Between 1870 and 1920, the department of the Soconusco in Chiapas, Mexico, became the country's largest exporter of coffee to global markets. The expansion of this economy required the mobilization of an ever larger workforce in the service of international commerce. Yet, as this article argues, global demand could only remake social and economic relations within the parameters of entrenched local structures. In the Soconusco, the development and endurance of incentivized contracts as opposed to coercive debt peonage were the result of tapping into a dispersed and diversified labor pool. By looking at the history of finca San Juan las Chicharras, this article explores both the day-to-day functioning of coffee plantations and the ways in which workers, planters, and politicians alike grappled with the redirection of their output toward ever more lucrative export production.
From the mid-nineteenth century onward, governments across Latin America founded departments offomento, or development, to promote economic growth and modernization. This article looks at the evolution of this department in Mexico and the ways in which it integrated infrastructure, migration, land policy, science, and education into a rural economic and social project. For Department of Fomento leaders, agriculture became the connective tissue linking peace to prosperity. Though many failed, initiatives aimed at increasing the diversity of Mexico's rural production illustrate a concerted effort to avoid top-heavy monoculture and use scientific planning to stabilize and unify the nation.
In 1899, municipal officials throughout Mexico sent tables of agricultural statistics to Mexico City to assist in the preparation of a special publication for the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition, where the Mexican government hoped it would impress the world with Mexico's modernity and potential. Though the activity was nothing new, the ways in which municipal officials provided the requested information confounded the national project of both understanding and representing the Mexican countryside. The statistics were never published. This article serves as an introduction to a new dataset and collection of maps built from transcriptions of the manuscript tables. It also demonstrates that regular participation in statistical undertakings served as a means for provincial Mexicans to complicate and confound the process of state consolidation. Here I see, rather than refusal or rebellion, ready participation in state knowledge projects as another way in which those beyond Mexico City managed their relationships with President Porfirio Díaz's technocratic government. Engaging with conceptions of governmentality on one side and data management on the other, I use the 1899 agricultural statistics to highlight how unruly participation in data collection frustrated the practice's centralizing and standardizing project.
This chapter draws on local stories of violence and instability to explore the lived experiences of international debates over sovereignty. Like many countries in Latin America, Mexico and Guatemala lacked a border treaty until the 1880s. For the national government, the absence of clear territorial bounds countered Mexico’s assertions of itself as a modern nation. For planters in the Soconusco, the lack of territorial fixity made it difficult to define and defend their property. Yet, for laborers and villagers from the Soconusco and Guatemala, the porous border provided access to land and opportunities for seasonal work. This chapter demonstrates how all of these interests came into play in the negotiation and implementation of the 1882 border treaty. While international aspirations spurred confrontation between national governments, local experiences of and knowledge about the border formed the basis for negotiating their resolution.
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