Coffee and Mayan Cultural Commodification in Guatemala

Today in Guatemala, coffee is a dominant feature in the landscape (Figure 1). Dominance in this case doesn't simply refer to export earnings, but also refers to how coffee shapes and has shaped Guatemala's environment, labor history, economy, and political landscape for almost 150 years (Brockett 1990; Lyon 2010). Exposure to coffee's dominance is evident upon arrival in Guatemala. Coffee advertisements and associated images greet tourists at the international airport, and gourmet beans are available for purchase as one leaves the country. Between arrival and departure, one cannot help but come into contact (in various forms) with large coffee fincas, coffee shops, coffee laborers, and of course the sociopolitical results of coffee's dominance in Guatemala. Coffee's modern dominance has been in the making for more than a century. It is not hyperbolic to state that the roots of Guatemala's 20th-century political, economic, and related social woes can be traced to the expansion and entrenchment of the coffee economy in the 19th century (McCreery 1976; Cambranes 1985; Paige 1997; Lyon 2007a). Perhaps most importantly, political elites associated with coffee laid the foundation for the present-day's highly unequal land distribution, which continues to be Guatemala's most pressing and deeply embedded political-economic problem. The disparity of land holdings between the haves and have-nots was the primary cause of Guatemala's 36-year civil war that ended in 1996, and continues to limit rural development and stability today (Handy 1994; Wilkinson 2004). Thus, labeling coffee as a historically repressive crop is not hyperbole. However dominant as coffee is today, it was almost nonexistent as an export crop in Guatemala until the 1870s (Paige 1997). In 1860, for example, coffee constituted only 1 percent of Guatemala's export earnings. Instead, cochineal (Dactylopius coccus; from which a crimson-colored dye is produced), which replaced indigo as the chief export crop after independence from Spain in 1821, stood as the most significant cash crop produced in the rural western highlands (Handy 1984). Cochineal accounted for 93 percent of Guatemala's exports in 1850 (Handy 1984). The cochineal economy depended on cultivation by Mayan smallholders. It was not until the 1871 Liberal overthrow of the Conservative regime that coffee began to emerge as a powerful economic force (Handy 1984; Johnson 2002; McCreery 2003). In a few short decades after its introduction, coffee came to dominate Guatemala's physical, economic, and social landscape. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] The rise of coffee in the late-nineteenth century brought with it conflict because Liberal regimes opposed colonial restrictions on labor, land, and markets (Paige 1997; McCreery 2003). In rural Guatemala, the coffee coup and the new polices that it set in motion radically altered the political-ecological landscape and consolidated a coffee oligarchy. Prior to the 1871 coup, Guatemala's Mayan population controlled extensive ancestral lands. These lands were held communally and controlled and governed by each village. Because cochineal production was so important to the state and Catholic Church, there was little incentive to disrupt this profitable system that relied on smallholders and their control of their own land. That situation changed in 1871 when the coffee economy provided an opening for the state and economic elites, often one in the same, to begin to gain widespread control of Mayan land, labor, and life (Lovell 1985 and 2010). Policies ushered in by the new Liberal regime intended to stimulate coffee production resulted in "a massive assault upon village lands" (McCreery 1976, 457). If coffee was to expand, the leaders of the Liberal regime believed that land in the highlands had to be freed so that coffee could be planted. The emerging Liberal-capitalist Guatemalan society began to successfully transform local cultural relations to economic ones. …