our roots

I am a coffee farmer, as is my father, as are my brothers; we farm just as our family has done for five generations in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Mountains.

On this small piece of world, farming shade grown coffee is a way of life.  It is a hard life.  Our work begins long before dawn, and often continues long after the last rays of daylight are swallowed by the night. As a boy, I believed education would give me the wings to fly far from my family’s coffee farm, far from this way of life.  I was a studious and disciplined student.  My discipline and resolve took me farther than I ever dreamed—beyond my family’s coffee farm, beyond my homeland.

I did not start out as a coffee farmer.  Through training and education I became an attorney.  Certainly something to be proud of, but I came to realize a man is defined by more than the work for which he trained.  A man is more a reflection of his family, and the life and community in which he was raised.  My flight from home was swift and distant; my journey home a slow, years long walk.

Not much changed on the coffee farm since the days of my childhood.  The coffee still grows on the western side of the Sierra Madre Mountains, shrouded most nights in the midnight fog that floats inland from the Pacific Ocean.  We still rise early to tend the coffee plants.  We still keep vigil over the ripening of the coffee beans, harvesting not by timetables, but by our farmer’s understanding of what to look and feel for in a ripe, cherry red coffee bean.  We still harvest by hand, sort and select the best coffee beans to ensure the quality of the coffee that leaves our farm reflects and meets the high expectations of those who sit to enjoy our coffee with their family and friends.

What changed is how I feel about this land and community.  I now feel a deep bond to this land, land that was once too familiar for me to appreciate. As I work beside my father and brothers on our ancestral farm, our work fills me with a sense of belonging. This work that once felt to me like a burden is now both my privilege and an honor.

Oscar Bucio-Nunez