AGE: 45
OCCUPATION: Farmer
BIRTHPLACE: Chimaltenango, Guatemala
INTERVIEWED IN: San Lucas Tolimán, Guatemala
Francisca Cocón grew up on numerous Guatemalan fincas—coffee plantations with origins in colonial serfdom. On traditional Guatemalan fincas, workers are compensated for their labor with inadequate food and housing on the plantation itself as well as with a small wage—often less than a dollar a day.
During a childhood spent moving from finca to finca with her family in search of subsistence wages, Francisca survived malnutrition, the early deaths of her parents, and the Guatemalan Civil War. Today, Francisca owns her own plot of land. She also works with Ijatz, a women’s organization that runs training programs, sells produce, and is a member of a cooperative association of small-scale coffee farms, most not more than a few acres in size. In the Mayan Kaqchikel language, ijatz means “seed.”
We speak to Francisca in 2011 through a translator in San Lucas Tolimán, Guatemala, where Francisca lives and works. Our interview takes place on a sunny August day in the gazebo at the main office of Ijatz. We enjoy fresh strawberry pie, jarred peaches, and lemonade, which the women of Ijatz produce and sell as part of a catering business that supports the work of the cooperative. Francisca struggles through memories of her earliest years, and the deaths of her parents still weigh heavily on her. But when she speaks of her current work and her future, she seems cheerful and confident.
I HAD TO BE THE RESPONSIBLE ONE
My name is Francisca Ajcibinac Cocón. I was born on the tenth of October, 1968, in a finca called San Bernardino. It’s near Pochuta in the province of Chimaltenango in Guatemala.1
My mother is Juana Valeriana Cocón, and my dad’s name is Doloteo Ajcibinac. We came from a very, very, very poor family. We grew up speaking Kaqchikel—I didn’t learn any Spanish until I was a little older.2 We are from an indigenous people that have been without land for a long time, and my family has been working on fincas for generations.
I grew up in the fincas, helping my parents—working, cutting coffee. We’d live in one of the worker houses set up in a row right on the plantation. The houses were little and had no electricity or plumbing, just a roof to cover our heads. The only electric light on the farm was near the center complex, the administrative center of the plantation. In our houses, we had to use a gas-powered lantern. There would be dozens of other families living in the other houses and working next to us cutting coffee, some of them our relatives.
When I started working as a child, I helped my parents and my two older brothers because, in the finca, the whole family has to work together in order to earn enough. Eventually there were seven of us kids all together—I had two older brothers, two younger brothers, and two younger sisters. And we all worked. This was the way fincas operated then, and we still work as entire families today on our farms.
When you’re a kid, everything just looks so fun—I was happy to be accompanying my parents or brothers, and to learn how to harvest coffee. We’d set off early in the morning into the hills where the coffee trees were planted, and we’d work all day. As little kids, as soon as we were old enough to walk, our job was to pick the beans up on the ground. We’d follow the adults who were harvesting from trees and gather up anything they dropped. We’d give the beans we found to our parents, and they’d bring all we collected for the day to the boss. The tasks on the finca weren’t just coffee harvesting. There was also keeping the coffee fields clean and free from weeds, gathering the mushrooms on the hill. We always had more to do on top of the coffee harvesting work.
We also helped in the fields because there was no education. We were very far away from any school. Sometimes a teacher would show up at the finca and say, “Kids have to study.” But they didn’t come often, and there were no real opportunities for education.
Then my mom died when I was only ten years old. She was just-thirty-nine, and it happened suddenly. We don’t know what caused her to die. It was a surprise. I was the oldest girl, so after she died I had to be the person responsible for making the food for my brothers, for taking care of my sisters. We didn’t have much—there were mostly only tortillas. And that’s why we learned to eat chilies, spicy foods, which Mother had never prepared for us. Or we ate tortillas with lime or herbs along with beans. Sometimes a little bit of rice. That’s what was available at the finca.
It was so, so hard for me to make the food because there was not enough time for one person to do it all. I used to wake up very early to prepare the food for my dad, for my brothers, because they would leave at four thirty or five in the morning to go to work. If workers were late getting to the fields, they might lose money. There was one person who was watching the entry time and the exit time, and to make sure the task was well done. If workers didn’t produce enough in the field then they wouldn’t get paid their salary. Field workers were always heavily pressured by the boss to produce more and more.
There were a lot of times I saw my father waiting for his salary on payday. When workers were paid, they received the payment every fifteen days. But many times the boss didn’t arrive on time and the men simply waited for their payment until eleven, twelve at night because they were told to wait for the boss, who was supposedly on his way. But many times the boss wouldn’t come. There really wasn’t anything we could do if they decided not to pay us. There were many problems, and we suffered a lot on the fincas when I was a child. But we were survivors, and as time goes on God gives all of us some purpose.
And then came the violence.
WE WOULD SLEEP IN THE HOMES OF OTHER FAMILIES
When the guerrillas started appearing on the fincas, I knew they were fighting for the poor people, because they would always stop by and ask how the bosses and the overseers treated us. Sometimes we talked about it, and sometimes we didn’t because we were afraid of what might happen.3 Then in 1982, when the violence started, one of my brothers was kidnapped by soldiers. They took him away.
I was fourteen years old when my brother was taken, and he must have been around eighteen. I saw the army kidnap him. I remember it was around seven thirty in the morning. I got up and I saw that soldiers had arrived at our home. The only thing they said to him was that he shouldn’t be afraid, because he was going to return home later. We waited that night for him to return, but he didn’t. Sometime in the evening we heard gunshots in the distance. My dad said, “They’ve killed my son.” We tried to calm him down, but we were panicked ourselves.
The next day, we woke up and went to meet with our cousins who lived on another finca to tell them what had happened. When we arrived at our cousins’ place, they were crying and they told us that their parents—my uncle and aunt—had also been taken. All together there were six men and my aunt who had been taken, including two of my cousins’ husbands and one man who wasn’t from our family. He was the only one who returned, but we don’t know why or how. My cousin was trying to get the truth out of him, but he never said anything. He just said that he and the others were tortured and that he had stayed down and pretended to be dead. But we didn’t know what had really happened.
That was a difficult situation because my cousin was four months pregnant when her husband was kidnapped. She was pregnant and so was our neighbor, whose husband was one of the six men taken. Six months later they also took someone else—another of my uncles. He was too stubborn about staying at the finca, saying, “I’m not going to go anywhere with them, I don’t owe them anything, so they can’t harm me.” The soldiers persuaded him, saying they just needed him to direct them to a road they didn’t know. So he left with them, but never returned to his house.
After my brother’s kidnapping, and that of my uncles, we realized that we could no longer live in peace. Now we knew that the soldiers might return again and attack us or attack our relatives at any time. Sometimes we would leave the fincas and sleep in the homes of other families up in the mountains, so that we wouldn’t be sought on those nights when soldiers were nearby. But on the finca, we were exposed. There was no place to hide.
THE SICKNESS TOOK ITS TOLL ON HIM
Because of the kidnappings, my family and other families decided to abandon the San Bernardino finca. We packed up our things, including a few chickens we kept, and headed to another nearby finca, looking for a place that might be safer and pay better wages. We moved from finca to finca, a few miles at a time, but it was the same situation everywhere we went: there was work, but the wages weren’t enough. Also, when someone is born in one place and comes to another place it’s completely different—you don’t know the people. I was very, very sad. We were asking ourselves, Why? Why did all this happen to us?
Eventually, we arrived at a finca called Costa Rica, also near Pochuta and not all that far from San Bernardino. It was even worse! There was work, but my brother said they paid 3.20 quetzales per day.4 It still wasn’t enough to live on, but we tried. And then, when I was sixteen, my dad started to get seriously ill.
He always had bad health, problems with arthritis and swelling. Sometimes when he worked he felt pain, and he would be hospitalized. So I knew he was a bit sick, but he always worked, always worked. He was already feeling very ill when we got to the Costa Rica finca. I think that what affected him most was the sadness he felt over my oldest brother. He was always remembering my brother and I saw that his health got worse and worse. He died sometime in 1984. He was around forty-five or fifty, I don’t know. He wasn’t that old, but the sickness took its toll on him.
LITTLE BY LITTLE A BIT OF CONFIDENCE
My father’s death was that much harder for me to take because my remaining older brother already had his own family by then. The workload was very hard for him because he was the oldest, and he was responsible for so many of us. He couldn’t also support his five younger siblings. And then one day he said that in the parish of San Lucas there was a house available through a priest we knew named Father Juan Goggin.5 He is the one in charge of the project for children, CFCA.6 We got to know him because he would always come to celebrate mass with us and he always valued the farmworkers. He recognized the suffering in the fincas. So my brother talked to him about helping us find better opportunities. Father Juan told him that he would talk to the parish about having our family move to San Lucas. And, thank God! He was able to arrange it so that my sisters and I could move there. The letter from Father Juan said, “Yes, you can come here and we can help take care of you.” So I moved to the mission with my two younger sisters while my younger brothers stayed and worked.
All of this happened when I was sixteen, just after the death of my father. I was still so young, but I had already spent ten years working, and I was exhausted. I was ready for someone else to take care of me. At first, the adjustment to life in the mission was difficult, because there was already another family in the house that we moved into. There were a lot of problems, just fights over space. And I was thinking, Why did we move here? For me it was a sad change to leave what I knew, and I was so weak—malnourished—that the move was very draining.
Not long after I arrived, I met a woman named Juanita, who worked in the mission’s free clinic. She had a little boy, and she asked me, “Do you want to look after my son sometimes?” I said I did. It was an opportunity to have a little more food for myself, so I said, “I’ll take care of the boy.”
Apart from my new job, the mission also helped us with living expenses. They gave us 12 quetzales a day, enough to buy a little food, a little medicine.7 It was a big help for us. I had my two sisters. So the three of us were together and could help each other, give each other support, but one of my sisters had a lot of health problems. Sometimes I was filled with despair because life seemed so hard, but I wanted to look after the boy, I wanted to stay in the parish. I started to feel more confidence, and I began to trust the people who were working there.
Now I can approach people. But before, growing up, I was always very afraid, because I could not speak much Spanish, and I was too bashful. My mother could speak well in Spanish, which she’d learned mostly from listening to the radio, but none of the rest of us had ever picked up very much. Just communicating in San Lucas was a big challenge at first.
Father Gregorio, the head of the church here in San Lucas, told me, “If you want to learn to read and write, you can start to study from first grade to sixth grade. If you’re interested.”
I told him, “Yes, Father! I want to read!”
But it was very hard for me because it was difficult to be studying with children. I felt bad to be on the same level as seven-year-olds. They were all kids and I was an adult. But they never said anything; in fact, they gave me confidence and so I was able to be cheerful. I felt like I was important because I was so tall and they were all small. Sometimes I would play basketball with them during breaks. I was there for the five years it took me to finish all six grades. I finished sixth grade in ’89, when I was around twenty-one.
Over the next few years I learned a lot in the parish. How to cook, how to clean the house. It was a huge change for me, and I felt valued. I felt animated with everything that I was learning and the relationships I had with people. This was healthy for me, to have friendships with people.
Then in 1992, I had an opportunity to travel to Minnesota. I knew a friend, Anna, who was like a role model for me. I had met Anna around the mission—she is from San Lucas, but she lives right now with her family in the States. I visited for eight months with her family in 1992. It was like a dream. And Anna’s family spoke Kaqchikel. They fixed the papers for me to travel, and so it was a little easier for me to obtain the visa.
During one of our little trips we’d take, in July or August, we went camping on the Canadian border for a week. That was a great experience for me. At the end of the trip, there was a storm with rain and wind, and the lake near our campsite became very dangerous and choppy. But we went out on the lake anyway, and I was a little afraid that the canoe would tip over, but we were okay. I had a lot of other great experiences in the States, too. When I returned to the parish after eight months, I came back to continue studying some more, and I was able to finish middle school in ’93. And then I met a man named Adolfo, and I fell in love.
THERE’S A MOMENT WHERE ONE NEEDS TO HAVE A VOICE
In 1994, Adolfo and I got married in San Lucas. I was twenty-six years old. The mission donated to us two cuerdas of land in the mountain—they provided land donations to a number of families in the area.8 We cleaned it and planted coffee, and that first year we had a son. Eventually we had four children together—three boys and one girl. Pablo, the oldest, is now sixteen years old; David is fifteen; Lourdes is thirteen. And the smallest one, Josue, is ten.
I found out that the life of a woman is so hard. When a woman has her husband, it’s not easy to go out and participate in the world. It has been a long process. According to the husband, it’s not good that the woman is out elsewhere, involved in the community. What they want is that we be there tending, tending, tending the home. It’s true that a woman has her responsibility in her home—cleaning, making food—but there’s a moment where one needs to have a voice, interact with people. Because one learns many things out in the world and has many experiences that are important.
A little after my last child was born, around 2000, I learned about a women’s group called Ijatz. The coordinator of Ijatz at the time approached me at the mission and asked me what possibilities there were to teach other women to prepare food, to teach them some of the skills I’d learned at the mission.
I had heard of Ijatz from other women in the mission and was curious. And I thought, Now, this is my opportunity to go see what they’re up to. So I said, “Sure, I’ll teach them.” I felt embarrassed at first, because I was very shy. But I helped do the food-preparation training they’d asked me about, and when I finished the work, I wanted to stay with the group.
When I joined Ijatz, my husband didn’t like it. He said, “I don’t want you to go, because you have food to prepare in your own home. I am giving you money for the food. So why are you going to these people?” He said, “I make the money, so you take care of me and the house.” But I wanted to have experiences out of the house, so I stayed on with Ijatz.
Then around 2005 we had an opportunity to travel to the capital and work with an organization called MuJER.9 There we also had the opportunity to get certificates as workshop facilitators. It was a little hard for me because my children were small still. I had to take them with me for two days to the capital to attend the talks about women’s rights, self-esteem, gender equality. I was in class with people who had titles. There were doctors, secretaries, students from the university. Those of us from Ijatz didn’t have that level of education—but they all said, “No, we’re all equal. You have to talk about your experiences, it really helps a lot.” I was there with a woman who was a widow. The army had killed her husband. We both went and supported each other until we finished the course. It was change, little by little. I gained the confidence to share.
WE COME TO KEEP IT ALIVE
My husband and I separated not long after my trip to the capital. The problem was infidelity. I couldn’t live with a husband who did not respect me. So I had to make my decision. It would mean living alone, but also no problems or issues of mistrust between a husband and a wife. My husband’s family said it was my fault, that I wasn’t at home, that I wasn’t taking care of my children. They said I was the guilty one. But I knew in my conscience that it wasn’t so. So he moved out.
Not all women want to work. But I did it because I also wanted to learn interesting things, particularly about women. I don’t know if you’ve read books or have experience in other countries where women are always subservient to men—but the point is that a woman shouldn’t feel like that. Women have a lot of value and self-worth. And that is what a lot of men don’t want to understand. The culture here is like that; a woman gets married and has to stay at home taking care of the children, feeding her husband. That’s it. It’s considered weird for a woman to want to go out and work. I see now that there are wives who still have that problem—they are afraid to go out for fear of their husbands. They are always afraid, silent, not speaking the truth.
Ijatz in past years had the support of international organizations. But in 2009, the funds ran out. So right now Ijatz is alone; it doesn’t have support. It’s a little bit hard. Because when there was the financing from outside, we would all have a stipend of about 300 quetzales per month.10 Now we are sustaining ourselves. There are a few of us women in the San Lucas area who have sales on the side of the road to let people know what we do. Customers like the dobladas.11 We make dobladas with masa, vegetables, salsa, and cabbage or onions on top, along with some cheese. We sell each one for only 1.50 quetzales, just a few cents. And we sell refreshments such as fresh juices as well.
Sometimes there are days we sell very little. But with this program we are sustaining ourselves. We don’t pay ourselves a salary; all of our individual income comes from what we can sell of our own goods. We can each earn 50 quetzales per day when we have stable work.12 The week that just went by, we were working Tuesday through Saturday. We were very tired because it was a lot of work, but it was very happy.
I HAVE CARRIED IT WITH ME EVER SINCE THE FINCAS
I haven’t got by just on work with Ijatz. I also cultivate a little of my own coffee. This was something my family did ever since we were given land by the mission. After years of maintaining and growing two cuerdas of coffee, I was able to buy another four cuerdas after I separated from my husband. That means I now have six cuerdas devoted to coffee. I work with a local group that helps sell the coffee of small farmers like me to big markets. I also have a few beans, and a little squash, and some avocados. And a little maize—about half a cuerda, maybe about the equivalent of two blocks’ worth.
I am doing this so that my children don’t lose that knowledge, the value of planting, of knowing where our food comes from, who makes it. They have to have an understanding because they’re studying right now. Pablo and David are in basico.13 But they are very helpful on the farm. They go with me to fertilize, to harvest the coffee. They can carry fifty to seventy-five pounds on their backs. And also my brothers and my nephews are always with me to help with the duties on our farm.
Cultivating the land is a knowledge I have carried with me ever since the fincas. We saw how to fertilize, how to cut, how to clean. Sometimes I wonder why we have our land now when in the past we were always slaves, under the orders of the people who had the power.
I remind my kids how situations were back then on the finca: twelve people in the house, but the house was deteriorating. And people lived in these houses out of necessity; they wanted to live in a better house but there was nothing to do about it. So I ask my kids to give thanks to God because now we have a solid roof over our heads.
It’s a great advancement for me, a great blessing. All the accomplishments that I have had, I feel very grateful toward God, to the parish, especially to Father Gregorio for encouraging me to have new knowledge, new ideas. In Ijatz I have learned many things, like how to work with people, value people—the women, know about their problems, and how to find a solution, and to be an example as well. My sons are learning humility, to share, to help in the house. Many, many things. That one has to struggle, to fight. It’s a constant struggle.
ONE PERSON ALONE CAN’T DO IT
For my family, my ultimate hope would be that my sons keep studying, and that they keep fighting for a career, and that they don’t forget our origin and to value nature more than anything else. That they don’t lose the knowledge of how to harvest corn and beans. And that they keep in mind that it’s necessary to cultivate to be able to eat and live. That is what I want for them as well. So my sacrifice now is so that they can, in the future, have a better life. That is my goal.
For the group of women here, I hope that they realize that they have to fight in order to succeed. And they have to keep in mind that work is important in order to have an income. Because if you don’t work, you won’t have anything. They have to widen their minds, see the reality that we’re living in. All of the workshops that we’re having here are to improve the conditions for our families.
Our dream in Ijatz is to have a little restaurant. To be able to serve people. We recently had the opportunity to have a group of Canadians here who are doing volunteer work nearby. They came here for three nights, and we served them their meals. And always at the end we have a small chat, like we are having right now. Talking, telling the story of our lives.
What we want is for this to grow more and for all of us with Ijatz to have jobs. And we hope that in this way our sons and daughters will have more opportunity to study, to have better nutrition. And that the women will feel better, encouraged, so they forget their problems. We want to accomplish more things. We want to know more, discover more. That’s what I want. But we have to be in groups because one person alone can’t do it. So then all the people who are in need of advancement—we all have to be united.
It has been very difficult, since I was very little, my childhood. There was a lot of suffering, a lot of mistreatment. And it’s regrettable because I think now if my dad were alive, in the conditions we have today, which are a bit better, perhaps I would have been able to give him what he needed. He never had the opportunity even to eat well. He was always very sick. Sometimes I remember him and others I have lost, and I start to cry and wonder, Where are they? Where are they? But thanks to them, because of all the suffering, we’re a little bit better off now. Because now we have a roof. We have a bed when we never had a bed before. We have a little better health, when before we didn’t have that. We have a bit of property, the parcels. And there’s confidence to move forward—one can do many things.
1 Chimaltenango is a rural, mountainous department, or state, in the southwest of Guatemala. The population is near five hundred thousand in an area approximately 1,200 square miles.
2 Kaqchikel is a Mayan language spoken in the highlands of Guatemala. Today it has approximately four hundred thousand speakers.
3 The Guatemalan Civil War was long and bloody, spanning over three decades of Guatemalan history. Violence was commonplace during Francisca’s childhood in the 1970s, when leftist guerrilla movements conducted strikes against the oppressive military-run national government, and the government responded by killing tens of thousands, including innocent civilians. In 1982, a nominal civilian government was overthrown in a coup led by General Efraín Ríos Montt, who waged a notorious campaign for control throughout Guatemala, employing death squads to murder and torture civilians who weren’t able to prove loyalty to his military junta. Montt targeted indigenous Mayan groups such as Francisca’s Kaqchikel people, believing that they were more likely to be on the side of the guerrillas. While Montt was in power from 1982 to 1983, as many as three thousand civilians were killed or disappeared every month. Montt was himself overthrown in 1983 by an opposing general, but the war continued on for another thirteen years, until 1996.
4 At the time, 3.20 quetzales = approximately US$0.40 per day.
5 San Lucas Tolimán is a town of about twenty thousand about an hour’s drive through the mountains from Pochuta. The San Lucas Mission was built around 1584. Today, its stated purpose is to address poverty in the area by helping indigenous Guatemalans access housing, healthcare, and land. According to the mission’s website, it has purchased nearby lands and distributed them in two- or three-acre plots to over four thousand indigenous families.
6 CFCA is the Christian Foundation for Children and Aging. For more information, see www.unbound.org.
7 At the time, 12 quetzales = US$1.53.
8 Cuerda, when translated, means “rope.” However, in the context used, it means approximately one acre of land.
9 MuJER is Mujeres por la Justicia, Educación y el Reconocimiento (Women for Justice, Education, and Awareness). The organization’s stated mission is to educate and provide resources for sex workers in Guatemala City, the nation’s capital, and elsewhere throughout Guatemala.
10 300 quetzales = approximately US$38.
11 A doblada is a type of turnover, stuffed with vegetables or meat.
12 50 quetzales = approximately US$7.50.
13 Basico is the equivalent of junior high school.