From Xico

Coffee Harvest Devastated in Our Colonia by La Roya Fungus

Someone up north commented on facebook that she was envious of our weather right now.  Gimme a break, I say.  Her weather may be colder outside, but it isn't colder inside, I can guarantee it. I am writing this with two shirts, two sweaters and cold hands.  Today the high is supposed to be 18°, two degrees warmer than yesterday, and the low 8°.  Okay, okay, it's celsius.  Fahrenheit: 64 and 46.  And it´s damp and the sky is solid dirty gray except on the mountain Acamalín, directly across from us there is a soft pillow of fog.  This has been going on for days.  Remember, people don't have heat in their houses.  We have a wood stove which heats our main room to tolerable and so we are lucky.  We hadn´t used it until this morning, partly because the wood is all damp, even that which has been protected, so it's hard to get going.

The really disturbing news is that the coffee harvest is lousy.   This is because a fungus not previously known at our altitude has made its way up to us. It's called la roya. It spreads as a fine dust,and it is wreaking havoc with coffee and with our neighbors' livelihoods.

Normally, the height of the coffee picking season should be about now.  Normally,the  ejido land which surrounds our colonia you could walk the paths through the coffee, and hear the voices of the pickers, often family memberss, drifting around, You could see the workers carefully pulling off the properly ripe berries, say hi to those  you know.  Burros and horses would be tied along the path waiting for their masters to load sacks on their backs.  Dogs would run through the underbrush.  At meal times, people would gather around to have tortillas and salsa and soda, hot beans and eggs, cooked on small fires.  Workers who don´t have coffee of their own work for other people, and they move from place to place.  Sometimes a pickup waits on the road for them to hurl their sacks of coffee into. 

Our area is ideal for growing coffee de altura, coffee grown at a higher elevation. It has plenty of shade, soil mulched by years of harvest remnants and banana plants, cool weather.  It is easy under normal circumstances to grow it organically, too.  And it tastes delicious.  I´m drinking a cup from our own beans right now.  But this year, the losses are breathtaking: some people have lost all their plants to la roya.  The average loss is apparently 85%.  Even if the coffee hasn´t succombed to la roya, the price per kilo has fallen sharply. The coffee de altura is usually high quality coffee.  Unfortunately much of both it and the cheaper and not so good and not organic coffee planted on huge numbers of flat acres across places like Vietnam are in the hands of giant food companies.

 

 

As you can see in the photo above taken from Revista Industrial de Campo, coffee is labor intensive with the berries, only the ripe ones, picked by hand.

Coffee and the End of the World, among other things

Narcotrafico, border issues and immigration continue in the news up north.  While on that side of the fence we found ourselves often asked questions about safety, what was going on, etc. etc. We dont even bother suggesting that grandkids might enjoy a visit here anymore.  Obviously there are serious problems, but in this country of 106 million people, daily life goes on for ordinary folks pretty much as before.  We find ourselves not enjoying the view of large State Police pickups and even larger military vehicles loaded with armed police and soldiers patrolling the roads.  I am not sure what their purpose is, but they are intimidating.  I do wonder how much profits for US automakers and gunmakers have been helped by their addition to Mexican forces.  I don't really want to address these problems in the blog, at least not at this point.  I'd rather let you know of the other stuff that fill our lives. If you want some reasonably reliable sites for news of the uglier aspects, the Americas Mexico Blog is a good starting point. 

We are still struggling with Hughes satellite service for our internet so there still won’t be many (any) pictures for awhile.

While in big cities customs are fading, in our colonia they persist.  Yesterday was Three Kings Day., the traditional present-giving day and lots of kids were out showing what they’d received.  Girls got mostly dolls of all sorts.  Boys had trucks and cars.  There were a couple of radio cars, but mostly ones that were motorized by hands.  Two boys had trucks with horses in them.  Everyone looked happy.

I bought two  fruit called chicozapotes.  They are UGLY.  They were in the bin right under the bin for mamey zapotes. Mamey zapotes are sleek looking,with a rough light-brown skin, kind of egg-shaped with a point on one end.  They have a fairly sweet orange flesh which can have a touch of bitterness.  The chicozapotes were sort of round, sort of lumpy and  battered looking.  They had dirty orange flesh BUT tjhey tasted sublime.  They were a little more expensive.  You know that old saw, don’t judge a book….

As you mostly know, we  had a sad summer and fall with two of Jim’s siblings dying.  It is quite clear to us by now that at our age death has much more immediate impact: not grandparents or great-aunts or your parents friends or even your parents.  Instead, siblings and close friends and famous contemporaries whom you admire and are shocked to learn are gone.  Roger Ebert addresses this truth here as well as giving some insights into how one lives with it. Ebert’s blog is a treasure.

Guillermo is picking our coffee now and this year we are going to process some of it and try roasting it.  First batch has been processed and is continuing to dry.  Guillermo and his son took about twenty kilos up to a processor in the colonia yesterday.  The first step involves washing off the fruity top layer of the coffee bean.

There is a fair amount of noise about the Mayan calendar predicting the end of the world this year.  I have lifted almost all of an Aztlan listserv pos by David Hixon, PhD which provides good information.

"Dr. John Hoopes... has authored a well-researched and extensive blog entry regarding 2012.  We, the current moderators of Aztlan, have asked list members to refrain from back-and-forth discussions of the 2012 phenomenon on our list.  But we have promised to forward any messages that relate to solid research being published online or in print.  To that end, here is a link to Dr. Hoopes' new resource for both academics and the general public:
What You Should Know About 2012: Answers to 13 Questions
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/reality-check/201112/what-you-should-know-about-2012-answers-13-questions

"He wrote, in part
"'[This blog entry] originated in my email answers to two international journalists, one from China and the other from Bulgaria, as an attempt to answer some of the most common questions that I've been fielding from the media over the past several years (my first interview on this topic was in 2006).  If there's anything in the post that you think merits correction or clarification, please don't hesitate to let me know.  I'm trying my best not to perpetuate any more disinformation on the topic than is already out there!  I keep hoping that providing basic information in clear terms will lead to more sophisticated and interesting questions about the Maya and Mesoamerica.  I've thought for a while now that the 2012 hype and the massive tourism that will accompany it will result in a watershed for quality knowledge about the pre-Hispanic Americas.'

"Please contact Dr. Hoopes directly with any comments or questions at:
 
"Hoopes, John W. <[email protected]> "

__________________________________________________
We have had very chilly weather recently. At least three people have died from the cold in our area..

Coffee and the End of the World, among other things

Narcotrafico, border issues and immigration continue in the news up north.  While on that side of the fence we found ourselves often asked questions about safety, what was going on, etc. etc. We dont even bother suggesting that grandkids might enjoy a visit here anymore.  Obviously there are serious problems, but in this country of 106 million people, daily life goes on for ordinary folks pretty much as before.  We find ourselves not enjoying the view of large State Police pickups and even larger military vehicles loaded with armed police and soldiers patrolling the roads.  I am not sure what their purpose is, but they are intimidating.  I do wonder how much profits for US automakers and gunmakers have been helped by their addition to Mexican forces.  I don't really want to address these problems in the blog, at least not at this point.  I'd rather let you know of the other stuff that fill our lives. If you want some reasonably reliable sites for news of the uglier aspects, the Americas Mexico Blog is a good starting point. 

We are still struggling with Hughes satellite service for our internet so there still won’t be many (any) pictures for awhile.

While in big cities customs are fading, in our colonia they persist.  Yesterday was Three Kings Day., the traditional present-giving day and lots of kids were out showing what they’d received.  Girls got mostly dolls of all sorts.  Boys had trucks and cars.  There were a couple of radio cars, but mostly ones that were motorized by hands.  Two boys had trucks with horses in them.  Everyone looked happy.

I bought two  fruit called chicozapotes.  They are UGLY.  They were in the bin right under the bin for mamey zapotes. Mamey zapotes are sleek looking,with a rough light-brown skin, kind of egg-shaped with a point on one end.  They have a fairly sweet orange flesh which can have a touch of bitterness.  The chicozapotes were sort of round, sort of lumpy and  battered looking.  They had dirty orange flesh BUT tjhey tasted sublime.  They were a little more expensive.  You know that old saw, don’t judge a book….

As you mostly know, we  had a sad summer and fall with two of Jim’s siblings dying.  It is quite clear to us by now that at our age death has much more immediate impact: not grandparents or great-aunts or your parents friends or even your parents.  Instead, siblings and close friends and famous contemporaries whom you admire and are shocked to learn are gone.  Roger Ebert addresses this truth here as well as giving some insights into how one lives with it. Ebert’s blog is a treasure.

Guillermo is picking our coffee now and this year we are going to process some of it and try roasting it.  First batch has been processed and is continuing to dry.  Guillermo and his son took about twenty kilos up to a processor in the colonia yesterday.  The first step involves washing off the fruity top layer of the coffee bean.

There is a fair amount of noise about the Mayan calendar predicting the end of the world this year.  I have lifted almost all of an Aztlan listserv pos by David Hixon, PhD which provides good information.

"Dr. John Hoopes... has authored a well-researched and extensive blog entry regarding 2012.  We, the current moderators of Aztlan, have asked list members to refrain from back-and-forth discussions of the 2012 phenomenon on our list.  But we have promised to forward any messages that relate to solid research being published online or in print.  To that end, here is a link to Dr. Hoopes' new resource for both academics and the general public:
What You Should Know About 2012: Answers to 13 Questions
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/reality-check/201112/what-you-should-know-about-2012-answers-13-questions

"He wrote, in part
"'[This blog entry] originated in my email answers to two international journalists, one from China and the other from Bulgaria, as an attempt to answer some of the most common questions that I've been fielding from the media over the past several years (my first interview on this topic was in 2006).  If there's anything in the post that you think merits correction or clarification, please don't hesitate to let me know.  I'm trying my best not to perpetuate any more disinformation on the topic than is already out there!  I keep hoping that providing basic information in clear terms will lead to more sophisticated and interesting questions about the Maya and Mesoamerica.  I've thought for a while now that the 2012 hype and the massive tourism that will accompany it will result in a watershed for quality knowledge about the pre-Hispanic Americas.'

"Please contact Dr. Hoopes directly with any comments or questions at:
 
"Hoopes, John W. <[email protected]> "

__________________________________________________
We have had very chilly weather recently. At least three people have died from the cold in our area..

Coffee and the End of the World, among other things

Narcotrafico, border issues and immigration continue in the news up north.  While on that side of the fence we found ourselves often asked questions about safety, what was going on, etc. etc. We dont even bother suggesting that grandkids might enjoy a visit here anymore.  Obviously there are serious problems, but in this country of 106 million people, daily life goes on for ordinary folks pretty much as before.  We find ourselves not enjoying the view of large State Police pickups and even larger military vehicles loaded with armed police and soldiers patrolling the roads.  I am not sure what their purpose is, but they are intimidating.  I do wonder how much profits for US automakers and gunmakers have been helped by their addition to Mexican forces.  I don't really want to address these problems in the blog, at least not at this point.  I'd rather let you know of the other stuff that fill our lives. If you want some reasonably reliable sites for news of the uglier aspects, the Americas Mexico Blog is a good starting point. 

We are still struggling with Hughes satellite service for our internet so there still won’t be many (any) pictures for awhile.

While in big cities customs are fading, in our colonia they persist.  Yesterday was Three Kings Day., the traditional present-giving day and lots of kids were out showing what they’d received.  Girls got mostly dolls of all sorts.  Boys had trucks and cars.  There were a couple of radio cars, but mostly ones that were motorized by hands.  Two boys had trucks with horses in them.  Everyone looked happy.

I bought two  fruit called chicozapotes.  They are UGLY.  They were in the bin right under the bin for mamey zapotes. Mamey zapotes are sleek looking,with a rough light-brown skin, kind of egg-shaped with a point on one end.  They have a fairly sweet orange flesh which can have a touch of bitterness.  The chicozapotes were sort of round, sort of lumpy and  battered looking.  They had dirty orange flesh BUT tjhey tasted sublime.  They were a little more expensive.  You know that old saw, don’t judge a book….

As you mostly know, we  had a sad summer and fall with two of Jim’s siblings dying.  It is quite clear to us by now that at our age death has much more immediate impact: not grandparents or great-aunts or your parents friends or even your parents.  Instead, siblings and close friends and famous contemporaries whom you admire and are shocked to learn are gone.  Roger Ebert addresses this truth here as well as giving some insights into how one lives with it. Ebert’s blog is a treasure.

Guillermo is picking our coffee now and this year we are going to process some of it and try roasting it.  First batch has been processed and is continuing to dry.  Guillermo and his son took about twenty kilos up to a processor in the colonia yesterday.  The first step involves washing off the fruity top layer of the coffee bean.

There is a fair amount of noise about the Mayan calendar predicting the end of the world this year.  I have lifted almost all of an Aztlan listserv pos by David Hixon, PhD which provides good information.

"Dr. John Hoopes... has authored a well-researched and extensive blog entry regarding 2012.  We, the current moderators of Aztlan, have asked list members to refrain from back-and-forth discussions of the 2012 phenomenon on our list.  But we have promised to forward any messages that relate to solid research being published online or in print.  To that end, here is a link to Dr. Hoopes' new resource for both academics and the general public:
What You Should Know About 2012: Answers to 13 Questions
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/reality-check/201112/what-you-should-know-about-2012-answers-13-questions

"He wrote, in part
"'[This blog entry] originated in my email answers to two international journalists, one from China and the other from Bulgaria, as an attempt to answer some of the most common questions that I've been fielding from the media over the past several years (my first interview on this topic was in 2006).  If there's anything in the post that you think merits correction or clarification, please don't hesitate to let me know.  I'm trying my best not to perpetuate any more disinformation on the topic than is already out there!  I keep hoping that providing basic information in clear terms will lead to more sophisticated and interesting questions about the Maya and Mesoamerica.  I've thought for a while now that the 2012 hype and the massive tourism that will accompany it will result in a watershed for quality knowledge about the pre-Hispanic Americas.'

"Please contact Dr. Hoopes directly with any comments or questions at:
 
"Hoopes, John W. <[email protected]> "

__________________________________________________
We have had very chilly weather recently. At least three people have died from the cold in our area..

One Reason Mexicans Head to the US for Work: Coffee

In my previous post I translated two local articles about coffee growing.  At the end of the second, I mentioned that the real problem with coffee production lies in coffee distribution: that is, there are few distributors -- companies that purchase from the growers and pickers and sell to the retailers and wholesalers, often in the US -- and that these are the profit-makers.  A couple of days ago, the article below appeared in the Veracruz edition of La Jornada, emphasizing the point.  You'll note that the thrust of the article is on the conversion of land from coffee to other uses. However the problem for the ordinary worker who works for large land owners remains: low pay ---very low pay-- whether the worker is picking coffee, citrus or sugar.

*******

Neither going through the official means of registering complaints, nor through the infomal route of demonstrations demanding that federal and state agriculture authorities support the coffee sector have had much effect, making clear that there exist strong interests in favor of transnational businesses, the president of the Regional Coffee Committe in Coatepec, Cirio Ruiz Morales, said.

He criticized the fact that in spite of the existence of more than 600 million pesos (50 million dollars, more or less) in the Fund for the Stabilization of the Price of Coffee, federal authorities are sitting on these resources which were approved last year rather than using them.*

Meanwhile, they permit businesses like Nestlé and Café California to dictate economic policy with respect to the cultivation of coffee, letting these companies fix the prices per quintal (100 kilograms), the rules of operating the programs and the varieties of coffee to be planted.

"There doesn't exist a greater authority than these three companies. They decide everything: not only do they fix the price, we now know that there are families of functionaries of Sagarpa [roughly, the Department of Agriculture] who work for Nestlé or for Amsa, and thus they are collecting favors at the expense of the coffee producers," he said.

In the face of this situation, he indicated that they are making a substantial effort to reactivate the movement in which all the producers of the country are involved, although they are faced with serious obstacles.  "The [coffee producers] have created an alliance which includes representatives of regional organizations which participate in the National Coordination of Coffee Organizations, in the National Campesino Confederation and other groups which are disposed to tougher protests, when dialogue has failed and the denunciation to the media also hasn't worked," he added.

Ruiz Morales warned that in the face of this sitation, there may be a scarcity of coffee and an unchecked rise in prices, because many producers have opted to abandoned their coffee farms or converted them to the cultivation of sugar or citrus or decided to sell their land.

He emphasized how important it was that  the governments of coffee-growing states intervene to reorient the direction of this sector, "considering that it appears that the companies behave as if they are sure that they are going to continue to be supported officially, facts which are clear  in their continueing to act with arrogance and voraciousnss in a business which can be of more of social benefit [than when it is strictly in private control].

*********************

*If I understand correctly, in the case of Mexican coffee, the government would stabilize prices at a level high enough to sustain what workers are paid.  As it stands, Nestlé, et. al. lower prices when the market demands them, and the price stabilization process is supposed to ensure that workers' wages don't also go down. The instability of prices and wages (never high) contributes to the need for workers to migrate.  And Americans who drink much of this coffee (sometimes at ridiculously high  prices, sometimes sridiculously low) are at the consumer end of this product's cycle, and thus should understand the difficulties of workers at the production end.

There are also other issues: lower prices mean that production processes which make cheaper coffee possible, practices which are environmentally degrading.  (I guess it's no secret where I stand).

Coffee, Coffee Growers and Monsanto, too

Today an interesting juxtaposition of two articles which appeared in La Alta Voz, the local weekly which covers Coatepec, Teocelo, Xico and some other nearby towns.  This has to do with coffee farmers and farms.  

The first, by Omar Madrigal:

Coffee Farmers Demonstrate in Plaza Lerdo [Plaza Lerdo is the central park/square of Coatepec, right in front of the City Hall.]

This past April 12, around 1500 coffee farmers from the areas of Xico, Cosautlán, Emiliano Zapata, Teocelo, Xalapa, Tepetlán, Pinoltepec, El Haya and municipios in the region of Huatusco gathered to renew their recognition of Emiliano Zapata as the gretest spirutual guide in the fight of campesinos, today not to gain the land, but to gain better conditions for production.

....

Among the eight demands ... of the producers...we wil mention two here which were presented as urgent:

    1. The immediate delivery of resources from the Program for the Productive Promotion of Coffee for 2010.

    2. That the state government distribute in an urgent manner the fertilliers which have to be used in this production cycle.

Both demands are due to the necessity of beginning the work of cultivating the coffee fields now so that they give better fruit in the present cycle. ...

[There were some claims that the demonstrators lacked their leaders by the government representatives which were resolved but which led to delays, and then the government representatives said they couldn't themselves do anything, but would have to forward the demands.]

Finally, [it was resolved] that both demands would be met by April 30 or the coffee growers' organization would block highways and important streets in Xalapa as a way of pressing for action.

The Birthday Party

This place we live in, a deeper awareness of it, settles on us in bits and pieces. We go to a party at the hacienda in San Marcos that existed before the town because we met the heiress at our book club in Xalapa – and then again at the Universidad Veracruzana -- Escuela para Estudiantes Extranjeros where she is an administrator and we are students. So we are neighbors of a sort. Only fleeting ones, though, because the hacienda is now uninhabited and Christina uses it only for parties and gatherings.

The party at the hacienda is a birthday party for a woman named Felicia, an old woman now, elegant and intelligent. An American, she has lived in Xalapa for over 40 years and raised six children, three of whom live in the U.S., three who live in Mexico. One of the daughters is an actor here in Mexico. She is a serious actor and like most good and serious actors here she makes her living in telenovelas. She was at the party as were two other of Felicia’s children, all beautiful, and some grandchildren. All the children here are married to Mexicans. Christina, our hostess, is married to an American and has been for forty years. He and she met when he was a student at the UV Escuela para Estudiantes Extranjeros many years ago. It is he who takes us through the faded, high-ceilinged old rooms now barely furnished: an elegant old canopied bed here, an old chest there; artwork framed in termite-ridden frames, an array of antiques on the floor which the heirs haven’t gotten around to choosing from, a game table with chairs pushed away as if a game had just ended; here the room he and she stayed in when they were first married, there her parents’ marriage bed. Ancient photos of her grandfathers: one sympathetic to the revolutionaries a hundred years ago, the other not.

The party is outside, in the coredor, or covered porch which runs the inside length of the building. Sitting here in a large circle of friends and relatives, we are completely unaware of the buses and cars and trucks making their way up and down the busy road just forty feet away. The party is a convivio: everyone has brought something to eat, from Mexican flautas (not called flautas here, but if I remember simply rolled tortillas) to sushi. We have brought salami and cheese and crackers. The birthday cake is glorious. Cream and chocolate, towers and swirls of icing. There is one candle with one of Felicia’s rings around it in the center of the cake. The grandchildren, the children, the friends, the men, then the women, take turns ringing Felicia at the table to sing Las Mañanitas and Happy Birthday as well.

The coredor does not look out on a garden as one might expect, but on a large, two-levelled concrete courtyard. This was a working hacienda, a coffee hacienda. The coffee was dried in the courtyard. Christina’s husband, a Minnesota boy when he arrived, ended up running the day-to-day operations. In those days, they lived here for the coffee-harvesting part of the year. Even as a child, Christina did not live at the hacienda full time, but only perhaps five or six months of the year. She and her family lived in a house in el centro de Xalapa, one that now contains some store or other.

In days gone by, the land around the hacienda was all coffee-growing land that belonged to Christina’s family. I have not yet fit this into the broader history of our area, but bit by bit, they sold the land off or squatters claimed it and the townof San Marcos grew while the hacienda became a beneficio, a place where small growers and pickers bring their coffee to sell. Christina’s husband told us how the growers brought the coffee and how he sorted it. He showed us tubs for soaking the coffee before it was hulled and how the coffee was laid out on the courtyard for the first part of the drying process which was then was finished in large cookers. He also talked about how the coffee has been hijacked recently by giant companies and how he would like once again to open his beneficio so he and the growers could sell directly to smaller buyers in Mexico City and the U.S. He had had good relations with the producers and felt they all deserved a better deal than they were now getting.

I thought of the movie, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis as we said good-bye. All these beautiful people, the generations of them together and seemingly happy inside a wall, so close and so distant from the noise of modern Mexico outside. But unlike the Finzi-Continis, their cloistered existence ended some time ago, if it ever existed at all.