Markets of Progress: Coffee, Commerce, and Community in the Soconusco, Chiapas, 1867-1920

Markets of Progress presents a new holistic story of rural development in Mexico at the turn of the century. In the Soconusco, as in regions throughout the world, the accelerating circulation of commodities and capital, ideas and immigrants reshaped society during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Yet the Soconusco also reshaped all that circulated through it. I argue that the interplay of resilient local structures and adaptable imported institutions was essential to the growth and endurance of the region’s coffee economy. An isolated, impoverished backwater when Benito Juárez overthrew the French in 1867, by 1910 the Soconusco had become a small but vibrant hub of migration and commerce. It had also become the largest exporter of coffee from Mexico, a role it retained for much of the twentieth century. Yet where export development has generally been tied to the impoverishment of locals and their land, here coffee emerged in the hands of a diverse body of participants. Alongside foreign merchants and migrant planters, local smallholders, migrant laborers, and regional politicians took an active role in the expansion of the coffee economy.

Forceful state involvement has long been understood as essential to the expansion of export production in Latin America during this era. In line with this, Mexico City politicians and bureaucrats instituted liberal legislation regarding land, labor, credit, and infrastructure across the mid-nineteenth century. Yet by the 1870s, few impacts had been felt in this distant corner of Mexico, hedged in by mountains, the Pacific Ocean, and the border with Guatemala. As in much of the rest of the countryside, the national government was a distant idea, not a local reality. In the absence of the supposedly pervasive hallmarks of a modernizing, consolidating state, the emergence of the Soconusco’s coffee economy was governed by bargains and compromises. The purportedly long and intrusive arm of President Porfirio Díaz’s decades-long regime (1876-1910) – his railroads and rural police, his científicos and cronyism – had little role to play in the pace of development in the region. Rather, those in the Soconusco, both natives and newcomers, struggled within and against the bounds of local circumstance to build one of the most enduring agricultural economies of the era.

My ongoing work explores how residents of the Soconusco dictated the spaces and speed of export growth. The dissertation on which this manuscript builds examined how migrant planters and merchants from across Mexico, the United States, and Europe fashioned the coffee economy without much assistance from the Mexican state. If, as I have shown, the narrative of state-driven export growth does not hold, the attendant story of legally mandated expropriation and peonage in the service of new economies also becomes suspect. My research into the role of planters and merchants in the creation of the coffee economy revealed substantial constraints on their activities, the majority imposed by local participants. Quantitative findings regarding active markets for land within villages, comparatively high wages for workers, and total exports beyond what plantations could produce are all suggestive of how my work challenges received wisdom about export agriculture in Latin America. As I continue researching, I am driven to explore how locals engaged in export production, what benefits and impediments they found in outsider involvement, and how they in turn shaped the large plantations and foreign networks that generally define our understanding of commodity agriculture. The Soconusco was in no way the Eden its early proponents described, neither for big time planters and merchants, nor for smallholders and workers. Yet the sizeable migration of both foreign investors and indigenous laborers to the region during the coffee boom suggests that all saw opportunity within this new economy. By continuing to examine the interactions between the multiple modes of production at play in the Soconusco, my research makes a case for a more constrained and at the same time more capacious experience of export growth than we yet understand.