Colono

Colono, a term that in Spanish and Portuguese refers to a class of rural workers tied to the land, often with a status similar to that of sharecroppers in U.S. history. As a general rule, colonos provide their labor in exchange for either access to land or for a portion of the harvest on large Latifundia. In Argentina the term colono simply implies a member of a colony of agricultural immigrants. In Peru, it can refer to a day laborer on a hacienda.

The actual practice of colonage varies widely by region, but generally it is associated with the rise of debt peonage and dependent labor that accompanied the consolidation of the large landed estates in Latin America. This solution to labor shortages offered the laborer a minimum of basic needs in exchange for the landowners' guarantee of work during harvests and other peak labor demand periods.

In Brazil, colono generally refers to a small (tenant) farmer. In the nineteenth century it was associated with foreign immigrants whom planters introduced to work their estates as an alternative to slave labor. Private and public sources financed the transatlantic transportation and settlement of tenant farmers under contract arrangements that stipulated the number of coffee trees to cultivate, process, and harvest. The colono received half of the profits from the sale of the coffee he harvested after processing, transport, and other expenses were deducted. Payment might be made at the termination of the harvest or on an annual basis.

Initial experiments with colonization plans involving immigrant colonos proved a costly and, in the long run, unfeasible labor alternative. They faced large debts and tropical illnesses, lacked clergymen and legal counsel, and were subject to the disciplinary measures of local planters and police authorities. A second wave of European immigration to Brazil introduced contract farm laborers into the expanding coffee areas of São Paulo in the 1880s and 1890s. In Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and Espírito Santo, where postemancipation labor needs were met mostly with Brazilian labor, colonos referred to foreigners and Brazilians who were contracted individually or in family units as sharecroppers, tenants, and in some cases part-time salaried laborers on rural estates.

See alsoCampesino .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Warren Dean, Rio Claro (1976).

Emília Viotti Da Costa, Da senzala a colónia, 2d ed. (1982).

Additional Bibliography

Cortés López, José Luis. Esclavo y colono: Introducción y sociología de los negroafricanos en la América española del siglo XVI. Spain: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2004.

Juarez-Dappe, Patricia Isabel. "Cañeros" and "Colonos": Cane Planters in Tucumán, 1876–1895." Journal of Latin American Studies 38:1 (February 2006): 123-147.

                                     Todd Little-Siebold

                              Nancy Priscilla Smith Naro