12 - Beauty Queens and Theme Parks: Coffee Culture in Contemporary Colombia

Summary

Most scholars presume that Colombians have a weak national identity that remains “under construction” and undermines political efforts at state construction (Gonzalez; Bushnell). For example, Fischer states that “the Colombian state is weak because of the weak articulation of the Colombian nation” (186). Political elites are blamed for failing to articulate a strong national identity or produce symbols of national unity (Pecaut; Palacios and Safford; Sousa Santos and Garcia Villegas). This elite failure is said to have resulted in a “fragmented” nation, with people identifying first and foremost with a region or political party instead of the nation-state (Gonzalez, Bolivar, and Vasquez). This “incomplete construction of national identity” is thought to have impeded the state from transcending either geographic or social boundaries (Rodriguez, Garcia-Villegas, and Uprimny, 138).

Explaining Colombian state failure through national failure, however, is a tautological argument. Moreover, it does not shed light into what kinds of collective imaginings Colombians do share. Rather than relying on binary conceptions of national identity as absent or present, I seek to describe the quality and content of at least one component of contemporary Colombian collective imagining. Nation-states are not simply authored by political elite or imaged through print capitalism; the consumption of material commodities, images, and symbols also constructs national identity (Coronil; Anderson). Spectacles invite people to participate in the construction of political power while allowing for contradiction, repetition, the omission of inconvenient truths, partial truth telling, and various interpretations. Gender and the nuclear family provide some of the most easily imitated and elastic scripts for official performances that establish the protocol for public conduct and practices of national belonging, particularly in moments of crisis (Caldeira; Taylor; Wedeen; Norton; McClintock; Butler). Recurrence of these familiar tropes is particularly depoliticizing, naturalizing political decisions and power imbalances.

In this chapter, I argue that Colombians have constructed a collective national identity based on the consumption of coffee culture. Rituals of coffee culture invite citizens to engage in easily recognizable and widely reproduced performances of national belonging. Nationally, the spectacle of the coffee economy unites fragmented regional identities behind the image of one common coffee culture that is marked by the absence of historic inequities. In the first section, I discuss the origins and collapse of the coffee state.