Working Women, Entrepreneurs, and the Mexican Revolution: The Coffee Culture of Córdoba, Veracruz

1. Emergence of a Coffee Commercial Elite in Córdoba, Veracruz

17 1 Emergence of a Coffee Commercial Elite in Córdoba,Veracruz When the recent Spanish immigrant Antonio García Menéndez entered into a commercial agreement with a British and a German entrepreneur in Córdoba, Veracruz, to buy, prepare, and export coffee to Europe and the United States in 1895, he created the first major agro-export business that functioned as a commercial intermediary between Mexican coffee producers and the Atlantic community. This venture, which included the construction of a beneficio to prepare export-grade coffee, marked a decisive turning point for Mexico’s coffee agroindustry. This chapter seeks to explore the macrolevel and microlevel factors that contributed to the transformation of Córdoba ’s coffee economy between the 1880s and the 1940s as it solidified its links to the Atlantic coffee market. It analyzes the rise and decline of Córdoba’s coffee producers, the penetration of U.S. export-import companies, and the emergence and consolidation of a new immigrant commercial elite. This transformative process would shape Central Veracruz’s coffee agroindustry and also that of the nation. This chapter shows how Córdoba was transformed from an internal -oriented economy to an export-oriented one that shipped to markets along both Atlantic coasts and the contiguous Caribbean Ocean and Baltic Sea. It became a “linchpin” between transatlantic trade and immigration and the interior of Mexico.1 As Alison Games contends, 18 Emergence of a Coffee Commercial Elite “Atlantic history is not only about the literal points of contact (ports, traders, or migrants, for example), 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.”2 A number of macrolevel and microlevel factors contributed to Córdoba ’s emergence as the nation’s largest commercial center for coffee preparation and commercialization beginning in the 1890s. Most importantly , the enormous increase in demand for coffee and ensuing price increases on both sides of the Atlantic drove foreign and domestic entrepreneurs to invest heavily in the financing, commercialization , and preparation of this commodity in Córdoba, just as in other parts of Latin America. The town’s central location privileged it over all other coffee centers. It enjoyed easy access to the coast, lying only sixty miles from the port of Veracruz and at the intersection of two national railroad lines. However, the role of other internal factors cannot be discounted. Medium-sized landowners who produced sugar, tobacco, and coffee for the domestic market spurred the initial phase of coffee commercialization and preparation in the Córdoba region. By the 1880s, they had developed an unbounded confidence in the idea that coffee production and export could drive national development. This process paralleled what was occurring in other Latin American coffee regions at the same time.3 However, a major shift occurred as agroindustrial operations moved from the coffee farm (finca) to the urban exporting firms (casas de exportación). Two groups of immigrant merchants altered the urban landscape by establishing family businesses that would finance the basic infrastructure for Córdoba’s future Atlantic -oriented agro-export industry. Meanwhile, large U.S. coffeeexport -import companies began to enter the region and compete in the region’s coffee market. Their coffee profits spurred urban modernization , cultural projects, but also socioeconomic inequality as the Porfiriato came to a close. Córdoba’s coffee exporters were able to adapt far more easily than Emergence of a Coffee Commercial Elite 19 its growers to the external challenges of overproduction, social revolution , and depression that buffeted the region between 1906 and 1940.4 In the midst of political and economic upheaval, the second group of Spanish immigrants began to emerge as the region’s key coffee traders, financiers, and preparers. They organized their export firms around family-based entrepreneurial strategies that allowed them to respond and adapt with greater alacrity to the boom and bust cycles of export commodities than the growers. As the second coffee boom reached its height in the mid-1920s, the immigrant entrepreneurs developed different power relationships with the growers, the predominantly female labor force, and foreign buyers. They came to hold shifting “nodal positions within a variety of hierarchical networks .”5 How can we explain the extraordinary success of this new commercial elite? The Cordobeses, the term applied to the emerging coffee exporters by Veracruzanos, built their businesses around...