By Riccardo

The sun is still hiding behind the Sierra Juarez mountains, when Doña Elvira opens her eyes and the day begins. She tosses a shawl over her shoulder and goes outside and looks at the sky, a soft light is radiating from behind the mountains while the last stars are shimmering. Don Tomás, whistling, greets her as he tends to the turkeys and horses, "Buenos dias, mi amor," he says. He kisses her cheek before going up to the rooftop to spread out yesterday's coffee harvest to dry.

In the Zapoteco community of Tanetze de Zaragoza, life is timed by the rhythms of nature, of the crops' cycles. This is coffee harvest time- the steep mountainsides are full of coffee; red berries hang heavy on the weighted branches. During harvest time there are no Sundays or rest days- unless the rains make the steep hike to the coffee fields too muddy to attempt.

Doña Elvira fills her basket with the corn harvested in October and walks towards the local mill, still listening to her husband's cheerful whistling from the rooftop. When she gets back with the ground corn, Don Tomás has already cut the wood and lit the stove- the comal is hot and Doña Elvira prepares the tortillas for the day. Breakfast is ready: scrambled eggs, chile, black beans, tortillas, salsa and a steaming atole are on the table. We talk and laugh while we enjoy the good, homemade flavors of the first meal of the day.

It is 9:00 AM when Don Tomás and Doña Elvira are ready to go down to the cafetal. They tie the basket carrying food for lunch to their only and treasured helpers – a horse and a donkey – and they start walking down to the coffee fields. The path is muddy and steep. On our way we pass clearings of corn and sugar cane fields, along with lemon, lime and orange trees interspersed among the coffee fields.

While the horse trots down its daily path gracefully, I have hard time not slipping in the red mud. The path is narrow and steep, but also busy: the majority, if not all of the people in Tanetze grow coffee, the only crop they are sure to sell despite the low and fluctuating prices. We pass other campesinos drying coffee beans on straw mats and many carrying heavy loads of wood on their back to use as fuel for cooking.

Doña Elvira tells me how at the beginning of the 1990s, the coffee price fell so low that she and Don Tomás had to abandon Tanetze and Oaxaca to go to Mexico City. There, she worked as a maid while her husband found a job as a security guard. Far away from their land, their culture and their language, they found themselves drowning in a world of smog and materialism and hectic urban rhythms, where life is always hardest for the last arrived migrants. Refugees of sort arrive to Mexico City every day, just as they migrate towards the northern border. They flee the fluctuation in market prices, against which their government does nothing to protect them, and desert the countryside that they find can no longer sustain them, hoping to find work in the concrete jungle.

Doña Elvira and Don Tomás walk quickly along the path, crossing the neighbors cafetales, after walking for half an hour we can hear the gushing waters of the river at the bottom of the mountain, we see a tin roof where their working tools are gathered: baskets, wood and a machete. Doña Elvira's dark and careful eyes become two thin lines as I ask her the name of the river, she looks at me surprised and entertained at the same time, as if I were asking an absurd question. "What's it called? Well... it's called.... river...How else should we call it?" We laugh together at my question; I realize for the first time that this is the only river that exists in her world, the only river that holds any importance for her, The River, the only river that runs through her valley.

Don Tomás ties his two helpers to a tree, while Doña Elvis – as her husband affectionately calls her – covers her head and neck with a shawl to defend herself from the thousands of tiny mosquitos flying around, and a new day starts in the cafetal. Just like yesterday, and the day before yesterday, and the day before that, daylight hours are dedicated to the meticulous coffee harvest, bean by bean, branch by branch, plant by plant. Tanetze's cafetales have got nothing in common with the tidy vineyards of my hometown in Italy, where the tidy grape trees grow in straight lines. There is wild vegetation along these slopes also- among the branches full of red, yellow and green berries there are big shady banana trees, orange and lemon trees as well as an array of weeds and rocks. The tangle is so thick that Don Tomás creates a path for himself with the machete. In the midst of all the unknown plants for me, Don Tomás shows me the vanilla they planted three years ago; the vine of green pods grows intertwined in the branches of the coffee plants.

Doña Elvira's hands move along the coffee plants like a pianist's hands on the piano, fast and decisive they select the mature berries from the ones still green, she doesn't miss one, coffee is way to precious for her to lose even one bean. Afterwards, she crouches down below the plant to pick up any berries that might have fallen.

The coffee process is long and laborious. While Doña Elvira fills the basket hanging across her shoulder, Don Tomás starts the engine of the maquina despulpadora, which separates the bean from the red fruit. Dark red fruit peels are piled up around the machine surrounded by flies and mosquitos flying hysterically, attracted by the sugar of the berries. Once the peels are dry they are used as compost for the plants. After a brief but tasty lunch of tortillas and vegetable soup, we start working again until the sun sets. Don Tomás whistles and sings. He likes music. When he was young and still single he used to play in the local brass band of the pueblo. Now he only sings for Doña Elvis in those days when he can beat the exhaustion of a day in the cafetal.

Doña Elvira is serious and her basket fills up quickly. I wonder what she thinks about in all those silent hours spent surrounded by coffee plants? About who is going to take care of them when she gets too old? Who will inherit this land, her memories, her stories? About the children they longed to have but couldn't, the children she wasn't even permitted to adopt because the urban agency wouldn't approve a campesino family for adoption? The stories Doña Elvira tells us are one sad one after another, though she bears the weight of both her memories and her work with grace.

As it gets dark, Don Tomás loads the bags full of coffee beans on his horse and donkey, whistles to Doña Elvira telling her that it's time to go, and we move along the path, on the dark upward slope home. The animals struggle under the load of the coffee, farting noisily and stopping regularly to rest until they hear Doña Elvira shoo them along. I trip several times, clearly revealing that I am accustomed to city cement and asphalt. Don Tomás is used to the steep uphill. He tells me how, before they had animals to help with the load, he had to carry the heavy bags of coffee beans tied to his back, going up and down the hour-long path several times to carry up a day's harvest.

When we get to Elvira's home its pitch black. Sweaty and tired, we sit down on the wooden chairs around the table. Work in Tanetze, however, does not end at sunset. The coffee must be soaked in water for 24 hours so that the sugar left on the beans ferments and it is easier to clean. The bags full of coffee are poured into the cement tub outside Elvira's front door. A strong smell of fermenting sugar fills the air. It is a familiar smell, it reminds me of the grape harvest in my hometown in Italy: the wine in pungent wooden vats. Doña Elvira turns the coffee in the tub with a broom. She then sifts the beans, removing skins and green beans by hand. Don Tomás goes once again up to the rooftop to collect the coffee spread out to dry: three days of sun for commercial coffee, eight days for the coffee destined to their cooperative and for personal use. Once the coffee is dry they have what the call "el café de oro", and this is what is taken to be roasted and ground. Elvira's parents have climbed up onto the roof sifting through the beans, spreading them out, carrying them into bags. There is no such thing as retirement here.

Doña Elvira is founder and member of the cooperative Yu-Van, which means Living Earth in Zapoteco. The cooperative is made up of 14 women in Tanetze, who put together part of their harvest to sell it directly in the organic market in Oaxaca City, which is 6 hours from Tanetze. Through the cooperative, and with the help of a foundation for start-up costs, they have been able to buy an oven to roast the coffee and a grinder to completely process their own coffee. The cooperation between the women in Tanetze, although being a way to sell their products at a fair price which compensates the heavy work behind a simple cup of coffee, also involves further work.

Every Friday, Doña Elvira gets up at 4:30 so that she can take the only daily bus to the city of Oaxaca. At 10:30 AM, she is selling coffee in the market. The rest of the harvest is sold to the coyotes, the intermediaries between local producers like Doña Elvira and Don Tomás and the big distribution houses. The coyotes buy the coffee, already roasted and ground, for a price that oscillates between 14 and 16 pesos a kilo, a little more than a dollar.

It is now night, Doña Elvira heats up the tortillas prepared that same morning with some cheese that we brought from Oaxaca, salsa and some spicy chile. Don Tomás pours coffee in the typical Oaxacan cups made of red clay. Coffee is different here, light, sweet and with a touch of cinnamon. As I taste the flavor of the coffee, I wonder at all the work behind this hot drink, and how much the people's lives in Tanetze are both timed and defined by it.