THE LAND 



45 



tablones allowed to go to seed for another 5 or 6. 

 Since it is a rare individual who can regulate his 

 time and land perfectly, part of such land is 

 usually idle for a month or two once or twice a 

 year. In most cases very little is planted during 

 the rainy season, so frecjuently there are 4 or 5 

 idle months during that time. 



(5) A crop of garlic followed by a crop or two 

 of onions and other vegetables. As in the case 

 above, there is apt to be considerable idleness of 

 the land during the rainy season. 



(6) A crop of ■pepinos, occupying most of the 

 year, followed by one of the various yearly patterns 

 mentioned above. Most frec[uently, perhaps, 

 pepinos are alternated with one of the combina- 

 tions including corn, and in such cases the pepinos 

 may be planted while the corn is still in the field. 

 Pepinos are rarely grown in consecutive years on 

 the same land. 



A particular landowner may follow several of 

 these patterns on ditTerent plots of his land. 

 For example, it is frecpient among Indians for a 

 man to use two pieces of land in manner \o. (i, but 

 to alternate them so that in any one year he has 

 both pepinos and the other crops growing. 



Notwithstanding such complexity, it is possible 

 with some confidence to calculate how the truck 

 land is use<l in any one year, for particular families 

 and "race" groups usually follow consistent and 

 commonly knowni patterns. Table 7, which 

 brings togetluT the myriad items of land-use data, 

 calculated for every plot of land, reports the 

 acreage devoted to each of the important truck 

 crops during the year. 



The situation whereby so great a proportion of 

 idle land is to be found diu-ing the rainy season 

 when tablon crops are relatively few could be 



avoided if all the land were planted with corn 

 during the rainy season. Actually, the Ladinos 

 do plant corn on virtually all their tablon land, and 

 their idle land is found rather in the dry season; 

 this results in less intensive cultivation of the most 

 valuable money crop of the dry season, onions. 

 Most Indians cannot afford this. Garlic and corn 

 might seem the optimum combination from this 

 point of view. But garlic supposedly cannot be 

 grown j^ear after year in the same land; it is also 

 said that garlic land should be prepared months 

 in advance to allow the turned-under grass to rot, 

 so that a repeated sequence of garlic and corn is 

 uncommon. Of course continual use of land is 

 not the only measure of intensity of use; as wdl 

 be seen later, when compared with corn or any 

 other crop, the labor and the gross income involved 

 in vegetable growing is out of all proportion to 

 the acreage involved. 



Table 8 compares the percentage of acreage 

 devoted to various crops throughout the year 

 (the arithmetic mean of the monthly figures) on 

 Ladino lands, resident Indian lands, and those of 

 outside Indians virtually all of whom live in San 

 Jorge. Tlie comparison is instructive: unlike the 

 resident Indians who strike a lialance, the Jorgcnos 

 devote almost 57-percent of their land to onions 

 (and grow neither corn nor garlic) and the Ladinos 

 the same proportion to corn (and grow no j^epinos). 

 In the case of the San Jorge residents, the explana- 

 tion evidently is that they have acquired these 

 lands for onion growing; on the one hand they 

 doubtless have cornfield lantls back home that 

 occupy their rainy season time and give them the 

 grain they need, and on the other, onions rather 

 than garlic are a traditional crop in San Jorge. The 

 case of Ladinos, who grow so niuch corn on truck 



Table 7. — Panajaclul truck acreage 



