176 pages / 5.50 x 8.50 inches / 21 halftones, 4 graphs, 1 map
Business & Economics / Food Industry | History / Central America | Social Science / Agriculture & Food
Costa Rica After Coffee explores the political, social, and economic place occupied by the coffee industry in contemporary Costa Rican history. In this follow-up to the 1986 classic Costa Rica Before Coffee, Lowell Gudmundson delves deeply into archival sources, alongside the individual histories of key coffee-growing families, to explore the development of the co-op movement, the rise of the gourmet coffee market, and the societal transformations Costa Rica has undergone as a result of the coffee industry’s powerful presence in the country.
While Costa Rican coffee farmers and co-ops experienced a golden age in the 1970s and 1980s, the emergence and expansion of a gourmet coffee market in the 1990s drastically reduced harvest volumes. Meanwhile, urbanization and improved education among the Costa Rican population threatened the continuance of family coffee farms, because of the lack of both farmland and a successor generation of farmers. As the last few decades have seen a rise in tourism and other industries within the country, agricultural exports like coffee have ceased to occupy the same crucial space in the Costa Rican economy. Gudmundson argues that the fulfillment of promises of reform from the co-op era had the paradoxical effect of challenging the endurance of the coffee industry.
Lowell Gudmundson is professor of history and Latin American studies at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of Costa Rica Before Coffee: Society and Economy on the Eve of the Economic Boom; coauthor of Central America, 1821–1871: Liberalism Before Liberal Reform; coeditor of Blacks and Blackness in Central America: Between Race and Place; and Coffee, Society, and Power in Latin America.
“Gudmundson’s book . . . is another academic and critical homage to Costa Rica by this historian, a piece of whose heart beats to a marimba, moved by the old, broken-down oxcarts abandoned to their fate on the edges of coffee farms, the same farms where today U.S. and European tourists wander, keen to know how coffee was picked.”—Diálogos: Revista Electrónica de Historia
“[Gudmundson’s] new book, which recovers with particular empathy the memories of those who participated in the cooperative utopia, is a valuable and welcome contribution to studies on coffee in Costa Rica.”—The Americas
“[An] excellent book. . . . We must all be grateful for Gudmundson’s generous, challenging, and timely contribution.”—Hispanic American Historical Review
“Gudmundson deserves high praise for not only producing a smartly argued monograph but doing so in just over one hundred pages. . . . Costa Rica after Coffee affirms Gudmundson’s prominent position in the field of Costa Rican studies and promises to become required reading for Costa Ricanists. This book additionally will appeal to Latin Americanists interested in the process of cooperative development.”—Agricultural History
“Lowell Gudmundson’s Costa Rica after Coffee is a most engaging account of the role that coffee has played in transforming Costa Rican society in the last 70 years.”—Journal of Latin American Studies
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