Lowell Gudmundson was part of a small group of American, European, and Latin American historians who in the 1970s helped to renew historical studies in Costa Rica. Gudmundson joined that change by investigating demographic trends, social differentiation, and economic activities in the period 1750–1850. Although he considered the initial stage of coffee cultivation, which began in the 1830s in the Central Valley, most of his research focused on the period before that expansion. In fact, his most important contribution was a book titled Costa Rica before Coffee, published in 1986.

In direct reference to that work, Gudmundson has now published a new book about Costa Rica after coffee. With that title, he refers to the transformation experienced by the Costa Rican economy since the late 1980s, when coffee ceased to be one of the main export products and was displaced by other activities, such as tourism. Gudmundson studies this process based on the changes experienced by coffee-producer cooperatives, particularly those in the districts of Santo Domingo and San Isidro (province of Heredia) and Tarrazú (province of San José). Based on some statistical sources, but especially on several dozen interviews with cooperative members, promoters of cooperativism, and agronomists, Gudmundson analyzes the extraordinary success achieved by Costa Rican coffee cooperatives in the period 1950–1980. In addition to the study of the economic and social aspects of this process (acquisition of plants to process coffee, size of farms, type of coffee grown, and characteristics of the workers), he also considers its political dimension. Cooperativism was systematically promoted by the National Liberation Party (PLN in Spanish), as a double strategy to confront communists and to build solid electoral support in rural areas.

After the economic crisis of 1980, which led to the implementation of policies favorable to the free market (also known as neoliberalism), coffee cooperatives began to transform. Gudmundson shows how, as the size of the families decreased, sons and daughters of coffee producers, thanks to their technical or university studies, lost interest in continuing the coffee activity. Others of those descendants emigrated to the United States. Simultaneously, as the urbanization of the Central Valley intensified, numerous coffee farms were destroyed to make way for real estate development. In this context, the close connection between rural cooperativism and the PLN also began to disappear. Faced with these challenges, the Costa Rican coffee industry, since the end of the twentieth century, has been oriented toward the production of coffee for the gourmet market. As Gudmundson demonstrates, this displacement has been led, in some cases, by foreign entrepreneurs and transnational corporations such as Café Britt and Starbucks, and is based on a workforce of immigrant workers, especially Nicaraguans. Cooperatives, increasingly aging in terms of the demographic composition of their members, have joined this process. As a result of these changes, Costa Rica has now become an importer of lower-quality coffee to meet domestic demand, particularly that of the popular sectors.

Composed of five independent essays, Gudmundson's book presents some problems common to this type of compilation, such as the unnecessary repetition of some content and the lack of connection among the chapters. Without an introduction, its reading becomes even more difficult for a reader unfamiliar with the history of Costa Rica. In addition, Gudmundson omits the studies of historian Victor Hugo Acuña on the mobilization of small and medium Costa Rican coffee producers during the 1920s and 1930s to raise the price paid for coffee by the owners of processing plants (beneficios). By not considering these important contributions, Gudmundson loses a valuable opportunity to explore the connections between those struggles and the extraordinary cooperative movement after 1950. Despite these limitations, his new book, which recovers with particular empathy the memories of those who participated in the cooperative utopia, is a valuable and welcomed contribution to studies on coffee in Costa Rica.