Part Four, Mayan Harvest Women's Group: A Series on Our Partnership with Mayan Harvest

By Corazon Padilla, Director of Quality Control & Corey Turner, Director of Coffee Production

Mayan Harvest Women’s Group

On our last day in Bella Vista, we got to attend a meeting with some members of the Mayan Harvest Women’s Group. This group was founded by Rosalba in recognition of all the women coffee producers in Bella Vista, who are often overshadowed or silenced by their husbands. The Women’s Group is broken up into chapters based on region, and each chapter votes for a leader of the group. The chapters meet monthly to discuss farm maintenance, best practices, how to maintain different coffee varieties, and other craft projects that they can do for additional income.

When the group first began meeting, some of the women’s husbands would attend in case the women were conspiring, which Rosalba allowed so they could see that wasn’t what the meetings were about. She was firm, however, that the meetings were only for the women to participate in. Many of the women were very shy in the beginning, but over time, both the women attending and their husbands have developed more trust in Rosalba’s leadership and the number of women in attendance has grown. Rosalba has also been able to buy the women’s group’s coffee at a higher price in recognition of the higher quality and care that goes into it, which is a direct result of the invested time and knowledge of the women producers in Bella Vista. 

Edilma demonstrating that she can move around her farm with her grandson her back, no problem.

Maydileni, Edilma’s daughter, and the Group Leader of the Women’s Group’s El Progreso chapter.

For many visitors on an origin trip, harvesting cherry is one of the most highly anticipated activities. This is perhaps the most romanticized part of the seed to cup process. We often see images of pickers walking peacefully among coffee trees while picking cherries. But we learned just how labor intensive cherry picking is when Florismelda of the El Progreso chapter invited us to her farm and taught us how to harvest. We were picking during her last round of harvesting for the season, and while her trees were starting to look a little bare, there were enough cherries for us to pick.

When picking the cherry, we had to make sure that we didn’t rip the skin (this would speed up the fermentation of that cherry), and that we also didn’t pluck off the stem, because that would be one less cherry that the tree would produce the next year. Florismelda and other women farmers also taught us to harvest old and unripe cherries. While we dream of only the ripest cherries being picked, harvesting old and unripe cherries, especially during the last harvest, is a part of the farm management process. After getting our rhythm down, the farmers joked that we could become pickers now. We laughed at this because we knew that we could never pick cherries with their same amount of speed and diligence. 

Trying to pick cherries correctly at Florismelda’s farm

After attending this meeting and visiting some of the womens’ farms, we headed back to Bella Vista for a town meeting where Rosalba’s work was celebrated. So many members of the women’s group were in attendance, coming from all over the Bella Vista municipality, and they arrived earlier than everyone else! It was really hard to imagine that Rosalba met so much opposition when starting this group, and that even now, with close to 90 women producers who are members, many women are kept from becoming official members due to their husbands’ insistence that the farms remain in their names. It’s amazing to see how far they’ve come since they’ve been able to organize, and that Rosalba is still not satisfied--they trust her to continue to help them improve their quality and get higher prices for their coffee year over year for the betterment of their community. It was also really powerful to bridge our efforts to create more spaces for women in our respective jobs and communities, to see the same work being done at origin.

El Progreso Chapter of the Women’s Group