Woven into the panorama of colors and the smell of wet soil is the social contrast shaped by the division between private property and communal lands, or ejidos, which often depend on the commercialization routes, and infrastructure owned by the larger estates. Situated within the landscape is the human life of the plantation: the often unseen bodily pain of the workers, the stories of migration, the joy and the soreness of the harvest season, and the longing of what has been left behind. This marks a striking contrast with the luxurious experience advertised in plantation resorts: the heavenly countryside in the heart of a tropical atmosphere, a hidden treasure in the jungle of Chiapas. La Ruta del Café emphasizes the coffee terroir and confers coffee with symbolic attributes in terms of the historic, cultural and ecological backgrounds of the region . Printed in a lustrous package, the description of this region’s coffee reads: “this wonderful coffee comes from the slopes of the Sierra Madre de Chiapas, Mexico’s finest coffee-growing region, where high altitudes and rich, volcanic soil create ideal growing conditions. This coffee is cultivated under a canopy of shade trees that protect a diversity of wildlife– foraging tapirs, colorful quetzals, the sleek jaguar–, by farmers who are committed to producing something exceptional. Chiapas’ coffee is crisp and nutty with hints of cocoa”.

Along with the economic benefits associated with ecotourism activities, the region is notorious in the alternative coffee market, wholesale plant containers particularly through biodiversity-friendly initiatives, such as organic, shade-grown, and bird friendly. Today, these fincas export their product in specialty coffee markets to Europe, the United States, and more recently Japan, primarily to accommodate their product in an increasingly competitive environment and overflowed market. Additionally, coffee plantations in this region have had an important presence in the history of alternative agriculture. In fact, the region is portrayed as the first to export biodynamic coffee internationally, and many plantations have been in the spotlight of scientific research. Some finqueros have adopted biodiversity conservation practices such as increasing tree diversity, shade cover, promoting ground cover vegetation, and not applying agrochemicals. These practices are regularly accompanied by strict regulations in relation to the use of natural resources within the plantations. For example, farm workers are instructed to not cut trees, and it is common to find signs that say: prohibido la caceria; cuida los bosques y selvas, no esta permitido cazar, extraer flora y fauna silvestre, o tirar arboles . In this section I lay out the lived experience of farm workers in relation to living and working conditions in the coffee plantation. Here, I highlight foodrelated experiences, the suffering and joy characteristic of the harvest season, and the injustices perceived by farm workers, which become central when discussing conservation narratives and the normalization of poverty and violence surrounding farm workers. Every year, entire families from Guatemala prepare for a journey across the border to work in la cosecha de café .

Back at home, los tapiscadores are campesinos who own small plots of land where they grow milpa– a traditional intercropping system with corn, beans, squash, and chile–, hortalizas , and engage in animal husbandry, primarily raising pigs and chickens. This rural semiproletariat constitutes one of the primary labor fluxes in this region since the XX Century . Although exact numbers are not reported, almost 12,400 migrants crossed the border in 2017 to work in Mexico. Of those, the majority work in the agricultural sector, and about 42% specifically in the coffee industry. Due to labor shortages in Soconusco, the region benefits from this influx of migration from Guatemala, and at the same time, this allows tapiscadores to reproduce and sustain their peasant living back at home , as wages from coffee picking allow them to buy seeds, fertilizer, and home goods after the coffee harvest season is over. The journey of los tapiscadores lasts about 4 months following the path of Arabica coffee maturation: from the Soconusco highlands at an altitude between 900 and 1100msl, to the highlands of Jaltenango, in the Frailesca region in Chiapas at 1600msl. For many of them, the journey starts in the border village of Chanjulé, in the municipality of Tacaná in Guatemala. Families pack burlap sacks full of clothes, cooking pans, and foods from their own plots, such as potatoes , Calabazas, chilacayotas , and tomates de arbol . They also pack blankets and other goods like radios and machetes. The contractor, who is from Guatemala and often a family member of the tapiscadores– and hired for this job by the plantation– charges ~$200 Mexican pesos per family to transport them in an old camion de redila to the coffee plantation. Near the entrance, people are received by a sign that says: “welcome home, respect nature”. Upon arrival, families and single tapiscadores are assigned to their shacks. Each room has two bunk beds, and may host a family of up to eight people. Single tapiscadores are assigned to the singles’ shack, a long room with more than 20 wooden bunkbeds.

No mattresses, pillows or blankets are provided. The rooms are dark and the odor of sweat mixes with the humidity impregnated in the wood and the moldy walls. During my research, I am also assigned my own shack neighboring about 20 other rooms that are part of a recently renovated living area. My shack smells like newer concrete, and has a laminated roof that gets hot during the day and amplifies the sound of rain at night. I am also given a ficha de alimentacion , which I can use to pick up breakfast and lunch at the communal kitchen. I am also given a basket to pick coffee, which I can fasten to my waist using a mecapal– a belt made of plastic or leather. A distant bell rings at 4 am, my neighbor’s lights turn on, a radio starts playing banda music, a child cries in a neighboring shack, and the sound of an industrial tortilla maker is in the background. Farmworkers start gathering at the kitchen to pick up the breakfast ration with their ficha dealimentacion: coffee, tortillas, and beans. The men bring the food back to a separate communal kitchen with fogones , where women are preparing other foods to mix with the basic food ration. They cook eggs bought at the plantation store and boil or fry plants collected during the previous day. As I later came to discover, there are about thirteen species of plants used around the plantation to complement their daily ration.5 With them, women sometimes prepare tamales and mix them with frijoles, cheese, or eggs, and eat them with tortillas, plastic pot manufacturers which they pack in plastic bags and cloths to take with them to the field. The work of harvesting coffee begins as soon as the sun comes up, at about 5:30 am. Families of farm workers carry their baskets and burlap sacks, which they will later use to separate the green coffee from the red, kneeling on the side of dirt roads in the plantation. Most of them are wearing sandals, and very few are wearing rubber boots. I am at the end of a long line of workers walking up a muddy trail in the plantation, following the sound made by the horn of el caporal. 6 Workers are making jokes or talking about how bad the coffee is this year, and often I hear about the fear of la migra , who visit plantations to take people’s children away from their parents. Despite the fear, children of all ages are running around playing, shooting birds and squirrelsin the trees using their handmade slingshots. Children also contribute to the coffee harvest, they are– as Zapata-Martelo and colleagues point out– “invisible contributors” of the coffee harvest, as they neither get paid nor receive food stamps, but do help their parents pick coffee, and represent– to some extent– a monetary benefit for the plantation. In this sense, minors in coffee plantations find themselves in a highly vulnerable position, as they depend on their parents for food, and for medical attention . At the end of the day, full burlap sacks are left on the side of the muddy plantation roads, marked with a colorful ribbon to identify each farmworker. A large truck picks up the burlap sacks and deposits them in the beneficio for la entrega de café . Immediately after, farm workers deposit their coffee in large wooden measuring boxes, which according to some are rigged to increase plantation gains. Farmworkers are then handed a ficha by the plantation administrator or mayordomo, which then they return to the administration in order to keep track of their monthly harvest records.

Farmworkers get paid at the end of the month, although it is common for owners to delay the pay day, to keep farm workers from leaving the plantation earlier. In this regard, a man in a family of four tells me that, “it is hard to harvest coffee, if they don’t pay us we are going to strike, we are not toys”. Other work-related abuses are common in the plantation. For example, workers report having ongoing debt in the plantation store, which not only charges an excessive amount for the products, but also subtracts what is owed from the monthly paycheck. Furthermore, health care and transportation to the nearest hospital is not necessarily provided to people in need.Another contradiction in shade coffee is that conserving biodiversity can promote natural pest control, but organisms that control pests may also pester humans. For example, ants have had considerable attention in the ecological literature, as they are important natural enemies of major coffee pests . Despite the attention placed on the beneficial effect of these organisms, much less attention has been given to potential disservices and social tradeoffs associated with their conservation in coffee systems. This, as well as the fear associated with the dense vegetation, poses an important contradiction to management and conservation. The tropical fire ant is the most feared ant species, it nests on the ground close to coffee plants and has a very powerful sting. Farmworkers often advise their children about ants, because many of them wear sandals or go barefoot to the field, as they cannot afford to buy rubber boots. Other species of ants are less harmful, but harvesting coffee in plants that host ant nests is not considered a pleasant experience. While harvesting coffee among ants, it is common to be bitten by the aggressive Azteca ant. I asked a family “what do you do when you find a plant with this many ants?”. They replied, “Nothing, if we don’t harvest all the coffee the caporal scolds us”. The conflict here is twofold. On the one hand, the farmworker wishes to harvest coffee in a “clean” space, free of snakes and the nuisance of ants, as this evidently adds stress and anxiety to the everyday working experience. On the other hand, management practices in coffee production in general, necessitate that all fruits are harvested, because leaving ripe fruits in the field is an important source of pests. This contradiction poses an important challenge for coffee management, and for the conservation discourse. The experience of farm workers in this labor-intensive system, as well as the experience in relation to ecological attributes of the organic shade-grown coffee plantation, is accentuated by strict regulations surrounding the use of natural resources. Particularly, farm owners and administrators emphasize the prohibition around hunting. Although these regulations sustain a fundamental aspect of the conservation discourse in organic shade-grown coffee plantations, hunting allows farm workers to diversify their diets. From the perspective of the farm workers, the illegality of this practice presents a barrier to improving their living conditions. Migrant farm workers are not allowed to bring dogs to the plantation, but borrow hunting dogs from their families or friends that are established farm workers. The practice is so common among farm workers, that there is chatter about who has the best hunting dog. At night, farm workers gather in the lowlands of the plantation and hunt for hours in the hopes of finding armadillo, andasolo, tlacoache, and tepezcuintle.