by Bruce Wydick
Angela was curious.
“Fernando, who are the people in the picture?” she asked.
“My grandparents.”
“Were they coffee growers?”
“Sí. For many years.”
“What were they like?”
Fernando smiled. “I will tell you about them.”
March 1935
Several of Isidro Ixtamperic’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren were resident coffee laborers, or colonos, for the Ehrlichmann family of Mazatenango, a prosperous household of German immigrant coffee growers. Under the Liberal regime in Guatemala, there existed three official categories of coffee workers: mozos habilitados, those who did not live on the plantation but had received wage advances and were therefore bound to a landowner until the debt was paid off; mozos no habilitados, who worked for a wage and were free both from debt and to go wherever they pleased but were subject to a mandamiento, or labor draft; and colonos, who lived voluntarily on the coffee plantation but often had rental or labor contracts that bound them to a particular plantation owner for a specified amount of time, after which the contract could be renewed.
Compared to other plantation owners, Otto Ehrlichmann treated his workers relatively well, especially his colonos, some of whom had resided on his land for decades. His father had done much the same, providing his workers additional payments that allowed them to share some of the bounty from the coffee boom of the mid-1890s, while shielding them from the worst effects of the price crash of 1898 that destroyed the lives of many indigenous laborer families. Otto had learned well from his example, and even during the disastrous British blockade of exports to Germany during World War I, the Ehrlichmann family, as well as its colonos, somehow managed to pull through together, in no small part due to Otto’s ability to forge new channels into the North American market. When the war was over in 1919, the plantation, now enjoying a more diversified portfolio of buyers for its product, seemed to thrive more than ever.
This was not to say that there were not social divisions between the Ehrlichmanns and their colonos, for there were indeed. If not accompanied by the usual contempt for the indigenous Mayans, the divisions were nevertheless clear. Basilio Ixtamperic was the great-grandson of Isidro and the grandfather of Fernando. Of all of Otto Ehrlichmann’s workers, Basilio seemed to understand the most about coffee cultivation, and even more, how to train, manage, and motivate the mozos. Unlike most plantation owners, Otto had made sure that the children of his colonos obtained several years of formal schooling, and Basilio had gone even a little further, completing the eighth grade. For an indigenous Guatemalan in 1928, this was a substantial achievement. His natural good looks, strong frame, and the confidence that accompanied his literacy and fluency in Spanish and German caused him to stand out as a leader among his peers and to his patròn.
The years of 1924–28 were some of the best for coffee in Guatemala. Strong exports and high coffee prices, supported by Brazil’s withholding of a substantial amount of its production off the market, allowed the coffee industry in Central America to thrive. The additional resources flowing into Guatemala not only brought benefits to plantation owners, but also resulted in improvements for coffee laborers. The government built more rural schools, and because coffee labor was scarcer than ever relative to desired production, plantation owners sweetened contractual arrangements to lure workers.
Basilio was a beneficiary of these times along with Ester, his younger sister, who in many respects was his female counterpart. Only fifteen, her beauty, education, and charm were already attracting the attention of a number of young men, and not only within the indigenous community, a fact to which she was still mostly oblivious. When she wasn’t at work helping her mother with cleaning and taking care of her younger siblings, more than anything she enjoyed teasing the young mozos who worked on the plantation. They didn’t seem to object much, but when any of them would try to charm her, she was an expert at keeping potential suitors at arm’s length. At this point in her life, she preferred fun over romance.
One of those attracted to Ester was Friedrich, the eighteen-year-old son of Otto. Like his father, Friedrich was fluent in Spanish, and unlike many of the indigenous girls, so was Ester.
Because of Friedrich’s fair complexion, he wore a dark brown leather hat with a wide brim while at work in the fields. He liked the hat, not only because he thought it made him look older and more handsome, but also because it protected him in the sun and kept his face from acquiring the permanently reddish tint that characterized the faces of so many of the other fair-skinned Germans in Guatemala. Every so often Ester and the other girls on the coffee plantation would try to coax him to take the hat off, an effort that never succeeded due to Friedrich’s self-consciousness over his thin, white-blond hair, looking even thinner when pressed down to his scalp by the sweat under the brim of the hat.
One day while he was relaxing and having a drink of water between chores, Ester sneaked up behind him, grabbed the hat off his head, and ran. “Hey!” yelled Friedrich, caught off guard. He got up to chase her, but Ester was surprisingly fast. She also had a head start. Friedrich tried to catch her as she turned the corner and headed behind the stable. After several minutes of chasing and eluding, Friedrich managed to playfully grab Ester on the run by one of her arms.
“No lo tengo!” I don’t have it! She was laughing hysterically, almost completely out of breath, and only partially able to free herself from Freidrich’s grasp. Ester’s laugh was usually contagious, and by now all of the mozos who had been watching the scene were now also laughing, as well as Otto Ehrlichmann. Through a merciless bout of tickling, Friedrich finally got her to confess, Ester now hysterical to the point of tears. “I don’t have it . . . Bonzo lo tiene!” Friedrich turned to the barn, where Bonzo, Otto’s faithful buro, was now proudly sporting Friedrich’s leather hat, which was neatly tied in a bow under his neck, gazing placidly out of his stall at the commotion while he chewed his hay.
“I will get you!” exclaimed Friedrich in vain, trying to sound halfway serious but unable to keep from laughing himself as Ester escaped his grasp again. She ran back to the protection of her girlfriends, the whole group laughing, including Otto.
Every coffee crop has a window of only a few days when the crop must be harvested. This window begins when the majority of the coffee cherries begin to turn from yellow-orange to bright red. Picking the cherries inside this window avoids the bitter taste of unripened cherries as well as the sour taste of coffee produced from cherries that have begun to ferment on the plant. The key to a successful coffee crop in western Guatemala is marshaling the appropriate number of laborers for the harvest to begin on the right day.
November 2, 1929, was such a day on the Ehrlichmann plantation, and with the help of Basilio, Otto had enlisted a full complement of over one hundred mozos to work the harvest. Otto and Basilio walked through the plants in the late morning, monitoring the workers as they quickly picked the cherries, filling the straw baskets with the red, ripe fruit. Suddenly a deep explosion thundered across the highlands, which frightened many of the mozos so badly that they dropped their baskets and began to run.
Otto turned to Basilio. He had never heard such a noise before. “What in heaven’s name was that?” he asked him, as startled as anyone.
Baslio gazed into the mountains behind Otto’s head, standing openmouthed as he witnessed a dark cloud rapidly projecting into the sky above the gigantic Volcan Santa Maria, which loomed over the area to the northwest. Otto turned around immediately and saw the cloud of ash projecting high up into the sky. He stood, stunned and speechless, his voice almost paralyzed. It was a surreal, cataclysmic event.
“Mein Gott . . . ,” he whispered to himself in German.
The coffee laborers stood stupefied as the ash cloud extended across the sky in the general direction of the plantation, the volcano continuing to belch a hellish storm of smoke and ash. Spreading in every direction, but particularly toward the sout
h, it now began to cover the sun so that even before noon it seemed like twilight.
Ester had been nearby, picking with the other workers. “Basilio, what is happening?” she yelled to him, alarmed. It seemed like the end of the world.
“It’s the Santa Maria—it’s erupting!” he shouted.
The Santa Maria volcano, looming at over twelve thousand feet, had exploded nearly three decades before in 1902, covering the nearby region with six feet of ash, completely destroying fields, cattle, houses, and people. It was this 1902 eruption of the Santa Maria that had caused the formation of the Santiaguito volcanic dome complex lying adjacent to the Santa Maria to the south. The dome had begun to swell noticeably since 1922, pressure continuing to mount underneath its black, volcanic surface. It had finally blown its top.
Deep rumbling noises continued to be heard from the distance as the cloud enveloped ever greater portions of the sky. It was thicker now, causing the day to grow increasingly dark. Midday twilight was rapidly turning to early-afternoon dusk. Now ash began to rain down out of the sky, and some of the smoke was descending from the cloud. The shiny red coffee cherries on Otto’s plants were becoming a dull gray, coated with small particles of ash. The smoke was causing some of the workers to cough and panic. Some of them had inhaled pieces of ash and were choking and coughing uncontrollably. Otto ordered everyone to cover their faces with handkerchiefs.
“Basilio, we must find some way to get the workers and their families farther away from the volcano. Let’s try to get them on wagons and head to the coast,” directed Otto above the noise of the fray. “I think Gerhard Meier has extra wagons. He lives northwest of here, so it means you’ll be heading toward the volcano for some miles, but I think it’s our only hope.”
Basilio tied a red bandana over his mouth, mounted Erlichmann’s stallion, and drove it at full speed in the direction of the Meier plantation. Ester remained with the Ehrlichmanns trying to help calm some of the workers and their children, who themselves were now being coated with soot and ash. She hustled them inside houses on the plantation and comforted some of the crying children. Ester had them cover the windows with wet cloth to keep out the ash.
The dirt road from the plantation led northward, toward the volcano, for several miles. As Basilio drove the horse on, the smoke and ash became more intense, stinging his eyes and making it hard for him to breathe. He shook the ash out of his bandana and replaced it over his mouth. It was also getting hotter. Basilio could now glimpse orange rivers in the distance from the torrid pyroclastic flow that surged from the volcano. He stopped for directions on the road when he encountered a mountain dweller who had seen raging rivers of molten lava sweeping through an indigenous village less than three miles away from the base of the Santiaguito dome. Hundreds of people had perished in an instant.
Basilio headed west off the main road, finally locating the Meier plantation. His hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes were now filled with ash. His breathing made a wheezing sound. Gerhard Meier was in the final stages of evacuation, but had extra wagons. He was also planning to flee to the coast and was heading in the general direction of the Ehrlichmann plantation anyway. The horses were frightened and resisted being bridled. But Gerhard and Basilio hitched them to the wagons as quickly as they could, and drove the horses with the wagons toward the Ehrlichmanns.
With tears of relief, Ester saw Basilio approaching on the road through the clouds of smoke and ash, leading the team of horses and wagons with Meier and his family. When they arrived, Otto and Basilio immediately loaded women and children of the worker families onto the wagons. They also loaded a few days’ supply of food and water and other provisions.
All of a sudden Otto shouted in a distressed voice above the crowd, “Where’s Irma?” His six-year-old daughter wasn’t on any of the wagons. He had been distracted with preparations for the evacuation. “Friedrich, find your sister!” Friedrich sprinted back to the area around the house, his footprints kicking up ash clouds several feet high as he ran. Although it was midday, it was now almost as dark as night. The darkness combined with the densely falling ash made it difficult to see.
As the first wagons began to leave, Ester yelled, “I’ll check in the coffee field!” She started running through the rows of coffee plants, even searching under them to see if Irma might have taken refuge underneath from the falling ash. Every time she brushed away a group of branches to check, it created a cloud of ash that enveloped her face, making her choke.
Five minutes went by, and then ten. The Erlichmanns were beginning to panic, shouting for Irma. Otto’s wife wept as she searched in vain around the barn and stables. Finally, Ester gave a loud cry, “I found her! She is here!” Irma was indeed hiding under a coffee plant toward the back of the plantation where she had been playing with some of her friends when the chaos had started.
Irma ran to her parents who hugged her, and they quickly tossed her up onto the last wagon taken by Friedrich, Basilio, and Ester. The remaining mozos jumped on horses, two or even three on the back of one horse. Striking the confused horses repeatedly with switches, they sprinted away toward the Pacific.
The coffee harvest that year was badly damaged by the volcanic eruption, the yield reduced by about half. In the weeks after the eruption, nearly a foot of ash had continued to cover the ground, frustrating their attempt to salvage the remainder of the harvest and making living and working conditions almost unbearable.
Basilio then approached Otto with an idea. He had heard from some of the older mozos that after the eruption of 1902, a few farmers had turned the ash in their coffee plantations deep under the soil. The coffee yield the following year had been enormous. Although this would be a significant investment of time and money, Otto consulted with some of the older growers and agreed. They brought in dozens of new workers to go over the entire coffee plantation, turning as much of the ash as possible under the dirt and mixing it with the soil, especially in the areas closest to the base of the plants.
The subsequent years were difficult ones for coffee growers everywhere, for the Great Depression in the United States and Europe cut coffee prices in half. But the coffee yields on the Ehrlichmann plantation were nearly 30 percent greater than their historical average due to the nutrient fortification of the soil. The effect lasted well until the mid-1930s. Only then did the yields begin to regress to normal levels.
In the years after the eruption, Otto would put his arm around Baslio after picking and mutter something like, “Well, Basilio, we can thank your Santa Maria for this harvest again, can’t we?” It was a playful double entendre, a reference to Basilio’s Catholic faith which was different than his own Lutheran upbringing, but also an affectionate recollection of how he had helped save the plantation from the eruption not only with his bravery, but with his resourcefulness too.
Otto’s affection didn’t extend quite as far, however, to the emerging relationship between his son and Basilio’s sister. Over those same years, the relationship between Friedrich and Ester grew until one day, when Friedrich was twenty-five and Ester was twenty-two, he was reminiscing on the wooden porch with his father. They sat in old rocking chairs as they gazed at the tall pink clouds that hovered over the Pacific. A cool evening breeze relieved the sweltering workday.
Otto recalled the life of the family back in Europe and the voyage to Guatemala. Together they recalled the many trials of the coffee plantation, the volcano. After a time they were silent except for the quiet squeaking of the old chairs rocking on the loose floorboards. A soft gust of wind rustled the leaves of the coffee plants near the house.
Friedrich broke the silence. “Father, I want to marry Ester.”
A different type of silence, a thicker and tenser silence, followed the proclamation. Friedrich felt the pain in his stomach at his father’s disinclination. “You won’t let me because she is Mayan.” Otto didn’t know how to respond, and so the silence continued. “Father, I have loved her from the first moment I was able to be in love, from a
time when she was so young it would have been wrong of me to say that I loved her. I have never loved anyone else. You know this.” Otto nodded, put his head in his hands, and rubbed his eyes.
“Why won’t you let me marry her?”
Otto finally looked up at him, his expression pained. “Friedrich, you are German.”
“Am I, Father? You are German. I am a Central American with parents from Germany. This is my home. I do not even know Germany. Isn’t it all right to marry someone from my home? I love her. You care for her and her family too. Where would you be without her brother? She even saved my sister, your daughter, do you remember? Will you at least consider giving your consent?”
Otto wanted to convince Friedrich that his best interests lay elsewhere, or that he owed it to his family to marry a European bride, yet he knew this would be fruitless.
“Yes, I will think. I will consider.”
Because of the large number of German families cultivating coffee in Guatemala, the dictatorial government of President Jorge Ubico had enjoyed close economic relations with Germany. But the regime had gradually moved toward stronger relations with the United States. The new relationship was not only political, it was also economic: the United States had substantially increased its imports of Guatemalan coffee under the Inter-American Coffee Agreement of 1940.
But as Hitler’s armies began to march over Europe at the dawn of World War II, the United States became concerned with the German population in Guatemala. Reports of Nazi activity in some German social and business organizations in the country had reached the United States government. It was unclear whether this merely reflected a new German patriotism or a desire to expand the influence of the Third Reich to their new land in the western hemisphere. But the Americans were in no mood to take chances. They had come to view the three thousand Germans living in Guatemala as a menacing outpost of Nazism in their own hemisphere. If the United States should enter the war on the side of the Allies, Guatemala, with its strong economic connections to Germany as well as its claims against the British in Belize, might enter the war on the side of the Axis, creating a southern front on the United States that could divert British and American troops from defending Europe. It needed Guatemala to eliminate a threat to American national security.