Factories in the fields of plenty: Gender, agrarian transformation, and industrial restructuring in the southwestern regional economy of Colombia

This case study of the Talleres Rurales del Valle Cooperative in southwestern Colombia departs from recent work focusing on the urban locus of the industrial informal sector by revealing the conditions for the emergence of a rural industrial informal labor force comprised of rural women residing in households of small-scale coffee producers and/or coffee daylaborers in Colombia's southwestern regional economy.;This work traces the linkages between rural factories in Columbia's North Valle region, and the subsequent industrial proletarianization of rural women, to the monopsonic structure of coffee production on small farms in the region. The emergence of the small farm-based coffee economy dependent upon a capitalist coffee export sector is linked to the development of a national industrial base located in the western region of Colombia. The study also argues that the structure of coffee production in the western region is a legacy of an extractive economy based on the independent mining of gold tied to an export oriented merchant sector during the period from 1700-1850.;Drawing upon primary and secondary sources, and ethnographic field research methods, the study concludes that the extension of industrial informal work to rural Colombia is a result of the availability of a female rural labor force whose past relationship to the petty commodity production of coffee places them in the center of a monopsonic structure controlled by the coffee export sector. Thus, the changing structure of coffee production, opened the way for the incorporation of rural Colombian women into the global assembly line.;The study's regional economic framework offers a new perspective for understanding the social and economic origins of flexible production arrangements in once agrarian regional economies revitalized by industrial restructuring. It challenges earlier models characterizing capitalist transformation in Colombia which underestimate the potential for industrial development in a national economy historically dependent upon coffee as its chief export.