A History of Mexican Coffee: The German Fincas of Soconusco

In the mid-1890s, the coffee boom in Chiapas was on the verge of collapse before it had properly begun. Over the previous few years, Mexican and foreign planters had put more than four million coffee trees into the ground, most of them after 1892. By 1895, 1.1 million were already bearing fruit, and another 3.2 million were due to start by 1899 (Rus).

The problem was that almost nobody was there to pick them. Most of the new farms had been planted in the Soconusco, the thinly populated mountains of Chiapas’s southern Pacific coast, far from any large workforce. That year there were barely enough hands to bring in the harvest, and every crop after it was going to be bigger (Rus).

How that problem was solved shaped Chiapas for the century that followed, and it’s a large part of how the state became Mexico’s biggest coffee region.

Land, prices and planters

The boom had three drivers. Coffee was fetching high prices on world markets. The Mexican government was offering huge areas of fertile land for as little as two pesos a hectare. And planters were promised abundant, cheap labour (Rus).

German investors were among those who answered. Arriving with private capital, they settled in a border region that looked, on paper, almost empty, and founded coffee farms in the high volcanic slopes of the Sierra Madre de Chiapas (Mejía). Finca Hamburgo, one of the oldest, was founded in 1888 by Arthur Edelmann, at the invitation of Porfirio Díaz’s government (Mexicanist).

Finding the workers

Planters knew coffee trees take five to seven years to mature, and they had assumed that in that time they could recruit seasonal workers from the densely populated Maya communities of the Central Highlands. By the mid-1890s, though, none of those arrangements had been made, and there were still no highland workers on any Soconusco plantation (Rus).

The flow of workers did eventually begin, and it grew quickly. In 1895 there were fewer than 5,000 coffee workers in the whole state, almost all of them living on the plantations or in nearby villages. By 1910 there were more than 21,000, and 10,000 of them were long-distance migrants from the highlands (Rus).

Most of them came through a system known as enganche, recruitment against a cash advance, which workers then paid off through labour on the fincas. Its reputation is grim. Historian Justus Fenner notes that the word became shorthand for a whole system of abuses, from forced recruitment organised by local officials to workers held before the march to the coast and sold goods at inflated prices (Fenner). Until 1914, government intervention mostly codified the system rather than protecting workers, guaranteeing a steady supply of labour to the fincas and a share of a profitable business for the state. That year, a new revolutionary government passed Chiapas’s first labour protection law (Fenner).

Fenner’s own research, based on the internal accounts of one coffee finca between 1919 and 1941, argues for a more differentiated picture of working life on the plantations than the familiar story of violence and deception alone (Fenner). The workers who made the Soconusco boom possible were not simply passive victims of it. They negotiated, moved between fincas and made their own decisions within a system stacked against them.

A German coffee town

As the fincas grew, so did Tapachula, the region’s main town. By the early 20th century it had become the most prosperous and important city in Chiapas. Three German-owned trading houses opened in its central streets and, for decades, supplied the Soconusco and its remote coffee estates with goods that were hard to find anywhere else in Mexico (Mejía). The German community there has traditionally been seen as a closed group of coffee traders bound by business and national ties (Mejía).

What remains

Some of those first fincas are still running. Finca Hamburgo is now run by the fifth generation of the Edelmann family (Mexicanist). Nearby Finca Irlanda, also owned by a German family, is believed to be the world’s first certified organic coffee farm, and ecologists from the University of Michigan have used it since the late 1980s to study how shade-grown coffee supports biodiversity (University of Michigan).

Today, though, most of Chiapas’s coffee is grown by smallholders, many of them organised into cooperatives. That’s a story we’ve told in Industry Insight: Mexico, Where Fairtrade Began.

What this means for us, and for you

The Soconusco’s history is a reminder that every coffee carries a story of land, labour and the people who shaped it, even when none of it is printed on the bag. Mexico’s coffee looks very different today. Most of it is grown by smallholders rather than on great estates, and producers are now exploring new ground, from careful decaffeination to experimental fermentation.

We buy our Mexican coffees through two partners. Ensambles supplies our Mountain Water decaf, and Edelmira supplies our experimental Mexican lots, from producers pushing beyond the traditional washed process. Knowing where a coffee comes from, and who grew it, tells you more about it than any label can.