Coffee Anyone? Recent Research on Latin American Coffee Societies

The recent explosion of the popularity of coffee houses in the United States coincides with a swelling number of monographs on the history of coffee in Latin America. However, these studies are less motivated by the faddishness of the Starbucks Revolution than by concerns about the fate of peasant producers, particularly in Central America. Unlike most coffee sippers who care only about the brew, scholars who study the history of coffee are more concerned with the local social, cultural, and economic impact of its cultivation; the arabica itself is often almost incidental.

In the last decade a spate of excellent historical monographs, often influenced by anthropology, have deconstructed earlier conventional wisdoms, models, and categories through detailed local studies. Many of these works raise several new and important questions and provide insights principally in social and cultural history. More important, several scholars have used coffee as a backdrop to study peasant societies, state building, class formation, as well as national, racial, and gendered identities. Nevertheless, generalizations about the impact of coffee cultivation on societies that employ these recent insights have been rare.

The main purpose of this essay is to trace the changing perspectives applied to the historical study of coffee societies and to suggest that the current trend in history towards deconstructing categories and exploding verities, while salutary, should perhaps return to seeking patterns through bounded generalizations that ask broader questions about the commonalities shared by coffee producers and the degrees of freedom of action that local producers enjoy. In other words, does coffee production impose certain structures and world views?

In a recent issue of the Hispanic American Historical Review, Eric Van Young suggested that we should "take another look at economic history as cultural history." ¹ Many of the recent students of coffee societies have done just that. The challenge is to go from particular historically-grounded cases to broader generalizations. This not only accentuates the importance of the study of the past but brings to life the historical economic actors who too often are caricatured as predictable "economically rational men." By marrying social, cultural, and economic history, historians can accentuate the limitations of neoliberal analyses that are currently animating Latin American economic policy at a considerable detriment to the peoples of Latin America.

The Way We Think

Social and cultural historians have argued against grand theories or master narratives. To a considerable degree, marxism has been replaced by poststructuralism, which favors decentered, unstable, heterogeneous, and multiple identities. The subjective attitudes and acts of individuals or groups supersede class analysis by emphasizing human agency and diversity. In other words, the deconstruction of categories, such as race, gender, and national identity, have subsumed class. The notion of reason in history (teleology) and greater social structures are reduced by a stress on contingency, disjunctures, and fluidity. Ambiguities undercut certainties. ²

In contrast, the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism have also encouraged very different self-assured movements such as rational choice and neoliberalism that are very much grand theories undergirded by a positivistic faith in empirical evidence and general laws. The international penetration of the world economy has led these theorists to posit homogeneous, economically rational people whose search for gain and self-interest are rather predictable. These tendencies, particularly noticeable in economics and political science, are very much structural and materialist. Rather than the local and particular, they stress the global and the general. ³ Individuals are subordinated to the rationality of the broader capitalist system. ⁴ The struggle between structure and contingency, large systems and individual will is evident in the studies of coffee.

Why Coffee?

Studying larger theoretical trends through the lens of coffee might seem to cloud the issue. But this is not an exercise in "coffee fetishism." ⁵ Coffee is a commodity worthy of serious attention because of the central and long-standing place it has held in the world economy and in...