In Mexico City’s ancient and enormous central square, the zocalo, the tourists filed through the old wooden door leading into the National Palace. Inside the courtyard a troop of young soldiers in green uniforms were preparing to carry the national flag out into the zocalo and raise it to the top of the central flagpole. Few of the visitors glanced at the massive emblem rolled up like a giant carpet on the ancient flagstones, so large that it took a dozen soldiers to carry it.
The tourists, like me, had come to see Diego Rivera’s murals painted around the central staircase and the galleried balcony of the colonial building. Parties of Mexican schoolchildren, foreigners and their competitive tour guides mingled in the stairwell, mostly concentrating on the giant triptych around the alcove. With arms raised and fingers pointing, the guides’ commentaries overlapped, bouncing Spanish, English, German and Italian words off the walls. It is one of those sights to be ticked off on any decent tour of the great capital, though the political scope of the mural is too vast to be taken in on a single visit.
There is a lot to gawp at. In Rivera’s epic, every imaginable icon of Mexican history is there, from the terrifying Gods of the pre-conquest creation myths to the heroes of the Revolution, and at its very centre the Aztec eagle, still the central symbol of the nation. According to legend the wandering Azteca founded their great city of Tenochtitlan in the valley of Mexico at the spot where they found an eagle atop a cactus bush devouring a serpent. It was the sign promised to them by the sun god Huizilopochtli. In Rivera’s other panels there are noble indigenous peoples going about their business, farming, trading, dancing and worshipping their respective deities. Hairless dogs lie at the feet of the nobility, cocoa plants are tended in the fields, floating gardens surround the city of Tenochtitlan, and of course there are sacrificial victims being led to the altar. The great figures are there too, including the Conqueror Cortés, his Indian mistress La Malinche and the revolutionaries, Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa.
Rivera gives his communist philosophy full reign, with many heroic, but anonymous, figures of the proletariat bearing banners proclaiming their connection to the land and its produce. Closer inspection of the main panels reveals his denigration of those who exploit the workers, the evils of capitalism and foreign interference in Mexican politics. The Catholic Church doesn’t get off lightly either, a priest is shown embracing a whore and the Inquisition is just one of the horrors visited upon the indigenous Mexica by the Spanish conquerors. The main panel is magnificent in its scope, but it was one of the less obviously dramatic scenes further along the corridor which grabbed my attention. Here, in great detail, Rivera depicts the cultures of Mexico’s tropical Gulf Coast.
In subtle earthy tones, with a backdrop of mountains, an Aztec trader resplendent in feathered dress faces a Totonac tribal chieftain, recognisable from his artificially flattened forehead. In pre-conquest Mexico the Totonac would strap wooden boards to a newborn baby’s skull, moulding the bones to emulate the shape of their totem, the jaguar’s head. Elsewhere in the panel, which is ten feet high and at least as wide, I spotted other clues to the culture depicted. There is the great stepped temple of El Tajin, a relic from a little known civilisation that flourished in about 100 a.d. In the mid ground of the painting is another potent Totonac symbol, a high wooden pole from which men in bird costumes are suspended by their ankles on ropes, so that they ‘fly’ down to the ground from a hundred feet above. These ‘fliers’, known as voladores, are enacting a powerful religious rite, a symbolic link between the tree of life and the heavenly powers. At weekends, I have seen them putting on their flying demonstrations in Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park for visitors queuing to enter the magnificent anthropology museum.
The Totonac chieftain in Rivera’s panel wears padded body armour and a magnificent headress. Attendants shade his face from the sun with fans and he proffers a basket of fruit towards the Aztec. At his feet are pineapples, melons and papaya, a slain deer, rolls of tobacco leaves and baskets of beans—all commodities gathered from the tribal land. And, between the Aztec and the Totonac there is a dark green vine, its flat leaves immediately identifiable as the crop which formed a crucial part of the region’s special tribute to the Emperor. The snake-like creeper hangs between the two men, and there, beside the chieftain’s face are the small pale flowers, with just a tint of yellow that I recognise: vanilla orchids.
The Totonac land is still fertile, and it is where most of Mexico’s vanilla crop is grown and cured. On the narrow tropical plain, between the high eastern peaks of the Sierra Madre and the Gulf Coast, the rolling landscape hides tiny villages where peasant farmers rely on the crop for much needed cash. Sandwiched between the coastal resorts of the Costa Esmeralda and the mysterious two thousand-year-old ruins of El Tajin there is a small town called Papantla. A hundred years ago there were fortunes made here from the black bean, and it produced so much vanilla they called it the ‘city that perfumed the world.’
The drive to Papantla from Veracruz city took me half a day, a long run along Highway 180 past the places where Spanish explorer, Hernÿn Cortés made his first stops along the route to the interior. His journey, and eventual encounter with Emperor Montezuma Xocóyotl has been romanticised over the centuries. When he entered the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan in 1519 he was greeted by thousands of richly dressed noblemen wearing pearl necklaces and golden earrings. Believing the Spaniards to be in some way divine, the Emperor chose not to make war upon them. Warriors dressed as eagles and jaguars and clothed in ornaments made from thousands of hummingbird feathers stood back as the men in steel armour rode their horses into the city. Crossing over causeways built across a great lake, and passing floating gardens, the Spanish invaders were met by Aztec aristocracy who touched the ground with their hands and kissed them before they entered the city. A broad avenue three miles long then led into the centre of the capital where hundreds more nobles waited with flower-filled gourds to welcome them. Finally, more than an hour after entering Tenochtitlan, they were in the presence of the Emperor. “This is your house,” said Montezuma, presenting Cortés with a fine necklace, “Eat, drink and rest from your own journey …” It was a defining moment in history, the moment of contact between the ruler of the greatest civilisation in the New World and the conquering power of Europe.
At Antigua I saw the old stone custom house enveloped by banyan roots where it is said the Conqueror stayed. It is just a ruin, but there is a spreading tree close to the wide brown river to which local people believe Cortés may have tied his ship. It was here, at the mouth of the River Huitzilapan, that they he took the momentous decision to burn his ships to prevent his troops deserting him. Cortés had no royal warrant to establish a colony in Mexico, and his original mission was supposed to have been merely an exploratory sortie on behalf of the Cuban Governor Diego Velásquez.
Avoiding the half-dozen souvenir stalls near the tree I walked across the wire rope-bridge over the river and saw wooden pirogues drawn up on its muddy banks. Further along the route I stopped at the ruins of Cempoala, where Cortés made a crucial alliance with a local chief, the famous cacique gordo, who was so obese he went everywhere on a litter carried by his bodyguards. The fat cacique was crucial to the eventual success of Cortés’ mission. Like many of the Aztec subjects he was resentful of their power, and he offered both men and advice on how best to deal with the Emperor.
Cortés headed inland from here towards Jalapa, guided by Totonac nobles and with several hundred Cempoalan warriors provided by the fat cacique. Then, I took the road northwards, across flat green plains, the land given over to citrus farms and cattle ranches.
I drove over countless bridges spanning small rivers and past Mexico’s only nuclear power station at Laguna Verde. Zopilotes— big brown vultures—circled in the thermals above the tarmac keeping an eye out for squashed frogs, rabbits, or if they were very lucky, dogs. In the fields there were cowboys on horses and plantations of bananas, papayas and mangoes. On one of the cattle ranches I saw a small bull ring, a white cement circle of death in a field. Further on, a man stood by the road with his arm outstretched and holding an armadillo by the tail, offering it for sale, either as food or as a pet to the passing motorists.
For mile after mile a steady stretch of billboards tried to entice me to the hotels built between the highway and the beach. The Palacios and the Marymar Paraiso, an El Doral, a Copalar and a Casa Blanca, some shabby, some smart, but none good enough to deter me from reaching the interior. At Nautla the river leading to the sea was a hundred yards wide, and beyond it the highway veered inland away from the plain. As the road climbed into the hills a mist came down and the windscreen clouded over with fine spray. Huge lorries laden with sugar cane laboured upwards, scattering leaves and straw in their wake. Past the narrow road to Tecolutla and through the town of Gutierez Zamora I drove on, until just before dark I saw the sign for Papantla.
The town square was greasy with rain and outside the Hotel Provincia I could smell candyfloss in the air. There were street vendors on every available spot on the pavement and at least four competing open air disc-jockeys were filling the night air with a mixture of rap music, folk-tunes on the guitar and the tinny sound of poorly amplified Christmas carols. Christmas was just two weeks away, but before that all of Mexico would be celebrating the Festival of the Virgin of Guadalupe, patron saint of Mexico and all of the Americas. The Papantlecos had yet another reason to party. Tomorrow was the official date for the beginning of the vanilla harvest.
The receptionist gave me a room overlooking the town square and told me that there was just one other guest, another foreigner, also looking for vanilla. “A gringo?” I enquired, wondering if it might be one of the traders from the United States on a buying trip. “No, no Señor, he is a man like you. He is from Guatemala, and we give you the room next to him.”
My only contact in Papantla was through the Consejo Veracruzano de la Vainilla (Veracruz Vanilla Council), a state-funded body set up to improve communications between the Totonac planters and the buyers in the main towns to whom they sold the green beans for drying and curing. Victor Vallejo, a local landowner and businessman was in charge of the Council, and I had spoken to him by phone from London. Speaking to him from the Hotel Provincia proved more difficult. The line crackled and buzzed and frequently cut out entirely, but Victor said he would collect me from the hotel at eight the next morning and take me with him when he went into the hills to officially notify the vanilla planters that the season was open. I wanted to ask him if he knew anything about my Guatemalan neighbour, but the line was too poor to chat.
The rain had not stopped completely, but it was soft and light, what the Mexicans onomatopoeically call chipi-chipi. It didn’t seem to be dampening the enthusiasm of the DJ’s in the square, so it seemed a good idea to explore the town. From my balcony I could see the parish church perched on a steep slope overlooking the square, and behind it, higher still, a grey shape illuminated from below and standing out against the night sky. It was the statue of a man playing a flute and I knew it represented the musician who calls the Totonac fliers to their dizzying posts on top of the sacred tree represented in the Rivera mural. Once upon a time the Totonacs would scour the forests of Veracruz for a suitable tree, a search led by the piper. During the build up to the ceremony the fliers stuck to a regime of fasting and sexual abstinence. Today the fliers use a man made podium, and there, beside the church, I spotted it: a steel pole with a circular platform at its tip, the platform no more than three feet square where the voladores and their piper would sit while incantations to the gods were offered before they flew. The pole stretched up into the rain to what seemed an unfeasible height, which a local flier told me later was one hundred and twenty-five feet.
There were no fliers tonight, but in the square there were children playing in the rain, and women in shawls scurrying from last minute visits to the shops around its perimeter. The market-stall holders had food and trinkets for sale, though the busiest trade was being done by the man selling plastic farm animals and Holy Nativity families. Close to the hotel, the man from the Discoteca Brillante was pumping out his rap music and a new acoustic competitor had joined the square. A small red van disguised as a train, with a carriage behind, was now broadcasting an appeal by megaphone. It was Santa’s post-box, decked out in logos for Coca-Cola, whose corporate colours fortuitously echo those of the great man’s costume and beard. To escape the cacophony I walked towards the church. There was a mass going on inside and I veered away, walking onwards and upwards on the steep streets hoping to find my way to the statue I had seen from my balcony. Up here it was dark and the sounds from the market square were barely noticeable, muffled by the press of the rain.
The view from the hill was disappointing. Close-up, the statue was ugly and the rain obscured all but the bright lights of the town square immediately below me. The floodlights at the feet of the piper attracted a massive cloud of flying ants, which seemed impervious to the rain, and I was about to leave when two armed soldiers in dull green anoraks appeared at the foot of the plinth. One was slim and smiled a lot, the other quite fat and he didn’t smile at all. The cheerful one asked me what I was doing, saying they wanted cigarettes, and I found myself apologising for not smoking. I made to leave, but the fat one blocked my path and held up his weapon. Now they wanted money for beer. I had very little cash to give, and it irritated me that I was alone up there in the rain at their mercy, but I stuffed a few coins into his hand. He didn’t budge and I didn’t know what to do. As we eyeballed each other I noticed that he had very smooth cheeks. The rain made them shine in the naked glow of the spotlights. Eventually the other soldier gave an order, and the fat one turned sideways just enough to let me go down the stairs at the base of the statue. I retreated to the companionship of the noisy square.
The next morning the rain had stopped. Victor Vallejo was running late, and called to tell me that he had official documents to prepare before we headed into the countryside. “Tim, forgive me. I’m so busy this morning please wait for me at the café next door to the hotel, and I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
As I handed in my key at reception, the hotel’s only other resident emerged from the room next to mine. I guessed he was ‘the Guatemalan’, a stocky man with large pale eyes and a neat beard. He was a carrying a video camera and wore a baseball hat emblazoned with the logo of a well know European vanilla importer. I introduced myself in faltering Spanish, and he gave me a firm handshake. He told me his name was Dario Fontana, but didn’t smile. “Inglés? All English are pirates yes?”
“Not all of us, no. I see from your hat that you are in the vanilla business?”
He stared at me for several seconds before replying.
“Me, I am a poor Indian from Guatemala. I care only for one thing. The Truth, and Vanilla.” He pronounced it the Spanish way—by-nee-ya. “I am not a spy. That is all I have to say.” With this declaration Dario was gone. I watched him leave the hotel, clacking down the steps to the street in his metal tipped cowboy boots. It was already 25°C outside but apart from the baseball hat he wore tight jeans, a long-sleeved shirt and a quilted jacket.
In the Ristorante Sorrento I was the sole customer. The owner was installed in front of a television watching a soap opera, the volume so loud it distorted the soundtrack. Papantlecos seemed to like things noisy. I drank tea and waited for Victor, who eventually drew up in a mud splattered pick-up which bore the lettering CO.VER.VAINILLA.
After Dario’s strange outburst it was a relief to meet Victor in the flesh, a slim pixie of a man, a charmer with a neat white moustache and a sun-tanned complexion. He spoke good English, and at high speed. “Tim, we are so honoured to have you in Papantla. You must forgive this poor simple farmer for being late. I have so much to do today but I really wanted you to witness the start of the vanilla season. But we have a long way to go and I am already behind schedule!”
Victor drove like he spoke, rapidly and with a tendency to veer from one topic to another. It was a two and a half-hour drive to the mountains and he was in expansive mood. He was keen to discuss the work of the Vanilla Council, but equally keen to find out where I stood on matters of global alliance. “It is so nice to have a visitor from Europe, there are many things we must discuss before you leave. But tell me, will the war come in your lifetime?” he asked eagerly.
“Which war?”
“The one between Europe and the USA! Don’t you agree with me it is only a matter of time?”
The countryside flashed by, and I tried to concentrate on asking about the work of the Vanilla Council. We passed cowboys on their horses and barefooted peasants in their traditional white trousers, tunics and straw hats. The landscape was green and gentle, and I was telling Victor how much it reminded me of the vanilla regions of Madagascar, when he suddenly slewed the van to a halt beside the road.
“Shit! Shit!” he exclaimed. And then again, “Oh Shit! Mother of God. I am a stupid old man of sixty-nine years old. Oh my God, how could I do such a thing.” Victor leaned against the wheel, shaking his head in dismay. He had left the all-important vanilla documents behind, the very things he said he had to collect before he picked me up from the café.
Eventually, Victor calmed down. He made a call on his cell-phone to his secretary in Papantla asking her to fax a copy of the papers to the mayor’s office in the town where we were headed. Then we drove in silence for a time, all the while heading southwest on smaller and rougher roads. There were low hills and hummocks in the fields on either side as we drove, and around the hills I saw striations in the earth where cattle hooves had worn narrow terraces in the soil.
“We need to encourage the vanilla growers,” said Victor, recovering from his embarrassment at forgetting his documents. “You see what damage the cattle do to the land. And the ranchers cut down the forest for grazing for the animals, and then we get less rain. Even I notice how much hotter it is here now compared to when I first came from California forty years ago. But, vanilla doesn’t harm the land like this, no, no, no.”
We reached the steep cobbled main street of a village. A large crumbling church took up one side of the central square, and there was a small formal garden in front of the municipal offices opposite. “This is Coxquihui,” said Victor with a grin. “Don’t you love the sound of the word—‘kush-kee-wee’ it’s a type of bamboo they use hereabouts for thatching the houses.”
Mayor Juvencio González Juaréz was a busy man, and there were at least twenty people waiting outside his small office for an audience. But for Victor and the Inglese he would make time.
“We welcome you,” said the mayor as we were ushered into his small bare office. “Because you will tell people outside the district that we want tourists to come here. And you, Don Victor, because you bring the documents to allow us to harvest this year’s vanilla.”
It seemed that one of Victor’s main achievements as head of the vanilla council was convincing the farmers that without official documents from his own office they should never, ever cut their vanilla beans. After years of argument the growers had only recently agreed that no-one would harvest vanilla before Victor delivered the Council’s permission, on paper bearing the State seal. Having left the papers in Papantla, Victor now had to explain the complicated plan he had to circumvent his own regulations, and as the conversation became heated I studied Coxquihui’s coat of arms on the plaque on the mayor’s office wall. There on the carved wooden shield was the vanilla vine, pendulous with beans.
“Why is the paperwork so vital?” I asked the mayor.
“Because of banditry and theft,” he explained. Out of the corner of my eye, Victor looked relieved that I had decided to intervene. “If the buyers agree,” continued the mayor, “not to buy any vanilla before the official date, then thieves cannot sell it to the benificios—the curers—before that day. We need this protection. The price of vanilla is high now, and there have been killings in the countryside. Outsiders, you understand.”
It was time to move on. Victor’s final destination was another village, and again he delighted in rolling its name around in his mouth. “Here is Zozocolco” he declared with a grin, as we bumped along the tiny and seemingly deserted main street. The road flattened out at the top and steep steps led down to other narrow streets clinging to the side of the hill. Here there were even more men in peasant dress gathered outside the slightly less grand municipio. Victor was immediately surrounded by the farmers who clustered about him, short men in bare feet with gnarled toenails and sun beaten faces. They doffed their white hats and reached over one another to shake him by the hand. “My God, this is so embarrassing”, Victor muttered to me in English. “Why did I have to forget those damned papers.”
Many of the farmers, or campesinos, were clutching canvas bags containing a few kilos of green vanilla. They wanted their paperwork so that one of their number, a kind of foreman with access to a van, could take it by road to Papantla or nearby Gutierez Zamora and sell it to one of the curers. It became clear that part of the foreman’s skill included speaking good enough Spanish to deal with the curers. Growing the beans is relatively simple, but the drying and curing is more complex, and labour intensive. A few farmers experiment with curing their own beans but in general the process requires a skill which takes many years to perfect, and secure premises in which to store the crop as it increases in value.
In Papantla and nearby Gutierez Zamora there are just four local buyers, or beneficiadores, who dry and package the vanilla for export, though once there were many more. Today the Papantla region produces around two hundred and fifty metric tonnes of green vanilla, which equates to about forty tonnes of dried beans. As they are cured they dry out and lose weight. For much of the nineteenth century the figure was more than ten times as great, around six-hundred tonnes of dried beans some of it for export to Europe, but most of it going north across the border for the huge American baking and confectionery industry. In villages like Zozocolco many of the farmers now produce just a few kilos of beans, but in their subsistence economy it is a valuable source of desperately needed cash. If they have a piece of land on which they can grow vanilla, then it is worth picking a few beans when they ripen.
I could tell that the farmers were curious about me, and I asked Victor what they were saying. “You are a foreigner, they say you must be a rich buyer from America, and they are asking me to tell you to pay more for their beans!”
“No soy gringo,” I said to some of the farmers nearby, soy britanico!” It was one of the first things I learnt to say in Mexico, and it usually produced a smile. In Zozocolco it was met with total silence.
“Does anyone know where England is?” Victor asked the crowd. Almost everyone shook their heads, and there followed an explanation about the speed of aeroplanes and how many hours it would take to get to Mexico city from here, and then to England. The farmers nodded slowly as it became clear how far I had come. I couldn’t tell if the distances involved meant much to people who had never been more than a few hours on foot from their home villages. To the campesinos, Papantla was a big city. At the end of Victor’s geography lesson there was further silence. Then one of the farmers spoke up: “Even if he has slept one whole night on an aeroplane he must still give us more money.”
There was a lull in proceedings while Victor went to use what appeared to be the Zozozolco’s only telephone, in the post-office cum mayor’s office. His cell-phone was no good here and he needed the fax from his office in Papantla in order to authorise the official harvest. There was tension in the air and nothing to do but wait. I asked one of the farmers if I could take his photograph. Several of the men decided they too would like to be included, and a debate erupted about who should be first. Then one of the foremen decreed that it would not be fair unless everyone was in the picture. And it seemed that there were more farmers waiting somewhere else in the village. They too, must be included, or he would not be doing his job of representing the community.
The foreman took charge, and led me off down the steep steps behind the town hall to a street which eventually brought us to the village church. On the way we filed past a barber’s shop with a bad-tempered horse tied to a hitching post outside. It flattened its ears and raised a hind foot as I walked by. The church was set into the side of the hill, and on the terraced stairs outside there were at least another eighty farmers and about fifty women, whom I took to be their wives. The men arranged themselves in rows upon the steps, some of them brandishing a fistful of vanilla beans in front of them as I prepared to take the photograph. The women shielded their faces or looked away and there was some surprise when I asked if they too would line up for the picture. One or two of them smiled shyly as they joined the men, but mostly they averted their eyes and showed no expression. The deed was done. I wanted to thank the farmers, and asked for the correct word in Totonaca. The foreman provided the answer—“pashte katini”, which sounded like pashtee katz-eeny, when spoken. I repeated the phrase and was rewarded with a murmur from the crowd that I hoped was approval.
Now that we were well away from the mayor, and from ‘Don’ Victor, the foreman and the farmers were more relaxed and answered my questions about how they hoped to sell the crop. Many of them had walked for three or four hours to bring their beans into town today, and once the paperwork was in order the foremen would drive it into town to the curers and sell it for the best price possible. How much did they hope to earn from vanilla this year? “Well,” said one man, “the beneficiadores have told us they will only pay 150 pesos (about $1·50) a kilo, so that is what we must accept.”
The figure surprised me, as in the 2002–2003 season the wholesale value of good quality dried beans was more than a hundred times that. In Madagascar the farmers expected more than ten times that amount for green beans, and if anything they were even poorer than the Mexicans. Given that this low price was for green beans which would lose most of their weight when cured, you could multiply that price by five or six to get the dry weight price. In other words, it takes approximately six kilos of green beans to produce one kilogram of dry. The beneficiador has other costs of course, the staff to prepare the beans, the premises in which to store them, security precautions, and of course the time it takes for the drying and conditioning to be completed—between three and six months. He will also have to sort and pack the beans into uniform bundles and ensure rigid quality control to meet the demands of foreign buyers. Even so, there was a healthy profit to be made between green and black.
By the time I returned to the main street Victor was ready to leave. The fax had never arrived and he couldn’t reach his secretary by phone. He had hatched another scheme; the mayor and the foremen would make a list of each farmer’s name and the quantity of beans they were selling. Victor would meet the foremen at the buyer’s offices in Papantla and collect a copy of the list as a record of which farmers had sold vanilla, and how much. I couldn’t see how this would work, since I understood that the idea of the Vanilla Council issuing papers was to ensure that the buyers didn’t buy any beans from anyone unless they produced documentation. “Never mind,” said Victor, “I will straighten it out with the buyers.”
The problem with vanilla beans is that once they are ripe on the vine they are easy to pick, and hence to steal. They grow on supporting trees in forest plantations where it is difficult to guard every vine. To get around the problem there have been various schemes, at various times, to try to ensure that no-one picks beans or deals in them before a certain date. Beans offered to a curer before this date are likely to have been stolen, and should therefore be refused. However, this system depends on the curer being honest, since if he buys ‘illegal’ beans he can get them at a very low price—like any ‘fence’ dealing in stolen goods he will pay a fraction of the true value. In a subsistence economy where even $1·50 is worth having, then desperate thieves are prepared to kill for vanilla. Peasant farmers in Madagascar and Mexico mount armed guard on their crop as harvest time approaches, and in both countries the police and the army will set up roadblocks to check who is carrying vanilla. Supposedly, they will stop anyone transporting vanilla without paperwork, and before the harvest date. In many places it is also forbidden for anyone to transport green beans after dark.
If you look closely at dried vanilla beans from Madagascar you can sometimes find little raised bumps, resembling a Braille symbol, somewhere along their length. The bumps are a unique tattoo, which individual growers brand upon the beans with pins or a piece of bamboo to mark their own crop. It is one more safety measure against theft, allowing stolen beans to be identified and allowing buyers and rural collectors to verify that the vendor is also the grower.
The problems of regulating the market in green vanilla are not new. Henry Bruman, an early American historian of the Totonac region, discovered documents in the Mexican National archives relating to the problems of regulating the vanilla trade as early as 1743. At that time, Don Franco de Cagicipajo, the mayor of Papantla, had issued a decree prohibiting the cutting of beans before the eighth of December, although his motive seems to have been to ensure that he had a personal monopoly on the crop. At the time, farmers objected to the mayor’s decree on the grounds that it didn’t allow any leeway for those Totonacs who relied on picking ‘wild’ vanilla. In one contemporary letter, a local nobleman, the Count of Fuenclara, writes to the state Governor on behalf of the “poor Indians who walk in the forest looking for vanilla, to relieve their poverty.” The Count claims that the Indians have always picked wild vanilla, and are now being excluded from the market by the unscrupulous mayor. He also appeals against the potential fine of 500 pesos which the mayor wants to impose for early picking, a sum clearly unaffordable to the Indians who are being paid one peso for twenty-five vanilla beans. Another letter, twenty years later, discusses the plight of the peasants who are being impoverished by vanilla thieves and also prevented from gathering vanilla on land which has recently been sold into private hands. Interestingly, this complaint stems from the fact that the Indians say it is land on which they have “always planted vanilla vines, with much labour and repeated journeys. Here, we have no other means to trade or to maintain ourselves and to clothe ourselves or pay our tribute to the King or tithes to the Church, except for vanilla and a little fishing.”
No-one can be certain when vanilla was first formally planted. It seems likely that the Totonacs practised some form of systematic cultivation of the vines during the Aztec period, and that such methods were refined and developed in response to increased demand from Spain following the Conquest. Perhaps at first it was merely a case of protecting a wild vine in the forest so that when it produced fruit they could be reliably gathered. The Totonacs, and other Indian tribes, may even have known that the vine could be transplanted and grown from cuttings, but it is by no means certain that they knew how the vanilla orchid was fertilised. Studies on the few remaining wild specimens of Vanilla planifolia prove that the plant is endemic to the evergreen tropical forests of eastern Mexico, and also in Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. It seems that individual vines are generally found growing some distance apart, and that they can live for hundreds of years. As with so many organisms, from elephants to sharks, long life tends to go with a low rate of reproduction.
In the thick forests of central and southern Mexico the work of fertilisation would be done naturally by the small, metallic coloured insects sometimes called ‘orchid bees’. These fast-flying species are common in lowland forest areas, exactly where vanilla thrives, and it is probable that one particular Mexican species of bee, Euglossa viridissima, is the one which does the work of transporting the pollen of one vanilla orchid to another. Another species, Eulaema cingulata, is also suspected and at one time Melipona beechii was thought be responsible, but has since been accused of inefficiency by entomologists.
Euglossine bees are known to be responsible for fertilising at least a thousand orchid species, and it is only the male bee that does the work. Although vanilla orchids are not strongly fragrant to the human nose, these bees generally favour aromatic flowers. They collect scent from them which they are then believed to modify by chewing and masticating and then transferring the mixture to special pouches on their hind legs. This scent is then used as a territorial marker. Female bees are attracted to a male’s territory by this scent, and have been observed landing near a ‘scent marker’ and immediately adopting the requisite mating position. Clearly, the sex life of the bees and the sexual habits of the vanilla orchid are closely connected.
Orchids have a reputation for lewd sexual display. Their intricate and erotic petals and lips are often unavoidably reminiscent of human female pudenda. But, alluring as they may appear to the human eye, they guard their own sexual parts away from view. While ‘ordinary’ flowers will happily display their breeding organs at the heart of their open petals, the orchid is generally more discreet. One of the special features of orchids is that the sexual parts of the flower are fused into a single structure known as the column. Opposite the column, usually on the lower side of the flower there is the orchid ‘lip’, in fact a modified petal known as the labellum. At the tip of the column, and often hidden by the lip, is the anther—the part of the flower that produces pollen—which is separated from the fertile stigma by a flap of tissue. It is the stigma that must receive the pollen and on which it will eventually germinate. The tissue flap is called the rostellum, and it needs to be lifted out of the way for a flower to be fertilised. The rostellum probably serves to prevent the orchid fertilising itself, and also presents the sticky tips of the pollen masses, called viscidia, to the bee. The pollen grains themselves are sticky and adhere together into a ball. When a male bee visits the flower he finds the labellum a useful landing platform, which leads directly to where he wants to go, drawn in by the scent he needs for his own courting strategy. During the collection of the ingredients for making his scent marker a certain amount of this sticky pollen ball will attach itself to the bee’s ‘back’. This happens as the bee retreats from the interior of the vanilla orchid, when it is forced to climb over a tiny hump of raised tissue on the surface of the labellum known as the callus. As the bee climbs out of the flower it pushes against the anther collecting a cargo of pollen.
The scent particles that the bee is searching for have nothing to do with the pollen balls, and neither is he rewarded with food for his visit. Instead the bee scrapes his perfume ingredients from the surface of the flower lip and attaches them to pockets in his hind legs. And, when the bee visits the next vanilla orchid to repeat the process, he will leave a proportion of the pollen behind on the other flower’s fertile stigma. When the pollen from one flower eventually reaches the stigma of another, pollen tubes germinate and grow downwards to reach the ovaries which in the case of vanilla lie within the stalk, behind the head of the flower. Then, the ovaries develop into the fruits we call beans or pods. In the wild, the vanilla beans are fed upon by bats, and possibly some birds. Once eaten, the beans will spill their seed into the animal’s gut, to be excreted elsewhere in the forest. If conditions are right, they will germinate into a new plant.
Vanilla planters cannot rely on natural pollinators to fertilise their orchids. They must do the job themselves.