ABSTRACT
San Jeronimo was in all apparent respects a prototypical Mesoamerican peasant community. The base of the diet—of biological reproduction—in San Jeronimo is corn and beans. One of the first research tasks undertook was to assess local agricultural production to better understand the relationship between peasant farming and cash income in the overall economy of the town. Two of the primary components of the definition of peasants are that they engage in self-directed subsistence agricultural production and that they exist in relations of political and economic inequality with nonpeasants, such that the economic value that originates from peasant production is transferred from the peasants to nonpeasants. Both of these criteria apply to Lencho Martinez, but in his case, as with that of the entire town, the ratio of peasant to nonpeasant production is fairly low. In San Jeronimo, most surplus accumulated from its citizens takes the form of surplus value accumulated through wage labor at sites far from San Jeronimo.
