Resumen

EJEA MENDOZA, María Teresa. Café y cultura productiva en una región de Veracruz. Nueva antropol [online]. 2009, vol.22, n.70, pp.33-56. ISSN 0185-0636.

This article deals with the economic and sociocultural relations around the production of coffee. It focuses on the strategies of small producers in a region of central Veracruz, Mexico, to confront changes in their sector in the last years. It establishes that the variety of practices developed by producers are related to specific ways of understanding coffee, and that such ways of thinking and practices had been built socially, in the frame of a regional and local historic and social context, as well as by the experience and position of small producers in the productive chains. We identified, within a variety of individual and family responses, two general tendencies, two ways of working and thinking coffee, associated with two different productive schemes, one specialized and the other diversified. To characterize these two tendencies, the article describes -in comparative terms- the strategies developed by producers on the two localities of the region and how these strategies allow them to continue to be coffee growers. The different strategies place producers in distinct positions to confront the dynamic of the international market -that ceased to be regulated and turned into an oligopoly-, with its tendency to segmentation and to be influenced by new patterns of consumption.

Palabras llave : coffee; producer; strategies; market; economic and sociocultural relations.