Rationalizing the Bean: The Campaign to Improve Coffee Cultivation in 1920s São Paulo

In 1927, the City of São Paulo hosted the Grand Coffee Exposition that celebrated the bicentennial of coffee’s introduction to Brazil. The exposition highlighted the important role coffee had come to play in Brazilian culture and the country’s economy. On the heels of the Expo’s success, the State of São Paulo’s Secretary of Agriculture established a formal Coffee Section to promote rational cultivation practices that might lead to higher quality and greater consistency in the Paulista coffee harvest. The section initiated a two-year campaign that traveled across the state’s coffee growing regions to bring agricultural experts into contact with farmers, where they might learn from one another.

The Coffee Section’s campaign to rationalize coffee production came while large numbers of Japanese immigrants were settling in rural São Paulo. Most Japanese first worked on coffee plantations as laborers to save money to purchase their own land and become independent farmers, where many continued to grow coffee. Given coffee cultivation’s importance to Japanese economic mobility in Brazil, Japanese institutions often translated the latest techniques and understandings into Japanese for farmers who were unfamiliar with the crop.

This paper explores the relationship between the Coffee Section’s campaign to rationalize Paulista coffee cultivation and Japanese immigrant farmers. Newspaper articles and histories of the campaign’s travels along with Japanese-language agricultural manuals and magazines demonstrate how attempts to improve quality were simultaneously local – driven by soil quality and climate in different regions of São Paulo – but also global – collected for and translated into Japanese for farmers settling in Brazil. What emerges is a multidirectional and multilingual understanding of the creation of Brazilian coffee knowledge in the twentieth century and the important role that ways that coffee experts and Japanese farmers worked together to buttress Brazil’s place in the world.