Cargos and conflict: The fiesta system and capitalist development in Eastern Peru

This article considers the fact of and reasons for pre‐ and post‐reform change in the structure of the fiesta system on a rural estate in the province of La Convención, and its effect on the development of a capitalist agriculture. In economic terms, this process involves a transformation of the fiesta from a context in which the landlord extracts rent from his tenants to one in which different peasant strata struggle for control over means of production acquired as a result of the agrarin reform. In politico‐ideological terms, the fiesta operates as an arena where contradictory, non‐religious, and class‐specific idioms of struggle are accepted or rejected by the protagonists.