In the misty highlands of Chiapas, women begin working hours before dawn, balancing household responsibilities with skilled roles in coffee production that are essential yet often unrecognized. From tending nurseries and coffee plots to sustaining families and communities, their labour underpins both local livelihoods and the global specialty coffee trade.
Words by Sabine Parrish · Photos by Alexa Romano · In partnership with Bean Voyage
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Mist rolls over the mountaintops of the Chiapan highlands long before the sun’s first warmth reaches the valleys. It moves in slow, pale ribbons, softening the sharp edges of pines and cloud forest, settling on corrugated metal rooftops and the small milpas that cling to the slopes. At this hour, when even the roosters have not yet found their voices, the villages are still. Except for the women.
Doña Luisa is one of them. At 4 a.m., while the rest of her family sleeps, she lights the first fire of the day already planning how much time she will spend later inspecting seedlings at the nursery and checking the condition of the young coffee plants that will shape future harvests. The thin blue flames lick the morning air as she pats tortillas by hand, shaping the day’s nourishment. ‘I make tortillas, coffee, get my children up. Then we eat, they leave for school around 7. And then I will wash the dishes and do the laundry, mop and clean,’ she explains. Only when the kitchen is clean, the children fed and dressed, her husband sent into the fields, does she begin preparing for her own workday.
The women of these highlands rise early not because they are restless, but because their labour is what makes everyone else’s rest possible. This labour is often named as ‘household work,’ yet it exists alongside women’s direct and skilled involvement in coffee production–an involvement that is frequently under-recognized even within their own communities. In every home, in every hamlet scattered through the forest, women’s reproductive labour–that is care, cooking, childcare, household management–anchors the rhythms of life. Only once that work is done can the day’s productive labour begin: tending coffee plots, maintaining nurseries, or weaving textiles whose patterns stretch back generations.
The double day
By the time the mists lift, women are already hours into their day. For coffee-farming families like Doña Luisa’s, the work is constant and cyclical. Her family farms coffee in small intercropped forest plots, agroforestry systems that combine coffee with bananas, maize, beans, and other subsistence crops that help feed the family. These patches rarely exceed a few hectares, and they require continual care: weeding, selective pruning, maintaining shade diversity, monitoring pests, watching for the first cherries to blush red.
Like many families in the region, they also belong to a collective–in her case, Yamtel Lumaltik–whose nursery, led and primarily managed by women, has become a vital community resource. The nursery’s seedlings, tended primarily by women, supply not only Yamtel Lumaltik’s members but also neighbouring families who aren’t members of the association.
Doña Luisa has been part of the nursery project since its inception four years ago. The netting which serves as a roof over the nursery is still wet with dew when she arrives some mornings, and the scent inside is fresh, sweet with the smell of moist earth. ‘I go to work at the nursery, filling the bags,’ she says simply, referring to the small plastic sacks into which young seedlings are transplanted, though in actuality her role entails far more than mere bag-filling, and includes monitoring plant health, selecting viable seedlings, and maintaining quality standards for the cooperative’s future production. Doña Luisa and the other women who work at the region’s only local nursery for high-quality plants are responsible for the cultivation of viable Geisha, Marsellesa, Anacafé 14, and Lempira varietals.
The work is delicate but communal. Women sort seeds, prepare substrate, water the seedlings, and monitor the young plants’ slow push toward the light. Children often sit nearby shelling beans or playing in the dust. This garden of future coffee is as much a social space as it is an economic one.
Yet the labour that surrounds it remains gendered. When asked about the difference between her responsibilities and her husband’s, Doña Luisa puts it plainly:
‘Well, my husband works in agriculture. He goes out to work, cleaning coffee, planting corn, planting beans… The difference is when my husband goes out to work in the fields, at my house I’m just a housewife. I work from home, do the laundry, clean my house.’ Here, ‘just a housewife’ is said without irony but the list that precedes it and her real actions throughout the day tell another story. Her phrasing reflects a familiar social shorthand rather than the reality of her days: she moves constantly between home, nursery, and fields, contributing technical knowledge and labour that directly affect coffee quality and yield. The weight of reproductive labour sits squarely on women’s shoulders, and yet they carry it without relinquishing their roles in the productive economy of coffee and community projects.
Seasonal rhythms, shared practices
Hours from Yamtel, down rutted, muddy, perilously steep roads lies the coffee association Yikeb. Getting there requires perseverance and luck: these mountains are known territories for traffickers, and rain can turn the unpaved switchbacks into impassable mire. But at the end of the journey lies a community where coffee and weaving form parallel lifelines.
Doña Carolina, one of Yikeb’s three female roasters and also responsible for defining the association’s roasting profiles, also begins her days in darkness. ‘I get up at 4 in the morning; I make my tortilla, my pozole. It’s got to be ready for the kids,’ she says. ‘And if I go to my plot, I come back at noon to eat with the [younger] kids [who are not yet in school] again… I make the food.’
After the eating and washing and tending comes the third thread of her daily weave: textile work.
Backstrap weaving in Chiapas is more than craft; it is lineage. The loom is anchored to a tree or post, and the body of the weaver–always a woman–forms the other anchor point. Her back becomes part of the tensioning system, her breath in rhythm with the creation of cloth. Patterns are learned from mothers and grandmothers, passed hand-to-hand, warp-to-weft. ‘Our weaving designs are from ancient times but we don’t know anymore if they have any meaning, we just keep making them,’ Doña Carolina says. What once held cosmological or symbolic significance now persists through practice and muscle memory. Hands remember even when stories fade.
For many of the women I met, weaving and coffee are not separate vocations but complementary ones that follow seasonal rhythms. Both coffee and weaving require patience, sensory acuity, and an attunement to small details. Watching a backstrap weaver make microscopic corrections to tension feels remarkably similar to watching a roaster make fine adjustments to airflow or heat. It is no surprise that Doña Carolina draws the same comparison. To her, weaving and roasting are both skills that demand presence, humility, precision, and the authority to make decisions that cannot be undone. They are also forms of authorship. Just as a textile bears the unmistakable signature of its maker, so too does a roast curve shaped by a woman who knows the land that produced the coffee.
But weaving, unlike coffee work, bends more in the face of other obligations when women’s labour in the fields and processing areas becomes even more critical. ‘When it’s weaving season it’s about 4 or 5 hours a day,’ she says, but the looms are set aside during harvest. ‘There’s too much other work to be done,’ she explains. As the coffee cherries ripen, every pair of hands is needed and none can be spared to the work of weaving.
In this way, the cycles of coffee production sculpt the cycles of textile production, and women’s lives become an interplay between forest and loom, craft and care.
Productive and reproductive labour: The invisible thread
Social scientists often differentiate between productive labour, work that generates income, and reproductive labour, the unpaid work of sustaining households and communities. But in these coffee-growing villages, such distinctions blur. A woman might step from the hearth to the nursery to the milpa to the laundry line within a single morning. As Doña Luisa describes her day, the sequence sounds both exhausting and matter-of-fact:
‘From after the children have breakfast until two in the afternoon I work at home or in the fields. When my daughters come home from school at two I prepare lunch. I do rest for a while after that, but then there is more cleaning, dinner to make. I go to sleep around 9.’
A day that begins at 4 a.m. and ends at 9 p.m. contains fifteen hours of labour: reproductive, productive, bodily, emotional, agricultural, communal. Yet despite the weight of their responsibilities, the women speak about their work not with resentment but with clarity: they know their lives are sustained by the balance they maintain between home, farm, and loom. And their contributions to coffee production are more than peripheral, they are essential.
‘Women are always doing everything, and all the work with the children… Working in coffee is heavier for us than for men, in terms of our overall work, but we do it with all our heart,’ Doña Luisa says. Her phrasing, ‘with all our heart,’ is not sentimental. It reflects how deeply women’s labour is tied to group survival. To care for the seedling, the loom, the tortilla, the child: each is an act of cultural and familial continuity.
Yet in the highlands, these forms of labour are not separated into clean columns of ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive.’ Women move between them with practiced fluency, in an intimate choreography. Their days are long, yes, but they are also full of skill, intention, and knowledge that sustains both households and ecosystems. The work is demanding, but it is not passive: the choices a woman makes around how to pick coffee, how to maintain the nursery seedlings, and how to manage a household with precision each shape the agricultural and cultural fabric of her community. These sequences hold knowledge about soil, seasons, nutrition, and timing. They also reveal a cultural logic in which the home, field, and workshop form a single continuum of care and production.
This is the part the specialty coffee industry too often overlooks: the invisible infrastructure of labour that makes high-quality coffee possible. Not only the pickers who select ripe cherries with discernment learned from agronomists but the women who train others in those practices, manage nurseries, make roasting decisions, and sustain the households that allow agricultural work to continue, but the women who ensure that the people doing that work are fed, rested, and supported, and who themselves participate in cultivation, nursery management, and harvest.
In this landscape, weaving offers a useful metaphor. Backstrap weaving binds the loom to the weaver’s own body, making her posture, breath, and balance the tools through which pattern emerges. Textile work is knowledge embodied: precise tension, incremental adjustments, sensitivity to materials, the ability to hold a design in the mind as it slowly becomes cloth. Even if certain symbolic meanings in the designs are obscured by time, the practice persists because it remains essential: economically, culturally, and personally. Women teach their daughters not out of obligation, but as a gift. ‘Although sometimes only on Saturdays and Sundays, because she’s studying,’ notes Doña Luisa of her eldest daughter with the lightest hint of a smile. The coexistence of formal education and communal craft is not a contradiction; it is a strategy for the future, allowing young women to move between modes of being with choice rather than constraint.
The final hours of the day bring a soft exhale across the highlands. Light slips behind the mountains, and the air grows cool enough that people wrap themselves in shawls woven by their mothers or aunts or neighbours. By this time, many women have already put in twelve or fourteen hours of work, yet what lingers is not a sense of depletion but of completion. As she wraps up her day, Doña Luisa often drinks a small cup of her own coffee. A quiet and well-earned ritual. The cup she drinks is the same cup that, by the time it reaches a barista in London or Seoul or Melbourne, will have passed through dozens of hands, but hers is among the first–and certainly the most important. She is not adjacent to coffee production; she is one of its primary authors.
The work that holds the world together
In specialty coffee, we often talk about traceability, sustainability, and transparency. But rarely do we talk about the forms of labour that do not fit neatly onto infographics or supply-chain diagrams: the cooking, the cleaning, the childcare, the weaving of textiles that are sold to pay for school supplies, the tending of nurseries that stabilize future yields, the community collaborations that keep smallholder agriculture viable. These are not auxiliary tasks for the women of Chiapas; they are technical systems of care and production that make quality coffee possible, governing everything from seed viability and harvest timing to household nutrition and labour allocation.
Yet framing their labour solely through struggle would be to miss its richness. The women I spoke with did not portray themselves as overburdened victims of circumstance. They portrayed themselves as stewards and decision-makers: of land and plant health, of processing choices and quality standards, of knowledge, culture, children, and futures not yet visible. When they speak about the nursery they built, the cherries they pick with expert judgment, the textiles they weave with ancestral patterns, it is with pride. When they describe teaching their daughters, it is with hope. And when they articulate their daily routines, it is with a clear sense of purpose.
Their lives illustrate something the specialty coffee world often intuits but rarely names: that some of the most meaningful forms of sustainability are social and cultural. They are carried out in kitchens before dawn, in shaded nurseries, in forest plots humming with insects, and in the measured sway of a weaver leaning back against the strap around her hips. They are sustained by women who understand that continuity is not passive; it is made and remade through persistent, attentive work.
As mist returns to settle over the highlands each evening, the villages grow quiet again. Fires dim, looms are put away, children gather their schoolbooks for morning. In the darkness, the threads of daily life tighten and hold. And when the first light comes, and the first tortilla is pressed, and the first seedling watered, the work begins again: steady, skilled, and essential, carried forward by the women whose technical knowledge, care, and authorship hold the world of coffee together.
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This article was written by Sabine Parrish in partnership with Bean Voyage.
Photos by Alexa Romano.
