-
Introduction
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 Introduction In March 1965 the coffee exporters of Córdoba, Veracruz, laid off all the women workers who cleaned their green coffee, and replaced them with electronic sorting machines in their preparation plants (beneficios). This decision marked the conclusion of a seventy-year period of enormous expansion and gradual mechanization of the state’s coffee agroindustry. As the Diario de Xalapa had noted at the onset of mechanization, it “would have repercussions throughout the country owing to the fact that Veracruz has more coffee workers and grows more coffee than any other state.”1 For the coffee entrepreneurs, plant modernization and the success of the labor settlement would ensure future economic profits. For the women workers, it represented the elimination of a relatively secure form of employment and the failure of the labor movement to save their jobs. It also marked the end of an era in which global, national, and regional forces had come together in such a way as to create employment for thousands of working women, foster their unionization, and foment the development of a working women’s culture. My purpose here is to write a history from below. This regional history of Córdoba’s coffee economy shows first how it was shaped by national and international forces and how, in turn, it influenced the development of Mexico’s coffee agroindustry. The study is about how 2 Introduction place matters, because it helps us understand the interrelationships between the region’s entrepreneurs, workers, labor movements, gender relations, and culture on the one hand and Mexico’s social revolution , immigration, modernization, and the Atlantic coffee market on the other hand. It contends that macrolevel processes helped to shape Córdoba’s regional economy, which influenced the development of Mexico’s coffee agroindustry and its labor movement. Regional Coffee-Export Economies in an Atlantic Context At least three theoretical approaches have influenced the study of the Latin American coffee economies over the past century. Each of them grapples with the constantly shifting interrelationship between macrolevel and microlevel social, economic, and political factors. First, nineteenth-century laissez-faire and certain forms of twentieth-century modernization theory that are based on classic economic theory support the idea that world trade was the engine of regional economic growth. Dependency theory offers an alternative approach, contending that this export model actually made Latin America more and more dependent on foreign capitalism for its markets and its financing and that most profits ended up in the pockets of foreign financiers and import companies rather than smaller native producers and the workers. They also argue that regional coffee elites were complicit in assisting foreign entrepreneurs in the penetration of the weaker underdeveloped coffee economies.2 A third approach to the study of coffee focuses on commodity chains that “serve as a bidirectional link between producers and consumers worldwide.” A modified form of the world systems theory, it argues that the production, financing, transport, preparation, financing, and marketing of coffee has been vertically and sometimes horizontally organized by global capitalism over the course of the last 150 years. It leaves open, however, a large range of possibilities on how the boom and bust cycles impact regional economies and cultures.3 Without denying the overall impact of the global market on Latin American coffee economies, I prefer to concentrate on the commer- [18.209.209.246] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:09 GMT) Introduction 3 cialization of coffee and migration of people within the Atlantic world during the three major coffee booms that occurred between the 1880s and the 1950s. As one Colombian scholar noted, coffee needs to be seen within the context of growing demands for tropical products in industrializing nations of the North Atlantic basin.4 As Atlantic scholars are now making clear, Atlantic history is not only about “literal points of contact . . . but rather about explaining transformations, experiences , and events in one place in terms of conditions deriving from that place’s location in a large multifaceted, interconnected world.”5 Rachel Moore has shown this to be true for Xalapa, Veracruz, which became integrated into the Atlantic community in the eighteenth century. Although it lay forty miles from the coast, it emerged as the linchpin for internal Atlantic trade for the Spanish empire.6 I will argue that the region of Córdoba began evolving at the end of the nineteenth century from an inward-looking, sugar- and tobaccoproducing , postcolonial economy into Mexico’s major center of coffee production, preparation, and...