Don Taso - Mintz 1974

Question 1

When did Mintz write it?

Answer 1

1974

Question 2

What does mintz look at ?

Answer 2

Don Taso’s life history.

Question 3

Livelihoods:

Answer 3

• Anthropology departs from classic notion of political economy, and is more focused on the notion of livelihoods, not just simply labor, or the management of households or businesses.
• Mintz looks at livelihoods through the life history of Don Taso, which shows the the shift from haciendas to corporations in Puerto Rico.

Question 4

Explain worker in the cane briefly:

Answer 4

• Looks at livelihoods
• Mintz is deepening understanding of the exploitation of people.
• Slavery in Puerto Rico as something that illegal ended with the arrival of american governances of effectively a colony, but at the same time the continuity of exploitation in labour relations there because of this industrialisation of agriculture.
• This dramatically change the lives of people there by uprooting the traditional and customary patterns that they were used to.

Question 5

Don Taso life history explain (before US)

Answer 5

• Man who talked freely about barrio politics, the union of sugar cane workers, and work in the cane and life in the village
• wrote down his life history for Mintz
• BEFORE, life moved at slow pace, in small villages.
• One was born to work and “defend” themselves in the cane, which is their phrase for the struggle of making a living.
• Little formal education,
• Work done in haciendas
• relationships were PATERNALISTIC - quality of their relationship between hacienda owner and worker.
• Even thought the sugar industry was capitalistic in character and oriented towards the world outside, life on the hacienda communities was turned inward, isolated and largely self contained.

Question 6

Don Taso life history (US intervention)

Answer 6

• US intervention - 1899.
• found him reminiscing about ‘old times’
• American corporate agriculture replaced face to face paternalism with indirect paternalism.
• New centrals = very modern and economic. A symbol of the kinds of changes in Puerto Rican life brought around by Americans.
• ‘The spread of the corporations, the capitalisation of previously untilled land, the rise of industrial production in the fields, the standardisation of wages and hours, the proletarianisation of the worker, and the elimination of local artisan and upper classes.

Question 7

What did Mintz discover about the experience of Don Taso?

Answer 7

The experience of Don Taso and his neighbours is that it is profoundly impersonal. Mintz explains that looking at Don Taso’s life history helps him put the problem of labour exploitation much for firmly in view.

Question 8

Don Taso conversion:

Answer 8

• Conversion to Pentecostal CHurch
• The events that occur in Don Tasos life run parallel to the major changes going on about him.
• What Mintz infers from his conversion is that it is less about individualistic move to find salvation for himself, and less about sweetening his bitter experience of working in corporate agriculture, but rather a more collective move to find a basis of social support against the damages of that depersonalisation that occurred.
• salvation of the community

Question 9

Why does life history matter?

Answer 9

Its a life history thats able to chart that shift from face to face colonialism to faceless economic colonialism, in a way that no other account could of grasped.
His life history is a series of personal decisions and events and overcoming adversity can be told of as an account of a contest between American values and Puerto Rican values.