From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico by Casey Marina Lurtz (review)

Casey Marina Lurtz's meticulously researched book analyzes the rocky transition of the Soconusco region of Chiapas from a backwater nineteenth-century ranching zone into Mexico's most important coffee region. Readers will appreciate her attention to labor, land, and the challenges state actors and larger-scale planters faced to gain control over them. Only once planters and merchants began to offer incentives like access to credit and land, did villagers and migrant workers from the Mexican highlands, Guatemala, and elsewhere begin to plant trees and tend to beans. Many locals became small-scale producers themselves, and to this day communally held village landholders produce a significant portion of the region's coffee.

Lurtz convincingly depicts the Soconusco as simultaneously "a place where all of the traditional narratives of Latin America's export boom come together" and "a place where none of those narratives hold" (4). The textbook version of Latin American history emphasizes how late nineteenth-century liberal regimes dispossessed villagers and welcomed foreign investors to make way for large-scale plantations. Fusing economist Douglass North's arguments about institutions and capitalism with political-scientist/anthropologist James Scott's theories on state and society, Lurtz's corrective explains that coffee production could only expand once the borderlands became less violent and bureaucracy became stronger. To engage in export agriculture, planters and villagers alike needed infrastructure and reliable institutions. They needed to agree on the norms surrounding titles to land, access to mortgages and credits, labor, and trade contracts. As one of Lurtz's many beautifully crafted sentences put it, "Cattle could be branded as a person's property and walk themselves to market; coffee could not" (25).

Soconusco residents, politicians, and planters confronted a series of hurdles as they sought to emulate the increasingly wealthy coffee planters across the Guatemalan border. First, was fixing said border: villagers, politicians, and soldiers had taken advantage of the possibilities for rampage and refuge provided by Mexico's porous southern border for decades. Once Guatemalans and Mexicans finally signed an agreement in 1882, bureaucrats slowly replaced armed forces and strongmen, rendering possible long-distance economic activity.

The regime of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910) consolidated the state through "a careful dance of violence and compromise that gradually brought an end to outright political chaos" (65). Historians of other Mexican regions have found examples of violent strongmen becoming crony capitalists, lining their pockets as they facilitated business and state investments. In the Soconusco, villagers and planters engaged institutions and administration as a way of getting around the strongman. Less inspired to participate in the sort of popular liberalism and electoral politics documented in the Mexican heartlands, the villagers of the Soconusco instead used judges, notaries, customs officials, scribes, and surveyors to carve out space for their livelihoods (78). Villagers and planters embraced civil and commercial codes to guard against fraud, they paid taxes to prove ownership, and they invested in infrastructure to bring workers to the region and to ship coffee out of it.

Grounds skillfully integrates attention to geography and land use to highlight the many options available to villagers. "Centuries of overlapping means of establishing ownership layered on top of eons of volcanic activity," Lurtz notes, "made the legal terrain nearly as indecipherable as the physical spaces it purported to govern" (88). Locals and migrants tapped into the available spaces to plant subsistence and market goods. A US girl's story about arriving in the Soconusco and fraternizing with Germans, Swiss, and other immigrant planter families emphasizes the foreigners-civilizing-the-tropics trope, but Lurtz reads this and other narratives, public record documents, and maps against the grain to tease out local stories.

"As much as ridges and gullies became natural borders for neighboring plantations," she argues, "communally held lands were man-made bounds for the spread of fincas as a whole" (88). The historiography of globalization emphasizes the loss...