Casey Marina Lurtz

From the Grounds Up

Building an Export Economy in Southern Mexico

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

In the late nineteenth century, Latin American exports boomed. From Chihuahua to Patagonia, producers sent industrial fibers, tropical fruits, and staple goods across oceans to satisfy the ever-increasing demand from foreign markets. In southern Mexico's Soconusco district, the coffee trade would transform rural life. A regional history of the Soconusco as well as a study in commodity capitalism, From the Grounds Up places indigenous and mestizo villagers, migrant workers, and local politicians at the center of our understanding of the export boom. An isolated, impoverished backwater for most of the nineteenth century, by 1920, the Soconusco had transformed into a small but vibrant node in the web of global commerce. Alongside plantation owners and foreign investors, a dense but little-explored web of small-time producers, shopowners, and laborers played key roles in the rapid expansion of export production. Their deep engagement with rural development challenges the standard top-down narrative of market integration led by economic elites allied with a strong state. Here, Casey Marina Lurtz argues that the export boom owed its success to a diverse body of players whose choices had profound impacts on Latin America's export-driven economy during the first era of globalization.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 296
• Erscheinungstermin: 17. Mai 2022
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 229mm x 152mm x 17mm
• Gewicht: 462g
• ISBN-13: 9781503632615
• ISBN-10: 150363261X
• Artikelnr.: 62755178

Autorenporträt

Casey Marina Lurtz is Assistant Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction:
chapter abstract
Across the late nineteenth century, Latin American rural economies
transformed and expanded to meet the demands of urban and industrial
markets in the North Atlantic. In examining these transformations,
historians have long failed to register the ways smalltime producers as
well as foreign and local elites integrated Latin America into global
trade. Yet it is impossible to understand the export boom without
understanding all those who produced for market. Neither the liberal
policies of Latin American elites nor the capital and connections of
migrant investors could absolutely disentail regional participants in the
shifting political and economic landscape of the era. From the first years
of production, numerous factors constrained commercial investors as they
attempted to turn places like the Soconusco into model plantation economies
serving global markets. Chief among these was the active participation of
local villagers in the self-same global market and the institutions that
undergirded it.
1An Uncultivated Eden
chapter abstract
Borrowing the language and rhetoric of correspondence between individuals
living in the Soconusco and the Mexican Minister of Finance, Matías Romero,
this chapter elucidates the hurdles that stood in the way of the region's
integration into global markets. After an overview of the region's
precolonial and colonial history, the chapter establishes how little the
Soconusco had to recommend it in the 1860s. Without a fixed border, a
reliable political leader, institutions to secure property and commerce, or
a population adequate to meet the labor demands of plantation agriculture,
the Soconusco did not present an ideal site for development. Yet precisely
because of these absences, Romero and others posited the region as an
exemplary site for experimentation. With this in mind, the chapter
illustrates how the region can stand in for other parts of rural Latin
America undergoing a shift to export agriculture in the same era.
2Fixing the Border
chapter abstract
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.
3From Bullets to Bureaucracy
chapter abstract
Order and progress have long defined both the ambitions and achievements of
governments across Latin America at the turn of the century. This chapter
demonstrates how local actors also put those ideas into play, working
around political violence by engaging with state bureaucracy. In parallel
to the political history of popular liberalism, this chapter traces a
popular history bureaucratic liberalism. Beginning with the history of a
local cacique's rise to the state governorship, it then traces his decline
through the gradual reworking of the apparatus and physical spaces of state
institutions into places where producers could work around the cacique's
arbitrary exercise of power. This sidestepping of political authority set
the stage for local control over the implementation of reform, even after
the cacique's death. Administration substituted for electoral politics, but
administration itself became a means of local assertions of
self-governance.
4The Landscape of Production
chapter abstract
This chapter traces the overlapping stories of villager and finquero-driven
land privatization efforts and the attendant acceleration in local property
markets as export agriculture expanded in the Soconusco. In the process, it
shows how smallholders and their neighbors increased their holdings and
defined the spaces within which local and migrant elites could invest. As
much as ridges and gullies became natural borders for neighboring
plantations, municipalities and their communally held lands were man-made
bounds for the spread of fincas as a whole. Counter to a historiography of
globalization that has long emphasized the loss of village lands to
plantation owners, here villagers maintained and even expanded their reach
into the foothills of the Sierra Madre de Chiapas.
5Scarce Labor and Unrealized Reform
chapter abstract
This chapter uses the history of a large finca called San Juan las
Chicharras to demonstrate how laborers extracted incentives from their
employers as the export economy of the Soconusco expanded. While labeled
debt peonage, the labor system of the growing coffee economy is better
understood through the idea of incentivized contracts. Because of
demographics and planters' lack of coercive capabilities, planters'
continual attempts to circumvent or reform contracts that came with
advances, access to credit, good wages, and subsistence plots continually
failed. Finqueros tried to ease their bottom lines through legislation and
attempts to reach beyond the regional labor source. Yet so long as need for
workers outpaced the supply of interested laborers, these attempts failed.
The informal institutions of incentivized contracts won out over attempts
to reform formalized labor relations.
6The Circulation of Codes and Commerce
chapter abstract
This chapter uses the Bado family's commercial activities to capture how
local actors engaged with the increasingly diverse array of commercial
instruments in use in the globalizing economy. Through the use of
state-sponsored institutions to secure and promote their investments, local
actors built these institutions into meaningful and durable parts of the
economy. Making use of running tabs at general stores, small short term
loans registered at the local court, advance contracts for coffee, and long
term mortgage-backed loans, people across the economic spectrum came in
contact with and made use of liberal commercial reforms. In so doing, they
created a liberal economic vernacular to govern quotidian transactions. The
chapter also emphasizes the increasing material and institutional
integration of the region into the global economy and shows how the
expansion of the global economy relied on local actors' engagement with and
interpretation of its essential institutions.
Conclusion:
chapter abstract
This conclusion illustrates how the book has sought to advance a history of
the export boom that understands late nineteenth century globalization
through the activities of all those involved in production. Pulling the
history of the Soconusco's export economy through the Mexican Revolution
and into the present, it illustrates how this place provides a model for
understanding the transformation of rural economies through engagement
rather than imposition. State projects for modernization and consolidation
manifested on a timeline and in a manner that had much more to do with
local need than the desires of higher authorities. This stilted, sometimes
stumbling manner of building new legal and commercial institutions may have
impeded future economic development. Yet as the nineteenth century slipped
into the twentieth, it facilitated the continued involvement of a large
swath of local society in export production.