Conclusion: Labor Portrayals on Coffee Plantations in 19th Century Brazil

Throughout the 19th century in Brazil, coffee exports dominated the Brazilian economy but also told a parallel story about slavery and modernity. European artists would travel to Latin America to capture the coffee industry through lithography and photography, ultimately creating icons that would turn into stereotypical depictions of coffee laborers who were predominantly of African descent. The laborers are portrayed as part of the scenery, often blending into the fields and becoming part of the overall production machine. Not only were the laborers blended into the background, but their stories were translated into languages outside of the realm of their creation and being exported to Europe to be exhibited and judged by European audiences. It is commonly expressed among historians now that history is often told from the perspective of those in power, and we can see from the depictions we have exhibited that this sentiment held true on coffee plantations in Brazil.

We found the following aspects to be of importance in order to fully explore and analyze both the work and its impact: the descriptions of illustrations and photography, the labor history of Brazil in the 19th century with a focus on coffee plantations and farms, labor depictions and changes in portrayal, artist biographies of prominent labor and industrial artists, and the impact of the intended audience on the art-making process. Our argument is that these images we have selected romanticize and glorify labor, depicting slaves not as individuals, but as pieces of a larger production project.

Today, there is a commodification of the idea of “organic” coffee that harkens back to an image of the exotic laborer in the field producing the coffee for the white consumer. Fair Trade producers, as depicted in the video below, are represented as hard-working, happy individuals or families with their own stories as opposed to the often silenced, exoticized, and seemingly subdued slave laborers of the past. This commodification, however, is a cycle back away from industrialization and back to the conditions that the slave laborers were originally operating in without machinery. Coupled with Fair Trade families often being brown or dark-skinned, “[functioning] as an extension of the colonial and imperial ideology of ‘the little brown brother,’” this imagery provides an ethnically charged relationship between the consumer, coffee, and the producer, who is often othered through their blatant exoticization (Cole, 175). In this promotional video produced by the Fairtrade Foundation, the family is brown-skinned and depicted picking coffee berries in a mountainous “jungle” or cleared-out soil that mimics the imagery produced in the 19th century by artists such as Marc Ferrez. Similar to our previous images, the workers are depicted as uncoerced players in both the production of the imagery and the production of the coffee itself. Ultimately, it seems as though the history and imagery of coffee production, with its silencing of violence, identity, and stories of laborers, cannot shake its colonial roots.

Today, there is a commodification of the idea of “organic” that harkens back to an image of the exotic laborer in the field producing the coffee for the white consumer. Fair Trade producers, as depicted in the video above, are represented as hard-working, happy individuals or families with their own stories as opposed to the often silenced, exoticized, and seemingly subdued slave laborers of the past. This commodification, however, is a cycle back away from industrialization and back to the conditions that the slave laborers were originally operating in without machinery. Coupled with Fair Trade families often being brown or dark-skinned, “[functioning] as an extension of the colonial and imperial ideology of ‘the little brown brother,’” this imagery provides an ethnically charged relationship between the consumer, coffee, and the producer, who is often othered through their blatant exoticization (Cole, 175). In this promotional video produced by the Fairtrade Foundation, the family is brown-skinned and depicted picking coffee berries in a mountainous “jungle” or cleared-out soil that mimics the imagery produced in the 19th century by artists such as Marc Ferrez. Similar to our previous images, the workers are depicted as uncoerced players in both the production of the imagery and the production of the coffee itself. Ultimately, it seems as though the history and imagery of coffee production, with its silencing of violence, identity, and stories of laborers, cannot shake its colonial roots.