Santa Anita

This past weekend I went to a nearby coffee finca called Santa Anita. Santa Anita, about twenty minutes outside the town of Colomba in the southwest of Guatemala is actually a decently well known community within Guatemala. It is one of only four communities of former members of the guerrilla movement who received land through the government sponsored Land Fund after the Peace Accords were signed in 1996. The land, however, is not free, and the community has ten years to repay the government for the loan. It is unclear at this point whether this will be possible. After two years, they are yet to be able to afford to make a payment.

Santa Anita is a small community, up a steep hill in the steamy jungle-like forests of western Guatemala. The community members are working tirelessly to operate a viable organic coffee and banana farm, but have faced many setbacks. I first learned of the group through a friend in Xela who is working with the project Cafe Conciencia. He is working to provide the technical assistance necessary for Santa Anita, and two other local coffee fincas to operate viable business that provide sufficient compensation for the families involved and that will result in the secure, continued posession of the land. I went to the farm with two photographer friends who were there to take photos that might be used for promotional material for the finca. Hopefully i´ll get to post some of their work here. The preliminary shots i saw were really beautiful.

Growing coffee is not enough. The community is trying to start an agri/eco-tourism project to supplement their income. They have a large house, the former house of the dueño, that has been converted into habitaciones. They provide the opportunity to volunteer at the finca, eat with a family in the community, attend charlas on their work and exeriences, as well as explore the beautiful grounds of the finca. Cafe Conciencia is trying to facilitate the development of this program, as well as provide trainings in areas such as coffee roasting, marketing etc. that will help the business develop.

My time at the finca made me think quite a bit about my time working at NCV in Boston helping people (mostly recent immigrants) start food businesses. I think that one of the greatest satisfactions in life for people who grow food, cook food, do anything professionally related to food, is the opportunity to nourish your own community with the fruits of your labor. For the people i worked with at NCV, and for the member´s of Santa Anita, this is not possible. There simply is no local market for organic coffee. They cannot command a higher price for organic beans, and few people are able to afford the price that they must charge in order to obtain a fair wage for their efforts. This reminded me a lot of one particular man at NCV, Niel, who was originally from Jamaica. Niel was passionate about hot sauce. Jamaican hot sauce made with Jamaican peppers. Niel´s sauce was damn good. Niel dreamed of opening a hot sauce business, of selling his hot pepper sauce at every corner bodega in Boston, at the larger urban markets, anywhere with a Caribbean community. But when Niel and I figured out his costs, what it would take for him to be able to support himself, he realized that he would need to charge so much for each bottle of hot sauce that few recent immigrants from Jamaica would be able to afford to buy the sauce that he hoped would make them feel more at home in their new community. Niel would have to market his sauce to an affluent (read: white) commmunity that could purchase his ¨exotic¨item at a high price. And so it is with Santa Anita. They must attempt to market their coffeee to tourists, extranjeros, sell it abroad at upscale markets and boutique coffee stores. They cannot be profitable by nourishing their own community. I am meeting this week with someone from Cafe Conciencia to see if there is a way that my weird experience with food business marketing that i never thought i would be doing can somehow be helpful to a group of former guerillas in Guatemala, hoping to make a really great cup of coffee.