ABSTRACT
I came to know the peasant community of San Juan Bautista de Catacaos for the first time more than 30 years ago. The community, located in the lower valley of the River Piura in the north of Peru, is one of the largest communities in the country. At the beginning of the 1970s it numbered some 50,000 comuneros, of whom about 2000 were wage labourers (estables) employed by one of large cotton-producing haciendas. At the beginning of the 1970s, these enterprises, which had controlled 10,000 hectares (ha) of irrigated land plus a lot of barren land, were converted into state-controlled co-operatives. Alongside this more or less stable part of the workforce there were some 4400 pequeños propetarios, small farmers possessing small plots of community land. In addition, there were thousands of campesinos sin tierra (landless peasants) involved in harvesting cotton in Bajo Piura, and in transplanting and harvesting rice in the valleys of Alto Piura, Chira, Lambayeque and Santa, and sometimes even farther away. Their constant movement from one work place to another gave them the collective name of golondrinas (migratory swallows). While estables and pequeños2 were poor, the life of golondrinas was miserable and insecure. However, regardless of such differences, in everyday language all of the above categories were grouped into one entity as campesinos pobres (poor peasants).
