New Endeavors for the Bella Vista Women's Group

Before Rosalba Cifuentes Tovia began exporting coffee in 2016 with her company, Mayan Harvest, she was always looking for ways to help women in her home community of Bella Vista, Chiapas, Mexico. Women in the Bella Vista community take on an incredible amount of responsibility: they work on the farms while still being expected to cook, clean, and take care of the children. Despite this heavy workload, Rosalba noticed that women-produced coffees were cleaner and better selected. She wanted to recognize them for their hard work, and after a few years of starting Mayan Harvest, she started the Bella Vista Women’s Group.

Visiting the El Progreso Chapter of the Bella Vista Women’s Group in 2020.

Many women in Bella Vista operate their farms on their own as widows and divorcees, while some are married but maintain management control. Any woman farmer is able to join the group as long as they come to meetings and the farm is registered under their name. In this group, women are organized by district, and each chapter votes for a leader of the group. The chapters meet monthly to discuss best practices in farming and other projects they can do for additional income.

When we visited Bella Vista in 2020, we had the opportunity to meet with the El Progreso chapter. We shared some coffee that we roasted, and some women asked some great questions, including why our coffees looked lighter than the ones that they roast at home on a comal, a large piece of cookware that is placed over a flame. Coffee roasted in a comal is labor intensive, as the beans need to be stirred constantly over a long period of time to reach the right roast level. During that visit, I recall Rosalba telling us and the women of the El Progreso chapter that, as they continue to grow, the next step would be roasting their own coffee.

During our visit in 2020, The El Progreso Chapter of the Bella Vista Women’s Group were eager to show us their farms and showed us how they picked coffee. We picked coffee at the farm owned by Florismelda (top left).

We returned from our trip about a week before lockdowns in the US were set into place, and other countries soon followed. The year 2020 was set to be the biggest year yet for Mayan Harvest. but it was difficult to predict what would happen as a result of the pandemic. For many in Bella Vista, especially older and single women, coffee was the only source of income. What would they do if there were no buyers to take their coffee? Rosalba had to think quickly. She told the Women’s Group that they would roast the coffees themselves. While the women liked the idea, they were weary—it would take too long to roast so much coffee on a comal! But Rosalba already had a bigger idea planned. She found a roaster in a nearby town to teach her how to roast. After a two week intensive training, she came back to Bella Vista to show women about roasting, bagging, and selling coffee to the national market. Now, coffee from the Women’s Group and other farmers in the Bella Vista community can be found in other states and large hotel chains, and the roasting business for the women’s group continues. 

Mayan Harvest began roasting their own coffee in 2020 to sell to local coffee market!

Rosalba fronted all of the expenses to get the Women’s Group roasting business started. She looks forward to passing management and finances back to the women of Bella Vista so that they can run the business independently. For now, she knows that the women have enough to worry about, and is prepared to spearhead this endeavor.

We’re excited about this new venture for the Women’s Group and can’t wait to see how much it will grow over the coming years. We look forward to traveling to Bella Vista again when it is safe, and hope that in our next visit, we’ll be able to share notes and learn about one another’s roasting styles! Their 2021 harvest landed in the US just weeks ago, and this fresh arrival has notes of cara cara orange, dried pineapple, and piloncillo, an unrefined whole cane sugar that tastes earthy and is a little like brown sugar and molasses. It’s a sweet and citric coffee that’s easy to drink!