Ariana Guerrero
Anthropology 210
November 23, 2014
Coffee and Guatemala Guatemala is a very diverse country full of rich history and culture. The Mayan population flourished in Guatemala until the Spanish took over. The Spanish began to take large pieces of land and started selling them to settlers. The land that belonged to the traditional Mayan’s, quickly became large estates that the indigenous people were forced to work on. The Spanish took over Guatemala in 1544 but it wasn’t easy. Myan’s put up a fight and did everything they could to resist Spanish control. However, before the Spanish even got there, there was already tension between Myan groups, which was why it took them longer to take over. A huge contributing factor to Spanish…show more content… There are around fifty countries and over twenty-five million farmers that produce coffee (Equal Exchange). These coffee producers are kept in a cycle of poverty by the global economy to maintain and exploit a cheap labor force and keep consumer prices as low as they can (Equal Exchange). Coffee production depends on an influx of migrant workers that travel to the highlands of Guatemala to make a meager income. There is a lot of tension surrounding the land for these big coffee plantations. Many Guatemalans were evicted from their ancestral homes without being paid…show more content… Guatemalans started drinking coffee when they were very little. It is given to babies in bottle and sometimes they would dunk sweet bread in it and give it to infants that were teething. Coffee was seen as more of a snack than a beverage. It was consumed whenever people got together as well, so it was a very normal and social thing to be constantly drinking coffee through out the day. Many Guatemalans argue that coffee has many health benefits and can even make you feel better when you are sick. Some families do not drink coffee as often because it hurts their stomachs. However, many hold the belief that if you are more educated then coffee can cure stomach pain and alleviate stress and headaches (Global Exchange). One of the major reasons why coffee production is very strenuous in Guatemala is because they do not use as much machinery as other coffee growing nations. They believe that the reason their coffee beans are of the highest quality is because of the fact that they do not use machinery to process their beans. Coffee culture is what Guatemalans lives revolve around. Families work together to make sure their crop is of the highest quality. Many people do not know how much Guatemalans sacrifice to make the coffee they drink. They have little resources and it is a lot of hard manual