Lords Of Atitlan

Drive between Atitlán and San Lucas Tolimán some April morning, coursing through rolling hills covered with coffee in bloom, and you will start to understand why the coffee workers love the harvest so. Tiny white-star clusters shower the waxy emerald green leaves, as splashes of yellow sunlight filter through the grabilea and other shade trees above. Stand at the upper reaches of finca (plantation) Pampojilá in late December. Look down its straight rows of coffee trees bursting with red fruit to the beneficio (processing floor) below. Look out toward the coast to the lower limits of coffee cultivation. Turn back toward the magnificent cerro Iquitíu, and everywhere you look you will see coffee: holly green leaves and holly red berries at Christmas. Now you will feel with a certainty why the workers love the harvest so. If you climb Iquitíu and look down at the coffee coating the fantastic fairyland hills mushrooming up around San Gabriel and el Naranjo, then you will pick up your costál and mecapal (gunny sack and head harness), strap your canasta around your waist, and march off to pick coffee yourself.

At the lower altitudes of coffee cultivation, around fincas Santo Tomás Perdido and Santa Teresa, the picking takes place in November and December. Migrant laborers come from everywhere: Joyabáj, Zacualpa, Zacapulas, and Chichicastenango in Quiché, the indigenous towns of Mazate, and from Nahualá and its ancestral home, Santa Catarina Ixtahuacán, in the Department of Sololá. Most of the women wear traje, and the cafetal (coffee plantation) becomes an international festival of color and culture.

From the far-side of Lake Atitlán descend the poorest of the poor, girls in flame red orblue huipiles from towns within Santa Cruz la Laguna: Pajomel, Chuitzancháj, and Tzununá ("home of the humming-bird"). These girls come to the hotlands to begin the harvest and rise with the fruits` ripening to the lake towns San Marcos, San Pablo, San Juan, and San Pedro in January. They climb home in late February to complete the harvest at altitudes where some of the best coffee is grown. They stretch two months of work into five, but spend most of that time away from home, scared, and missing their families. They are an unhappy aberration in the cafetal, where most migrants arrive in family groups, and I`m always glad to see them back in their homes near Santa Cruz.

Three or four kilometers above the road from Santa Teresa lies Comunidad San Jorge la Laguna. A few generations ago citizens of San Jorge la Laguna (an aldea higher in the mountains above Panajachel) bought land there during a coffee boom. A dozen or so families live there year-round in ramshackle huts filling two clearings. Other shacks scattered throughout the coffee groves accommodate seasonal workers from the parent city. Most just make the daily commute during November and December from San Jorge or Panajachel on the Cocales bus. Dressed in the wool traje of Sololá, picking coffee in among semi-tropical fauna, they seem as misplaced as I do.

No one commutes far to finca Pampojilá. They come from nearby Colonia Pampojilá, Xejuyú, Panimaquíp, San Martín, and la Providencia. Those who up until Hurricane Stan in October 2005 called the finca home, come from the new colonia built with the help of Father Gregorio Shafer and the Parroquia of San Lucas Tolimán: Colonia San Andrés. From colonias contiguous to San Lucas come others, almost all with generations of ties to the finca. Coffee-picking in Pampojilá is a neighborhood event. Everyone knows each other. The women of Colonia San Gregorio pick coffee within the family unit first but surrounded by community members. It`s the same for those from the inter-related colonias la Esperanza, Espencer, la Unión, and Nuevo Amanacer Uno and Dos. Among the pickers are real characters and personalities, women of awesome beauty and fearsome strength, and interfamilial connections spanning generations. Whole families from infancy to old age participate in the harvest. Small children carry smaller children in perrajes or towels on their backs. Mother picks the upper branches, kids search the middle branches, and toddlers comb the bottom. Grandma kneels in front of her canastas selecting out the green, red, yellow, and dried-out brown berries one from the other. Old women stroll together beside moss-covered stone walls beneath the towering eucalyptus trees which line the ancient roadways. They loll the time away while balancing 80-100 pound sacks of coffee on their heads. Younger women bearing far greater loads on their backs race past them. The work is exhausting, sticky, and strenuous; the mood, pure joy and celebration.

When you first enter through the monumental front gate of Pampojilá, step onto its thick stone mainstreet, and pass its elegant public pila with bell-tower reflecting in the water, you can`t help but be struck by the beauty and history of the place. Walking along the rows of dilapidated shacks lining the road and pila, you also sense something of its misery. Standing among the ruins of these mostly abandoned habitations and reflecting upon the adaptive capacities of man, you have to think that some fun was also had here, some good fun, and probably continues still.

Those who arrive from San Lucas and surrounding colonias to pick coffee in the morning know more about that than I do. Many trace their ancestry to one or more of these broken-down shanties. They share memories of deceased co-workers and common ancestors, whose presence they can feel working alongside them in the cafetal. They still imagine their grandmother at the pila washing clothing, or Grandpa straining down a mountain trail with coffee on his back. The old woman today selecting coffee beans on the ground was once nursed in the cafetal. She was once the little girl picking berries from the bottom branches. Her memories of other old ladies selecting coffee, as she now sits doing, somehow keep her eternally young. The harvest´s true appeal is that it provides a sense of family, community, and history to the workers and connects them in a living way to generations past.