Clamoring Interests and Multiple Realities
I think that I have only seen them in magazines, things like People. Okay, there are a bunch of people at Hamilton that also fall into this category. And I am sure that I have met many more of them that I didn’t even know belonged to this group. But this weekend, I had my first real experience with a national elite, and certainly my first real experience with the world’s coffee elite.
The Nottebohms are a family of German descent. The two that I spent the weekend with are Tommy and Charlie (Tomas y Carlos), grandchildren of the first Nottebohm to come to Guatemala. Both grew up here in Guate, both still work in the coffee business, and both have Guatemalan and German passports. They are states educated, and the upper echelons of Guatemalan society. At one point in Guatemalan history, there were the third largest producers of coffee, and now own the company that commercializes the exports of more than half the nation’s production.
This morning, the lovely trio of Carlos, Tommy, and Tommy’s wife Kix picked me up in Antigua. We went first to a house one block from the main plaza (in Guatemala’s main tourist destination city) that Kix is restoring to all its formal glory. From there, we traveled to a celebration at a plant where the Nottebohm’s macadamia nuts are processed. Macadamia for Hershey’s and other international buyers was their crop diversification plan when world coffee prices fell. It has served them well. At the luncheon at the plant, I enjoyed a world-class lunch and joking conversation while sitting next to the Harvard educated Director of the Guatemalan Central Bank.
In the afternoon, we visited various farms that belong to Tommy. I experienced for the first time massive coffee production, on farms that are measured in how long it takes a horse to get across them in a day. These farms process between 100,000 and 150,000 pounds of coffee each day, which comes out to about 20,000 pounds of green, exportable coffee. In Nicaragua, I was dealing with people that produce 300 pounds of green coffee in a season. The farms are swarming with indigenous workers, hired for thirty day periods to come and pick during the harvest, given tortillas and rice and beans, paid $3 a day.
In the evening, after visiting various farms, talking to various people, we arrived at the farmhouse, a lovely, historic structure with a tiled wrap around porch and a caretaker. We chatted about the coffee business over spinach dip and wine by candlelight. We discussed lack of schooling among workers, and a lack of desire as seen by the Nottebohm’s, about how they feel that the plantation lifestyle must be coming to an end, but that that doesn’t necessarily mean things will be better for the indigenous workers, who are accustomed to the relationships that exist with the farms. I couldn’t help but thinking of the antebellum south prior to the civil war as I sat in a charming setting with charming people, trying to understand a glimmer of these relationships, this context, and the future of both people like the Nottebohm’s and those that work for them.
This weekend, I have learned about coffee, about big business, about charming well-educated, very wealthy people; about industrial coffee dryers and the Guatemalan civil war, about ‘society’, about rubber and macadamia nuts. I have been with pleasant people that I both feel I connect with and to whom I feel a genuine estrangement. I have been invited to their lovely homes, helped to make connections, treated like royalty and had any and all of my questions answered.
I am both surprised and taken aback by the way that workers on his farms call Tommy “Patrón” (Master) and “Don Tommy”. I am made uncomfortable by the ominous distance clearly present between me and the people working on the farm from the moment that I arrive gazing at them out the window of the SUV. In many ways, I want them to know that I feel more allied with those peering timidly into the windows of the SUV more than these people whose lives much more resemble my own.
But it is not all so simple. In their paternalistic way, the Nottebohm’s are attempting to care for the people that they hire, start schools, feed children. Though the housing does not belong to them, on the farm the mozos or workers have homes and clothes and work. But none of it belongs to them. And they work for their keep and $2.50 a day, in the face of people who own five houses. In this light, what is fair? Who has a right to what kind of lifestyle? Can one person be condemned and another supported? I don’t know, but I am amazed, confused and impacted by seeing this whole social antebellum, plantation structure, so far yet so related to the models I am examining.
The Nottebohms are a family of German descent. The two that I spent the weekend with are Tommy and Charlie (Tomas y Carlos), grandchildren of the first Nottebohm to come to Guatemala. Both grew up here in Guate, both still work in the coffee business, and both have Guatemalan and German passports. They are states educated, and the upper echelons of Guatemalan society. At one point in Guatemalan history, there were the third largest producers of coffee, and now own the company that commercializes the exports of more than half the nation’s production.
This morning, the lovely trio of Carlos, Tommy, and Tommy’s wife Kix picked me up in Antigua. We went first to a house one block from the main plaza (in Guatemala’s main tourist destination city) that Kix is restoring to all its formal glory. From there, we traveled to a celebration at a plant where the Nottebohm’s macadamia nuts are processed. Macadamia for Hershey’s and other international buyers was their crop diversification plan when world coffee prices fell. It has served them well. At the luncheon at the plant, I enjoyed a world-class lunch and joking conversation while sitting next to the Harvard educated Director of the Guatemalan Central Bank.
In the afternoon, we visited various farms that belong to Tommy. I experienced for the first time massive coffee production, on farms that are measured in how long it takes a horse to get across them in a day. These farms process between 100,000 and 150,000 pounds of coffee each day, which comes out to about 20,000 pounds of green, exportable coffee. In Nicaragua, I was dealing with people that produce 300 pounds of green coffee in a season. The farms are swarming with indigenous workers, hired for thirty day periods to come and pick during the harvest, given tortillas and rice and beans, paid $3 a day.
In the evening, after visiting various farms, talking to various people, we arrived at the farmhouse, a lovely, historic structure with a tiled wrap around porch and a caretaker. We chatted about the coffee business over spinach dip and wine by candlelight. We discussed lack of schooling among workers, and a lack of desire as seen by the Nottebohm’s, about how they feel that the plantation lifestyle must be coming to an end, but that that doesn’t necessarily mean things will be better for the indigenous workers, who are accustomed to the relationships that exist with the farms. I couldn’t help but thinking of the antebellum south prior to the civil war as I sat in a charming setting with charming people, trying to understand a glimmer of these relationships, this context, and the future of both people like the Nottebohm’s and those that work for them.
This weekend, I have learned about coffee, about big business, about charming well-educated, very wealthy people; about industrial coffee dryers and the Guatemalan civil war, about ‘society’, about rubber and macadamia nuts. I have been with pleasant people that I both feel I connect with and to whom I feel a genuine estrangement. I have been invited to their lovely homes, helped to make connections, treated like royalty and had any and all of my questions answered.
I am both surprised and taken aback by the way that workers on his farms call Tommy “Patrón” (Master) and “Don Tommy”. I am made uncomfortable by the ominous distance clearly present between me and the people working on the farm from the moment that I arrive gazing at them out the window of the SUV. In many ways, I want them to know that I feel more allied with those peering timidly into the windows of the SUV more than these people whose lives much more resemble my own.
But it is not all so simple. In their paternalistic way, the Nottebohm’s are attempting to care for the people that they hire, start schools, feed children. Though the housing does not belong to them, on the farm the mozos or workers have homes and clothes and work. But none of it belongs to them. And they work for their keep and $2.50 a day, in the face of people who own five houses. In this light, what is fair? Who has a right to what kind of lifestyle? Can one person be condemned and another supported? I don’t know, but I am amazed, confused and impacted by seeing this whole social antebellum, plantation structure, so far yet so related to the models I am examining.
posted by Hilary King at
1:13 PM
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