Zapotecs once dominated Oaxaca from the valleys to the coast.

When coffee arrived in Mexico, their communities still controlled the mountains and the beaches.

Today their influence is waning.

Coffee production and hurricanes are both expanding and the plantations are scrambling to adapt to the new climatic regimes.

Coffee drinkers everywhere are rooting for their success.

Gracias Raúl.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

The state of Oaxaca in Mexico is one of the most culturally diverse places in the world.

There are sixty-two different languages spoken.

It's also one of the most biologically diverse places in the world.

It has deserts, pine forests, oak forests, jungles, tropical rainforests, and a huge central valley that is one of the most fertile places in the world.

This valley, the great central valley of Oaxaca has been densely occupied for at least three thousand years and it's probably been occupied for at least eight thousand years.

It's all part of this amazing state of Oaxaca.

Zapatocs have been the most numerous and influential people in the Central Valley for a couple of thousand years.

Perhaps, their most influential city is Tlacolula de Matamoras at the eastern end of the valley.

Tlacolulans claim that their market is the oldest in the Americas and hearing the amount of Zapatocen spoken here and seeing some of the ancient, traditional foods and the way things are built, I suspect that they're right.

Noé Garcia is the minister of tourism for the municipality.

Noé is going to lead me around the market.

He knows it.

He's lived here.

He's born here and he is going to teach me things about it beyond anything I can comprehend.

(Spanish) The market here in Tlacolula is divided into aisles and each one has its own specialty and this is aisle of bread and it appears to be quite obviously correct.

(Spanish) These are special cuts of beef that are being roasted here and they all have different names to them too.

(Spanish) So this market has the custom where you buy your cut of meat first.

You give it to the women and then they cook it for you.

You buy what you want to have in your taco and you bring it here and they custom barbecue it over charcoal.

So this barbecue is actually barbaqcoa.

You slaughter the animal, take the skin off and then you take the whole animal and put it in a clay type of container and bury it in the ground and cook it in an oven in the ground and when you cover the whole pit and when the proper time is done the steam cooks it and they take it out and that's what they call barbaqcoa.

So I have to get strict instructions on how you eat grasshoppers, chapulines.

(Spanish) They put it in a big griddle called a comal.

(Spanish) They put garlic, lime and salt on them and then they cook them.

Okay.

(Spanish) This is really organic food, locally grown corn without any kind of chemicals and grasshoppers.

What could be more organic than grasshoppers?

(Spanish) So they sell here a beverage here called Tejate, not Tecate the beer, but Tejate.

(Spanish) So I have never heard of this before.

This is corn with chocolate in it and chocolate flour.

That is the flour of the chocolate tree (Spanish) and there's chocolate in it, believe it or not and it's got corn.

That's the tree things in it and the flour gives the essence to it.

So here it goes.

Bottoms up.

Oh, that's excellent.

How can I have lived my whole life without having had Tejate?

It's simply marvelous stuff.

From the market we head a few hours to the south over the towering ridges of Oaxaca's Sierra Madre del Sur into the cloud forest that lumes above the nearby Pacific Ocean.

In the heart of that mysterious place is the town of Pluma Hidalgo, which has lent its name to the coffee that originates here.

Waiting for me is my friend and coffee plantation owner, Raúl Navarro.

(Spanish) So this little town of Pluma Hidalgo is a coffee based town.

The eople who came to work here basically came from every other place around in order to find work here in harvesting coffee.

(Spanish) This region is very important because of the mixing of a hot climate with a cold one.

This is a very special micro-climate for plants.

Coffee planting began here in 1870.

The first growers to discover this rich, agricultural area were Germans and they began to grow the first coffee plants.

The coffee was destined for Europe.

It was exclusively exported to Europe.

Later, when the local native populations took over these lands, the production and sale of the coffee became known as one of the best coffees on an international scale.

(Spanish) Yes, yes it is.

It's a rough, windy road from Pluma Hidalgo to Raúl's coffee plantation.

I don't usually ride in the back of a pick up truck, but today the cab is occupied by an Italian coffee espresso machine.

In coffee country, it has precedence.

Besides, the view of the forest is much better from back here.

This farm is called Independencia, La Independencia.

It's about 250 acres and it began back actually back in the 19th century.

Germans brought coffee plants here from Europe.

Why they happened to find out about this place is unclear, but they actually raised coffee, built this farm and then during World War II were invited to leave the country by the Mexican government.

So it now is entirely farmed by Mexicans, who understand the value of having the forest intact.

(Spanish) We are in Zapotec land.

This is Sierra Azul.

The coastal area here is inhabited by Zapotecs and in this region the Zapotecans are known as the sons of the clouds because of the fog that floats in and out of the forest here appearing and disappearing.

This is legitimate four-wheel drive country because the slopes are very steep and the coffee plants grow on this probably 100-110% slope here, but to get back and forth and carry the big buckets of picked cherries requires a lot of work and it's helpful to be able to get here by truck.

(Spanish) Our mission here is to create a real school here for campesinos.

We want to show and teach our neighbors, small coffee producers how to plant and harvest coffee in a poly-cultural way, how to vary the planting process, to obtain better results with poly-culture and planting (madurables, fruit trees as well as coffee.

We are maintaining an edible forest, a productive forest and a forest that brings in money through coffee production.

We respect the forest, the environment.

We won't cut trees and take only what the environment can honestly give us.

These slopes are very steep as my lungs tell me, but they're ideal for the coffee because the shade trees, the sun's angle means that every plant will get some shade.

It also means that they can use this very clever system of contour planting with irrigation.

The ingenious part of this system is that they use three different canopy levels to provide top shade, medium shade and then the coffee trees below.

So it's a very carefully thought out system and they say that this is a sustainable coffee plantation.

So as I look up, a magnificent effect from the sun is these hundreds of vines coming down that gives the harp like effect and they use those vines to make the baskets that they harvest the coffee.

So not only does the coffee come from here, but the baskets that they make to gather the coffee come from the very same place.

They plant these with the leaves oriented where the sun will first hit the leaves.

So that it will grow up in a way that the harvesters can reach them.

If they turn the plant around and plant it the other way, they will have to bend over and it will make it much more difficult to get at the beans to pick them.

In this particular farm, Raúl pays his workers by the hour, but in other places, they get paid by weight, the amount of coffee that they harvest and if they are the wrong kind of beans or green beans in there, they get that deducted from their pay.

So they have to be very careful what they pick and that training extends here as well.

They have very skilled coffee workers here.

The plantation is large enough to have different habitats, including a fine tract of cloud forest.

The coffee zone in the Pacific Coast of Oaxaca is up in the mountains and it's a couple thousand feet that you can grow coffee in and it has the happy coincidence of being in some of the finest forests in all of the Americas.

It's a mixture of tropical rain forest plants and then what we call dry tropical forest.

Come the wintertime in about a month, they will start dropping their leaves.

It is rich.

There are dozens and dozens of different trees here.

They get very tall.

There's some very good hardwood, so you have to guard your land as they do here.

There are hurricanes, increasing numbers of hurricanes that blow over the trees or they get lightening strikes that explode or knock over the trees.

For those trees, they come down with a chainsaw and they cut them into lumbar.

All the furniture that they have here on the plantation is made from trees that have fallen over one way or another.

I don't want to have to try to do what Hugo is doing here.

Carry that very green wood up this steep slope.

It's going to made into furnishings, but my guess is it probably weighs about 125 pounds and I don't think he weighs a lot more than that.

He's got a good hundred yards to go at about a 100% slope.

The hurricanes have damaged the forest of the coffee plantation as we soon learn, they have brought havoc on the lowlands as well.

To see what's happening first hand, we drive down to one of the most popular beaches.

It's only about 30 kilometers from the coffee plantation.

In the last few decades, surfers have discovered that some of the best waves anywhere are located on the Pacific Coast of Oaxaca.

This beach is called La Ventanilla named after the little whole in the wall down there.

The waves here are actually too rough for surfing.

There's great currents, there's terrific undertow, but what La Ventanilla has to offer is a very special mangrove swamp located inside the coast from the beach.

The Pacific coast of Oaxaca forty years ago was almost completely unoccupied by people.

In those last four decades, the tourism has sprung up here quite quickly.

Fortunately, with it has come some awareness by the government that mangrove forests needs to be preserved.

This is an estuary that is supposedly filled with wild life.

We'll find out.

One nice feature of coming to the Laguna la Ventanilla is there are now motors allowed on the boats so it's quiet.

Of course you can't really see wild life well, the motors would scare everything off, but it enables us also to be very intimately close to the sounds.

Mangrove estuaries are teeming with birdlife and the reason is there's a lot of food here, there's a lot of very small fish, there are a lot of crustaceans.

There are a lot of shellfish and then the fish come in, other fish come in to eat the little fish.

So there's a richness in here that you don't find out at all in the ocean.

People come from all over to this particular place to see the Anhinga, which is a member of the cormorant family.

They're very tropical and they have a very distinct way of holding themselves up.

They dive.

They actually dive quite deep and they are good divers.

When they come out of the water, they don't have oil on their wings and they get very, very wet.

They have this habit of getting up into the trees to dry themselves and they hold out their wings sort of like a 'w' much in the way that vultures are prone to do.

Mangrove estuaries are really the source of, the bulk of marine life, without them the ocean life tends to fizzle.

(Spanish) Ever since hurricane Carlotta, 80% of this preserve has been affected.

It affected the trees and the iguanas that depend on the leaves produced by the trees here.

In order to support their populations here, we bring in leaves known as orejas de la turtuga.

This provides 10-20% of their food.

If we didn't do this, they would look for food outside of the preserve where they are not protected.

So this is a big male iguana up here feasting on the local vegetation that they people have brought.

Without that extra added nutrition that the people bring, they fear that the iguanas would go away to other places, away from this preserve.

They are protected here, but they are not protected in other places.

They are a very popular food source and people will make them into tacos and into enchiladas and they make them into el mole.

(Spanish) By supporting them here, they stay here, but obviously their natural predator is the crocodile.

Of all the similar places in Mexico, this is where we have the best chance of actually seeing crocodiles.

There is somewhere up in here an old guy that is well known.

They estimate that he is over 60 years old.

Crocodiles will live to be over 100 years old.

He is very well protected.

He is a celebrity here, but it does show that the estuaries and the pacific coast of Oaxaca were once populated by a lot of crocodiles.

(Spanish) This here is the deepest section of the lagoon, almost five meters deep.

So here is where the largest crocodiles live throughout the whole area.

The crocodile can be four meters long and lives primarily here and being the king of the pond, the Alpha male, you can never know his exact location, including the possibility that he could be underneath us right now.

(Spanish) On land, completely outside the water, he can move from 0-35 kilometers per hour.

What helps their movement to capture prey is the impulse movement from the tail.

Rarely do they pursue the prey, but prefer to wait and lie and ambush.

After they grab the prey, they drown it.

They also are attracted to carcasses.

The more rotten the meat, the better it is for them.

The crocodiles don't have tongues so they don't chew their food.

They bite down and perform the famous death roll.

They roll and roll almost an impossible number of times to rip off a chunk of meat so that they can swallow it whole.

Raúl wanted us to see the crocodiles, while he and his crew are still picking the coffee cherries.

We return in time to watch the unfolding, caffeine drama.

(Spanish) Once we harvest the fruit, we place it in to the tanks and begin the humidifying process and then after we have the drying phase and then we peel off the outer skin so that we can toast and then package the coffee beans.

(Spanish) So this is a flotation process for the coffee cherries.

The good cherries will after being stirred will go to the bottom and then the ones that will stay at the top are going to be of inferior quality, so it makes an easy way from separating the good from the bad.

So the first selection for coffee is always where the beans are being picked.

That's where the primary knowledge of the picker is.

This is the second selection and these that come to the top then will be taken out and dried and they call this cherry coffee.

Although some people swear by and think it's really the best coffee.

The workers bring the cherries or the coffee beans inside the pulp down to a holding tank here.

Water is added and then that's fermented for 24-36 hours.

Then it is let down into this machine, which is a de-pulper.

It pulls the outside husk and the pulp away.

It's washed down and then we can begin to see what coffee beans actually look like.

These coffee beans here are very unusual.

This kind is left to grow on the tree.

They are not picked when they're red.

They are allowed to ripen and dry out on the tree.

The effect of these cherries ripening on the plant is that instead of fermenting the beans in a tank, the beans ferment right on the tree and it comes out with a more concentrated coffee and consumers particularly savvy consumers are willing to pay a high price for this very special coffee.

This is the big toaster of the beans.

This is not a toy.

So you begin by putting the green beans into that hopper.

They are then sucked out or pumped up into this and then it comes down to here where they are actually toasted.

As we look in the window, we begin the beans are that non-descript green color and then very slowly then they change colors into a light brown and then to a darker brown and Raúl says if you look carefully and I think I can see it.

The outside of the bean has a little white glistening to it, kind of like a frost on it.

It's not frost cause it's being toasted, but that's a sign that the process is working that the procedure, the toasting procedure is right on tract.

I can look in here now and see that it's a much darker brown than a few minutes ago when they were green.

We have to leave the cooler going and rotating the beans, so that it goes from 220 degrees Celsius down to an ambient temperature, which in this case it's about 30 degrees.

This keeps the toaster itself from warping but also allows the beans to slowly retain that marvelous flavor.

I am salivating here smelling that and waiting for the real test, which is the coffee itself.

The Oaxacans know how to grow the coffee, we have to hand it to the Italians, they do know how to make the espresso machines.

What a marvelous experience and it's not just the tropical forest here.

It's not just the gorgeous mountains with the trees and the bamboo growing behind us, the orchids, the sound of the chickens.

It's excellent coffee as well.

(Spanish) In general the buyers of quality coffee come from the European market and some from the U.S.

There are American buyers that look for environmentally friendly coffee and specialty coffees, gourmet coffees and these are the ones that buy our coffee, but in small quantities and at reduced prices, so that they can resell for a much higher price.

Oaxacans have been drinking coffee for a couple of hundred years and they know all about it.

The rest of the world now is finding out that some of the highest quality of coffee in the world comes from the Pacific coast of Oaxaca.

It's now getting known internationally and that's fine with me.

Join us next time In the Americas with me David Yetman.

Internationally, Brazil is best known for the great city of Rio de Janeiro.

Rio is best known for its carnival and its vast assemblage of creative samba schools and music.

Its roots and development come from the shantytowns called favelas.

From inside we will see how these humble origins produced one of the world's truly original and most compelling art forms.

Okay.

(Spanish) It's good.

Uhm, I could probably get used to it.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

Copies of this and other episodes of In the Americas with David Yetman are available from the Southwest Center.

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