costs of living, almost everyone agreed that it was better than nothing. The
following week, they returned to work laying the foundation of the cooperative. As of
this writing, the Genesis cooperative has completed the main structure of the facility, and
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CSD has acquired for them the necessary production machinery, purchased with a loan of
230 thousand dollars, the collateral for which includes about 100 dollars scraped together
from individual donations, CSD's personal retirement funds, as well as the land and the
building. After a significant delay due to the aforementioned internal issues in the
cooperative as well as financia11imitations, Genesis anticipates beginning installation in
January so that training and production may begin in early February.
CONCLUSIONS
In a trenchant critique of the use and abuse of the concept of "rationality" in
economics, John Adams writes:
The strength of the concept of rationality is perhaps that it insists that in some
underlying way all people are the same...a welcome alternative to many colonial
racial doctrines and to many early views in development economics of the peasant as
a hopelessly inert drudge, to be saved only by being pulled headlong into
industry...Still, in making this simplification all has been lost of what might most
directly be called the "cultural content" of peasant 1ife...There is no content in being
rational. The content comes from the cultural and attitudinal realms and it is the
interaction of those realms with specific economic circumstances that gives rise to
observable behaviors about which something useful can be said. [1982:666]
Something similar could and, in many cases, still should be said about consciousness.
The strength of the concept is similar to that of rationality: people are not isolated beings,
they live, labor and learn in "definite relations" with one another. Yet, at the same time,
there is no content in consciousness itself, outside of a consciousness ofsome set of
historical, social, environmental, or economic relations. The content, in other words,
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comes from the specific "social processes," in Harvey's (1996) term, that exist
independent of the wills of individuals.
E. P. Thompson (1966) demonstrated with great aplomb the intersection of these
various social forces in the formation of working class consciousness in England. This
consciousness, in other words, did not come about by way of the tides of history, but
rather through a historical (which is to say, social, cultural, and economic) process in
which the working class underwent a total transformation of its imagination of itself in
relation to society. As John Burdick (1998) further points out in his study of the black
consciousness movement and its close affinity with popular religious traditions in Brazil,
certain social phenomena cannot simply be dismissed as breeders of false consciousness
(e.g. ideology, religion) while others are embraced a priori as "true" (e.g. class, political
economy). The distinction between false and true consciousness, in fact, is an
unproductive dichotomy if the manifestation of social consciousness is continuous with
the warps and wefts of the social fabric. To take the content of a thought or act or social
process as a mere appearance, dissolving the particular in the universal (here the
economic substructure), is a kind of destructive analysis, as it were, because social
consciousness is, if anything a Gestalt in the sense that a shared political subjectivity,
sense of community or idea about what is "right" or "just" is greater than the sum of
those individual sentiments.
If, on the other hand, the work of understanding social consciousness is taken to
be ethnographic-acknowledging, of course, that the term consciousness is a very
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provisional and by no means universal tool social analysis-what is opened up in the
process is a renewed understanding of the many ways in which people from disparate
social locations may chart their courses toward a shared, political outlook: How do
people come to understand themselves as part of historical, economic, gendered,
environmental, or racial struggles? How do those people narrate, collectively and
individually, personal or social transformations? Or, alternately, how might the language
and vocabulary of consciousness also be appropriated for political effect? In order to
answer these questions, however, it is first necessary to move beyond a simplistic notion
of consciousness as an objective social phenomena that is "gained" or "ratcheted up" and,
by being confused with an object, tends to obscure the ongoing and emergent social
process of organizing, arguing, debating, compromising, and changing one's mind that
inevitably goes on beyond the scenes of consciousness-raising. Karen Brodkin (2007)
gives a great deal of insight into the ethnography of consciousness in Making Democracy
Matter: Identity and Activism in Los Angeles. Centering on the stories of 16 activists
recounting their journeys toward political consciousness and activism in service workers'
unions, Brodkin suggests that, for some, becoming the target of "othering" and
encountering the "powers of institutionalized whiteness" galvanized activism, while
others charted their course instead through experiences of escaping privilege and
undergoing radical, sometimes painful, changes in thinking. Brodkin therefore stresses
how the political and the personal came together for these activists, forming an
"organizing tradition" that is invigorated by, if not shared experiences, then shared
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understandings of "who we are" and political subjectivities rooted in what is right and
just.
In the case of Genesis, conciencia-or rather the concept of civic solidarity,
which elicits the same kind of process that Brodkin (2007) describes-is perhaps better
thought of not as social "consciousness" so much as social "conscience," referring to the
moral values, feelings rectitude and integrity, and the faculty to therefore distinguish
actions as right or wrong. Yet, instead of operating from within an individual, civic
solidarity as a kind of social conscience works on the level of a social process, organizing
and sustaining equitable, professional relationships between socias and making power
and knowledge transparent, regardless of individual difference. It is, in other words, an
ongoing process of "aligning oneself' against the onslaughts of economic hardship,
divisive, self-interest, and the temptation to forego broad, social inclusion in the creative
process-a vision of organization that ironically becomes visible in the aftermath of the
OW and the fragmentation, conflict, and mistrust that it caused.
Although the OW has since its inception in the 1960s been built upon the
recognition that all development projects are inscribed in concrete relations ofpower-
between communities and their surroundings, between funders and beneficiaries, and
among the stakeholders themselves-the ideas of organizational and artisan
consciousness differs sharply from the full range of the social process that is involved in
socias' organizational strategies and consciousness-building techniques. For the OW,
consciousness, by contrast, occupies the narrow space of "objective" interactions between
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workers and the material world, and it is for that reason that participants may be said to
have "consciousnesses" that fall into rough-hewn typologies. It is also by virtue of the
concept's decontextualization from the many dimensions of its underlying social process,
stripping the idea down into a narrow set of "objective" material practices, that the OW
may claim to "instill" consciousness by creating the "ideal conditions" for effecting
transformation. The usefulness of an ethnography of the OW is that, in the encounter
between the two discourses of concienca-conciencia as articulated by the workshop
practitioners, on the one hand, and conciencia as social conscience or civil solidarity in
Genesis' already established practices of organizing, on the other-conflict arises, but
certainly not without churning up in its wake heated discussions about what is right, just
or fair in the workplace.
In her discussion of the concept of "scenario," performance studies theorist Diana
Taylor (2003) provides a useful dramaturgical tool for conceptualizing the impact of the
OW on the already existing social processes and practices of organization in Genesis.
Taking as a starting point the assumption that embodied practices function as sources of
social knowledge, Taylor's scenario is similar to Foucault's (1972) notion of "discursive
formation" insofar as both function as analytical devices for challenging the apparent
unity of the various "stages" upon which social action takes place. The idea of scenario,
in particular, allows one to examine social action in terms of the rules governing
performance-rules that otherwise appear as natural unities-which is to say the specific
"meaning-making paradigms that structure the social environment, behaviors, and
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potential outcomes" (Taylor 2003 :28). By calling into view the rules and norms of
embodied behavior, moreover, scenarios point out that agency and the social production
of knowledge are not free-floating, but rather mediated or constrained by "scenes,"
"scripts," and "frames. "59
Meaning-making paradigms, however, are irrelevant if not inscribed in particular
social contexts. In the case of the OW, I argue, the construction of the scenario was in
motion the moment that Tobias held introductory meetings with Genesis socias in order
to outline the goals and methodologies of the workshop. To be sure, that scenario may be
imagined to pre-exist any specific rendition of itself, encoded in Tobias's blue binder and
his many references to "typical" OWs. Yet, the inscription of the OW as a meaning-
making paradigm in the particular social context consists primarily in the shaping,
molding, and scripting of the roles ofsocias as "participants" in and "organizers" of the
workshop and in the disciplining of their behavioral or mental patterns according to an
ideology of organizational consciousness that identifies individualism, spontaneity, self-
sufficiency, and other artisanal behavioral forms as inimical to optimization. Of course,
this is not to say that Genesis socias passively accept those roles. Rather, as the
ethnographic account of the workshop suggests, they bring to bear on the situation their
own interpretive frameworks, allowing to resist or shape those scripted roles on their own
terms. What is more, in the case of the Genesis OW, the construction of a common
scenario, a shared meaning-making paradigm, is obviously incomplete, given that,
despite the OW's goals, segments of the participating population remain unfamiliar with
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the basic tenets of the workshops ideology, methodology, or goals. The strange effect of
the incompatible frames that socias then bring to the project is to produce cleavages
between those who came to understand themselves as "organizers" of the project and
those who were merely "participants" in it.
The concept of scenario is useful, Taylor writes, because it allows the analyst "to
keep both the social actor and the role in view simultaneously, and thus recognize the
areas of resistance and tension" (2003:30). Yet, that utility quickly comes to an end if
one does not also contextualize the scenario's implementation within a broader field of
social forces and competing scenarios. James Clifford (1988), for example, warns against
the tendency to make particular cases in microcosms of something more general. If
mistaken for an objective statement about reality rather than a space-clearing theoretical
tool for social analysis, that is, performance can itself function to de-contextualize social
action. Perhaps even worse, as Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett writes, understanding
performance as a statement about social reality is a kind of "genre error" in which it
appears as if "one man's life in another man's spectacle" (1991:407). Social reality
appears to be the same as the models that purport to explain it, when it should be clear
that life is not, of course, a stage for those who are living it. Or as Erving Goffman
succinctly puts it, "Social life is dubious enough and ludicrous enough without having to
wish it further into unreality" (1974:2).
As Goffman (1974), Lakoff(2004), and others (e.g. Montoya 2007) have pointed
out, however, this does not necessarily mean that we should abandon the performative
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approach entirely. Rather, we have to move away from the idea that performance is
somehow an objective representation of social reality and instead understand concepts
like scenarios and scripts as political tools for people to bring to the fore certain ways of
certain situations and suppressing others-not for building the frames of interpretation
from the ground up, but rather for manipulating them, bending them to one will, in order
to achieve a (unconsciously or consciously) desired effect. In the case of the Genesis
OW, treating scenarios as a political tool is a particularly useful for separating out the
idea of the OW (and its suppositions about consciousness and objective activity) from the
already existing social processes of organization among socias. In this perspective, the
workshop does not so much create the "ideal conditions" for effecting transformations of
consciousness among its participants so much as the ideal conditions for the
implementation of its own ideologies about consciousness, the related method, and of
course the project itself, dependent as it is on funding, political supporters, and
participants.
The idea that the OW is somehow self-contained, that it is a "proven solution" for
employment generation in radically disparate locations like Central and South America,
Africa, and Eastern Europe, is ultimately based on the presumption that its typology of
consciousness and its radical method of conscientization are so flexible that they can be
successfully implemented anywhere. The world, after all, is walled off into the Included
and the Excluded, and the key reason why the poor cannot pass between the two, it would
seem, is their organizational mentalities. Yet, what is missing in the OW's focus on
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consciousness and conscientization is recognition of the fact that unemployment and
poverty cannot always be attributed to the consciousness of the unemployed and
impoverished; there exist structural political and economic determinants outside of those
individual mentalities--determinants which came to the fore during and after the
workshop--the solution to which is not merely a shift in frame but a total reconfiguration
of political and economic power. In this sense, it is useful to draw a comparison between
the OW's method and the "culture of poverty" thesis, first articulated by Oscar Lewis in
the mid-1960s. A careful reading of Lewis (1961) shows that he understood that
abolishing poverty would require massive structural change-that only "by creating basic
structural changes in society, by redistributing wealth, by organizing the poor and giving
them a sense of belonging, of power and of leadership...the culture of poverty could be
overcome" (Lewis 1966:405). Yet, Lewis nevertheless locates the "culture" of poverty in
70 plus interrelated traits-resignation, fatalism, low aspirations, low literacy rates,
isolated from mainstream institutions, common law marriages, early initiation into sex,
dependency, present-time orientation, lack of impulse control, weak ego structure,
inability to defer gratification-that exist on the level of the individual and, as a whole,
constitute a "way of life, remarkably stable and persistent, passed down from generation
to generation along family lines" (Lewis 1961 :xxiv-xxv). Arguing that the poor are
enmeshed in an intergenerational quagmire of dysfunctional values and behaviors, Lewis
pathologizes the poor, reflects an ideological process of "blaming the victim" (Ryan
1976). Though Lewis generates expressive ethnographic portraits of poverty, as Eleanor
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Leacock (1971) critiques, he nevertheless fails to link macrostructural political and
economic forces in any way to the ideologies, individual values, and, indeed, "culture"
about which he speaks, making his empirical asserts about poverty psychologically
reductionist. The culture of poverty, in other words, is treated as a self-enclosed static
moral condition, without connection to the contradictions of capital and production or the
very real political and economic structures that arise therein.
Many of the same critiques may be registered with the OW, but, rather than
treating class as a static moral condition, it instead proceeds from the subject-object
relationship of production. While De Morais presumes a direct connection between
relations of production and consciousness, like Lewis, however, he fails to articulate the
connection between consciousness and the political economic structures that condition
the possibilities of action. Ideologically and methodologically, targeting the
consciousness of the participants-problematizing artisanal consciousness as an obstacle
to development while treating organizational consciousness as a solution-surely
underlines the mentalities associated with work but at the same time ignores the outside
world, as it were. Even as a cursory view of the OW's implementation over the years
demonstrates, these wider national and transnational political and economic
transformations have also had tremendous effect. Likewise in the case of the Genesis
OW. The presumption that consciousness is something that can be
"instilled" (conscientization as the tool for doing so) belies the many historical, cultural,
political, and economic contingencies and determinants that lie well outside the
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individual and are involved in the social process of organization and supposes that
poverty and unemployment is somehow ingrained in intractable psychological or cultural
process, not in economic and political dynamics that are produced by the organization
and control of the economy by a class with interest in paying workers as little as possible.
For the OW, of course, bracketing these structures may be a methodological starting
point, given the entrenched nature of formal structures of formal structures ofpower, or
even a strategically cultivated image to frame the OW as a "proven solution" to
employment generation. The OW is built upon the recognition that all development
projects are inscribed in concrete relations of power, what is essentially overlooked is
that, while conscientization may be effective strategy for organization, there also exist
structural determinants of poverty and unemployment outside of that.
It is an ethnographic fact that people come together and work together; that they
may see in one another parallel experiences; that they may cultivate the inspiration to
affect social change together; that they may construct meaningful identities and narratives
together; that they may develop strategies for dealing with interpersonal conflicts,
political subjection, and economic deprivation together; and that, over time, they may
even see themselves not as acting alone, but as part of a larger whole with common
aspirations, ideas, outlooks, agendas, and goals. In the case of the Genesis cooperative,
however, the social process through which such a social transformation occurs is not a
mere matter of social consciousness in the sense that individuals may one day 'wake up'
to find the structures of social existence illuminated and their minds enlightened. Rather,
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the "organizing traditions" they develop, to borrow Brodkin's (2007) term, occur by
means of a process of "aligning oneself," often through incremental adjustment of ones
ideas and actions. This is perhaps the key difference between the OW's idea of
consciousness, on the one hand, and the Genesis cooperative's idea of conciencia, or
civic solidarity: while the former is narrowly concerned with the effectiveness of
mentalities of work, the latter is, on a very fundamental level, cultivated on the level of
social conscience, of ideas ofjust and unjust in relation to others through experiences of
sociality.
Understanding that social conscience, like social consciousness, is inextricable
from particular social processes in turn requires us to understand, as Gananath
Obeyesekere points out, that "conscience is inextricably linked with ethics and ethics
with culture" (1990:188). The link between ethics (or morality) and culture (or society)
was of course set out long ago by Emile Durkheim in his notion of "collective
consciousness," which in the original French reflected a similarly ambiguous distinction
between conscience and consciousness (conscience collective) and which was intended to
refer to the symbolic forms of collective representation that the group projects for itself.
In Durkheim's vision of consciousness/conscience, morality and solidarity are intimately
linked within the concept of conscience collective, which is itself treated as a sui generis
reality that must be obeyed by reasons beyond those of the individual. Morality and
solidarity, in other words, are not independent or even universal systems, but rather are
imperceptibly different from sociality itself.
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Of course, one need not reifY morality, solidarity, ethics, or collective
consciousness as social facts, as 'things,' or as totalities with objective characteristics, as
Durkheim does, in order to understand that each have a powerful existence in social
relations.6o In the case of Genesis, what individuals envision in their actions and
interactions as "good" and "desirable" is a kind of social conscience/consciousness, but it
is not be defined by some external law. As the idea of "aligning oneself' communicates,
visions of equitable, democratic, and fair social relations are built upon the collective
negotiation of conflicts, differential power, as well as the many difficulties associated
with material, political, and economic life. As a social process, then, the mentality, for
lack of a better word, of respect and professionalism despite differences is not something
that can be engineered or instilled from afar because it is a delicate matter of adjusting
one's own actions and attitudes. This conciencia-what Genesis socias often refer to as
"civic solidarity"-is very much intertwined with, beholden to, and in active dialogue
with a range of material practices and social imaginaries, values, relations, and
institutions. And at a very basic level, it is a matter of fairness in the workplace in the
sense that it is, if not an objective projection of society's vision of itself, a vision of what
equitable, democratic, and just relationships of work should be.
NOTES
44 The Portuguese tenn conscientizar;:110 was introduced in Freire (1970) and has been translated to English
as conscientization, which is the meaning intended here. The English term capacitation, likewise, derives
from the Portuguese capacitar;:110, and it is de Morais' meaning that I use here (Carmen & Sobrado 2000).
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45 Freire was invited by President Joao Goulart and the Minister of Education, Paulo de Tarso Santos, in
1962 to stage more than twenty thousand literacy workshops for as many as two million people in Brazil,
which was expected to have a dramatic effect on the democratic process in Brazil, given that literacy
continued to be a requirement for suffrage. Of course, this was all cut short with in March of the same
year, following a speech in which Goulart promised to nationalize the country's oil refineries, a military
coup led by Brazil's army generals seized power. Those who had worked with the Goulart administration
were labeled traitors and imprisoned, and Freire himself was condemned as an "international subversive,"
comparable to Stalin, Hitler, Peron, and Mussolini. Freire consequently spent 75 days in a small prison cell
in Recife, an experience, he says, that proved to be a catalyst for "[throwing] light on the power relations
made opaque by the dominant class" (Freire and Shor 1987:31-2). From the Nordeste province of Brazil,
de Morais had been working variously as ajoumalist for a local newspaper, a musician in ajazz band, as
well as for the Ford Motor Company, where he rose to the position of a line supervisor. There, de Morais,
claims, he began to ally himself with life-long industrial workers and involved himself in trade union
activity, work stoppages, and strikes. In the 1950s de Morais became a clandestine member of the
communist movement (the communist party had been outlawed). He participated in political economy
seminars in Recife, but it was the logistics of running those meetings, coordinating the activities of more
than 50 people and the need to maintain a low profile, rather than the sessions themselves, that taught de
Morais about the need for strict organizational discipline (Sobrado 2000: 15). Freire's ideas, which have
since influenced well-known scholars such as Cornel West, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, and bell hooks,
were influenced by de Morais, whom he calls "amigo irmao, velho de guerra" (Freire and Shor 1987: 135).
De Morais and Freire eventually parted ways due to enforced exile, but they continued to be friends.
46 Leont'ev, Vygotsky and Luria collaborated in the 1920s to develop a Marxist alternative to the
behaviorism (stimulus-response mechanism) that was the favored explanation of human behavior being
developed in the U.S. and Western Europe. Leont'ev's psychoanalysis, known as "activity theory,"
represents the systematization of this theory and would later become institutionalized as the leading
psychological doctrine in the Soviet Union. In contrast to behaviorism, "activity" consists of the human
processes "that realize a person's actual life in the object world by which he is surrounded, his social being
in all the richness and variety of its forms" (Leont'ev 1977). The core of this proposal is a rejection of the
concepts of mental process and behavior, which are taken to be inherently reductionistic, recognizing no
discontinuity between the firing ofa neuron and discussing politics. According to Leont'ev, the concept of
behavior, in paIticular, is too mechanical and abstract, reflecting an erroneous way ofthinking about the
distinctness of conscious, living human beings-as criticized by John Dewey in 1896-that assumes that
external influence ultimately leads to a response, even ifthere are equally abstract intervening variables
like "motivation." By contrast, Leont'ev situates his theory of activity in "the process that active subjects
use to form real connections with the world of objects" (1979:42), which is not a mechanical mode of
thought so much as a "systems" mode. Leont'ev comments, activity is "a system with its own structure, its
own internal transformations, its own development" (1979:46). It is a kind of dynamic envelope enclosing
both subject and object (something he refers to as the "molar unit of life"). In this way, human activities
can be thought of as more complex and wide-ranging, involving systems of both subject-object interaction
and individual-group interaction, irreducible to the direct relation between genes and behavior.
47 In Carmen and Sobrado's (2000) view, "total marketization" is marked by the transition from the welfare
state into the neoliberal state, which is essentially a transformation in the logic of redistribution. The
welfare state, that is, ensured that wealth was redistrbuted before it was even produced, rather than acting
on already existing forms of capital. The transition, moreover, was catalyzed by the apparent tension
between "equity" and "private liberty." Hence, those who clamored for individual freedom, lower taxes,
less state, and less big government-following the Thatcherite line that there is no such thing as "social
wealth" and "there is no such thing as society"--targeted the state as the primary agent of equitable
distribution.
48 De Morais is careful to point out that this is not to say that the "ideological structures of organization that
are typical to the small producer. .. [are not] excellent in their own right and in a non-conflictual
environment" (Sobrado 2000: 17). Artisanal consciousness is only valued as "'bad habits,' a 'deviations,' or
a 'vices' when transferred to the the totally different-that is, complex-social organization."
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49 PROCCARA was initiated in 1973 as a state-affiliated program, but from 1977 onwards the workshop
was transferred to the private sector. The Honduran Institute for Rural Development (IHDER), a leading
private institution, applied this method in concentrated technical trainings for enterprises and cooperatives
in the Atlantic region, the major export crop-producing zone of Honduras. According to PROCCARA, the
experimental workshop appeared to be "a practical exercise, as well as a theoretical one which allowed a
group of participants to internalize the participatory mechanisms of organization at the highest level which
the status of the workshop participants would allow. In each case this level will be determined by the
praxis which emerges from the role which each individual plays in the productive process with social
division oflabor. The self-managing enterprise created in each Experimental Workshop will itself provide
for the most urgent needs for production-related technical training. More intensive and permanent training
emerges from the way itself, the multiple production and service provision activities organized during the
15 to 20 consecutive days the Workshop lasts" (PROCCARA/INA 1976:4).
50 The 23 courses in that the Tampa6n directors chose included the following: health nursing, plumbing,
sewing, accountancy, carpentry, radio and television, general mechanics, adult literacy, veterinary sciences,
entymology, needlework, apiculture, electricity, cattle raising, brickwork, mechanics, baking, agriculture,
cooking, soldering, confectinary, tractor mechanics, and driving skills.
51 Though he never officially became president, Torrijos was the leading power in the government military
junta until 1981. The Constitution was rewritten during his reign, his clientelist use of jobs at public
institutions created a political class of loyalists, and hundreds of opponents were disappeared, tortured, or
exiled. Despite that, Torrijos demagogic populism and infrastructure project appealed to many.
52 Interestingly, the involvement of these international organizations had a greater effect than to give access
to capital or political opportunity, it also opened up to the program other unexpected advantages. The
FAO's involvement, for example, was part ofa different scheme by the national director of PROGEl, who
managed to bypass the money devaluations that Brazil was experiencing at a rate of about twenty percent a
month by transferring the government funds to the FAO, and because it was international agency it was
able to 'dollarize' those so that they would not lose their value. This allowed PROGEI to draw on
uninterrupted financial support.
53 The Paraiba PROGEI was the largest of these field laboratories, with more than four thousand people
participating in thirty different courses in semi-professional training. Interestingly, many of its participants
were not content with the modest goal of forming micro-enterprises in the informal economy and so pooled
their resources to form much larger community enterprises that would go on to be notable successes.
Elsewhere, such as in the Alagoas PROGEI in 1995, de Morais claimed that the workshops "covered 90 per
cent ofthe municipalities of the state of Alagoas and helped considerably in reducing the grave financial
situation that has held down this poor state in Brazil's Nordeste for so long" (2000: 177)-an exciting claim,
but unfortunately one with no specifics to back it up.
54 The officials who co-op members chose to be members of the junta directiva in this initial stage tended to
have educational or professional work experience. Joaquina, because she had experience as a lawyer, was
elected president. Swanny, a woman in her twenties who had some college education but had been unable
to continue due to finances, was elected vice-president. And Vilma, who had a degree in accounting, was
the logical choice for secretary/treasurer. Three "vocales" were also elected, Juana, Maria, and Veronica,
whose responsibility was to maintain vigilantly the democratic process within the group.
55 Spanish collective nouns are typically masculine when they contain one male subjects, even if there are
fifty females. I choose to use the term socias because cooperative members refer to their collectivity in
such terms.
56 U.S. Federal Reserve interest rates dropped to below 0.25% during this time period, and one effect of
interest rates decreases is that money is less of a means to preserve wealth over the long term. Thus, people
have tended to invest in food commodities, which may, and which causes an increase in demand and
therefore price.
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57 According to Civil Coordinator economist Adolfo Acevedo, the cumulative inflation rate for food since
Ortega took office in 2007 is 39%. Between September of2007 and July of2008, the price ofrice
increased 40.8%, oil 66%, bread 43%, beans 33%, and milk 33%. This is of course exacerbated by the fact
that wages have not been adjusted concomitantly (Envio 2008)
58 At the end of2005 the price of a food basket made up of a collection of25 basic food items was 2,700
cordobas, or 135 dollars, per month (BCN 2005). In March of2008 it was 8,000 cordobas, or 400 dollars
(BCN 2008). In January of2009, it rose to 8,700 cordobas (MITRAB 2009). Thus, as the Instituto
Nicaragilense de Seguridad Social (INSS) estimates, an average Nicaraguan family in 2008 was capable of
procuring about a 26 percent of the basic food basket, compared to in 2001 when their incomes covered
about 70 percent (. This change becomes even more dramatic when it comes to light that only 80 thousand
wage earners of the 3.5 million people of working age people in Nicaragua are registered with the INSS.
59 Ortner (1989) developed a parallel idea that she terms "cultural schemes." Key scenarios/cultural
schemes are:
preorganized schemes of action, symbolic programs for the staging and playing out of standard social
interactions in a particular culture...every culture contains not just bundles of symbols, and not even
just bundles of larger propositions about the universe ("ideologies"), but organied schemas for enacting
(culturally typical) relations and situations. [1989:60]
60 In fact, by doing so, Durkheim constructs a kind of unidirectional causal link between instituted morality
and psychology, completely absent of any putatively "outside" influences on human behavior, such as the
materiality of existence (Hagens 2006). In a critical introduction to Durkheim's Sociology and Philosophy
(1967), Adorno presents a critique of the concept of collective conscience that may be more broadly applied
to the idea of consciousness in general. Rather than a loyal and explanatory introduction, Adorno argues
that, by treating morality as a 'social fact,' by situating morality within the state and thus opposite or above
individuals, imposing its moral force on them, Durkheim's moral thought amounts to an apology for the
predominant state of the social. Conferring a "status of mere atoms" upon individuals, that is, Durkheim's
presupposition of the social as the condition of possibility for normative obligatory morality hypostatizes
the rupture between the individual and the social and makes it into law (Adorno 1995:278). While the
rupture does in many ways exist, it also forecloses on the possibility that social reality could be different
from what it already is. According to Adorno, Durkheim's moral thought lacks "criteria to distinguish
between what a society truly is and what it believes itself to be" (1995:247). Moreover, Durkheim
"replaces the objectivity of principal societal life processes with the objectivity of conscience
collective" (1995:247). In response, Adorno finds Marx's conceptions of sociality as 'second nature' and
'continued natural history' useful. These concepts describe how society's individuals have a tendency to
acquire the given social reality as an immutable entity with inherent laws, such that society's individuals
transform so that they are no longer able to imagine any other reality than the one characterized by the
political economic system of capitalism
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CHAPTER VI
FAIR TRADE AND TRANSLATION
How 'fair' is fair trade? Is fair trade really a democratic, participatory, and
equitable solution to conventional trade? By what standard should one measure the
inclusion of producers, especially, in decision-making, their participation alongside other
groups, or the equity of their interactions? In sheer terms of profit relative to the
conventional market? The 'balance' of profit distribution with fair trade retailers? Or
should fairness, which is ultimately a matter of power, be expanded to account for other,
non-economic dimensions?
In this chapter I want to engage these questions by unpacking the concept of
"participation" among Genesis socias in the early stages ofthe cooperative's
construction. On a fundamental level, participation reflects upon the division of labor
among the various groups involved in the project-the NGO, the retailer, and Genesis
socias-as well as the definition of their roles with respect to the others. While that
division of labor links these groups under the heading of a common project, that is to say,
in ascribing certain tasks and defining certain areas of expertise, it also delimits each
group's capacity to shape various aspects of the project and the policies, practices, and
objectives that drive it. Moreover, the division of labor is matched by a division of
knowledge, particularly about the fair trade movement. The first part of this chapter
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therefore seeks to assess the participation of Genesis socias by examining their
knowledge about the broader fair trade movement: What is the purpose of fair trade
according to these producers? How is fair trade organized? And who are the fair trade
consumers?
An analysis of the relative participation of these fair trade groups, particularly the
degree of shared decision-making power, administrative control, and producers'
knowledge of fair trading strategies, gives critical insight into the wholly unfair aspects of
the movement while at the same time clearing space for understanding how it may be
made more democratic, more participatory, and more equitable. If the division of labor
and knowledge in fair trade is, in reality, characterized by a high degree of social
inequality, empowering NGOs and fair trade retailers to define policy, to direct on-the-
ground practices, and to represent producers while at the same time relegating producers
themselves to commodity production as "passive suppliers of product" (Utting-Chamorro
2005; Paul 2005:135; Blowfie1d 2004:78), the second question I want to pose in this
chapter is, how can producers become active participants in the construction of "fairer"
trade, as it were?
One area of improvement for fair trade is in the politics of representation of
producers. It is well documented that fair trade advertising schemes often attempt to 'lift
the veil' on production by presenting biographical information about producers and
producer communities (e.g. Fride1l2007; Waridel, Lappe, and Lappe 2002:27-31;
Raynolds 2002; Jaffee, Kloppenburg, and Monroy 2004; Zaccai' 2007; Hudson and
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Hudson 2003; Simpson and Rapone 2005:55; Lind and Barham 2004; Fisher 2007). Yet,
what has remained comparatively unexplored thus far is how fair trade advertising does
not simply "educate" consumers by providing them with disinterested knowledge about
production. Rather, given that the movement is very much a part of the advertising
spectacle of late capitalism, the distinction between fair trade and other marketing
strategies is often a bit indistinct. Fair trade advertising, as elsewhere in the advertising
world, is not a reflection of the conditions of production so much as a set of
representations that are actively constructed in order to manipulate desire, to appeal to a
person's political and social self-identity, and to generate an imaginary ethic of care
toward distant others (Raynolds 2002; Dolan 2005; Watson 2006; Shaw and Shiu 2002;
Dolan 2009; Carrier 1995; Friedman 1999). Contrary to the neoclassical theory in which
price mechanisms encapsulate all of the required information about a product (Wilkinson
1997), these extra-economic aspects of consumption have increasingly been recognized
as a key axis in current competitive strategies in the post-Fordist period (Harvey 1990).
In this sense, fair trade attempts to (re)connect producers and consumers economically,
politically, ethically, and psychologically. But, like all other forms of advertising, fair
trade is also semiotically constructed in order to traffic in specific "political ecological
imaginaries" and in order to facilitate for consumers a sense of "solidarity in
difference" (Goodman 2004:891). It is therefore important to understand the process by
which those representations are constructed. In pairing testimonies with colorful
photographs, how (and by whom) are choices regarding representation made?
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In the second half of this chapter, I attempt to destabilize the received image of
fair trade and to highlight the politics of representation in fair trade advertising by
drawing on an account of socias' and my attempts to create a collaboratively produced
website. Emerging from the recognition that, within fair trade's established division of
labor, advertising often reflects the aesthetic and ideological choices of Northerners
rather than producers themselves, the original goal of the collaboratively produced
website-with photos, quotations, and narratives generated, selected, and arranged by
socias themselves-was to clear space for greater power of self-representation among
producers. This is, however, not really what happen in the end. Claiming expertise in the
master logic of marketability, CSD (with the input of Clean Clothes) ultimately had the
final say in choices regarding translating, editing, and arranging the website, which,
conceptually speaking, had the effect of "filtering" the socias choices according to the
NGO's ideologies of acceptability (eliminating what they perceived to be "negative"
content) as well as their pre-conceptions about what is appealing to potential donors and
consumers. An analysis of the disciplinary power involved in the molding and shaping
this fair trade "text," as it were, sheds light on the persisting disjuncture between fair
trade production and consumption.
SOLIDARITY WITH WHOM? FAIR TRADE KNOWLEDGE AND POWER
In fair trade research inequality has recently come into sharp focus as structuring
on a very fundamental level the relationships between various groups, especially in terms
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of the distribution of profits (Murray and Raynolds 2000; Raynolds 2002; Renard 2003;
Lyon 2006). What has received much less attention, yet is in many cases more directly
related to the relative empowerment or disempowerment of fair trade producers, is how,
completely apart from profits, their participation in the broader movement is also
structured by inequality. While participation presupposes some degree of membership in
a political community, that is to say, social division of labor may at the same time limit
the abilities of certain groups to influence the political process. In this way, participation,
like wealth, is structured by basic inequalities. And like wealth, inequalities of
participation may manifest in terms of access to decision-making apparatuses,
administrative control, and, perhaps at an even more fundamental level, knowledge about
the conditions of one's actions. In his foundational book on the sociology of knowledge,
Ideology and Utopia (1936), Karl Mannheim illuminates the close relationship between
knowledge systems (particularly scientific knowledge) and the social conditions in which
they emerge. Because knowledge, he argues, is inseparably intertwined with activity and
influences one's participation in "the life of society" (Mannheim 1936:xxix), it stands to
reason that the relative distribution of knowledge, as it were, is directly related to the
relative distribution of power. So too in fair trade. Knowledge and information are
important determinants of power, and the party who is thought to hold more knowledge
and information tends to hold more power as well.
Ethnographically speaking, one way of measuring producers' participation and
empowerment in fair trade is to examine producers' knowledge of fair trade. As Gereffi
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(1994) argues, there are two major types of commodity chains: (1) those which are
'producer driven' (such as automobiles) where the concentration of capital and
proprietary knowledge in production allows producers to dominate the industry and (2)
those which are 'buyer driven' (such as garments) where brand-name distributors
dominate the chain via their control over the design process and market access.
Mounting evidence suggests that fair trade falls into the latter (Dolan and Humphrey
2000; Gibbon 2001; Ponte 2002). While fair trade is in most cases a better option for
producers than conventional trade, that is, this does not mean that producers have
available to them knowledge about the market's inner workings, its purpose, or the
people that it claims to connect in relationships of fairness and solidarity.
As Shreck (2003) points out in a study of small-scale banana production in the
Dominican Republic, access to export markets was one of the principal benefits of fair
trade certification, though at the same, producers really share an unambiguous
commitment to supplying any export market, fair or conventional. In fact, even the
banana producers from certified fair trade associations have a very limited level of
understanding about fair trade (c.f. Tallontire 2000). According to Shreck (2003),
although slightly more than three-quarters of the producers interviewed were listed as
members of the fair trade-certified associations, only half identified themselves as fair
trade farmers. When asked more specifically about the fair trade initiative, such as its
benefits and how it worked, even these producers demonstrated only an elementary and
partial understanding. Producers often mentioned that they knew there was something
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called "fair trade" (comercio justo) market, but they could not elaborate what that meant.
One producer responded: "Max Havelaar [the name of the fair trade organization that
worked with these farmers originally] is a guy form Europe and he likes us small farmers,
and so he buys our bananas." Significantly, none of the producers in Shreck's (2003)
sample knew what the minimum prices guaranteed by the FLO were, how they were
determined, or other regulations that the FLO put in place, such as the required long-term
commitment with fair trade partners. Lyon's (2006) research in Guatemala shows similar
results. While almost all cooperative members interviewed could articulate the inequities
they faced in global agricultural commodity markets, only three out of 53 surveyed were
familiar with the term/air trade, instead understanding the arrangement in terms of
"market access" (c.f. Tallantoire 2000:175) or international aid (Shreck 2002). This lack
of information regarding the role they play in fair trade networks, Lyon (2006)
summarizes, is symptomatic of the international fair trade structure in which producers
have limited decision-making power and administrative control (Renard 2003). It also
lessens fair trade's ability to capture the priorities and values of its intended beneficiaries
(Blowfield 2004:78).
In January of2008, in the aftermath of the Genesis OW and as the consequences
of rising food prices were beginning to manifest in the cooperative, I conducted a similar
series of individual and group interviews in order to determine what level of knowledge
Genesis socias had of comercio justo at this very formative stage in their project. Though
socias generally understood themselves to be the intended financial beneficiaries of the
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project-which is, of course, in sharp contrast to the socias of The Fair Trade Zone in
which it was commonly stated that others were profiting from the workers' labor-they
also understood their future roles as almost entirely limited to commodity production.
Their limited knowledge of the immediate circumstances of the network as well as the
broader fair trade initiative-insofar as knowledge is something of a precondition of
power at the same time that it is itself conditioned upon power- reinforces that
perspective that producers are relatively disenfranchised from apparatuses of control. In
a survey of forty Genesis socias, while all socias identified CSD as a source of financial
and legal support, only two people (the president and the treasurer) were able to identifY
the main client organization (Clean Clothes) with which their cooperative would
eventually work. Five of forty cooperative members identified "comercio justo" as the
intended market of the spinning plant, six others identified variations on that term such as
cadena limpia (clean production chain), and the remaining 29 were unfamiliar with the
term. And while all members expressed ideas about what "fair" trade and "dignified"
work (trabajo digno) meant in their own philosophies and in the context oftheir own
lives, no cooperative members recognized that fair trade was an initiative that, in other
contexts such as coffee production, involved certification organizations and regulations
regarding the relationships between producers, distributors, and retailers. In a group
interview in early February 2008, I asked socias what kind of people they imagined
typically bought fair trade merchandise. After a long pause, one socia came forward and
speculated that fair trade consumers were likely "poor people like us who want to
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purchase a high quality product at a low price." Several other socias confirmed this
impression and proceeded to suggest that the goal of fair trade was to connect producers
with people who could not afford the high prices, especially for clothes, that corporations
typically charged. In that way, fair trade enabled the poor to be in solidarity with one
another and to essentially bypass the exploitative tactics of capitalismo salvaje (savage
capitalism).
Unwilling to speculate any further, socias then asked me about my own
understanding of fair trade and my own impression of fair trade consumers. To socias'
great surprise, I explained that fair trade typically connects upscale markets in the U.S.,
Canada, and industrialized European countries with "underdeveloped" countries. And
instead of catering to poor people, fair trade instead markets toward "socially conscious"
activists and well to-do consumers who can afford to pay an above-market premium for
the goods. It is perhaps needless to say that the discussion that ensued touched off a
debate that lasted on and off for the next several months.
While the various ins and outs of the organization of fair trade, its certification
strategies, and its general price structure provided a constant source of confusion, it was
instead socias imaginings of (or rather, imaginary relationships with) consumers that
evoked the most charged responses. Over those months, socias pressed me for details
about these fair trade consumers, and as a long-time fair trade consumer myself, I
explained the best I could the various motivations for buying fair trade, including the
wish to express solidarity by "voting" with one's dollar. As time passed, discussions
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morphed into discussions about what fair trade should be, such as the widely agreed upon
notion it would be better to allow people to support themselves, instead of making them
depend on "charity" (caridad) from the wealthy class. For Adelina, in particular, the fact
that fair trade was not really about solidarity but rather charity was offensive:
Rich people discriminate against you, even if you are middle-class, neither poor
nor rich ...The way that they interact with you, they refuse to talk to you ...they
drink purified bottled water, they wipe their hands on their shirts after they shake
yours, and they act like they have to protect their wallet when they're around you.
They put up a wall between you and them, and they look down on you .. .Then,
they say they pity you and that they want to help you.
While most socias did not share her position and argued at length with her about it, they
nevertheless agreed that fair trade could not really be about solidarity.
In a conversation with Hernan one late February afternoon, for example, I was
explaining the feeling of solidarity that consumers might feel by choosing to support a
fair trade business rather than a conventional one when Hernan interjected. "That's not
solidarity," he said:
Solidarity is not a one way street, it goes two ways .. You express solidarity, and
others express it back. For a person to have solidarity in the heart, truly, he has to
have something at stake as welL.because your liberation is bound up together.
Taken aback by the frankness of his statement, I grinned ironically: "Are you saying that
you don't feel solidarity with those people, those fair trade consumers in the United
States?" Hernan grinned back: "How could we when we do not even know who they
are? They know so much about us, but we know nothing about them!" Ifhaving
something at stake, in his terms-or one might even say, risking something-is a
criterion for solidarity, then surely fair trade consumers, from producers points of view at
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least, could not be said to be risking much or expressing much solidarity at all. Hernan
later explained, "I've known people to risk their jobs, even their lives, in order to express
solidarity with workers unions ... Giving somebody some money when they need it...is not
solidarity.. .it's charity."
While fair trade consumers often express feelings of ethical connection with fair
trade producers-an imaginary connection that sometimes may even motivate them to
makethe purchase-the reverse is not true at all. The economy of fair trade knowledge is
structured by a very basic inequality such that, while consumers may feel like they know
a tremendous amount about producers and may even feel that exchange is an act of
compassion and care (Dolan 2008), producers know almost nothing in return. Instead,
from producers' points of view, it would seem that the market continues to be an
anonymous space, little different from conventional trade apart from the relative
economic benefits (e.g. Jaffee 2006). Perhaps even more generally, while fair trade
occupies an increasing amount of "shelf space," as it were, in the consumption patterns of
the United States, Canada, and Europe, it continues to be relatively unlmown among
producers. The reason for this is clear: fair trade is a "buyer-driven" market in terms of
price as it is a buyer-driven market in terms of participation (Garaffi 1994).
THE COLLABORATION
One morning in March of 2008, I had just found my gloves and shovel and was
about to start another day's work with the Genesis socias in the ongoing project of
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digging the foundation for the factory when a group from the junta directiva approached
me. Having just left a meeting in CSD's main office, they had just been petitioned to
collect information for a new website for the cooperative and, not knowing where to
begin, they wanted my help. "You aren't very good at construction anyways," pleaded
Maria. Perhaps reacting to the look of surprise and, later, indignity (I had imagined
myself as at least keeping pace), she continued, "Don't worry, you're good at other
things, and that's what we need right now....We've got enough work hands, we need
someone who likes to write things down, and, of all of us here, that's you."
Of course, once the idea sunk in I eagerly agreed and was intrigued by what the
process of building a website from beginning to end, selecting photos, constructing
individual and group portraits, and generally telling the story of the Genesis cooperative
could tell me about the politics of representation in fair trade. There was, of course,
already a great deal of advertising for the cooperative that had already been produced by
CSD and Clean Clothes as part of a recent donation drive, called "Making Stone Soup
with Genesis," that they had staged in order to continue to fund the project in the now
officially "recessed" economy. Given that the drive had worked, CSD obviously knew
something about telling the story of Genesis in an appealing way to their network of
supporters. On the other hand, however, those were pamphlets and fliers constructed
from beginning to end by CSD. I pondered, what would a website look like if Genesis
socias had free reign to tell their own story in their own terms? How would they choose
316
to represent themselves individually and as a group to the "conscientious consumers" that
we had been talking about over the past month and a half?
Eager to pursue a "collaborative" research project that took into account the
interests, questions, and concerns of research participants as well (e.g. Lassiter 2005;
Tuhiwa Smith 1999), I returned to the junta directiva later that week and asked them to
volunteer a few people with whom I could form a comite (committee) charged with the
collective task of building the website in the manner in which socias saw fit. As a group,
I imagined, we could engage in a real dialogue about how socias wanted to represent
Genesis and themselves. And as a dialogue, the resulting self-representation would not
only have the potential to expand socias' heretofore limited participation in fair trade, it
would also more fully and more faithfully realize the educational "consciousness-raising"
concerning the lives of poor and working class that fair trade often espoused.
Over the next three months, our website committee held weekly meetings in a
small, cement-walled annex to CSD's main office that the NGO had set aside for us.
Gradually, we sketched out a basic framework and defined five different areas to cover,
each corresponding more or less to a "tab" on the site:
(1) Nuestra Historia (Our History)
(2) Cooperativa Genesis (the Genesis cooperative)
(3) ;,D6nde estamos? (Where are we?)
(4) ;,Que es una cooperativa? (What is a cooperative?)
(5) Perfiles de Soci@s (Profiles of Cooperative Members)
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We spent the first two weeks identifying strategies for staging new photos or collecting
old ones, for gathering information, and for organizing that information.
The first, "Our History," came perhaps the slowest. Little by little, in these
meetings, the committee reconstructed a timeline of events, referring back to CSD staff
and other cooperative members when in doubt. The narrative started with the initial
organization meetings of the co-op in 2006, including the election of the initial junta
directiva, then moved on to the initial phases of the construction process in February of
2007, much of which I recounted in Chapter V. CSD provided us with their database of
digital photographs, which documented the multiple stages of the construction and the
skeleton of the facility slowly taking shape as well as others that depicted organizational
meetings with CSD, within the junta directiva, and in the general assembly. As other
socias continued to work outside, the website committee poured over photo after photo, a
process which triggered powerful memories about their experiences clearing the land
with machetes, transporting sand from Trinidad Central, mixing cement, working with the
block-making machine. Meanwhile, with fleshing out a timeline of "Our History" with
experiences of socias, I took detailed notes. The committee remembered their own
hardships, but also recalled some of the more cheerful moments and the generous support
that they received from CSD, including the support that the NGO had in tum organized
for them from the Interamerican Development Bank (BID) in the form of a training
session in financial accounting. When it came to the topic of the OW in October of2007,
committee members willing detailed the conflicts that arose, the hardship and damage
318
that the conflict caused within the cooperative, as well as the lessons learned about
working together with respect and keeping moving forward. "We've always tried to
make democracy a foundation of our business," explains Hernan, "and this has been as
difficult a process as pouring the foundation, the concrete foundation, itself." Debating
over aesthetic issues as well as the relevance of content, the committee eventually
decided upon three photos to demonstrate the progress of the facility's construction
(Figure 1, Figure 2, and Figure 3), one depicting the momentous occasion of signing of
the Acta Constitutiva (Figure 4) as well as three more photos of organizational meetings
at various stages (Figure 5, Figure 6, and Figure 7). It was one Friday afternoon as we
were sitting in our blue plastic chairs in the annex reflecting on the problems of the OW,
Maria suddenly announced that she had decided what the slogan should be: "La
solidaridad es nuesfrajuerza, y ella nos llevara" (Solidarity is our strength, and it will
raise us up). It was taken to a vote the following week at a general assembly meeting and
the motion passed.
After a few weeks and with my prodding (sadly, my own departure date was
quickly arriving in June), we began to move forward with other sections. For those
entitled "The Genesis Cooperative" and "What is a Cooperative?" the committee, to my
surprise, decided to outline the constitution of the cooperative in their own terms. We
outlined-in what was sometimes, admittedly, painful detail-the fundamental tenets of
cooperative organization, the requirements for becoming a socia, the rights and
obligations involved in being a socia, the regulations regarding work in the cooperative,
Figure 1: Clearing the land
Figure 2: Beginning the roof
319
320
Figure 3: The cotton gin
Figure 4: Signing the Acta Constitutiva
Figure 5: An early organizational meeting with CSD
Figure 6: Ajunta directiva meeting
321
322
Figure 7: A general assembly meeting
and the organization of the administration and direction of the cooperative. Our notes,
not surprisingly, looked like sections from the cooperative's constitution because it was,
in fact, that document that we poured over and were attempting to summarize. Though
my patience oftentimes wore thin, I tried my best to keep an open mind to the detail-
oriented nature of this exercise. I finally pulled aside Joaquina one day and posed the
question that had for weeks been on my mind: "Why is it necessary to tell donors or
clients or whoever about the legal structure of the co-op? Do you think that they need to
hear about that? Shouldn't we spend our time on something else?" Joaquina responded,
"Mi hijo, people need to know that we are professionals. Why would you want to do
business with a group of people who are unprofessional?" She pointed in the direction of
The Fair Trade Zone, ";,Sabes? You were over there with us at that meeting with la
fundaci6n [CSD] and la zona [The Fair Trade Zone]."
In May we eventually reached the third section, "Where are weT', the website
committee decided to leave our cramped office space and conduct something of a
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demographic survey of the cooperative. Each of us took a segment of the group and, as
the other socias continued to work digging the foundation, we collected basic
information, such as age, family size, and the barrios (neighborhoods) of Ciudad Sandino
socias hailed from. Several months previous, I had held an interview with the mayor of
Ciudad Sandino, Raymundo Flores, had been given a packet of information regarding the
city, including unemployment and poverty rates, maps, and other data. I gladly
contributed these resources to the committee, who decided it would be best to start with a
map of Ciudad Sandino in relation to Managua (Figure 8), move on to a map of the
various barrios of Ciudad Sandino (Figure 9), describing the differences between each
barrio from which socias hailed, and summarize the basic demographic information of
the cooperative in relation to the city:
Genesis Demogravhics:
• 40 women, 6 men
• ages between 21 and 69
• Average family income of
approximately $200/month before
entering the cooperative
Ciudad Sandino Demogravhics
• 61.5% women, 38.5% men
• 48% below 24 years of age
• Average family income of
approximately $15O/month
I contributed some disposable cameras that I had brought with me, and committee
members took photos of these barrios on their walk home (Figure 10, Figure 11, Figure
12, and Figure 13) as well as the new Cone Denim free trade zone, a building the size of
about 16 football fields, that was built in 2007 at the cost of about $100 million
(including the cost of a four lane concrete highway) but, notably, went out ofbusiness
S.Il.,....,d.1a
··"-Pall'~
LeguM 11$ Apc)yeQuo
fXn~)
LAGO DE
MANAGUA
.'
..
~:
INIFOM
324
Figure 8: Map ofCiudad Sandino in relation to Managua
Figure 9: Map ofCiudad Sandino
325
during the economic crisis of 2008, leaving 800 workers unemployed (Figure 14).
At the same time, the website committee also started work on the "Profiles"
section, for which socias also played around with the idea of naming it Testimonios
(Testimonies). The basic idea of having individual profiles was to allow socias to tell
something about themselves as individuals and their stories of coming to and working in
the cooperative. We printed out sheets of paper for each socia and asked them to answer
the five questions that the committee determined to be most important them: (l)
Birthplace and family life, (2) work history and education, (3) how and why they joined
the Genesis cooperative, (4) what they have learned while working in the cooperative,
and (5) what they hope to achieve by working in the cooperative. In order to connect
these stories to faces, the committee then decided to borrow a digital camera from CSD to
take "profile" photographs for each person. For those few who were were not able write,
committee members asked the questions verbally and transcribed their responses. Socias
were excited about the prospect of having their faces on a website, and so within a week
all 46 returned their sheets completed. A selection of their responses is available in the
Appendix.
THE WEBSITE GOES UP
By the time that profiles were returned and our website committee managed to
compile all of the information that we had collected about the cooperative's history, about
Ciudad Sandino, and about individual socias and their profiles, it was already early June
326
Figure 10: Photo o/Zona 8, Barrio Bello Cruz, originally built between 1972-1979
Figure 11: Photo o/typical house in Nueva Vida, Ciudad Sandino, built after Hurricane
Mitch in 1998
327
Figure 12: Photo ofhouses near Mosatepe, originally built between 1989-1997
Figure 13: Photo ofa house in Villa Soberana, a new development built between 2004-05
328
Figure 14: Photo ofa the Cone Denimfacility near Villa Soberana, a registered/Tee
trade zone in the production ofLevi Strauss jeans.
and I had only two weeks left before my field season came to an end. It was, to say the
least, a chaotic time, in which I could barely manage to organize my own things, let alone
keep up with website business. I eventually handed over the project to the rest of the
website committee, recognizing that no one really had any expertise in writing website
code, and returned to Oregon.
Two months later, I learned that the socias eventually turned the information we
collected over to CSD, who had a person on staff, Melissa, who was willing to translate
the material to English and to put it up on the NGO's own web domain. When the
website was up, it became very clear that the task of "translation" meant not merely a
matter of turning Spanish into English. As Melissa explained, there are some things that
make sense in Spanish that do not make sense in English, and there are some things that
make sense for socias to say that do not make sense for donors in the U.S. to hear. "The
idea," she continued, " is not to alienate people, but to draw them into a relationship with
one another." What Melissa is recognizing in a way is that, beyond the matter of
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language itself, translation is also a matter of "language ideologies." As Schieffelin ct al.
(1998) explain, language ideologies are cultural representations, whether explicit or
implicit, that exist in the intersection of language and human beings in the social world
and link language to identity, power, aesthetics, morality and epistemology. The idea that
certain sentiments can be expressed in one language but not another, that is, is based on a
model ofthat language. At the same time, languages also playa central role in the
functioning of power such as in schooling, law, and mass media. Thus, the task of
translating language is also a task of translating social events, representations, and actors
into their appropriate categories and roles. Moreover, as Bourdieu (1977) argues,
language is not merely about the communication of ideas, but may also have a role in
affecting the distribution of material capital. For example, as Bourdieu points out, in
Western European contexts, those who speak the standard dialect of their national
language will be able to get higher-paying jobs than those who do not speak it. Language
is thus integrated into a kind of linguistic market, where it has currency and receives
certain values depending on the particular market (i.e. context) in which it is offered.
Within speech communities, this linguistic capital depends heavily on the competence of
the speaking, and, by the same token in the case of translation, that capital depends
heavily on the marketability, as it were, of statements according to the recipient's
expectations and desires. In the case of the Genesis website, the subtraction, addition,
and modification involved in translation, as Melissa understands it, is not to change the
330
words or even their meanings but rather to shape a portrait of the cooperative according
to how CSD believes it should be received by potential donors or clients.
Although for this reason it is very much impossible to register and analyze all of
the changes that CSD made, I nevertheless want to point out some of the specific choices
that Melissa made because doing so illuminates the "marketing logic" involved in the
politics of representation in fair trade. Some choices, in fact, were not about modifying
or eliminating information at all, but rather emphasizing relative importance. For
example, in the narrative about the History of the Cooperative that the website committee
had first constructed, Melissa chose to expand upon socias' mention of the contributions
ofdonors and of international delegations in making the cooperative a reality. To the
committee's text, she added a photo of socias working alongside an international
delegation from the United States. (see Figure 15) as well as the following text:
The last two years working with the Genesis project have been a real faith
journey. We started the co-op with no funding for the building or machinery at
all. We just knew that this project had to happen and that we would find the
money somehow. We have not been disappointed. Over time, the money has
trickled in, mostly from individual donors. The cooperative is where it is today
because of the investments of people from all over who have come together for
this cause. To date, we've invested more than $130 thousand in the building, but
we're not done yet. We are lacking $100 thousand, and we need the continued
support.
I talked with Melissa about her choice to amp the presence of donors up, and she told me
that "donors like to hear that their money is actually making a real difference ...That's why
they donate and why they continue to donate." The added description of international
delegations from churches and universities in the United States, by the same logic,
331
provide readers with an example of people "doing good" and "getting dirty" with socias,
showing that solidarity is indeed within the reach of people like the readers. At the same
time, Melissa continued, it is also important to emphasize the hard work of cooperative
members themselves. "It's not surprising that many people in the U.S. perceive Latinos
to be lazy," said Melissa, "and so we have to be careful to emphasize the sweat of
cooperative members, too, in order to show that their contributions are being matched by
hard work on the other end." It was for that reason, it would seem, that Melissa also
chose to rhetorically embellish upon the conditions of socias' manual labor in the early
stages, while at the same time de-emphasizing immaterial, organizational labor.
Melissa additionally decided to change the website's representation of Ciudad
Sandino, claiming that donors are not likely to care very much about the relatively minor
details of different barrios. She therefore replaced the maps of Ciudad Sandino with a
single map ofNicaragua (Figure 16) and many of the photos of various kinds of Ciudad
Sandino housing taken by the website committee with images that CSD had used
previously in presentations to donors (see Figure 17, Figure 18, Figure 19, Figure 20).
"Nicaragua is a place of contrasts," explained Melissa, "of startling differences between
rich and poor and of beauty and ugliness."
Melissa's "cultural translation" also involved the suppression of certain kinds of
information that she perceived to be damaging to the relationship that she was trying to
construct between the cooperative and potential donors. Thus, with respect to the profiles
section-which was otherwise left untouched-Melissa chose to remove what could
Figure 15: Volunteers working with losetas on the outer wall ofthe Genesis facility.
Figure 16: Map ofNicaragua appearing on Genesis website
332
Figure 17: Photo ofLake Managua
Figure 18: Photo ofburning trash in Nueva Vida
333
Figure 19: Photo ofcoastal resort
334
Figure 20: Photo ofNueva Vida in 1998, shortly after Hurricane Mitch
335
potentially be controversial information about, for example, a socia's participation in the
Contra war, support for the Sandinistas, a critical opinion about capitalism and the
imperialism of the U.S., as well as some images that simply did not make sense, like
mention of enduring hunger and "desnudez" (nudity) while working to build the
cooperative. When it came to the discussion of the dynamics of the cooperative itself,
likewise, what got the axe was almost all discussion of infrapolitics and conflict.
"Although conflicts and disagreements are of course the rule," explained Melissa,
"donors do not like to imagine that there is anything but solidarity between cooperative
members ....Quite frankly, they just don't understand that poor people also fight with one
another, they want to romanticize them and continue to think that they're somehow
nobler than us and don't suffer from the same problems that we do." She continued, "To
some extent, you know, you have to give them that because if you try to challenge their
opinions or preconceptions too much, they react poorly." This was particularly the case
with the events surrounding the OW. However much it was a reality and however much
socias claimed that the conflict resulted in a renewed sense of solidarity and
responsibility to one another, Melissa claimed, mention of fraud or theft from the
cooperative could easily sour donors on the idea of contributing because "all of a sudden
it becomes uncertain where their money is actually going."
336
CONCLUSIONS
Initially, I was upset at some ofthe changes that CSD made to the project that was
intended, at least in my view, to be an exercise in autonomous, self-representation for
socias. Melissa de-emphasizes conflict irked me in particular because it was so clearly, in
my observation, such a large part of the experience of fair trade and of being a
cooperative member. Eventually, however, once I had a frank discussion with Melissa
and also socias about this, it became clear that, although I had attributed self-
representation the highest of values in generating the idea of a collaborative project, it
was instead self-determination that socias were after. As it turns out, in fact, socias had
turned the project over to CSD with full knowledge that they would edit it and make it
palatable to donors.
With the publication of Luke Lassiter's The Chicago Guide to Collaborative
Ethnography (2005), collaboration has recently enjoyed an upsurge in anthropological
research. Collaborative ethnography, in particular, has marked an important shift in the
way in which scholars formulate research questions, position the researcher within the
investigative project, and define the relationship between researcher and "the
researched"-all questions that have typically been omitted from scholarly publication.
"Collaborative" research can thus be thought of in terms of a critical alternative to
underlying colonial assumptions of anthropologists as positivist, "knowledge-gatherers,"
as it were, framing ethnography instead as occurring "with" people rather than "on" them
or "about" them (Tuhiwa Smith 1999). Collaborative ethnography rejects the arrogance
337
of positioning the researcher as the only one capable of collaborating (i.e. participant-
observation), and instead argues that critical research practices should be conducted hand
in hand with research participants-from fieldwork to writing--and with a purpose of
bringing about positive change. As Luke Lassiter writes, collaborative ethnography is
designed to;
emphasize a more fully and critically conscious approach to the power relations
inherent in all ethnography. Anthropologists and other social scientists called into
question both the hegemony of Western-situated knowledge and the structures of
power that engender ethnography. In an effort to resolve this "crisis of
representation" feminist and postmodernists initiated a sustained critique of the
ethnographic practice itself-from fieldwork to writing that lasts to this day. The
critique and its implications for founding a reciprocal and collaborative
ethnography on intersubjective grounds serve as the contemporary context for the
building of a more deliberate and explicit collaborative ethnography-one that
seeks to more honestly grapple with the divisions between the Self and Other,
between object and subject, and between academic and community-based
knowledge, but also with the complexity of representing human experience in an
ever-changing postcolonial and postindustrial world. [2005 :48]
Of course, although Lassiter (2005) is right that the movement toward collaborative
ethnography in its current form was largely initiated by feminists and postmodernists, it is
also true that research "subjects," have also pushed back and critiqued researchers'
narrow, often unilaterally defined projects. While ethnographers, in particular, often find
themselves in the awkward position of going to the field with a research project in mind
when there quite clearly exists more pressing and more relevant information to expose, it
is usually the research participant who finds out ways to put ethnographers' skills to use.
Research participants often emphasize the need to affect social change in projects. In my
338
case, for example, socias approached me with the idea of building a website together,
rather than the other way around.
It was, however, my error to assume, rather myopically, that the major
contribution of such a collaborative project would be to the matter of self-representation
in the text. Following from the insights on ethnographic representation of pioneering
feminist anthropologists like Ruth Behar (1993) and June Nash (1979), who observed
that the collaborative production of ethnographic knowledge could be expressed by
breaking up the monophonic authority of the ethnographer with regular and lengthy
quotes, I sought to re-center socias' narratives of themselves by encouraging detailed
descriptions of conflict as well as solidarity, pessimism as well as optimism, and
individuality of socias as well as their commonalities. Moreover, by drawing on the
approach of the testimony and refusing to stage quotes as quotes in the website, to refuse
to "[confirm] the final virtuoso orchestration by a single author of all the discourses in his
or her text," as James Clifford writes, I sought to encourage "a more radical polyphony"
full of political, intentional, and metaphorical complexity (1988:50).
Even as critically engaged methodology, however, my underlying assumption was
that self-representation is some kind of transcendent good, when in reality what is of
much greater value to socias is self-determination: agency not simply in the realm of
one's representation of oneself to other people, but the ability to effect change in their
own lives. In this sense, the fact that, once I left, socias turned over all of the information
that we had collected and with the recognition, even the objective, that CSD would mold
339
it to their own purposes, can be seen as socias' understanding of the (economic) value of
strategic essentialism. Constructionists, of course, reject the idea that there is an essential
fact of existence that precedes social, economic, and political processes. The term
strategic essentialism, however, argues that there is no pure order or essence in what it
means to be human (or a specific kind of human) but, at the same time, recognizes that,
as a "rhetorical maneuver," essentialism nevertheless has its place (Fuss 1989; Spivak
1988). Strategic essentialism asserts that the use of essentialism for useful ends, as
opposed to strictly epistemological ends, depends on who is using it, how it is being used,
and to what purpose. Socias, in other words, saw the utility in playing to donors'
sympathies, expectations, and desires, as they also saw the utility of, in Turner's words,
the "Romance of otherness... [turning] to ethnic and cultural identity as a means of
mobilizing themselves [in this case, representation of themselves] for the defense of their
social and political-economic interests" (1993 :423). However socias might choose to
represent themselves, that is, the inevitable fact is that fair trade consumers, like donors
to fair trade projects, are frequently called to "ethical action" through demonstrations of
difference, as opposed to sameness, and always within the strict political, social, and
cultural limits of acceptability (Dolan 2005:370)
From the beginning, the language of "fair" is actually quite heteroglossic and
polyphonic, in the sense that it is characterized by the co-existence of sometimes
radically different meanings, ideologies, and experiences (e.g. Bakhtin 1981). But what
an analysis of the construction of fair trade advertising shows-perhaps even about fair
340
trade more broadly-is that, against these centrifugal forces of difference are ranged
centripetal forces that, through active repression or exclusion, create a single unified,
institutionalized discourse. 61 While these disciplinary effects may be realized on the
everyday level of a politics of translation (Hansen 2007), so too, as I have shown in
previous chapters, do they come to bear on the actions and ideas of socias through the
normalizing forces of persuasion and coercion. In the case of fair trade advertising,
however, the master logic continues to be marketability. While many are eager to show
this tendency to absorb cultural difference within specific frameworks-what Wilk calls
"structures of common difference" (1995: 111), in which exchange is encouraged to be
different but only in specific ways that do not challenge the basic structure of the market
-to be characteristic of the system of global capitalism on a systematic level, it is really
the demands of marketability and profitability that constrain the choices of individual
people. In fair trade, the way that this plays out for consumers is in the creation of a
perceived (imaginary) relationship of compassion, care, and solidarity with a not-too-
radically different other. For producers, on the other hand, there is no illusion of any such
thing, just a compromise for a marginally better outcome.
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NOTES
61 As Bakhtin writes, the novel, too, is heteroglossic: the style of a novel is to be found in the combination
of its styles...a diversity of social speech times (sometimes even a diversity of languages) and a diversity of
individual voices" (1981 :262). Bakhtin poses in the novel in contrast to poetry, in which the unity of style
and the unity of an individual person realizing himself in this language are prerequisite. In his work on
Rabelais, for example, Bakhtin 1984:42) shows a specific case ofheteroglossia between unofficial and
official cultures, represented by the folk and vulgar language on the one hand and the Latin and polished
language on the other. Heteroglossia breaks down the frontier between these two cultures. In carnival
heteroglossia sets free "forbidden" and comical meanings from the established dogma. Polyphony is not
synonymous with heteroglossia. Polyphony refers to the many-voicedness of texts in which characters and
narrator speak on equal terms. The narrator does not speak over the character's heads, giving the reader
privileged moral or physical information. The characters narrate themselves, and the narrator never knows
more than they do. The narrator is not obtrusive, omnicient, but rather one voice among other.
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CHAPTER VII
CONCLUSION: RE-VISIONING FAIR TRADE
It should come as no surprise that many ongoing debates about NGOs and
cooperatives parallel those about fair trade (Fride1l2006, Fisher 2007). Like NGOs,
which are often conceptualized as agents of neoliberalism in the context of disappearing
state-sponsored social welfare, and cooperatives, which have, conversely, been imagined
to be precursors to socialism, fair trade exists in contrast to mainstream, seemingly
coherent and self-contained "capitalism"-almost as if it needed an antithetical Other in
order to conjure itself into existence.
In many ways, in fact, that is precisely what fair trade marketing does, if not fair
trade itself: packaging draws sharp distinctions between an equally imaginary world of
cruel and anonymous exploitation and an alternative, imaginary world of solidarity and
partnership. Yet, once we move beyond fair trade's projected image of itself, empowered
by the advertising spectacle of late capitalism, the lived reality of fair trade is far more
complex. Fairness, likewise, once a straightforward matter of dividing up profits,
empowering the poor, and generally leveling the playing field, is shot through with all the
subtle cont1icts of ideological disjunctures, ofdifferent experiences of work and labor, of
unequal access to capital and political opportunity, of asymmetrical power, and of
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disparate concepts of social and economic justice. What an etlmographic approach to fair
trade production shows us, in other words, is that fair trade is not an alternative to the
conventional market economy and neither is it somehow enveloped by it. Rather, the
persisting metaphors of inside/outside the capitalist "system" obfuscate the greater point
that all economies, even market economies, are sustained by a range of (often conflictual)
processes as diverse and intensely variegated as the rest of social and cultural life. The
goal of this concluding chapter, then is to deconstruct the idea of the fair trade
"economy," as Gibson-Graham (1998, 2006) suggest, revealing the shifting yet
constitutive forms that give fair trade its purchase: human motivations apart from self-
interest, values apart from exchange value or use value, and the multiple plays of power
apart from domination and resistance that, as a whole, determine what is right, just, and
fair.
FAIR TRADE AND NEOLIBERALISM
Perhaps one of the most common academic debates regarding fair trade is the
extent to which fair trade either challenges or reproduces the structures of neoliberalism.
On the one hand, some scholars argue that alternative trading strategies like fair trade and
corporate social responsibility importantly shape neoliberal market structures, and their
success in doing so is in no small part due to the fact that they operate very much
"within" neoliberalism as opposed to against it (Taylor 2005). Fair trade, in particular,
functions variously to critique conventional production and consumption standards, to re-
344
embed commodity production and distribution in "equitable social relations" to
democratize international trade, to demystifY global relations of exchange, to challenge
market-based competitiveness based solely on price, and thus also to challenge the
anonymous capitalist relations that fuel exploitation (Grimes 2005, 2000, Raynolds
2000). Still others have extended the argument even further, suggesting that the semiotic
production of commodities that express ecological, social, or place-based values, such as
fair trade and organics, traffic in particular "political ecological imaginaries," even moral
economies, that facilitate a sense of solidarity in difference, upheld by a series of basic
principles about people's rights in trade (Goodman 2004, Simpson and Rapone 2000). In
other words, fair trade represents a form of resistance to neoliberalism in the Polanyian
sense of protecting land, natural resources, and labor from the ravages of the market.
On the other side of the debate, however, alternative trading strategies are seen as
functioning to extend the reach of neoliberallogics and practices. Julie Guthman (2007),
for example, ventures that voluntary food labels are part of the larger neoliberal trend to
decentralize the governance of market mechanisms while also allowing non-economic
ascriptions of cooperation, solidarity, or environmental responsibility to be valued and
traded in the global market (Fridell 2007). The standards that are developed in fair trade
and organics, that is to say, establish the boundaries of acceptable behavior and
implement specific structures of enforcement-a practice that does not challenge
neoliberalism so much as produce new modes of (neoliberal) governmentality that
essentially validate the absence of state control over the economy and locating regulatory
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mechanisms in the market (Mutersbaugh 2005). Indeed, Heynen and Robbins (2005)
note in their discussion of the neoliberalization of environmentalism that these strategies
are quite typical of neoliberal regulation. Market-based regulation is governed by
complex arrays of private, NGO, and multilateral entities, it attaches economic values to
ethical behaviors (creating markets where none existed before), and it often "devolves"
regulatory responsibility to consumers.
THE MORAL ECONOMY
The extent to which these debates about fair trade mirror the anthropological ideas
of the moral economy versus the market economy are striking. In economic
anthropology, it has been commonplace to embrace the methodological approach of
starting with non-economic norms and values as a way to re-vision economies as
essentially "submerged," in Polanyi's (1957) term, in social, political, and religious
contexts, rather than autonomous of them. Indeed, it is this imagination-that certain
economies exist apart from society while others that are intimately connected with
society-that gave birth to the idea of the moral economy (to be contrasted, of course,
with the market economy).
The notion of a moral economy reflects the works of Karl Polanyi (1957) and E.P.
Thompson (1971), and has often featured the extraordinary phenomenon of poor, pre-
market people contesting the dictates of a much more capitalist economic order (Scott
1976). While Polanyi (1957), on the one hand, contributed the distinction between
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embedded and autonomous economies-in which the former are typically ancient or
primitive and submerge production and transaction in social, political and religious
institutions, and the latter typify modern, impersonal markets and are conceptualized as
apart from society-Thompson (1971) popularized the term moral economy and
explained how and why the transition between the two often generate social and political
unrest, even sustained violence. Drawing on an extensive study of eighteenth-century
English food riots, Thompson discovers the "delicate tissue" of traditional norms and
reciprocities unable to accommodate the "cash-nexus" of the emerging market order
(1971 :78-9). The clash between the two worlds was often explosive, and those who were
at the mercy of the emerging market order often regarded the transition as unjust. 62
Generalizing from the particulars of the food riots, Thompson conceives moral economy,
at its most basic level, as a historically mediated popular consensus about the distinction
between legitimate from illegitimate practices (1971: 131-6).
In the long view, the prevailing idea of the moral economy can be said to have
emerged in the heat of a disagreement over the "economic" approach to human behavior,
particularly rational choice and related theories (Booth 1993:653). In response,
traditional moral economists have argued that the economic approach to economic
behavior fails to engage the many instances in which behavior is instead shaped by non-
economic institutions and values. This position led Scott, for example, to write about
peasants in early twentieth-century Burma and Vietnam in terms of the "the central fact
that the peasant is born into a society and culture that provide him a fund of moral values,
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a set of concrete social relationships, a pattern of expectations about the endeavors of
others, and a sense of how those in his culture have proceeded to similar goals in the
past" (1976: 166). Instead of a set of prefabricated assumptions about human beings as
atomistic and narrowly utilitarian, the more appropriate emphasis is upon the "structure
of a shared moral universe, a common notion of what is just" (1976: 167). Or in Hahn's
words, the moral economy concerns economic activity as it is woven into the "web of
sociallife.. .ideas about justice, independence, obligation, and other aspects of social and
political life, rooted in specific relationships and refracted through historical
experiences" (1983 :685).63
If the moral economist's critique of rational choice theory can be stated as an
opposition to an oversimplified understanding of individual human motivation, then the
reverse could be said as well. From the rational choice standpoint, the moral economist's
insistence on systems of cultural meaning reflects a misplaced concreteness that cannot
help but subsume individual motivation within it. The debate needs not end there,
however. As Granovetter (1985) points out, embeddedness-the "master
assumption" (Booth 1994:563) of moral economists-is in the end the degree to which
economic behavior is affected by or submerged in social relations. Yet, traditional moral
economists do not treat it in this way. For them, so deeply is economic behavior
embedded that "social relations" ultimately become what individuals think in economic
behavior, and think otherwise they cannot. The view of social relations presented by
moral economists, in other words, reflects not what actually happens between people, but
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is rather elevated to a concept so abstract that it becomes a kind of "generalized
morality," a widely shared set of "implicit agreements to certain kinds of regard for
others" (Granovetter 1985:489), thus losing sight of what actually happens. Generalized
moralities, however, are not social relations, because social relations involve a flux of
concrete and specific interpersonal ties that are "continuously constructed and
reconstructed during interaction" (1985:486). They are not fixed systems of norms and
values, internalized through socialization. If they were, behavior would be automatic,
even mechanical, making individual action or experience irrelevant to knowledge of the
structural whole.
In his account of ancient Greece, Booth (1994) shows how the moral economy
model may proceed differently, without having to abandon the central principle of
embeddedness in favor of self-interest and rational choice. According to Booth, the
"moral architecture" and economy of ancient Greece can be understood not in terms of
something that filters down into the behavior of individuals, but rather in the fundamental
"ends" and "values" of the primary economic unit, the household-what Arnold (2001),
drawing on Booth (1994), refers to elsewhere as "social goods." The household, Booth
argues, rests on careful, even rational calculations of utility. As such, the role of the wife
is to manage the servants and children, and the role of overseers is to discipline the
slaves. But the central issue for the master is how to motivate the wife and the overseer
to do his work efficiently (Booth 1994:659). However, in contrast to what we may
expect, the value of the master's efficiency is not in maximizing wealth. Rather, it is in
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maximizing his own leisure, the value of which is that it is a prerequisite for meaningful
participation in political affairs and, indeed, for a "good and beautiful life." The moral
architecture, in other words, may define the "ends" or "social goods" of economic
activities-in this case, "detachment from provisioning activities" (l994:660)-but it
does not structure the activities themselves. 64
The ethnographic approach can also be seen as a partial resolution to the conflicts
between the formalist and substantivist approaches. "Bracketing" general morality as
well as the model of the rational, fully informed individual-which is to say, suspending
belief in the taken for granted assumptions that elevate these things to the status of
universals-the phenomenology of labor, proceeding instead a subjective standpoint, is
capable of comprehending the cultural self-understandings of the actors themselves, their
sense of propriety, justice, obligation, and the like. At the same time, rooted in an
intersubjective framework that takes social relations not to be an objective matter at all,
but rather in constant, dialogic flux, economic action, including labor, is not unified by
anyone logic, but rather determined substantially by the concreteness of those
interactions. The concept of the moral economy has brought into sharp relief the
structural interrelationship between religious, political, social, and cultural institutions
and economic activity as well as the many possible culturally and historically mediated
ideas about what are legitimate and illegitimate economic practices. What it has often
missed, however, is that the morality is not general at all, it is constituted and
reconstituted by its lived engagement in concrete, social relations.
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FEMINIST ECONOMICS AND THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF FAIR TRADE
Similarly, common approaches to feminizing the economy have involved adding
in the heretofore ignored domestic sphere or sector, attributing value to women's unpaid
labor and recognizing the socially and culturally-mediated questions and concerns of
women in the "whole" economy. Much like the moral economy, the contribution of
feminist economics has thus been to challenge the distinction between the economic
(here, conceptualized as a male-dominated sphere) and the non-economic or domestic.
There exists a basic affinity between economic anthropology and not only moral
economy but also feminist economics. Taking the idea of economic activity to be not an
a priori matter of self-interest or structure but rather an empirical question about the
complex interrelationship between social, cultural, and moral concerns and the material
world-in its revised form significantly less distinguishable from non-economic activity
-economic anthropology and feminist economics both allow us to begin in the terra
firma of experience and pose important questions about the "ends" towards which
productive and consumptive activities are put.
The task of re-conceptualizing "fairness" in fair trade-of dignified work, of
motherwork, ofthe idea of balanced exchange (as opposed to the basic assumptions of
the business contract), of self-determination (as opposed to self-representation)-
demands just this kind of gendered analysis. As the cases of The Fair Trade Zone and
Genesis cooperatives show, there is no such thing as a "pure" economy-be that a free
market ruled by an invisible hand, a cooperative, or an entire "alternative" economy-
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liberated from abiding questions of inequality and injustice or the particularities of social
and cultural location. Gendered questions and concerns, in particular, have shaped
almost every aspect of the lived experience of work. As cooperatives, The Fair Trade
Zone and Genesis socias have fostered a generalized sense of respect, mutual
responsibility, and a democratic governing structure for determining who "counts" as a
member of the cooperative and what is considered to be action consistent with that
framework that reflects not only a class-based idea of common management and
cooperation but also the ideas, values, and goals of women and mothers-foremost
among them, the role of the hope-giver of the family and the goal of providing a future
for their children. At the same time, their ideas of solidarity and partnership in the
broader context of fair trade lay the groundwork for a critique of fair trade in terms of
"balance" as well as the fair and unfair use of power across social, cultural, and economic
difference.
With those realizations in mind, it is no longer possible to hold onto an idea of the
economy-even an alternative economy-that is so adamantine as to be indifferent to the
peculiarities of its instantiation. Indeed, only at great cost can we sustain the idea of the
economy as a subject unto itself, acting either in an inert field--expanding, contracting,
inflating, slowing down, speeding up, yet evacuated of the lives that charged it with
meaning. As Amartya Sen (1987) points out, one of the consequences of such the
"engineering tradition" of economics is the tendency to construct workers as cogs in a
machine, possessed of a certain kind of stupid contentment.
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Economic imaginaries have played powerful roles in all kinds of politics,
especially for those who are interested in constructing alternative futures--economies
devoid of exploitation, hierarchy and rank, economies based on principles of self-
sufficiency and sustainability, and economies of infinite growth--especially in opposition
to the apparent economic realities of capitalist industrialization. Yet, fair trade is neither
enveloped by the capitalist, market, or neoliberal system, nor an alternative to it, a form
of resistance to its domination. Rather, taking the principles of economic anthropology
and of feminist political economy as a starting point, fair trade can instead be understood
as a debate-a debate about what values matter in trade, understanding that exchange
value is not the only relevant one, and about what the purposes of labor or exchange or
consumption within the many possible interpretations of a good life. Goodness, like
fairness, however, is not a given, but rather contained within disparate as well as shared
frameworks of meaning, across which broader fields of power work. To think of fair
trade as an alternative economy is not only to overstate the consistency of its message in
critique of other forms of trade but also to miss the many ways it falls short of social
justice.
NOTES
62 The prevailing concept of the moral economy has, in fact, attempted to explain conflict and resistance.
Scott's (1976) analysis of peasant rebellions in early twentieth-century Burma and Vietnam depicts
peasants as rebelling out of their desire to resist intensifying European colonialism and to restore ancient
peasant ways and rights. Eric Wolf (1969:276) explains peasant wars in Cuba, Russia, China, Mexico, and
Algeria in similar terms, emphasizing the predatory nature and culturally disruptive effects of "North
Atlantic Capitalism."
353
63 From the other camp, the most common response has been that the norms and reciprocities of any given
moral economy are fundamentally reducible to the terms ofself-interested political economy. Popkin, for
instance, argues that "by applying theories of individual decision-making to villages, we can begin to
develop a deductive understanding of peasant institutions and move the analysis back one step to the level
of the individual. By using the concepts ofindividual choice and decision-making, we can discuss how and
why groups in individuals decide to adopt some sets of norms while rejecting others" (1979: 18).
64 In the study of inequality, a corollary to social goods can be found in Amartya Sen's (1995) concept of
"capabilities." What matters, in other words, is the "capabilities" or the "choice set" an individual faces,
not the choice he or she actually makes.
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APPENDIX: PROFILES OF GENESIS SOCIAS
LEIZA
Nacf en Telica en el municipio de Leon, soy segunda hija de cuatro hermanos, mi
padre era agricultor, cosechaba algodon y ajorljoli, mi madre era ama de casa. As mis
65 anos no he aprendido a leer ni escribier, pero es uno de mis objectivos. No aprendi a
leer porque mi padre murio y mi madre tuvo que trabajar en una comunidad muy remota,
la escuela quedaba a 10 kilometros de mi casa. Vine a Managua antes del terremoto del
1972, y me traslade al OPEN 3 (ahora Ciudad Sandino) posteriormente. Ahora tengo 65
anos de edady habito en la Zona 8 de Ciudad Sandino. Tengo seis hijos y soy soltera.
Yo me di cuenta de este proyecto por una vecina y vine a las reuniones que estaba
haciendo en CSD. Y me gusto la propuesta, de varias reuniones nos mostraron el terreno
donde trabajamos y me entusiasme aun mas con el proyecto. En este momenta la
cooperativa esta en marcha hemos hechos bloques, losetas, vigas de hierro. Ahora
estamos mas organizados, pero no siempre. Hemos tenido muchos problemas entre
nosotros, no siempre nos hemos conjiado. Hemos pasado tiempos muy dificiles pero
gracias aDios y nosotros 10 hemos superado.
355
I was born in Telica en the municipality ofLe6n, I'm the second daughter of four
siblings, my father was a farmer, he harvested cotton and sesame, and my other was a
homemaker. At 65 years old, I have not learned to read or write, but it is one of my goals.
I didn't learn to read because my father died and my mother had to work in a very remote
community where the school was 10 kilometers from my house. I came to Managua
before the 1972 earthquake, and I moved to OPEN 3 (now Ciudad Sandino) afterwards.
Now I am 65 years old and I live in Zone 8 of Ciudad Sandino. I have six children and I
am single.
I learned about this project from a neighbor and came to the meetings that were
happening at CSD. I liked the proposal, and several meetings they showed us the spot
where we would work and that excited me even more about the project. Now, the
cooperative is in the process of making blocks, losetas, and iron beams. We are now
better organized, but we haven't always been. We have had many problems between us,
we haven't always trusted one another. We have been through difficult times, but thanks
to God and ourselves we have overcome.
KASSIA
Tengo 29 anos de edad. Naci en Ciudad Sandino, mi mama era ama de casa y mi
papa era albani! y siempre han vivido en Ciudad Sandino. Tengo un hijo de 7 anos de
edad, soy madre soltera y vivo con mis padres. Me integre a la cooperativa y me gusto
por eso decidi seguir en ella, no estaba trabajando. En esta cooperativa he aprendido
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mucho. He recibido varias capacitaciones, tambien he aprendido a relacionarme con
otras personas. Lo mas dificil ha sido el trabajo en el terreno porque he aprendido a
hacer los materiales de la construccion de la empresa hasta la construccion de ella.
Espero que sea positivo para un futuro algo que me benejicie ami y a mi familia y a mis
compafieros.
I am 29 years old. I was born in Ciudad Sandino, my mother was a homemaker
and my dad was a bricklayer, and they have always lived in Ciudad Sandino. I have a 7
year old son, I am a single mother and I live with my parents. I joined the cooperative
and like it, so I decided to continue, as I wasn't working. In this cooperative I have
learned a lot. I have received various trainings. I have also learned to relate to others.
The hardest thing has been working in the field because I've learned to make building
materials. I hope the cooperative will provide a positive future, something that will
benefit me and my family and my colleagues.
JOAQUINA
Naci en El Sauce en el Departamento de Leon en 1960. Toda mi familia paternal
y maternal somos de origen Leones. Toda mi generacion dedicada a la produccion
agricola de consumo. Soy la numero cinco de 13 hermanos, mis papas, procrearon 15
hijos, dos fallecieron: uno a corta edady otro a los 20 afios, despues del triunfo
revolucionario.
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Soy madre de cuatro hijos: dos mujeres y dos varones de 29, 26, 18, y 15 afios
respectivamente. De mis dos hijas tengo cuatro nietos, tres nifias y un varon. Tres de mis
hijos trabajan y vivimos cada uno independiente, sin embargo pendiente de ayudarnos
unos a otros, signijica que el problema de uno es problema de todos.
Estoy soltera, nunca he sido casada, espero poder cumplir este sacramento,
encontrar a alguien catolico y que acepte ser parte en mi comunidad
Estudie derecho en la universidad y Pos-Grado en Derecho Procesal Penal en las
Reformas. Antes de pertenecer a la Cooperativa Genesis me dedique por veinticuatro
afios a la vida militar, renuncie a la vida militar para integrarme de lleno a la vida social
desde el afio 2000. Fui miembro honorario de la Fundaci6n Padre Miguel (QEPD) y
desde el Afio 2005 formo parte de la Junta Directiva. Actualmente administro y dirijo un
comedor popular benejiciando al adulto mayor de la Zona 8 (); adulto mayor familiares
de socios de la cooperativa Genesis).
He aprendido mucho en el aspecto de la Construcci6n. He reforzado
conocimientos en todos los aspectos. He realizado trabajos de construccion que nunca
habia realizado, pero sobre todo he aprendido a convivir con todo tipo de personas. Ha
sido una gran experiencia porque no es 10 mismo haber estado vinculada tanto tiempo
con personas con discipIina y cortesia militar impuesta. Gracias a Dios que me regala
cada dia paciencia y tolerancia por que cuanto la necesito.
358
I was born in El Sauce in the department of Leon in 1960. All my mother's and
father's family are originally from Leon. All of us were dedicated to agricultural
production. I m the fifth of 13 siblings, my parents had 15 children, two died: one in
infancy and another at age 20, after the revolutionary triumph.
I am a mother of four children, two women and two men, aged 29, 26, 18, and 15
years respectively. My two daughters have had four grandchildren, three girls and a boy.
Three of my children work and live independently, yet each helps the others, meaning
that one problem is everyone's problem.
I am single, I have never been married, but I hope to experience this sacrament, to
find someone who accepts Catholicism and can be part of my community.
I studied law and post-graduate in Criminal Procedure Law Reform. Before
joining the Genesis cooperative, I spent twenty-four years in military life, but gave up
military life in 2000 to integrate filly into society. I was an honorary member of the
Father Miguel Foundation (FUNPAMI), may he rest in peace, and since 2005 I have been
part of the Board. Actually, I manage and direct a soup kitchen benefitting the elderly of
Zone 8 (as well as elderly family members of the cooperative Genesis).
I learned a great deal with respect to construction. I have done construction work
that I have never done, but mostly I've learned to live with all kinds of people. It was a
great experience because it is not the same to have been associated for so long with
military imposed discipline. Thanks to God that He has gifted me patience and tolerance
when I have needed it.
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JENIFER
Mi mama se dedicaba a la siembra y cuido de ganado en lajinca de sus padres.
Al morir mi abuelo, se tuvo que trasladar a vivir a Managua en compafzia de su mama,
formaliza la union con mi papa, un electrista. Como consecuencia de una inundacion, se
trasladan a vivir a Ciudad Sandino (OPEN 3) donde naci, junto mis cinco hermanos.
Soy madre soltera de tres hijos educados, disciplinados, estudiosos. Estudii
administracion de empresas actualmente trabajo como capacitadora en la organizacion
red de Mujeres Maria Elena Cuadra, temas como Enfoque de Genero y Economia de la
Mujer. De esta forma obtengo un ingreso economico para mantener a mi familia.
Ha sido una bella experiencia, he puesto en practica mis conocimientos y por
primera vez he estado dirigiendo a un grupo de hombres y mujeres, dedicando todo mi
tiempo. He aprendido a tener paciencia, a comprender y ser comprendida, a escuchar y
ser escuchada. El respeto que debe prevalecer, a poner en practica el concepto de
cooperativismo. He enriquecido mis conocimientos, hoy se que es cooperativismo
realmente 10 vivo. Estamos construyendo nuestra empresa, de la que somos socias y
duenas.
Lo mas dificil para mi ha sido la TOLERANCIA, me he dado cuenta que alfinal
quienes piensan diferente tienen los mismos objectivos, que es llevar adelante nuestro
proyecto, ser arte y parte de este gran proyect. Nuestra mision es atraer a mas y mas
familiares nuestros a que sean parte de este proyecto.
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Espero que juntas dejemos sentados precedentes y que nunca mas se nos excluya,
ni se nos imponga el machismo ni otros mitos que alienan a la mujer tratando de opacar
el papel importante que jugamos en la sociedad Hemos demonstrado que somos
capaces de salir adelante aun con todos los obstaculos en el camino. Ha sido dificil y
duro sin embargo no imposible, un dia muy cercano estaremos celebrando el exito de este
esJuerzo que al inicio muchos y muchas dijeron "Eso no es posible." Hoy es posible. Lo
estamos logrando, animol Adelante! Somos capaces, podemos alcanzar las metas que
nos propongamos, siempre y cuando nos mantengamosfirmes y confiado que juntos
podemos. Gracias a Dios que nos puso en el camino ados Fudaciones que desde el
inicio nos dieron la Mano, yen toda la solidaridad han estado presentes,
economicamente.
My mother dedicated herselfto the raising and care oflivestock on her parents'
farm. When my grandfather died, they had to move to Managua to live with her mom
and to formalize the union with my dad, an electrician. As a consequence of a flood, they
moved to Ciudad Sandino (OPEN 3) where I was born, alongside by five siblings.
I am a single mother of three educated, disciplined, and studious children. I
studied business administration and am currently working as a trainer in the women's
network, Maria Elena Cuadra, on issues such as Focus on Gender and Women's
Economy. By this means I earn an income to support my family.
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It has been a beautiful experience, I have put my knowledge into practice for the
first time, devoting all my time to leading a group of men and women. I've learned to be
patient, to understand and be understood, to hear and be heard. Respect must prevail in
order to implement the concept of a cooperative. I have enriched my knowledge, and not
I know what it is like in real life to be part of a cooperative. We're building our company,
of which we are members and owners.
The hardest thing for me was tolerance. I realized that ultimately that those who
may think differently may also have the same objectives, to carry out our project, and to
be part of this great project. Our mission is to attract more and more of our family to
become part of this project.
I hope that together we allow precedent and that we will no longer exclude,
neither imposing machismo nor other myths that alienate women and try to obscure the
important role we play in society. We demonstrated that we can move forward despite all
obstacles in the road. It has been difficult and tough but not impossible. One day very
soon we will celebrate the success of this effort. At the beginning, many said "That's not
possible." It is now possible. We're achieving it! Forward! We are able, we can achieve
the goals that we set out, as long as we remain firm and confident that together we can.
Thank God for putting us on the road to the two foundations that, from the moment we
shook hands, full economic solidarity has been present.
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OLIVER
Naci en Ciudad Sandino en 1989. Mi padre es comerciante. Tengo tres
hermanas, mi abuela y mis padres. Actualmente soy soltero, estudiante de tercera ano de
Secundaria y trabajo como socio de la Cooperativa de Produccion Industrial Hilanderia
Genesis.
Me integre a esta cooperativa por invitacion de otra socia, desde el inicio ya que
yo tenia deseos de trabajar en un lugar estable donde se respeten los derechos de los
trabajadores. Actualmente en la cooperativa soyfiscal del sindicato.
Durante todo el tiempo que he estado en la cooperativa, he aprendido d~ferentes
habilidades y considero que la organizacion y comunicacion que tenemos me ayudara a
tener buenas relaciones humanas con todos los cooperadores. Lo mas dificil para mi es
mantenerme firme. Hemos soportado hambre y desnudez por alcanzar una meta.
Que es ver a todos mis companeros y companeras trabajando dignamente en una
cooperativa que con mucho esfuerzo estamos impulsandola. Con fe, esperanza y mucho
amor.
Espero de esta cooperativa que ayude a la poblacion a levantar su nivel de vida
ya que serafuente de trabajo en una sistema capitalista que no permite la igalidad
I was born in Ciudad Sandino in 1989. My father is a businessman. I have three
sisters, my grandmother, and my parents. I'm currently single, in my third year of high
school, and I work as a member of Genesis.
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I joined the cooperative at the invitation of another member because I was
wanting to work in a stable place that respects the rights of workers. I'm currently in the
cooperative's union representative. In my time in the cooperative, I have learned
different skills, and I believe that the organization and communication we have will help
me have good relationships with all other members. The hardest thing for me is to stay
strong. We have endured hunger and nakedness to achieve a goal.
That is seeing all my colleagues work with dignity in a cooperative that, with
great effort, we are trying to move forward. With faith, hope, and much love.
I hope that this cooperative helps people to raise their living standards, as it will
be a source of work in a capitalist system that does not allow equality.
YASMIN
Nacf en Managua, tengo 41 ai'ios de edad. Soy casada, tengo tres hijos: dos
varones (13 y 21 ai'ios) y una mujer de 15 ai'ios. Tengo 37 ai'ios de vivir en Ciudad
Sandino. Mi madre es de Boaco y mi padre de Rivas, somos cuatro hermanos y yo soy la
tercera.
Me integre a la cooperativa el 5 de febrero del 2007, ha sido mi primer trabajo y
mi primer experiencia. Nunca pense aprender a hacer bloques, losetas, pi/ares, armar
viga, hacer mezclas, en fin todo 10 relacionado a la construcci6n.
Tambien he aprendido a relacionarme con personas de distintos caracteres,
actitudes, a ser tolerante, y a saber llevar las relaciones humanas. Me gusta mi trabajo y
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el proyecto de hilanderia. Tengo la fe en Dios que un dia hecha nuestra fabrica, tendre
un trabajo fijo y digno, para poderles dar unfuturo mejor a mis hijos.
I was born in Managua, and I'm 41 years old. I am married, have three children,
two sons (13 and 21 years old) and a daughter, 15 years old. I have lived for 37 years in
Ciudad Sandino. My mother is from Boaco and my father is from Rivas, and I am the
third of four siblings.
I joined the cooperative on the 5th of February in 2007, which was my first job
experience. I never knew how to make blocks, tiles, pillars, beams, or make cement
mixes-in short, everything related to construction.
I have also learned to relate with people of different characters, attitudes, to be
tolerant, and know how relate to people. I like my job and the proposed cotton gin. I
have faith in God that one day our factory will be finish, I'll have a decent and steady job
and will be able to provide a better future for my children.
ASCENSION
Tengo 35 arLOs, vivo en Ciudad Sandino en la Zona 8. Naci en Ciudad Antigua,
Nueva Segovia, mis padres se han dedicado a la agricultura.
"Vine a Ciudad Sandino en J990 porque queria seguir estudiando pero me dedique
mas a trabajar y despues me case y forme unafamilia de las cuales la conformamos
cuatro personas, dos menores y dos adultos.
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Cuando me integre en esta cooperativafue por medio de una amiga que me invito
a una reunion y como estaba desempleada ereia que se trataba de empleo, pero fue de
este proyecto que nos hablaron y decidf integrarme yaqui he aprendido muchas cosas.
Una de ellas es convivir con diferentes caracteres de las personas que creo que es una de
las cosas mas d(ficil que he experimentado en el tiempo que he estado en la cooperativa.
Espero tener un empleo fifo y dar empleo a otras cabezas de familia.
I'm 35, I live in Ciudad Sandino in Zone 8. I was born in Antigua, Nueva
Segovia, my parents worked as farmers.
I came to Ciudad Sandino in 1990 because I wanted to continue studying, but I
had to work, and afterwards I got married and started a family of four people, two
children and two adults.
When I joined this cooperative, it was through a friend who invited me to a
meeting and, as I was unemployed, I thought I should try to get ajob. I decided to join,
and I have learned many things here. One is to live with people of different
characteristics, which has been one of the hardest things I've experienced in my time in
the cooperative.
I hope to have a stead job and give employment to other households.
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ELIZABETH
Tengo 38 anos de edad. Vivo en Ciudad Sandino en la zona 11. Nacf en
Managua y vine a Ciudad Sandino a la edad de 8 anos. Mi mama es de oficio costurera.
Mi trabajo es hacer reposteria pero me encuentro desempleada. Tengo mi esposo y tres
hijos, dos mujeres de 21 y 22 anos y un varon de 15 anos. Formamos una familia de
cinco personas.
Cuando yo me integre a esta cooperativa mire que era un proyecto interesante, he
recibido varias capacitaciones de las cuales he aprendido mucho, porque siempre he
opinado en aprender mucho para salir adelante. Con este proyecto pienso que mi
familia y otras familias mas vamos a salir adelante 0 por 10 menos teniendo un trabajo
digno y sin maltrato. Lo mas dificil ha sido ir aprendiendo paso a paso desde los
materiales de nuestra empresa hasta la construccion porque nunca habia trabajado asi
en un proyecto de construcci6n. Espero que en un futuro todo sea bueno para mi y mis
companeros.
I am 38 years old, and I live in Ciudad Sandino in Zone 11. I was born in
Managua came to Ciudad Sandino when I was 8 years old. My mom works as a
seamstress. My job is to make cakes but I have found myself unemployed. I have my
husband and three children, two daughters of21 and 22 years old and a boy of 15. We
are a family of five.
367
When I joined this cooperative, it looked like an interesting project. I received
several trainings in which I have learned a lot. It has always been by view that one must
learn a lot to succeed.With this project I think my family and others are going to get
ahead or at least have a dignified work without mistreatment. The most difficult part has
been to learn step by step to build our business because I have never worked in a
construction project. I hope that in the future everything will be good for me and my
colleagues.
EUGENIO
Nad en Masatepe, departamento de Masaya en 1962. Mis padres se dedicaban a
la agricultura y el comercio, llegamos a vivir al antiguo OPEN 3 (hoy Ciudad Sandino)
en el ana 1972, buscando mejoria economica. Mifamilia la componen cuatro miembros.
Curse mis estudios universitarios de Derecho en Managua y estudie las tecnicas de
Construccion hasta su conclusion en el Instituto Nacional Tecnologico (INATEC), en
Managua.
Me integre a la cooperativa el 4 de Febrero del 2007, anteriormente me dedicaba
al comercio y trabajos de construccion domiciliar. He aprendido muchas cosas desde el
punto de vista de desarrollo social y economico, producto de capacitaciones sucesivas
sobre relaciones humanas y derecho cooperativo, entre otros. No hay cosas dificiles, 10
importante es aprender a hacerlo y con participacion.
368
Espero ver realizado este gran proyecto, por el futuro de todos mis companeros y
companeras, lograr triunfar todos y mejorar nuestro nivel de vida.
I was born in Masatepe, in the department of Masay in 1962. My parents were
involved in farming and trade, and we came to live in OPEN 3 (today Ciudad Sandino) in
1972, looking for an economic improvement. My family has four members. I attended
the university for law in managua and I studied construction in the National
Technological Institute (INATEC) in Managua.
I joined the cooperative on February 4,2007, and had previously worked in sales
and housing construction. I have learned may things from the standpoint of social and
economic development, the product of trainings on, among other things, communication
and cooperative law. There are difficult things, but the important thing is to learn how to
participate.
I hope to see this big project done for the future of all my colleagues, and to
improve our standard of living.
HERNAN
Naci en Managua, Nicaragua en 1950. Soy casado, procree tres hijos, todos
mayores.
Jline ala cooperativa en los primeros dias del mes de febrero del ano dos mil
siete, invitado por una companera miembro activo quien por esos dias se dedicaba a ha
369
hacer campana convocando a quienes estuviesen dispuestas a integrarse al proyecto, que
inicialmente e pretendio fuese exclusivo para mujeres.
Lo que me motivo a la integracion, fue principalmente las caracteristicas del
proyecto, que proponia una experiencia productiva y de mercado nuevo, combinando el
trabajo con respecto en igualdad de derechos, condiciones, equidad y justicia social.
Para mi de manera particular a parte de una opcion de trabajo que la
necesitaba, me ofrecia una nueva experiencia laboral, productiva, y economica, pero
ademas me permitio demostrarme ami mismo que podia superar la inactividad, los
temores y la incapacidad en la que estaba sumido, producto de las recomendaciones
medicas, despuis de haber sufrido una lesion cardiaca, y a la vez salir al paso a la
desgraciada discriminacion que sufrimos todas las personas a las que despues de
cumplir cuarenta anos le esta negado por la ley a un puesto de trabajo formal en este
pais.
Desde los primeros dias he sido parte del consejo de direccion, y he aportado en
la organizacion y direccion del trabajo. Actualmente ocupo el cargo de tesorero de la
Junta Directiva.
I was born in Managua, Nicaragua in 1950. I'm married and I've had three
children, all older.
370
I came to the cooperative in the first days of February 2007, invited by an active
member who in those days was campaigning for people to join the project, which was
initially intended to be exclusive to women.
What motivated me to join was mainly the characteristics ofthe project, which
proposed a productive and new market while maintaining an idea of equal rights,
equitable conditions and social justice.
Particularly for me, it was work that I needed, and it offered me a new labor,
productive, and economic experience, but also one that allowed me to demonstrate to
myself that I could overcome inactivity and the fears of of my inability to work, the
product of medical advice after I suffered a heart attack, and started to suffer the
discrimination against all people who after turning forty in this country is denied formal
work.
From the earliest days I have been part of the board, and have contributed in
organizing and directing the work. I am currently serving as treasurer.
- ----_._--------
371
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