In the coffee highlands of Chiapas, I spent time with the women of two associations, Yamtel Lumaltik and Yikeb, photographing their days for a project with Standart Magazine. Their mornings start around 4 a.m. by firelight, pressing blue corn tortillas (the best I’ve ever eaten) before the children wake. From there, the day moves between hearth, nursery, coffee plot, and loom.
These women grow Geisha and Marsellesa seedlings in the region’s only local nursery for high-quality plants, define roast profiles, lead their associations, weave on backstrap looms tensioned by their own bodies, and keep their families and communities fed and steady, often all before noon. Their days hold many kinds of labour at once: accounted and unaccounted, appreciated and overlooked, paid and unpaid, and nearly all of it valued at far less than it’s worth. A single day can run fifteen hours, yet the women often fold most of it into the phrase “keeping house.”
In specialty coffee we talk often about traceability and sustainability, but the labour that makes quality possible, from choosing which seedlings survive to the meal that sends someone out to the fields at dawn, rarely shows up on a supply-chain diagram. I made these images to bring that labour into view, not only as burden but as skill, authorship, and care, carried with pride and passed from mothers to daughters.
