by Bruce Wydick
“Well, señor,” said Rich, “show us the way.”
CHAPTER 6
Fernando
June 4, 2007
A TINY SHAFT OF WARM LIGHT CUT THROUGH THE MORNING chill of the Mayan highlands, passed between old wooden window shutters, and landed on Fernando’s cheek. In the distance the old diesel engine of his neighbor’s corn grinder protested its early summons to work and then rumbled to life, gradually moving Fernando from the haze of a blurry dream to the certainty of morning. The light and noise stirred him and opened his eyes, which slowly focused on an insect crawling across the adobe wall adjacent to his bed. The insect stopped momentarily, feelers twitching. Disadvantaged by his sleepy stupor, Fernando fumbled unsuccessfully for his slipper to swat it, and the insect scurried into a small hole in the wall. The rustling of the blankets awakened Fernando’s wife, Juana, who sat on the side of the bed for a few moments, then got up to collect sticks for a fire.
The house smelled like the memories of ten thousand fires, each kindled between three rocks on the floor. An iron grill balanced on top of the rocks. Cooking utensils were scattered on the dirt floor, mingled with a few cheap plastic toys and empty coffee sacks. On one of the adobe walls hung an outdated calendar with Pepsi advertisements. Near the calendar hung a colorized black-and-white picture of Fernando’s grandparents in an inexpensive frame, and next to it dangled a penmanship ribbon won by Juana in second grade. On the walls next to the fire pit were some roughly hewn shelves on which Juana stored jars of beans, peppers, and spices.
The four adobe walls surrounding the dirt floor were built a generation before by Fernando’s father, Emilio, who had inherited the land from Fernando’s grandfather, Basilio. It had taken most of the entire dry season for Fernando’s parents to finish the house with the help of other family and friends. The building process had involved weeks of fabricating hundreds of adobe bricks from mud mixed with straw. But the house was sturdy and had lasted nearly thirty-five years. The outside walls were finished with repello, a whitish plaster made with silty mud and lime.
Outsiders often romanticized the adobe houses as a quaint feature of the indigenous Mayan culture. But like most in their village, Fernando and Juana were not enamored with their adobe house. The dirt walls attracted insects, and Fernando had spotted a particularly dangerous one, a chinche or “kissing bug,” which hid in adobe walls and was drawn to the breath of unsuspecting sleepers. After withdrawing blood from the facial area, the chinche left a fecal droplet containing deadly parasites, sometimes causing heart failure in its victim years later.
Aside from their hospitality to insects, the walls crumbled in earthquakes, like the one in 1976 that struck Guatemala before dawn. That earthquake killed 23,000 people, many as they slept next to adobe walls. Many houses in Huehuetenango had been flattened. As soon as families had money, they replaced the adobe with concrete block and converted the old house into a pig barn or chicken coop. For Fernando and Juana, this kind of architectural transformation always seemed to lie just out of reach.
A corrugated iron roof, its underside coated with soot, kept the house mostly dry during rainstorms—mostly dry until several years ago when rust began to create little holes in the roof. Coffee prices were low that year, and afforded no surplus for the likes of new roofing sheets. And the lower the prices sank, the more rain poured through the little holes in their roof until there were so many holes that they ran out of buckets, and the dirt floor of their house became a mud floor. On the bad days Fernando would lie in his bed, not wanting to get up because he didn’t want to walk through the mud, and he would curse the rain, and the holes in the roof, and the coyotes who showed up at his field to offer him nothing for his coffee. But Juana would always comfort him, and rub his aching back, and tell him that God would provide for them, and that next year would certainly be better, which it was occasionally.
Juana began to light the sticks she had collected from the forest. She had collected this wood the day before. Like many Mayan women, she spent many hours a week collecting firewood, walking several miles with a carga of wood on her back, often eighty pounds or more of kindling, lassoed together with cord. A leather strap attached to the cord was placed around the forehead to absorb some of the weight off the lower back. Sometimes friends passing by in a truck would stop, help remove her load of wood, and allow her to ride in the back with her bundle. Most days she would walk the entire way.
She felt the residual warmth in the fire pit from last night’s fire. Bending down, she blew skillfully on some smoldering coals hidden underneath the ashes while adding a handful of dry sticks. After several minutes of Juana’s coaxing, a small fire began to crackle. Over the rocks she placed the iron grill on which to prepare their breakfast: tortillas, beans, and coffee.
Fernando, needing to relieve himself after waking up, trekked in his bare feet to the middle of the milpa, or cornfield. Milpa as family toilet was a common practice that simultaneously circumvented the costs of plumbing as it fortified the crops. One time a public health official came to the village and warned against the practice. He had even brought a movie projector to show them a cartoon that illustrated how flies land on the exposed human feces and carry diseases to food sitting on the dinner plates of neighbors. In this way, he explained, when one person became infected with an illness such as amoebic dysentery or hepatitis, the disease could spread throughout the village. Most of the villagers enjoyed the cartoon and agreed that disease was a problem in the area. They also agreed that old habits are sometimes hard to change.
Fernando returned to the house after stopping to talk with a neighbor, another coffee grower who related the latest coffee price news to him.
“Son tacaños los compradores . . . ,” he muttered to Juana as he entered the house. The price that the cheapskate compradores were offering on advanced sales had fallen again from the week before.
Juana sighed, assuring him it had to be better by harvest.
After breakfast she began to gather clothes to wash in the creek, and Fernando returned to the field to finish yesterday’s chore, applying mulch to the coffee plants. The sun rose in the sky and as the shadows grew shorter, the line of sweat down the middle of Fernando’s back grew longer, reaching down toward his belt.
Near midday, Juana called to him in the field in her musical voice, “Mi amor!”
“Qué es Gordita?” he called back. “Little Fatty” . . . it was one of those endearing terms used by the Mayans that would never be employed successfully between North American spouses.
Some young people from the United States wanted to interview him. Interview him? It was time for lunch anyway. He approached the house, greeted by a member of his fair trade cooperative who introduced the students: Sofia, Richard, Alex, and Angela. They had come to ask him some questions about coffee farming, his family, his life. Would that be okay?
Fernando was curious at the students’ interest in him. Some of his young grandchildren and nephews gathered around to listen to the interview with a newfound respect for their elder relative, who must be very important to have attracted such attention from foreigners.
CHAPTER 7
Angela
HE WAS THE FOURTH GROWER ON THE LIST THAT DAY. Fernando shook hands with the men first. “Fernando Ixtamperic, a sus ordenes.” He was short, but about medium height for a Guatemalan. His sinewy frame and chiseled features did not belie the perceptible acuity that lay behind the face. There was something in the face—was it curiosity or wisdom?—that separated him from the other growers they had met.
He then greeted the women. Sofia extended her hand, and he shook it, then he greeted Angela warmly. Angela noticed that when she shook his hand, it was so calloused it felt rough like a brick. Then she inwardly cringed as Fernando lingered perceptibly on her birthmark. Although it was just for a moment, it quickly made both her and the others uncomfortable.
Sofia broke in. “Angela is from Los Angeles but was born in Guatemala. She is now returning fo
r the first time.”
“Bienvenidos, pues.” Fernando smiled at her as he regained his composure.
Angela surveyed the house. It was the first home that day they had actually entered. So this is how people live, she thought. She looked at the beds lying against the walls of the main room. She could see that a small family slept together in the one room, the same room where Juana, his wife, prepared the meals, and where the students were sitting and talking with him. A wobbly wooden table furnished the middle of the one-room house. One of the four legs hovered awkwardly over a depression in the dirt floor. She watched as Fernando pulled together some wooden chairs from various parts of the room and arranged them around the table. The chairs were old, tiny, and had perfectly straight backs. Fernando placed his straw cowboy hat on one of the beds and ran his hands through his sweaty hair.
Juana shooed some little chicks out of the house that were being chased around by two of their toddler grandchildren, diverting the joyful little parade outside. Juana smiled at Angela, and she smiled back.
Angela had watched Sofia administer the survey questions for the previous growers and had volunteered to administer the questions this time. Fernando’s operation was one of a large handful that had been randomly selected for one of the in-depth case studies, which were intended to provide a more comprehensive picture of the economic welfare of a local coffee grower.
Angela tried to sound very official, although inside she felt like she was opening a portal into a secret world that she entered with some trepidation, but at the same time one she yearned to explore. “Please describe your family. Do you have children?”
Fernando and Juana, both in their late thirties, had four children. They had been married when Juana was sixteen and Fernando was seventeen, about average in their village. While their two youngest, Lourdes, eighteen, and Ema, the baby of the siblings at nine, still lived with them, the oldest, Mirabell and Bartolo, were each married and living nearby. Fernando seemed happy to share background information about his family.
“How long have you been a coffee grower, Fernando?” Fernando’s first language was Mam, a Mayan dialect almost completely unrelated to the dialects of Quiché and Kaqchikel more common to the region, but spoken in several areas in the western highlands, and by a number of families in the village. His Spanish had a Mam accent, but it seemed clear that he had more education than the average person in their village. The fact that Spanish was a second language for both of them made her feel more comfortable.
“Pues, since I was about fifteen years old,” he replied.
“Is that when you started helping pick the coffee?” Angela asked for clarification.
“No,” said Fernando, grinning. “I started to pick when I was three. When I was fifteen, my parents forced me to leave school so I could help on the plantation most of the time. I didn’t want to leave school, but my father became ill. They needed my help. I had plans to be the first in my family to attend preparatoria. Pero, no. Juana stopped attending school in the third grade.”
“How many cuerdas of coffee do you have now?” asked Angela, who had been instructed by Sofia to use the common Guatemalan property measurement. A cuerda was about a sixteenth of an acre, or about four hundred square meters. This was only an approximation because cuerdas came in curiously variable sizes across Guatemala. It was an adjustable measurement. Still, it was the most familiar.
“Pues, about sixty,” replied Fernando. His was an average-size plot for the area, about 2.5 hectares.
“Which members of your family work the field?”
“During the harvest, just about everybody, even the little ones.”
“What about other times?”
“Just Juana and me.”
They came to questions about his children and grandchildren, and Fernando began to reflect on the sacrifices he had made for his children. All of the older ones had finished high school, the younger one, Ema, still continuing. He and Juana had insisted on it, and were obviously proud of the educational achievement of their children.
Angela watched as little Ema approached her mother, who was standing behind watching the interview. Juana bent down and Ema whispered something in her ear. Juana looked back at her and nodded happily, getting up and walking toward the kitchen. A few moments later Juana approached the table and invited the students and José-Ernesto to stay for comida, lunch, the big meal of the day.
The students responded enthusiastically. Rich whispered to Angela, “I’m so starved, my belly must think my throat’s been cut.” It had been a long hike up to Seis Cierros.
Juana spread a red-and-yellow cloth over the modest table, and they all scrunched around it to share the meal. Ema sat next to Angela and began to ask her questions about Disneylandia.
“You have seen him?” she asked Angela with wide, dark brown eyes. “Ratón Mickey!”
Then the comida appeared: tortillas, beans, and atol, a traditional Mayan drink made with rice water, sweetened with honey and a pinch of cinnamon.
Over lunch Fernando explained to the students that some of his friends and relatives from the village had fled to California during the civil war. Most were still there.
“You all come from California?” he asked the students.
“Yes, all of us attend graduate school there,” said Sofia.
“Do you know Miguel Hernando Jeatz Ixtamperic?”
“No, señor, haven’t had the pleasure,” replied Rich.
“Have you met Jacquelin Maria Mendez Ixtamperic?”
“I don’t think so,” said Sofia, checking the other faces just to make sure.
“Gloria Eliana Vasquez Batz?”
“Unfortunately, um . . . no.” The students shook their heads and then glanced at each other, grinning a little bit by this point. There were nearly forty million people in California, four times the size of Guatemala.
“Quiren café?” asked Juana. Did anyone want coffee?
“Gracias, señora,” Rich said. He pronounced it slowly with a Southern drawl, so that it came out like “grassy-ass.” It made Angela giggle along with Juana and Fernando, but for different reasons. Angela noticed that Rich was fairly fluent in Spanish but had a horrendous accent, a combination of qualities that seemed to endear him to Guatemalans.
“Bien hecho, Juana. This java’s strong enough to float a boat anchor. But as tasty as any I’ve had. Loving it.” Rich gave his cup another loud, healthy slurp.
“This is your own coffee, Fernando?” asked Angela.
“Sí, grown from the plot behind the house. We always keep a little for ourselves. Juana roasted it in a pan over the fire last night.”
Even Angela could tell that the quality of the coffee was supreme.
“The best in the world, at least that is what we San Pedro growers like to brag to one other,” smiled Fernando.
Alex turned to the other students in English again. “To me this doesn’t make some sense. If coffee here is so great, why are these people so poor? Certainly they are being exploited.”
Angela’s immediate reaction was to write off Alex’s remark simply because it came from Alex and it involved the word “exploitation.” Yet as she considered it, she had to admit that the whole thing was a little strange. Why should growers who happened to be sitting on some of the world’s best coffee terrain, cultivating some of the highest quality beans, be living in a mud hut with a dirt floor—especially when the grower was a member of a fair trade cooperative?
Sofia concurred there was an incongruity here, a mystery needing to be explored. She turned to the other students and said quickly in English, “Even though the quality of the beans is high, it seems like the profits to the grower could be getting squeezed by some competitive force along the value chain. Let’s focus on what happens to the beans after they leave the grower. I think we may find some clues there.
“José-Ernesto, can you give us an overview of what happens to the beans after they leave the grower?” Sofia asked him in Spanish. After wash
ing down a mouthful of tortillas with some coffee, he was happy to explain as the students listened for clues to the economic mystery.
“You see, a one-hundred-pound bag of roasted coffee beans actually begins as about 780 pounds of coffee cherries, which here we call ‘rojitos.’ This is what coffee growers harvest from plantations just like this one. But the bean—actually usually two beans—lie inside a little husk that has to come off. So either the grower or his buyer puts the coffee cherries through a process that removes the little husks. Of course the grower gets more money for his coffee if he does it himself. They are put through a pulping machine that pops the beans out, leaving only the two beans from each coffee cherry, so 780 pounds of coffee cherries shrinks down to 156 pounds of what we call pergamino, or ‘parchment’ coffee.
“The parchment, the little white skin that covers the beans, is removed when the beans are milled. Sometimes the beans are polished at this point too, but to be truthful with you, that doesn’t make them taste much different. At this point they also get graded and sorted by size, and from your original 780 pounds of cherries, you now have 125 pounds of ‘green’ coffee. But you don’t want to do this until the beans are only a couple of weeks away from being exported, otherwise it spoils the taste if they sit green for too long. Green coffee is important because it’s this price of green coffee that gets quoted on your New York Board of Trade in the States.”
José-Ernesto grew ever more enthusiastic as his explanation progressed. Juana’s coffee was very strong, and the caffeine was kicking in. The more coffee he drank, the more animated he became in talking about it. Moreover, his knowledge of coffee was encyclopedic. Angela thought to herself that this portly little man must have as much firsthand knowledge about coffee as anyone on the planet. José-Ernesto scanned the table for questions with the mannerism of a college professor looking over his reading glasses at his class while leading a seminar. Seeing none, he continued with the coffee chain.
