A Day In The Life Of A Coffee Grower
Every muscle in my body - from the top of my neck to the tips of my toes - fights to keep my frame from collapsing. Like gelatin, my body struggles to conceal its unparalleled exhaustion. My uncooperative eyelids are falling down, taking my head with them, nearly landing in the middle of the coffee cup in front of me.
"It's alright, you can sleep now - the work is done for today," Socorro says as she scurries around the kitchen, making dinner for her five children. She wears a dark blue skirt with a maroon faja (a woven belt) and a pink turtleneck, traditional dress for Mayan women from Tenejapa, Chiapas. Here, in the mountain regions of Southern Mexico, coffee production is the only source of income for hundreds of remote indigenous communities.
With my head resting on my folded arms, I watch Socorro frying eggs on the fire pit in the middle of the kitchen. The flam from the fire illuminates the room, revealing the soot on the ceiling and the four surrounding adobe walls badly in need of repair. Her two-year-old son Paco amuses himself by chasing a chicken outside the door with a stick. Pascuala, the oldest daughter, age 13, helps make dinner, shaping masa balls into tortillas with a quick flip of her hands. I take a sip of my coffee, remembering that this morning began in the exact same way - sitting at this table eating a breakfast of black beans and tortillas at five in the morning.
It is January, the beginning of the second and most abundant coffee crop of a season that runs from December to April. There is a lot of work to do, and we have woken up early to head out to the coffee parcels to hand pick the ripest cherries. In darkness, we leave Socorro's youngest three children with her daughter of 11; Pasquala comes with us to the fields.
We hike up a narrow mountain path with the baskets full of empty coffee sacks. My breathing is heavy as I hike slowly and carefully up the slippery rocks on the mountain slope. Socorro does me the favor of walking much slower than usual. "If I want to experience what coffee production really entails," I think to myself, "I have to be strong and push my endurance as hard as ever."
I met Socorro two years ago at a march for indigenous rights in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. She was part of a women's organization that fought for land rights and basic services, such as running water, electricity, community schools, and clinics. Single-handedly, she had organized the women of her community to petition the government for development money to buy materials for making traditional textiles to sell at the local market. However, Socorro makes most of the income to support her family from coffee production.
After a half-hour uphill climb, we arrive at the coffee parcel. Normally Socorro would contract Indian laborers from Guatemala - worse off than she is - to harvest the coffee. But this year the "C" price for coffee is the lowest it has been in seven years - an average of 65 cents - meaning producers will get 25 cents at the dry mill, while their production cost is 45 cents. It is so bad that no one is able to pay workers to help harvest coffee.
"If I could, I would leave the cherries to rot on the tree, but I worked them all season long, and I can get at least a few pesos for them," Socorro explains as we climb the mountain. "It won't be enough to get us through the year, but what else can I do? My children need clothes and pencils and paper for school."
Following orders, I drop the coffee bags from my basket on the ground. Then Socorro leads me to a tree filled with ripe ruby-red cherries. She shows me which ones are blackened, or too ripe to use. Picking infinite cherries, I watch Socorro and her daughter selecting with utmost speed.. Cherry after cherry, I am hypnotized by the monotony of labor, interrupted only by swatting mosquitoes that attack my neck and hands.
We pick for four hours - to find that we have only filled three sacks - before taking a brief break for pozol and tortillas. Socorro takes out a ball of corn masa for each of us and crumbles the dough into a bowl of water. She adds salt and chile for flavoring. Pozol is power food that fills the stomach like steak, and it is the meal of the fields for all natives in this region.
The oldest daughter brought up in a small community in Tenejapa, Socorro inherited half an acre of coffee parcels from her father when he passed away. By that time, she was already married to a man from a nearby community whom se now only speaks of with resentment. They married when she was 14, after he had spotted her washing clothes in the river. After a few weeks of watching her and occasionally talking to her, he told her he was going to ask her father for her hand in marriage. One night he and his father arrived with a bottle of posh, a strong sugarcane alcohol drunk throughout the indigenous communities of Chiapas. They were invited in, and while dispersing the alcohol shots, they discussed her fate. Her father played hard to get at first, but after everyone was drunk, he gave in and told Socorro to get her things together because she was leaving with her new husband.
For six years Socorro performed the duties of a wife, getting up an hour before her husband to make fresh tortillas, clean the house, feed the animals, and wash clothes in the river. Her husband was an alcoholic who rarely had money for food or supplies, but who always managed to have enough to buy a bottle of posh.
Socorro asked her father many times for money to feed her children. He was always reluctant, because he believed she was no longer his responsibility. When Socorro had time, she would tend to her own crops near the house to guarantee a certain amount of food for her family.
Before long, her husband abandoned the family to live in San Cristobal, and he was never heard from again. "I was already making ends meet on my own," Socorro reflects. "Now at least I don't have to be harassed by him anymore. I don't have to smell his alcohol breath when he would come home late at night to bother me."
For three more hours we pick cherries. Watching Socorro and her daughter I am reassured and humbled by the fact that this is only an experience and not my reality. It is hard to tell if Socorro is tired; the expression on her brown face of engraved wrinkles never changes. I remember what a friend here once told me: "The mountain will make any beautiful woman ugly." The hardships that farmers endure on a regular basis just to survive are beyond our comprehension.
Five filled sacks represent the work of the first part of the day. But we have to carry them back to Socorro's house to wet-process them. For this, we brought ropes that tie around the sacks, attached to a leather strap. We place the leather strap around our foreheads to pull the weight of the sacks from our head to our back. It has always looked painful to me to use this hauling method, but now it is my turn to try. Socorro and her daughter take 2 sacks and I keep one. The strap pulling on my forehead is extremely uncomfortable, giving way to an excruciating headache. I can feel my neck stiffening up, and can barely make out the downhill slop in front of me. "You don't have to carry it. I can send someone to get it when we get back," Socorro says, seeing my obvious pain. "That's O.K., I can manage," I muster. "I wanted to know what you go through to grow coffee. Just go ahead of me and I'll eventually get there."
By the time I reach the house, Socorro and her daughter are already unloading the cherries on the concrete patio adjacent to her house. They have to be wet-processed immediately, otherwise they will start to ferment in the sacks, giving way to sour undertones in the coffee when drunk. A wooden box, the size of a coffin and filled with yesterday's picking. Is set up on the side of the kitchen. The pergamino beans (coffee in parchment) consist of the green bean surrounded by a paper-like skin and covered with a thick, clear slime called mucilage.
Yesterday's beans have been sitting 24 hours. The mucilage has separated from them, and they are ready to be washed. We remove the plug at the bottom of the box to let the thickened water from the mucilage to pour out. Socorro has no hoses, so all three of us grab buckets to cart water from 20 feet away to wash the beans. They are then gathered in buckets once more and laid out on a large concrete patio to dry. If the sun is strong enough, they will dry in a couple of days; otherwise it can take up to five days. Even the youngest children grab paddles to spread the beans over the patio, while we start working on the cherries we just picked.
Pascuala turns the crank on the manual grinder in front of a large pile of rotting cherry skins being feasted on by insects, while Socorro empties the bag in to the machine. The smell in the air is a cross between sweet, fresh fruit and sour, rotting ferment. I receive the pergamino beans in a bucket at the bottom, where I transfer them to the tank. Socorro and Pascuala take turns rotating the crank so their numbing arms won't break the speed and rhythm of their work.
Once they finish depulping the cherries and I feel as though I cannot lift another bucket, we all move to the fermentation tank to fulfill the last task of adding water to it. By now my arms are shaking so much that I drop almost all of the water on the way. It is 7 p.m - more than 12 hours since our odyssey began - and I can only sit paralyzed at the kitchen table.
Dinner still has to be made for everyone. Socorro hands me a cup of coffee that I stare at in awe, appreciating every step that went into its creation. "This is what we do every season for six weeks Out of the year, day after day, bean after bean." she says. "Yes, it would be easier if I had a man, but not like the one I had. Besides I can still do it myself. I just wish the price was better. I don't know who decides the price, but somebody is cheating us and all the work we do."
Staring at Socorro, I have tremendous admiration for her spirit. She is accomplishing the impossible by raising five children on her own and surviving as a coffee producer amid today's devastating market prices. The name Socorro means "a cry for help" in Spanish, but even if no one responds, I have no doubt that she will survive.