ABSTRACT
When I made my first round of Monte Coca to explain that I had come to study how people lived in the bateyes, nearly everyone had one response in common: life is hard and getting worse all the time; raises in wages were just not keeping up with the rise of the cost of living. An elderly second-generation inglés explained that, even though the company might pay a man 10 pesos more to weed a cane field than the 60 or 70 pesos it paid five years earlier, the money would not buy half of what it bought before. “Dis is slavery heeah,” he added in English. “Dey compel us to wuk fo nuttin!” With time, my observations of daily life in Monte Coca would confirm that consumption is perhaps more often a source of frustration than of satisfaction.
