Costa Rica After Coffee - by Lowell Gudmundson (Paperback)

About the Book

"Spanish edition published as Costa Rica despuâes del cafâe: La era cooperativa en la historia y la memoria (2018), by Universidad Estatal a Distancia (UNED), Costa Rica."

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

[Praise for the Spanish-language edition of Costa Rica After Coffee] [An] excellent book. . . . We must all be grateful for Gudmundson's generous, challenging, and timely contribution.--Hispanic American Historical Review

"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

"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

About the Author

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.