New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
A look at the history of Costa Rican coffee
SCSU assistant professor publishes book on South American trade
NEW HAVEN — Carmen Coury, an assistant professor of Latin American history at Southern Connecticut State University, published her book “The Saints of Progress: A History of Coffee, Migration, and Costa Rican National Identity,” which examines transnational migration patterns in the Tarrazu region of Costa Rica, with an emphasis on one of its biggest exports: wet-processed arabica coffee. However, a bad crop season can be devastating for farmers.
“You just need one bad crop and that’s it, because the margin is so slim,” Coury said.
With the growing seasons so unpredictable and the financial stakes so high, many Costa Rican men have looked elsewhere to support their families. For many in the Tarrazu region, that means New Jersey.
Although coffee was first discovered in Ethiopia, it began to grow in the Muslim world before finding its way back to Europe. Coury said a coffee plant grown in Paris eventually landed in Martinique before spreading throughout the Caribbean and Central America.
Coury said that, as the coffee trade began to spread through Central America as a profitable industry for colonialist farmers, Costa Rica led the region in selling its wet-processed coffee — where the fruit is removed from the seed before it is fully dried — to the developed world.
While it was the case in many Central American nations as the coffee trade grew throughout the 1800s that coffee would be grown on plantations with laborers working in conditions akin to slavery, it was not so much the case in Costa Rica.
“There was less animosity in Costa Rica between small-scale producers and more tension over the price that processers pay for the beans,” she said.
Although the profits in coffee in Costa Rica fluctuated over time, Coury said that by the 1980s, inflation and several blights on crop fields meant that many farmers with debts were unable to keep their farms themselves. In the Tarrazu region that Coury studies, a woman had moved to New Jersey in the 1960s; a number of men followed in the 1980s, hoping to earn money to send home to keep their farms.
“Because they’re in New Jersey, this means there’s now a labor shortage,” Coury said.
Soon, Panamanian seasonal laborers from the southeast began working on the Tarrazu coffee fields to fulfill a need; near the northern parts of the country, laborers from Nicaragua now work on the coffee fields picking beans.
“This has bolstered national ideas about what it means to be Costa Rican,” Coury said.
Specifically, Costa Rican national identity focuses on being of “Spanish stock,” and is representative of whiteness within Central America. However, Coury said, the consensus in all fields of study is that Costa Ricans are mixed race.
“The Costa Rican national mythos hinges on being white,” she said.
Panamanians working in Tarrazu are indigenous and many speak very limited Spanish, if any. Additionally, the Costa Rican attitude toward Nicaraguans escaping the Contras had been historically chilly, she said.
“Costa Rican identity is built in opposition to Nicagaruans, who are seen as mixed-race and violent,” she said.
Coury said that vendors like Starbucks mark up their coffee by several dollars, but the profits for laborers, processers and farmers are slim. Around the time Tarrazu men began migrating to New Jersey, the cost of a kilo of coffee fell from $1.39 in 1977 to $0.56 in 1983, Coury said.
Even profits from fair trade coffee, which benefits local owners, will often not trickle down to laborers. Many laborers earn the equivalent of $1 for every basket of beans they pick, she said; a productive worker can pick about six or seven baskets a day.
“You can’t have coffee production without cheap, foreign labor if there are no local men to pick the beans. You can’t have farms without Costa Rican men in New Jersey so they can afford to maintain the farms,” she said. “It causes anxiety in everyone.”