Colonial brews: Cafe and power in the America

Colonial Brews: Cafe and Power in the Americas examines coffee trade in the Americas generally, and between the U.S. and Nicaragua specifically, to see how unequal and colonial power is produced and maintained in a region. It is a geo-historical study that combines archival research, policy analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork methods with critical spatial and critical ethnic studies theories. Primary sources include nineteenth century U.S. canal project papers, coffee trade journals and agreements, GATT and WTO agreements, and fair trade materials. I also analyze the accounting archives of La Hammonia coffee plantation in Nicaragua in addition to conducting interviews and completing participant observation on-site. Colonial Brews combines these sources to answer key research questions. How do the production, retail, and consumption of coffee broadly and between the U.S. and Nicaragua specifically reveal the persistence of colonial power? What shapes do the control over the economic, political, civic, and epistemic take in a particular global commodity chain? Who are the actors involved in delineating the contours of---whether in a dominant or marginal role---production, retail, and consumption in a coffee commodity chain between the U.S. and Nicaragua? How are different crises---of surplus, of price drops, of infrastructure, of war---resolved? How do the resolutions inhibit or engender alternative forms of interdependence? Over the course of the dissertation it becomes evident that tracing the history of a coffee commodity chain between the U.S. and Nicaragua reveals colonial power at work that is structured by what Walter Mignolo calls the logic of coloniality (2005). In each instance, the resolutions to crises work to reproduce colonial power and extend the reach of coloniality. In the end, the colonial interdependence made between people and places across space in this context can only be undone through anti-colonial practices that form a diverse assault across the spectrum of political, economic, and social life in the service of refashioning global connection. This is all the more urgent at a moment in which political, economic, and social acts are binding people and places together with increasing intimacy. We must join in the work of many who are trying to make another kind of interdependence that is more equitable and life-sustaining. To make it based on mutuality.;Colonial Brews contributes to scholarship on processes of globalization and transnationalism in Critical Geography, (Transnational) American Studies, Transnational Sociology and Latino Studies. It builds on the work of geographers, sociologists, and anthropologists who use political economy and commodity chains to study the production of power at a regional or global scale by approaching them from the anti-colonial perspective of critical ethnic studies. In so doing it presents an analysis that is not couched solely in class terms, but one that sees class, ethnicity, race, and gender differences as mutually constituted and made simultaneously through the logic of coloniality. It challenges the modern conception of history as linear and the effects this has on economic and social policy by positing a nested notion of history that enables new beginnings and not simply points of departure. Lastly, the mixed methods research design combines the social sciences and humanities by bringing critical ethnic studies and critical spatial theories to bear on the practices of ethnography, policy analysis, and archival research.