PUTAENDO, ITS VALLEY AND ITS PEOPLE

Life in the valley during the time of the carts

(Taken from the study Hombres y mujeres en Putaendo: sus discursos y su visión de la historia (Men and women of Putaendo: their voices and visions of history), by Lilia Acuña, Centro de estudios de la mujer, Santiago, 1986)

Tenant farming

"The hacienda produced large quantities of wheat, fodder and cattle. It had at least five thousand head of cattle, two thousand sheep and around a thousand horses.

There were at least a hundred thirty sharecroppers working on the place in exchange for a piece of land. In those days, each one had an arriendo: a piece measuring more or less five acres, with a house on it. As payment for their arriendos, the sharecroppers were expected to begin working at 5:00 AM. The boss would blow the whistle. They worked until dark. It wasn't an eight-hour day, it was more like a twelve-hour day. All heavy work, too, most of all with the fodder crops. The sharecroppers were given certain chores; a team of six men had to produce at least four hundred bales. Each bale had to weigh around 175 pounds . . . and if anyone got tired, they'd send him home. He wouldn't get any more work and they'd take away his house and his land.

Those that had more animals, more resources, would hire someone to work on the hacienda for them while they worked their own land, took care of their animals and sold their produce so they could pay the person taking care of the hacienda obligation. In addition to this the tenant farmers had to hire an extra laborer three months out of the year, to help with the threshing. When it was time to thresh the wheat, or harvest the fodder, during January, February and March, besides the hired hand and the sharecropper, you had to hire another person for those three months. During those times, men without sons had to look for someone else to work and pay him for those three months.

Now when there was work to be done in the hills, the person who had animals had to go, seven, eight days. They had to do all those things. Most of the sharecroppers had grown sons, fifteen or older, and they sent their sons to the hills, or they sent them to the hacienda while they went to the hills to work. That's how it was. And whoever didn't go to the hills would lose a month of work, things like that.

There were eight boys in our family. We worked the land from the time we were small. Since we had extra time, we would hire ourselves out to work other people's land in exchange for half the harvest. This was in addition to working my father's arriendo. Here everyone did the same thing, the wife and the children would work on the arriendo while the men worked on the hacienda, or they would hire a farm laborer. And whoever missed a day would be penalized by losing another two or three days of work on the hacienda. We grew up, and unfortunately the older ones didn't have the opportunity to study. We studied the basics until we were fifteen, here in the hacienda school, and after that it was just work, work, work." (Ramón)

Threshing

When it was time to harvest the wheat, there was an automatic threshing machine. They would use the straw as fuel. They didn't get the threshing machine going until late because the wheat had to be dry, but once they started working it was a tremendous job. The patrón would bring in outside help to harvest the wheat and bind it into sheaves. And the workers would make really huge bundles so that their work would go faster, more than 175 pounds each. So then, to take the wheat down to the meadow where the threshing machine was was an enormous job, it seemed like it took forever. Everyone was working- the man who loaded the cart, the ones who were pitchforking the sheaves of wheat up. We started threshing late, around nine, but we didn't stop all day- the stars would be out and the machine still going strong, and the foreman and don Marcial waiting outside in a carriage. As long as the patrón was there, that machine kept on working. At night, those days, when the wheat had grubs in it, the men's shirts would be full of them, dyed completely red, and the men washing off the sweat in the canals."(Juan)

The jobs that killed men

"It's true that they used machines to cut the grass, but they would rake it up into piles and pitchfork it up into the carts using pure muscle. In those days there weren't any trailers like there are now, and no tractors either. All we had were oxcarts drawn by two teams of oxen. It was heavy work. They would fill up those really high carts and drive them to Tártaro or Vicuña, where the grass would be cut. After it was cut, it would be baled, and those were the heavy jobs back then. Those were the jobs that used to kill men." (Sara)