i Patrick W. Staib Anthropology This dissertation is approved, and it ...

café que bebemos se seca en uva y después se pila así . . . no existía esa cultura
de preocuparse por un buen lavado y secado (We never cared about washing or
depulping [our coffee]. We sold it in cherries. That’s the way it was; small
farmers didn’t really know how to process their coffee. More so, the coffee we
drink is dried with the pulp and then peeled like that . . . there was no culture of
concerning yourself with good washing and drying).
Don Amado acquired his lands from his patrón, Pedro Molina, and paid off his
debts with harvested coffee. This sharecropping arrangement was a common way for
smaller farmers to acquire land on which they could grow their own staples—corn and
beans—as well as produce for the local market and coffee for export. I then asked,
¿Y cómo fue que Usted consigió este beneficio húmedo, Don Amado? (How did
you get this wet mill, Don Amado?)
Lo puse yo después de recibir una capacitación en como ganar mejor precio con
el lavado y secado del café. Eso hace poco, pero si, fue UNAG creo. Me dieron
crédito y lo mandé a hacer (I built it here after getting trained on how to earn a
better price for washed and dried coffee. It wasn’t long ago, but yes, I think it was
UNAG [the National Farmers’ and Ranchers’ Union]. They gave me credit and I
had it built).
Even during the Sandinista era of centralized production on immense, state-owned
plantations, farmers did not manage the quality of their own coffee production.
The relatively recent effort to provide infrastructure to farmers is in response to
the growth in small-scale production after the fall of the revolutionary government.
Credit was made available to the farmers by international agencies and private enterprise
so they could afford to purchase depulping machines and eventually construct mills with
washing canals.
Quality control in post-harvest handling requires a combination of proper
equipment, sufficient labor, and timely washing, drying, and delivery of coffee to the
cooperative for further transport, drying, threshing, packing, and export. Most small
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