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Voices and images: Mayan Ixil women of Chajul
Chapter Three: Women and their daily life
9. Cultivating coffee for export
Harvesting coffee
For us, it is very good that many people grow coffee because then other people can get work picking coffee. Usually, the coffee beans are ripe and the people harvesting it can fill up a basket quickly, which is good because they are paid by the weight of what they harvest. But when there’s not much coffee, then the mozos [those working for the owner of the coffee field] don’t earn much.
The beans are collected all mixed up, the unripe ones with the ripe ones. The unripe ones are set aside and the ripe ones are put into sacks. When the sacks are filled with coffee, the shells are stripped in the mill, and it is then taken to the river to be washed. Once the coffee has been washed, it has to be brought back and, since it is still quite green, they have to put it in the sun to dry for some four or five days to get it ready for storing and selling.
Harvesting coffee is quite difficult since the coffee plantations are very far away in the warmer lowlands, which is where coffee grows. Boys and girls work picking coffee too since the coffee harvest requires many workers. The women have to travel with their husbands to help with the work and to cook. This is what coffee signifies for us here in Chajul.
In the Asociación Chajulense [Association of Chajul], you can sell coffee at a better price, but this is only for members of the Asociación. Otherwise, those who don’t belong to the Asociación sell their coffee to buyers in Huehuetenango. The Asociación’s coffee processing plant that buys the coffee helps us even though their terms are quite strict. The price paid is 5 quetzales a pound and 528 quetzales a hundredweight. If we sell the coffee to the Asociación, we have to wait about two months to receive our pay, whereas one is paid outright if you sell to the buyers who come from Huehuetenango.
Woman putting coffee in the sun to dry
Coffee was also the drink of our ancestors since they too dedicated themselves to its cultivation. They used to harvest it even though in those days the price of coffee was very low, compared to today when one takes in more money but everything is more expensive too. We hope that coffee is always planted so that its cultivation continues and we can improve our lives. We don’t want our lands to be turned into a national protected reserve. Similarly, those who have a lot of land have their fincas and their coffee and their mozos, but they are always taking advantage of the mozos who are not paid a fair wage and, moreover, those who work as mozos remain landless. We don’t want them to take advantage of us anymore. We want to have our lands free so that we can sow and harvest our own coffee.
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