Meaning of pulpería by JOHN

PULPERÍAOriginalmente was called by the same workers : TIENDA DE LA RAYA . It was a commercial establishment in a hacienda, plantation, cattle farm, latifundio, etc., in colonial times throughout the Americas, but especially in the Center, where workers were forced to obtain goods for their food and consumption, on account of their wages. The word used of RAYA is due to the one that every time a worker was exhausted the salary that he had accrued, having been subtracting the amounts of the various goods that he obtained from the warehouse-store of the master, the only place where he could get food and others, at the prices that were imposed on them, a stripe was put on him, as a limit to his credit, and he could no longer obtain goods, in notebooks that were kept with great suspicion by the master's foremen or by the master himself. They were not credit establishments, but could only receive goods for the wages they had already earned. Again, that "credit" was opened when the worker had been granted the following nominative payment, because the worker never received any salary in currency, there were only these stripe shops where he unfailingly exhausted his salary, under this arbitrary and abusive procedure. In South America the mining workers called them PULPERÍAS because they pulped the workers with the same system, only that this was more efficient because they were paid with tokens, which were exchangeable only in the stores of the mine or company. It is exclusive to colonial America