According to Mazatec traditions, land is inherited to the youngest son, thus the land of Maricela's grandfather was supposed to be inherited to her father. However, since he himself only had daughters and no sons, his father decided to give the land to his other sons instead. Maricela's family was left with nothing. They had to work and saved up enough money to buy their own land and thus managed to get back into coffee farming.
When we visited their farm El Sótano, which is not too far away from the region's biggest town Huautla de Jiménez, the family invited us to their house, cooked food for us and shared their ideas about coffee farming. The family runs the farm together with Maricela being the main decision maker. Their coffee trees grow in a healthy agroforestry system alongside oak, cedar, cuajuinicul and mandarin trees, amongst others, which provide shade, increase biodiversity, and keep the soil healthy. They work with organic fertilizer and composting and count on traditional coffee varieties such as Mundo Novo, Bourbon, Caturra or Typica. Maricela also looks after her own coffee nursery, whose seeds formed some of the best trees on El Sótano. She decided to swim against the tide when it comes to post-harvest processing, producing naturals instead of washed coffees. Due to the very challenging climate with frequent rainfalls even during dry season, it is very uncommon to process coffees as naturals in this region of Mexico. But thanks to Maricela's careful, disciplined practices it works. And how well it does!
In 2017, Maricela started working with Ensambles, a Mexican specialty coffee exporter who pushes agricultural biodiversity. She managed to sell the high-quality coffee she produces at much higher prices this way, thus allowing her and her family to make a good living from the coffee production. The profits also helped her to sustain the incredible quality of her natural coffee and to buy an additional 1.5 hectares of land to produce more coffee going forward. They now own six hectares of land, distributed across eight plots. In the Sierra Mazateca, coffee is often grown in areas which almost look like wild, organic stretches of forest. Coffee trees are situated on steep slopes quite frequently. These circumstances make for a very labor-intensive harvest. On top of that, due to the landscape, the farmers can plant only so many trees per hectare. Both results in quite a big effort for a small amount of coffee produced.
Maricela and her family have built raised beds in the shade big enough to dry about five tons of coffee cherries per season, a rather unusual infrastructure in the region. This is necessary because drying their natural coffee takes up to 45 days, which is drastically higher than the average of three days that most farmers in the region have to dry their washed coffees on patios. To protect them from the cold nights and heavy dew, they put the coffee cherries back into bags every night and store them in their house, before spreading them out onto the raised beds again in the morning.
Today, Maricela also roasts her own coffee and sells it on the local markets.
