Motozintla means “Land of the Squirrels”
A trip to the coffee growing region of Chiapas, 2006
I am in Motozintla and, while I haven’t been here long, I can say that there are no squirrels here. I came here on a bus, a wheezing, smoking diesel behemoth that used to be a painted Greyhound, probably the same one I took from Bakersfield to Fresno back in 1983.
Now it seems that 3 of its transmission gears still work, and to find them the driver either needs to synchronize with the engine rpm at a very particular speed, or he has to stop completely. It’s a charter, a bus that seats 50 for just 15 of us. But as far as coffee trips go, that’s about 10 too many on my book. We are off the visit the MexicoMexican coffee originates from South-central to Southern regions of the country. For that reason, coffees from Coatepec and Veracruz are much different from Oaxacan Plumas, which are in... Chiapas coffee cooperative where we have been finding nice lots lately. Lots, meaning, a chunk of a full container, nothing special but it tastes good!
in tapachula the word is … don’t be a pig! the zocalo (i.e. town square) in Tapachula, with effective, zhedged shade trees. more typical trash you find in Tapacula, Chiapas. typical portable taco cart. head of cow tacos? thony? jhony? i dunno. revolution, a horseshoe, a chicken head, a bull. and an ad for professional assessor services. yep, we’re in rural mexico. replacing the fuel filters. however many gears the bus originally had, there were 3 remaining, and the driver has to sync engine and tranny rotation to shift. or stop. welcom to tapachula, chiapas, as far south as you can go without being in guatemala! as usual, i am a sucker for commercial painting. i don’t know what this was for. along the way, some beautifully painted houses. there was hardly a stretch of river on our route from Tapachula to Motozintla de Mendoza that had been worked on, boulders moved, gravel rearranged, barriers installed, etc. typical buying station for non coop coffees, or storage for the coyote (buyers who roam the hills offering low payment in cash for coffee). rivers were filled with debris, homes washed away. sentiments in sympathy with the leftist protests in oaxaca are all around. hillside town where they replaced the road with concrete and cobble. we are here to see the effects, almost a year later, of hurricane stan. it wooped this area. a mudslide. they can’t fool me with the reupholstry – i know this bus. Motozintla de Mendoza, about 20k people. after a morning in Tapachula, the bus came. it happened to be the same one i rode from fresno to bakersfield in ’83, i think. it didn’t run as well, though. our destination, the udepom cooperative: union de ejjidos professor otilio montano… whew. the main 5 folks at the coop. eddie is on the left, antoniel on the right, and severiano in the middle. the other 2 i don;t recall. at the supermercado, 100% instant coffee. coffee trees all around, not one local coffee, whole bean or ground, in the shops.
No offense, but I am tired of groups. It feels like I am stuck in some gelatinous cytoplasmic goo. I prefer to be my own amoeba. The goo moves too slow, too much inertia. We let Tapachula, hot, sweatyUsually a taste defect, reminiscent of the smell of flavor of sweat, sometimes considered mildly positive.: Usually a taste defect, reminiscent of the smell of flavor of sweat,... Tapachula, in the morning. If the bus doesn’t have a major seizure, we will be in Motozintla, home base for the coffee co-op best called “La Union”. Or would you prefer the ugly acronym UDEPOM. Or would you like the full name: Union de Ejidos de Professor Otillio Montano.
We arrive at Hotel Alberto. If that is Alberto at the desk, he is hard to rouse, in fact he is asleep most times I walk up to the counter. I get room 43. Room 45 has a syringe on the floor, I am told. Room 43 is good enough for me, but it is not the place you want to hang out.
The group is a mish-mash of U.S. and Canadian roasters. Big ones, and little ones, varied in concerns, with I-don’t-know-what in common. I end up in a conversation I really don’t want to be in, about packaging machines. I guess I just have a compulsion to relate to people. It’s a weird trip.
at the community center, a little model coffin, for halloween, but with a religious statement. “we are dust and in dust we are reconverted. more grafitti opposing the govenor of oaxaca state. Motozintla de mendoza in the early morning. i walked alone… … well, people were on their way to market, and the packs of dogs were in full action. in this way, typical mexico. stray dogs everywhere. government office, covered in oaxaca grafitti. either there is wide support for the problems there, or there is one guy with a lot of spray paint. what’s going on here … hmmm. where you find a Motozintla Macho Man. local market, farmers bring in the potatos and onions indoor section of the saturday produce market coop minibus station christmas elf/pig likes converse. the fair price is 5 bucks, i guess. garden in town mangy coffee tree at the udepom offices another great commercial painting one of their 2 warehouses for dry-milling coffee. this is the annual producers meeting. all the “socios” come to hear the financial report, and have a big meal together. 650 socios, about 450 will come today. okay, back to coffee. at the warehouse for udepom cooperative another view of the former offices. the second warehouse, nearer the river, severly damaged by hurricane stan.
As it happens, I won’t need the cuppingCupping is a method of tasting coffee by steeping grounds in separate cups for discrete amounts of ground coffee, to reveal good flavors and defects to their fullest.... spoons I brought. I won’t even see a sample roaster or a cupping table. The Union office is stacked with their roasted coffee, in jars, labeled “OrganicGrown without the use of artificial fertilizers, herbicides, etc.: Organic coffee has been grown according to organic farming techniques, typically without the use of artificial fertilizers. Some farms... Instant Coffee.” The local supermercado, across from the Alberto, has only instant coffee too. What’s with that? Maybe it makes sense – where else would Instant be so useful but in a place with unreliable electric power, and a brewer costs money. Boil water, add a spoon of coffee, stir.
Fact is, if you want to have a competition for the world’s worst coffee, go to an area where they grow it. Now it’s not like coffee from the area, roasted “for local consumption” would save the farmers of Chiapas, or anywhere. Coffee is a cash crop, made to bring outside funds into an economy that needs it badly. But local coffee wouldn’t hurt; it also would be ideal if producers understood the varying qualities of their own product, which they might if they all roasted and cupped the coffee. It’s not like discriminating taste is strictly and urban quality.
I challenge you to find a more disciplined, discerning and frugal customer of fresh produce and meats than a Latino woman in an open-air market. It’s a typecast I know, I am sure some don’t care at all about the quality of their purchases. But I have sat and watched them shop, and they are discriminating and tough.
What’s the big difference between sniffing melons to anticipate which will be the sweetest, ripest, juiciest one, and what I do when “cupping” coffee? In addition to selling local roasted coffee, a bit of tourism dollars wouldn’t hurt, but outside our awkward pod of gringos, there are no out-of-towners in Motozintla. I like that, but I am not going to infuse the economy with much money so what’s that worth. Consider that my roundtrip plane fare from SFO was $1100, and right now SFO to Paris is around $1050. Hmmm… City of Lights or Land of Squirrels?
But this effort to get cooperative coffee up to the standards of estateA "coffee estate" is used to imply a farm that has its own processing facility, a wet-mill. In Spanish this is called an Hacienda. A Finca (farm) does... coffee is remarkable when you consider that 650 people in 29 widely dispersed communities are doing their own depulped (removing the skin of the coffee cherryOriginally coffee literature referred to the fruit of the tree as a "berry" but in time it became a cherry. It is of course neither. Nor is the...) on hand crank machines, then fermenting it in tanks to remove the fruityIn some coffee taster’s lexicon, “fruity” means the coffee is tainted with fruit, and “fruited” means a coffee is graced by positive fruit notes. We don't exactly see... mucilageMucilage indicates the fruity layer of the coffee cherry, between the outer skin and the parchment layer that surrounds the seed. It readily clings to the inner parchment... layer, washing , and patio drying.
There are so many ways you can mess up at any one of those steps, not to mention the lack of uniformity from person-to-person, community-to-community. And they manage to do it, somehow, consistently producing great Chiapas coffee year after year. The administrative legwork it takes to coordinate all this, to account for each quintale of coffee, and where it comes from, is monumental.
Coffee is a risky business; there is no crop insurance for coffee, anywhere. In this tranquil climes, at some point the producer will suddenly and swiftly get their butt kicked. Residual rainfall from a hurricane, mudslides; if the roads are washed out you might as well not even harvest your coffee. If you are picking, and you get sudden rainfall while your coffee is drying on the patio, you better hope someone pulled it in for you, or it is ruined.
Some in Chiapas where affected in a more dramatic way – the coffee trees themselves slid down the hill into the river. For 3000 others it was worse, they lost their homes. In any case, you see the damage here and you see a lot of people working on the repairs. But you are not going to hear people dwell on it a lot – for them it is just a part of life in the Sierra Madre de Chiapas.
dogpack at the coffee warehouse bathroom inside, filled with debris. the farmers, from a wide area centered on Montozintla. you can’t have a get together in chiapas without a marimba band ice cream cart as they call each of the 29 communities that are members, they stand and raise their hands. i was traveling with a group of roasters – most of us were part of the program last year to pay extra (above fair trade price) to help the coop rebuild from the hurricane damage. bob fulmer speaks. afte the presentation, we rearranged the tables for a meal. imagine feeding 450 people … and actually the food was fantastic. eddie, who is basically the general manager of the coop addresses the crowd my favorite little dude – i lent him my camera to take some pictures. bob enponga is everywhere the best cubist chicken painting ever. was picasso here? macho brahma zapatista help, a man with a huge upper body, and tiny torso and legs is breaking into my apartment. no, says the finger wagging boy. I like the little arrows by his finger, otherwise you might think he was signing “we’re number 1”. super prety motozintla street. the town is about 1000 meters. the coffee is between 1000 and 1500 meters in this area another fine painting there’s nothing quite like having a mariachi horn play in your ear. helen protects herself, bob is okay with it. that night at dinner, we had mariachi vs. marimba bands, one on each side of us. at the hotel, the keep was hard to wake. this was about 5 pm. wendy of tony’s coffee in wash. with eddie and his family. this horn player always had the same pained expression, like he was about to bust some internal organ. up in the hills nearer the coffee plots, here is a bridge that actually survived. one way to keep the birds away, or exterior decor. more flood damage another view. one of the socios on his coffee plot just how close to the river some of the houses are in the area… coffee drying on the patio. all coffee is pulped, fermented and dried by the socio, then delivered as pergamino to the udepom mill. plaque at the entrance of the national presbyterian church of chiapas … the verb of god. los quatro amigos not the prettiest pulper i have ever seen another dramatic volcanic view from the sierra madre de chiapas, heading to guatemala that was the end of the trip for me … but my camera went on to guatemala with alex mason of royal coffee (shown here at finca agua tibio with luis roberto and someone else.
I return to Tapachula. I left the palefaced cytoplasmic colony behind, and will fly home alone. I am just a lone amoeba now, I caught a ride down to the lowlands and the airport with a guy named Moises (not everyone here is Juan and Jose!) For that I empty my pockets of pesos so Moises can go do his bimonthly family shopping trip … at Sam’s Club. Well, maybe they have some coffee that is not instant.
They give me a tough time: Tapachula airport security is tough, be warned. They don’t like this thing and that thing, and they really don’t like the hand-cast aluminum spurs I am bringing back. I am going to have to find a box, and then check it through to SFO. Oddly, they announce the boarding rows in English as well as Spanish, but looking around I am the only gringo in the whole airport. (And frankly, I understand clear Spanish much better than garbled P.A>. system English.)
As we climb I look down at the long, straight sandy beaches that dramatically divide the lush flood plain from the azure blue Pacific. Some day, on one of my coffee trips to the mountains, I will get to sit on a beach like that, even for one day. But I am always up on the nauseating and twisty roads where the coffee is grown. And as quickly as I arrive, I must get back to West Oakland.
We’re too small of a company to allow for a dedicated specialist in coffee travels. I have to cup the incoming samples, update the web page, fix this or that machine, water the plants, reorganize the pallet racks, roast the batches on Monday night; any number of things from the many jobs I have in coffee. And while it could be better (like getting to spend a day on a beach) my motto that I hold to be universally true is this: “it’s not all good, but it could be worse, so it isn’t half bad.” –Tom
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