In Latin America, coffee production involved a wide variety of class relations. Before emancipation, many laborers on Brazil's plantations were slaves; after abolition most were colonos. In the nineteenth century in Costa Rica, Venezuela, and parts of Colombia, coffee was produced largely by extended households on family farms. In Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador, most coffee was produced on large estates that relied on forced labor drafts and debt peonage. Notwithstanding great differences in the class character of coffee-producing societies, some similarities in their gendered character are striking.

Gender relations in Latin America's coffee economies arose largely out of a union of nature and culture: the nature of coffee production and the culture of patriarchy. By nature, coffee harvesting was and remains a laborious process of picking and sorting coffee cherries (which contain beans) one at a time. In many times and places this phase of production tended to be women's and children's work, partly because of their purportedly “nimble fingers” and their low-paid labor. Notwithstanding variations in patriarchal cultures and ideologies, there were powerful similarities in the patriarchal character of societies in Latin America's coffee-producing zones.

An older historiography indicated by commission or omission that the labor force in coffee production was predominantly male. Subsequent research overturned that view, demonstrating that women played an important, sometimes predominant, role in the labor process.