O Little Town of Bethlehem

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Migration, Trade and Brutality “Why don’t you just stay here and farm coffee?”

“Why don’t you just stay here and farm coffee?”

-David Schmidt

The Mixtec indigenous community of San Juan Coatzóspam, nestled in the lush, forested mountains of the southern State of Oaxaca, is like many other rural communities across Mexico in two regards. (1) It is a beautiful place, with abundant natural resources, an ancient local culture full of lore and legends, and a spectacular view of the unspoiled wilderness. (2) In the past 20 years, it has practically become a ghost town. 

Most people have left Coatzóspam to look for work somewhere else.

People don’t leave beautiful places like Coatzóspam for no reason. They leave because of the macro-economic policies that fuel our own consumer economy.

In the case of Coatzóspam, it all goes back to coffee. For years, the Mexican government provided a stable price for small coffee farmers like the campesinos of Coatzóspam. The government institution INMECAFE provided credits to smallholders and guaranteed a baseline price. Then the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed. INMECAFE was disbanded. Mexico’s economy became more dependent on the economies of the U.S. and Canada. And coffee farming became a gamble.

Ever since 1994, the price of coffee has shot up and down. Some years, the farmers of Coatzóspam would spend all year preparing for the coffee harvest, only to find that the price of coffee on the world market had dropped. The market price of coffee—a price discussed in air-conditioned offices thousands of miles away, a price dependent on the fluctuations of the stock markets in London and New York—would drop so low that farmers would actually lose money by farming coffee. A product that used to allow them to provide for their families had become a financial black hole.

So the farmers left.

I wish I could say this story only happened in Coatzóspam. But this is the story of hundreds of coffee-producing rural towns across Mexico. Across Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, South America. As neoliberal economic policies were implemented during the Reagan-Thatcher years of the 1980’s and 1990’s, international coffee-buying corporations like Nestlé and Sarah Lee gained more and more control of the coffee trade, at the expense of small farmers. Rural communities became more and more dependent on the fluctuations of coffee prices on the world market. 

I wish I could say this story was limited to coffee.

It isn’t. After NAFTA was signed, millions of smallholding peasant farmers across Mexico were driven off their land, as a result of the lopsided policies of NAFTA. Corn farmers could no longer make a living, as Mexico’s market was flooded with cheap corn from the U.S. And the U.S. corn is cheap for a reason—it’s subsidized with millions of dollars from the U.S. government. While Mexico was required to remove its subsidies for its own small corn farmers as a condition of NAFTA, the U.S. has continued to subsidize its own massive agribusiness. (To the detriment of small corn farmers in the U.S. as well.)

So people have left the countryside. If they can’t make a living there anymore, they leave.

In the case of Coatzóspam, the first time I visited the Mixtec native community in 2006, I saw a visible generation gap. I barely met anybody between the ages of 12 and 65—most of the people of working age had left to look for a source of income somewhere else. I was reminded of a friend who had visited the Soviet Union in the 1970’s and told me he had seen an entire generation of men missing—the men who were killed during Hitler’s invasion in WWII.

In the case of Coatzóspam, it’s not just the men who are missing—working age women and adolescent girls leave as well, looking for employment in the outside world. Mexico City. Sinaloa. Sonora. Baja California.

And many have crossed into the United States. Many Coatzóspam natives are working in the fields of the large factory farms in Salinas, Oxnard, Watsonville, Fresno. Rather than working on the plots of land their families have owned for generations, they are working to support the massive agricultural industry that drove their families out of business in the first place.

The young people come back to town every now and then. Sometimes they come back to visit during Saint John’s Day festivals in the summer, or during the Day of the Dead at the end of October. Sometimes they come back after being deported from the United States.

And many of them come back changed. Resentful. Angry. A slow-boiling rage churns in the bellies of many young men who come back to town.

We’ll look more closely at this anger in the next installment.

This article is part of a series, “Migration, Trade and Brutality: A Journey through Mexico and Central America”, written byDavid Schmidt regarding his travels in Summer 2012. David is a volunteer with World Relief Garden Grove serving all of Southern California.

David Schmidt is a freelance writer and multi-lingual translator in San Diego, CA. He is a proponent of immigrants' rights and fair trade, and works with worker-owned coops in Mexico to help them develop alternative, fair sources of income. He can be contacted at davidschmidt2003@hotmail.com .

We append the following disclaimer on all posts: “Please note that the views expressed by guest bloggers represent their own personal views, and not necessarily those of everyone associated with Loving the Stranger or any institutions with which the blogger may be affiliated.”

Migration, Trade and Brutality STOP ONE: The Coffee Mountains of Oaxaca

Downtown Coatzóspam

-David Schmidt, Guest Contributor

San Juan Coatzóspam is a beautiful town. Located on the edge of the highest mountain around, it affords visitors a spectacular view. You can see the surrounding valleys, villages and settlements for miles around. An enormous river snakes through the valleys below, a day’s hike downhill from Coatzóspam. The town is so high up the mountain that the clouds rise up to meet it, caressing the cheeks of the town’s residents.

San Juan Coatzóspam is a fertile town. It is nestled amidst lush mountain forests, enormous trees hanging with Spanish moss, wilderness that threatens to overtake the small plot of land occupied by the town and reclaim it for Nature.

San Juan Coatzóspam is one of the few places on earth that have the right climate for growing coffee. Just high enough to sustain the fickle plants that produce the high-quality “Arabica” beans. Cool enough for the shade-grown coffee plants to survive and be productive.

San Juan Coatzóspam is far from the concerns of modern urban life. For most of its existence, this rural village has been separated from the dangers of city life—drug addiction, street crime, gangs, alcoholism, family violence, divorce, homelessness, poverty—by a thick veil of mountains and jungle. For most of its existence, Coatzóspam has been a self-sustaining community.

San Juan Coatzóspam is even insulated from mainstream Mexican culture. Many people in Coatzóspam, to this day, do not even speak the Spanish language. The community is inhabited by Mixtec indigenous people. The Mixtecs have lived on this American continent for thousands of years. They have their own language, their own culture, their own traditions, their own way of perceiving the world, the heavens, society, the economy, the natural world around them. The Mixtec way of life predates the Hispanic and Anglo cosmologies by millennia.

And San Juan Coatzóspam is a ghost town.

Ever since 1994 when the North American Free Trade Agreement—NAFTA—was signed, the Mixtec indigenous community of San Juan Coatzóspam saw a sudden evacuation of its people. This is a town where, just a generation ago, people stuck together to farm each others’ gardens and coffee fields.

Now, most people leave and go work somewhere else.

Why would anyone leave such a beautiful place? The answer lies in global neoliberal economics. The answer lies in worldwide economic policies that have drained Coatzóspam, and thousands of towns like it across Mexico, of their lifeblood.

The answer lies in the same policies that create migration all across the continent, that force people to leave their home communities and look for their livelihood elsewhere. The same policies, the same global forces that push people to leave beautiful communities like Coatzóspam, are also the policies that have created violence and brutality in other places.

In Coatzóspam, as in the rest of this continent of Las Américas, migration, trade and brutality go hand in hand. 

This article is part of a series, “Migration, Trade and Brutality: A Journey through Mexico and Central America”, written by David Schmidt regarding his travels in Summer 2012. David is a volunteer with World Relief Garden Grove serving all of Southern California.

David Schmidt is a freelance writer and multi-lingual translator in San Diego, CA. He is a proponent of immigrants' rights and fair trade, and works with worker-owned coops in Mexico to help them develop alternative, fair sources of income. He can be contacted at davidschmidt2003@hotmail.com. 

We append the following disclaimer on all posts: “Please note that the views expressed by guest bloggers represent their own personal views, and not necessarily those of everyone associated with Loving the Stranger or any institutions with which the blogger may be affiliated.”