<i>From the Grounds Up: Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico</i> by Casey Marina Lurtz
Casey Marina Lurtz’s meticulously researched book analyzes the rocky transition of the Soconusco region of Chiapas from a backwater nineteenth-century ranching zone into Mexico’s most important coffee region. Readers will appreciate her attention to labor, land, and the challenges state actors and larger-scale planters faced to gain control over them. Only once planters and merchants began to offer incentives like access to credit and land, did villagers and migrant workers from the Mexican highlands, Guatemala, and elsewhere begin to plant trees and tend to beans. Many locals became small-scale producers themselves, and to this day communally held village landholders produce a significant portion of the region’s coffee.Lurtz convincingly depicts the Soconusco as simultaneously “a place where all of the traditional narratives of Latin America’s export boom come together” and “a place where none of those narratives hold” (4). The textbook version of Latin American history emphasizes how late nineteenth-century liberal regimes dispossessed villagers and welcomed foreign investors to make way for large-scale plantations. Fusing economist Douglass North’s arguments about institutions and capitalism with political-scientist/anthropologist James Scott’s theories on state and society, Lurtz’s corrective explains that coffee production could only expand once the borderlands became less violent and bureaucracy became stronger. To engage in export agriculture, planters and villagers alike needed infrastructure and reliable institutions. They needed to agree on the norms surrounding titles to land, access to mortgages and credits, labor, and trade contracts. As one of Lurtz’s many beautifully crafted sentences put it, “Cattle could be branded as a person’s property and walk themselves to market; coffee could not” (25).Soconusco residents, politicians, and planters confronted a series of hurdles as they sought to emulate the increasingly wealthy coffee planters across the Guatemalan border. First, was fixing said border: villagers, politicians, and soldiers had taken advantage of the possibilities for rampage and refuge provided by Mexico’s porous southern border for decades. Once Guatemalans and Mexicans finally signed an agreement in 1882, bureaucrats slowly replaced armed forces and strongmen, rendering possible long-distance economic activity.The regime of Porfirio Díaz (1876–1910) consolidated the state through “a careful dance of violence and compromise that gradually brought an end to outright political chaos” (65). Historians of other Mexican regions have found examples of violent strongmen becoming crony capitalists, lining their pockets as they facilitated business and state investments. In the Soconusco, villagers and planters engaged institutions and administration as a way of getting around the strongman. Less inspired to participate in the sort of popular liberalism and electoral politics documented in the Mexican heartlands, the villagers of the Soconusco instead used judges, notaries, customs officials, scribes, and surveyors to carve out space for their livelihoods (78). Villagers and planters embraced civil and commercial codes to guard against fraud, they paid taxes to prove ownership, and they invested in infrastructure to bring workers to the region and to ship coffee out of it.Grounds skillfully integrates attention to geography and land use to highlight the many options available to villagers. “Centuries of overlapping means of establishing ownership layered on top of eons of volcanic activity,” Lurtz notes, “made the legal terrain nearly as indecipherable as the physical spaces it purported to govern” (88). Locals and migrants tapped into the available spaces to plant subsistence and market goods. A US girl’s story about arriving in the Soconusco and fraternizing with Germans, Swiss, and other immigrant planter families emphasizes the foreigners-civilizing-the-tropics trope, but Lurtz reads this and other narratives, public record documents, and maps against the grain to tease out local stories.“As much as ridges and gullies became natural borders for neighboring plantations,” she argues, “communally held lands were man-made bounds for the spread of fincas as a whole” (88). The historiography of globalization emphasizes the loss of village lands to plantation owners, but Soconuscan villagers “maintained and even expanded their reach into the foothills of the Sierra Madre” (88). Since it took four years for coffee trees to yield beans, and only titled lands could serve as collateral for loans and credit, villagers and new arrivals gained, then expanded, their access to private land through strategic engagement with work contracts and liberal reforms. In 1880, a villager needed only eight days’ wages to purchase a small plot of land: María Díaz and Manuel Molina did so, lending grandeur to their plots with the names Bolívar and La Libertad (freedom) (96). While larger planters borrowed from merchants through coffee futures contracts, these smaller landholders took advances on their wages from the planters who hired them, or borrowed money from shopkeepers such as foreigner Antonio Bado and his wife, and then widow, the local, elite Herlinda Rosales (141).Access to land meant that local families could feed themselves and participate in the market independently, so planters had to look farther afield for workers. When one planter brought 237 men, women, and children from the Gilbert Islands in the South Pacific, the experiment ended in disaster: over two-thirds died from smallpox within two years (118). Most planters had little choice but turn to the Guatemalans and highland villagers of Chiapas. At great expense, they hired recruiters and instructed them to offer better wages, access to credit, and land. Workers borrowed money, got paid wages, and returned to Guatemala or Chiapas without paying off debts, very frequently without consequences. As the demand for coffee soared and the need for workers overshadowed concerns about debt, planters opted for a system Lurtz describes as “incentivized contract labor” (118). This differed from the more-coercive debt peonage, closer to indentured labor, that reigned in the regions from which Soconuscan workers came.Soconuscan workers’ debts passed from generation to generation and from plantation to plantation, but these were largely on paper and actually served to give them security of employment and consistent access to credit for their families’ planting and subsistence needs. In the final chapter, we see a second case of workers using the system to their advantage as Guatemalan villagers claimed Mexican citizenship to get access to lands, cashing in on the agrarian promises of the 1910 revolution.Lurtz collapses wonderful detail and analysis into an efficient 173 pages. Upper-level students and specialists in Mexico, Latin America, and the new history of capitalism will appreciate Lurtz’s refreshing case of locals successfully participating in the global transformation brought by the beans many of us start our days with. Readers interested in learning more about gender and the postrevolutionary period might consider, respectively, Verena Stolcke’s Coffee Planters, Workers, and Wives: Class Conflict and Gender Relations on São Paulo Coffee Plantations (1988) and Frans Shreyer’s Rancheros of Pisaflores: The History of a Peasant Bourgeoisie in Twentieth-Century Mexico (1980).
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