The blood of heroes: Nationalist bodies, National soils, and the scientific conservation of the Federation of Colombian Coffee-Growers (1927–1946)

Abstract

This paper explores the scientific research and management programs of Colombia’s Federation of Colombian Coffee-Growers (FEDECAFE) as part of a campaign to ensure the long-term viability of the nation’s largest and most prominent export crop in the 1930s and early 1940s. Their work served a constituency of largely peasant small-holders in a period of increased erosion and declining coffee yields. Drawing on the organization’s internal records and popular publications, this research shows how new ideas about human and ecological natures were an essential component of FedeCafé hegemony, conceptually embedding the vitality of Colombian nationhood and citizenship in coffee country’s ecological systems. Further, this conceptual re-embedding of society in ecological processes was itself the result of concerted challenges to new forms of land and labor exploitation that accompanied the global capitalist commodity booms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.