Coffee. For most Americans it's just a tasty stimulant, but elsewhere, coffee is the heart and soul of many national economies. In parts of Central America, the history of coffee is inextricably intertwined with a century and a half of politics, economic forces, and control of land.
Few scholars have looked as closely or as tellingly at the dynamics of this phenomenon as Latin American studies program chair Lowell Gudmundson. In the past year and a half, he has published a flurry of articles and books on matters related to land issues and politics in Central America, stemming from more than twenty-five years of intensive research.
For Central American growers, even twenty acres of coffee land can yield a living income, and fifty acres is a substantial tract. But in some Central American countries--such as Costa Rica--a class of land-holding, smaller-scale, independent growers was able to survive, even at times thrive, whereas in other countries they were obliterated by land, labor, or credit policies favoring huge, plantation-style farms. "Explaining how coffee created and expanded family farming in some contexts, while undermining it in others, has been the real focus of my work throughout Central America," Gudmundson said.
Over the past eighteen months Gudmundson cowrote with Hector Lindo-Fuentes Central America, 1821-1871: Liberalism Before Liberal Reform; edited and contributed an article to Coffee, Society and Power and Latin America; wrote articles for Agrarian Structures and Political Power in Latin America and the forth- coming Rural Society in Colonial Latin America and Democratic Governance in the Americas; and wrote many entries in the Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture.
Gudmundson's immersion in the region began as a student in Costa Rica in 1972 and continued when he started teaching at the National University in Heredia, Costa Rica, in 1975. There, he found little-used documents including nationwide census records for Costa Rica from 1843-44 and 1927, probate records of individuals' property for over one hundred years beginning in the 1830s, and a barely legible microfilm copy of an agricultural census from 1955. Using these dusty, largely handwritten documents, Gudmundson constructed long-term histories of families and farms that showed the effects coffee and market farming had on small-farm owners and their descendants.
His work is causing scholars to rethink some traditional ways of understanding how political and economic forces shaped land use, economic classes, and the distribution of wealth and political power in Costa Rica and other Central American countries.
Gudmundson's interest in archival discoveries continues, but he has turned his attention to an agricultural region of central Guatemala, Amatitlán, in which descendants of African-American former slaves had a significant presence. Extensive archival materials recently opened to researchers in Guatemala City will prompt him to plow into the fields of the past once again.
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