Broken Village

In The Broken Village, Daniel R. Reichman tells the story of a remote village in Honduras that transformed almost overnight from a sleepy coffee-growing community to a hotbed of undocumented migration to and from the United States. The small village—called here by the pseudonym La Quebrada—was once home to a thriving coffee economy. Recently, it has become dependent on migrants working in distant places like Long Island and South Dakota, who live in ways that most Honduran townspeople struggle to comprehend or explain. Reichman explores how the new "migration economy" has upended cultural ideas of success and failure, family dynamics, and local politics.During his time in La Quebrada, Reichman focused on three different strategies for social reform—a fledgling coffee cooperative that sought to raise farmer incomes and establish principles of fairness and justice through consumer activism; religious campaigns for personal morality that were intended to counter the corrosive effects of migration; and local discourses about migrant "greed" that labeled migrants as the cause of social crisis, rather than its victims. All three phenomena had one common trait: They were settings in which people presented moral visions of social welfare in response to a perceived moment of crisis. The Broken Village integrates sacred and secular ideas of morality, legal and cultural notions of justice, to explore how different groups define social progress.

The Broken Village is sure to become obligatory reading for social scientists considering the cultural shifts resulting from neoliberal policies and the retreat of the state in Latin America and beyond. It provides much-needed perspective on the relatively understudied country of Honduras., Reichman analyzes human migration and economic globalization via ethnography of a small Honduran village between 2001 and 2006. The book's title evokes the twin dislocations of economic globalization affecting the village—the volatility of coffee markets following the demise of the International Coffee Agreement in 1989 and the upswing in global human migration in the two decades that followed. The book examines migration, religion, and coffee-planting strategies as various potential coping mechanisms for dealing with these dislocations.... Reichman writes briskly and well, making this book useful in undergraduate courses exploring globalization.

Daniel R. Reichman is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Rochester.