Christ in the Plantationocene: Land, Labor, and People’s Movements in El Salvador

The plantation is often spoken of as a relic of the past. In the antebellum era of the United States, slaveholders sought to conjure images of the plantation as the inheritor of “civilization.” Planters imagined themselves as cavaliers parading through houses with classical columns. Progressives have often hoped to distance present regimes of land and labor from the more explicitly racialized violence and exploitation of this past by speaking of the plantation in feudal terms that belong to a bygone age.

To the contrary, some scholars, like Clive Woods and Rufus Burnett, have argued that the plantation was at the heart of contemporary formations of racial capitalism. The role it played was so central to present economic, political, and cultural formations that Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing have proposed that we might designate our current geological era as the “Plantationocene.” The carceral geography of the plantation became the setting for regimes of labor where uprooted enslaved and indentured peoples were made to work a clearcut and uniform habitat centered upon commodity production.

To start with the figure and realities of the plantation can serve to reorient conversations related to the environment and class. Regarding the environment, the plantation intertwines issues related to ecological destruction and climate catastrophe with histories of racialized and gendered violence and exploited labor. On the matter of labor, it adds the insights and concerns of farmworkers and campesinos to movements that are often more focused on urban and industrial contexts (though, as Cedric Robinson notes, it was often from the landed contexts of so-called “primitive accumulation” that revolution in the 19th and 20th century typically came).

Furthermore, if we look more closely at the geographies of the plantation, we can begin to see the legacies and constructive visions of alternatives ways of living and working. Though the apologists of Neoliberal hegemony warn that there is no alternative, beneath the farm-turned-factory-floor we can find traces of the commons. On the garden plot on the margins of plantation, on the lips of abolitionists, organizers, and people’s movements are hopes of common life in community and on the land.

Among these efforts of resistance and re-existence are movements for land reform in El Salvador, especially in the late 20th century. In these movements liberation theology often played a role in helping to inspire utopic visions and in the prophetic work of rooting the grassroots.

Matthew Whelan’s work has helpfully made these connections, noting the consequences that patterns of privatization had for campesinos and rural communities, and highlighting the role that the Catholic Church and, especially Oscar Romero, played in articulating an opposition in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Yet, Whelan’s account tends to center the alternative vision on offer to the justice that comes from the transformed persons who are formed by acts of mercy and who view their property as being held with a “social mortgage.”

I want to highlight, by contrast, the vision articulated by Ignacio Ellacuria that is more focused on the role of cooperative labor and commonly held land, which would be expanded by a structural redistribution of land. At the heart of Ellacuria’s vision is an account of Christ’s love that was rooted in class conflict and solidarity. Christ’s love is directed against the social sin of private property and wealth, as it seeks to transform and heal social relationships. Following the path of Christ, Ellacuria seeks to cultivate power in the very social spaces that private property has deformed, so as to cooperate in the larger work of salvation.

These efforts for redistribution of land did achieve some mixed victories (for example in a constitutional amendment in 1981 and the land transfer program of 1992). Yet, in the ensuing decades, the central agents of this work were not church officials or academics (if they ever were) but it was carried on through the grassroots. As Elizabeth O'Donnell Gandolfo and Laurel Marshall Potter have shown, these visions lived on in the body of Christ, in the theological modes of popular education and through grassroots base Christian communities. Following the wider shifts of the third generation of liberation theology, this meant a greater attention to the space of the everyday and constructive modes of survival. On the local level, as Anna Peterson’s work has illustrated, this has often happened through the integration of ecological concern and regenerative agriculture.

These plural and diverse efforts for land reform in El Salvador—that oppose the carceral regimes of the Plantationocene with the methods and visions of cooperation and the commons—could serve as a school for cultivating deep solidarity with professional class Christian communities and networks that are engaged with environmental issues in the United States. Beginning in a context that is seemingly different can serve to sidestep norms that make issues of more proximate forms of race and class unspeakable. The figure of the plantation, however, serves to make the emergence of the connections to U.S. contexts unavoidable. Furthermore, looking at these issues in terms of wider dynamics connected to land and labor in late 20th century El Salvador can also serve as indirect routes to greater understanding of contemporary dynamics connected to migration and farm labor. A focus on land and labor also locates environmental challenges in their deepest sources of racial capitalism, thereby showing that environmental efforts must intersect with other movements for justice. Perhaps most significantly, the theological visions of the praxis and love of Christ, which point toward forms of cooperation and the commons, can provide constructive and practical alternative visions.