Much of the recent scholarship on the history of coffee in Central America has explored the distribution over time and space of small family-based cultivation, particularly in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Beyond the question of documenting the at times surprisingly wide distribution of these small-scale production units, researchers have also sought to understand the processes by which peasant or family farms were consolidated or fragmented over time and the reasons for such varied outcomes. From one extreme of dramatic impoverishment and dependence of the minifundista/semi-proletarian, to the other extreme of wealthier smallholders who employed their impoverished fellow villagers, these treatments of coffee's social history have tended to focus on a wide range of issues. Among these, commercial and financial relations between producers and merchant/processors and the always polemical topic of labor recruitment and coercion have been particularly relevant.

While no very broad agreement has yet been reached on a common nature of smallholding in Central America's coffee economy and its evolution over time, three general conclusions seem clear enough: first, some form of small holding survived, however impoverished and embattled, even in the more inhospitable contexts. While Williams no doubt provides the most copious evidence throughout the region, book-length works by McCreery for Guatemala and Lauria-Santiago for El Salvador and articles by Samper for El Salvador and by Charlip and Dore for Nicaragua have all made it clear that even in the cases long thought paradigmatic of estate-based coffee development, small holding has a complex and important history yet to be fully understood.