In the past forty years, scholars have made significant advances in our understanding of the roles of gender in history. At the same time, historians of commodity exports in Latin America have made important strides in our understanding of the history of capitalism. With important exceptions, however, historians of gender have devoted little time and attention to rural economies while historians of rural economies have devoted little attention to gender. This panel attempts to overcome these limitations in the literature by applying the tools of gender history to Brazilian sugar, coffee, and cacao export regions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These four papers address common questions related to gender and agricultural commodity production in Latin America during Brazil's second slavery, post-emancipation, and national periods. Using plantation records recently discovered in Switzerland, Mahony examines how planters endeavored to reproduce an enslaved labour force on Bahia’s expanding cacao frontier from the 1820s through the 1850s. She reconstructs those families and then uses the lens of the history of emotions to delve into both the impact of high mortality rates and the development of the multi-generational families that grew out of these twisted roots. Dezemone takes as his focus the Santo Inácio coffee production complex that included some twenty properties with more than 1000 slaves in the nineteenth century. When the government nationalized the property to distribute the lands through agrarian reform in 1987, great clashes arose between the descendants of the owner family and the descendants of the workers – former slaves and immigrants of European origin. The paper traces the as-yet-untold stories of women’s roles in these struggles by highlighting their actions described in the oral testimonies of male workers, police records, and administrative and legal proceedings; these stories allow us to see the structure of peasant families and the development of a relationship with the land, based on the construction of a notions of rights. McGillivray looks at gendered strategies for upward mobility among humble and elite segments of São Paulo’s sugar and coffee industries between 1880 and 1950, emphasizing important differences in such approaches among recently-freed Afro-Brazilian families versus newly-arrived immigrant sharecropper families. Soares dos Santos takes us back to Rio de Janeiro, where he explores how the rural workers' union in the sugar-producing region of Campos dos Goytacazes approached the issue of gender relations in daily labor, in relations with the owners and in the union life itself. The inclusion of papers on three different commodities—cacao, coffee, and sugar—from three different provinces/states of Brazil (Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo) allows us to explore important counterpoints that go beyond assumptions that crop or region determined the experiences of the women and men who lived and labored in these regions and to highlight the role of gender in these histories. We anticipate a broad audience of historians of Latin America and beyond for this panel. The attention to gender, labor, and commodity exports will attract historians of all three broad themes at the conference.