This is the first English-language history of Colombia as a coffee-producer.

In the 1890s, Spanish entrepreneurs spearheaded the emergence of Córdoba, Veracruz, as Mexico’s largest commercial center for coffee preparation and export to the Atlantic community. Seasonal women workers quickly became the major part of the agroindustry’s labor force. As they grew in numbers and influence in the first half of the twentieth century, these women shaped the workplace culture and contested gender norms through labor union activism and strong leadership. Their fight for workers’ rights was supported by the revolutionary state and negotiated within its industrial-labor institutions until they were replaced by machines in the 1960s. Heather Fowler-Salamini’s Working Women, Entrepreneurs, and the Mexican Revolution analyzes the interrelationships between the region’s immigrant entrepreneurs, workforce, labor movement, gender relations, and culture on the one hand, and social revolution, modernization, and the Atlantic community on the other between the 1890s and the 1960s. Using extensive archival research and oral-history interviews, Fowler-Salamini illustrates the ways in which the immigrant and women’s work cultures transformed Córdoba’s regional coffee economy and in turn influenced the development of the nation’s coffee agro-export industry and its labor force.

This book explores the impact on Latin America of the extraordinary transformation of the international economy that took place in the half century or so that preceded the world depression of the 1930s. The authors show how the response varied in terms of both growth and distribution, shaped by varying preconditions, and by natural resources and geography. The interplay of economic developments with political and social structures had profound and varied effects on policy-making and on institutions that were of great significance for later decades.

This is the first detailed scholarly study of culture and sociability in Colombia during the period c. 1850 and 1930. Patricia Londoño-Vega gives a vivid picture of some of the factors that reduced social distances in the province of Antioquia during this period of relative harmony and prosperity. She examines hundreds of the groups and voluntary associations which flourished at this time and which brought a growing number of Antioqueños of different social backgrounds together around religious practices and societies, the exercising of charity, a concern for education, and the pursuit of cultural progress. The book describes the crucial role played by religion and the Catholic Church, which underwent considerable growth after the turbulent period of mid-nineteenth century liberal reforms until the end of the conservative era in 1930, and traces the progress of parishes, devotional associations, religious communities, private and public religiosity, and numeros pilanthropic societies, all of which brought about the bonds between the classes. The author examines achievements in education and the emergence of a thriving gamut of literary groups, public libraries, social clubs, and other assciations created to promote public instuction, pedagogy, manners, temperance, 'cultivated' music, and moral improvement. These cultural associations strove towards the longed-for civilisation, as percieved in its prevalent Western connotations. The social intermingling brought about by all these forms of sociability did not of course abolish class distinctions, but did generate a complex and closely integrated society, with an optimistic and constructive view of itself. The description of social and cultural dynamism, set against the background of growing religiiosity, challenges the seldom-discussed assumption that religion slowed down social and cultural modernisation. Primary evidence, drawn from extensive researh in proceedings and reports by groups, associations, periodical publications, statistics, diaries and memoirs, travellers' accounts, books of etiquette, genre literature and other contemporary publications, as well as visual images, particulary photographs, document important topics which have in the past attracted little attention from scholars.

The continued growth of the Latin American economy is documented in this account of the economic and social consequences of its integration as a primary producer in the expanding international economy.

In January 1927 Gus Comstock, a barbershop porter in the small Minnesota town of Fergus Falls, drank eighty cups of coffee in seven hours and fifteen minutes. The New York Times reported that near the end, amid a cheering crowd, the man's "gulps were labored, but a physician examining him found him in pretty good shape." The event was part of a marathon coffee-drinking spree set off two years earlier by news from the Commerce Department that coffee imports to the United States amounted to five hundred cups per year per person. In Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin America, a distinguished international group of historians, anthropologists, and sociologists examine the production, processing, and marketing of this important commodity. Using coffee as a common denominator and focusing on landholding patterns, labor mobilization, class structure, political power, and political ideologies, the authors examine how Latin American countries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries responded to the growing global demand for coffee. This unique volume offers an integrated comparative study of class formation in the coffee zones of Latin America as they were incorporated into the world economy. It offers a new theoretical and methodological approach to comparative historical analysis and will serve as a critique and counter to those who stress the homogenizing tendencies of export agriculture. The book will be of interest not only to experts on coffee economies but also to students and scholars of Latin America, labor history, the economics ofdevelopment, and political economy.