Sabina Cristina Silva is proud of her indigenous heritage and coffee is the main thing that keeps her deeply rooted in the Zapotec culture she hails from. Sabina grew up amongst coffee fields, cuil trees and maguey flowers. As a native of San Agustín Loxicha, a small town in Oaxaca’s Sierra Sur, coffee runs through her veins, but not because she comes from a coffee producing region or a family of growers. No. She quite literally drinks it all the time. “Ever since I can remember, I was given coffee,” she said. She can drink seven or eight cups a day without side effects. “Coffee doesn’t mess up with my sleep, quite the opposite! I go to sleep happy after drinking it.”
I met Sabina, 58, at Café SL28, a specialty coffee shop in the heart of Oaxaca City, to hear the story of how she became a coffee producer. But before we got into any of that, first things first. Sabina orders a Cup of Joe and proceeds to the coffee cupping like a pro: she smelled the fragrance of the beans, inhaled deeply into the Chemex the barista drew near her face, and swirled her cup before taking the first sip. “Very good,” she says. Despite her clear mastery of all things coffee, Sabina is not a coffee snob, on the contrary. Her relationship with coffee is simply a part of her identity, one soaked in history and tradition. At home she sticks to the ancestral brewing method to prepare café de olla. “I learnt how to prepare coffee like my mom taught me,” she explains. She wakes up around 7 a.m., makes breakfast and her batch of coffee. She begins by grinding the beans in a small grinder and boiling water and sugar in a pot. She adds her coffee to the pot and blooms it. “The more water oxygenates the better coffee tastes,” she says. Her café de olla comes out with foam, she told me.
Sabina’s journey towards becoming a coffee producer began as a kid when she was around seven years-old. “My relationship with coffee, more than a job, is a tradition I inherited from my parents,” she said. Her parents owned a plot of land and it was the children's job to pick up the coffee beans that birds and rodents bit off the plants or the rain yanked away. “We had to go pick up all the coffee because coffee was money,” she explained. Sabina and her siblings essentially razed the fields, “parejito, parejito”, leaving the plot completely smooth after harvest. “We knew all the trails inside the plot of land,” she said, “and we knew exactly where we had to go to find more coffee to pick up.”
Sabina is the oldest sister of eight siblings and as such, the bulk of household chores and fieldwork fell on her. As a teen she went out with her dad to work in the field while her mom stayed home to roast the coffee artisanally on a clay comal, and to do the cooking and cleaning. Sabina helped with the picking, hand-harvesting the cherries, and processing the coffee. “We hurried up so that it took less than a month,” she said. Coffee production never affected her schooling. In fact, she excelled in school and went on to become a teacher. Still today, everyone in town knows her as “maestra” or teacher in Spanish.
Coffee production is a family affair. Her husband and children are involved, but she is the mastermind behind the vision to grow and expand. It was Sabina who had the vision to take her business to the next level. She takes after her mother whose resourcefulness knew no bounds. “My mom was the kind of person who grew a little bit of everything—cilantro, peppermint, epazote– and raised chickens.” Whenever her mom ran out of beans, sugar or other staples, she sent Sabina to town, some fifteen minutes away, to trade one of their chickens or eggs for whatever they were missing. “I think that’s where I got my knack for business.”
Sabina could have decided to stick with the status quo like many of her neighbors and keep growing, harvesting, and selling her coffee beans in bulk. That would have meant settling for the bare minimum. That business model didn’t yield any profits for them even as the price of coffee kept rising. “I used to say I was essentially giving away my coffee for free,” she said.
Sabina measures time with coffee, or rather the work it takes to produce it from removing weeds from the plot twice a year, planting the coffee seeds, and applying organic fertilizers to the plants. Around October, the fruit ripens, marking harvest season. “As producers, we need to know when to pick the cherries and be careful not to pick the green fruit because if we do that, our coffee loses a lot of its properties.”
It’s been about ten years since Sabina began her journey towards launching her own business. She broke off from the coffee cooperative she worked for and ventured on her own. The process wasn’t simple, despite growing coffee since she was a child. “It’s not only a matter of growing, harvesting, selling the coffee and that’s that,” she explained. Sabina had to learn how to select the cherries, process them and roast them, all while creating a business model. Sabina is the one who selects the beans after they are processed for quality control, to make sure they are not damaged. Her sharp eye is able to distinguish when her coffee bushes are missing a mineral, and when her children ask her what she is doing on her phone for hours on end, well, well, it’s because she is researching coffee illnesses, she tells them, naturally.
The process of launching her business hasn’t been only technical, time consuming and labor intensive. It’s also been emotional and personally challenging. Sabina had to work on trusting herself and her coffee. Now, it’s difficult to believe she ever doubted herself. “To me, my coffee is the best,” she says definitely. “ I will always say it’s the best wherever I go,” she stated defiantly.
Two years ago, Sabina registered her brand and named it Nyon which means sacred in her native Zapotec. "Coffee is a sacred beverage to me,” she said, “Mother Nature produced it.” It doesn’t come as a surprise that Sabina considers nature as a sacred element to respect, care and behold. She has been surrounded by its beauty her entire life. If she looks straight at the horizon, Sabina can see the ocean from her home in San Agustín Loxicha.
Mother Nature has always been generous with her family, supplying the solid foundation that sustains them, but also bananas, limes, guanábana and other bounties. “I always try my best to take care of nature and not take advantage of her,” Sabina said solemnly. “She is the one that feeds us and she is wise.”
Sabina inherited the land her parents worked for about 70 years. It might be the same plot, but the work has come a long way. Her parents never made money from their arduous labor. They relied on loans to keep their coffee production going.“Once harvest was over,” she explained, “my dad would again take out a loan. By the time the next growing season came around, Sabina and her family were back where they started off without ever seeing a profit. In her lifetime, Sabina has managed to turn that around and provide for her family at the same time she worked and raised her children. Her dream is to sell her coffee internationally and “God willing”, she added, “open a small coffee shop in her hometown”.
She wishes her parents could see how far they have all come, as a family. “I know they are proud of me, of the change I made,” she said. And just as they passed down the land to her, she plans to do the same for her children and grandchildren.
