Investment or Immigration? Foreign Planters in Turn-of-the-Century Soconusco

This paper will compare the personal and economic trajectories of a number of foreign coffee planters along Mexico’s southern border during the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. As booming global demand for coffee drew an increasingly diverse body of would-be planters to the state of Chiapas, the lines between investor and immigrant blurred and new patterns of integration into and segregation from the local elite developed. By looking at these planters, managers, merchants, and families side by side, this paper will posit that the agronomic and commercial demands of a global commodity overcame origin-based delineations and fostered an interconnected economic community that included Mexican participants alongside those from the United States and Europe.