In a terracotta-painted room with burning candles and clay masks adorning the walls, a young Mexican tourist dips her fingers into a small gourd of coarse, brown nibs and pops one into her mouth. She and her family, visiting from Cancún, discuss its flavors – like chocolate, but not as sweet – and all they’ve learned today at this workshop about indigenous cocoa varieties and their traditional uses. Ervit Hernández Hernández, founder of Chima Cacao, smiles approvingly.
Chocolate is the world’s dessert. But many of its adoring fans have little idea of its origins, which reach back thousands of years to pre-Hispanic, Mesoamerican cultures in Mexico. That’s true even in the cradle of cocoa, which imports more chocolate than it produces.
Why We Wrote This
The global chocolate industry is in turmoil. But in Mexico, where cocoa has been grown and consumed for 4,000 years, ancient traditions endure.
But in the southern state of Oaxaca, cocoa’s history remains alive, passed down by generations and amplified by projects such as Chima Cacao, whose name uses the Spanish word for cocoa, which comes from the Indigenous Nahuatl name for the bean, cacahuatl.
“When you find the origin of things, you gain tools, understanding, and a sense of roots,” says Diego Armando Contreras, a biologist with Chima Cacao who leads regular trainings for the staff about the history and science of cocoa.
“Part of my roots”
On a recent morning, about 45 minutes outside of the city of Oaxaca, in the state’s central valley, rays of sunlight are just breaking through the gray, fluffy cloud cover. But Carmen Martínez has already been working in her kitchen for hours, a black tin pot of heirloom corn boiling on a wood-fired stove as she gathers some of the oak ash and adds it to the pot for flavor.
This is the start of an hourslong and at times athletic process of making tejate, an ice-cold foamy beverage with a base of cocoa that Ms. Martínez has been selling on a folding table near the town square of San Bartolo Coyotepec for three decades.
In recent years, the global chocolate world has entered a period of unprecedented turmoil, punctuated by cocoa bean shortages and roller-coaster price fluctuations. From farmers in Côte d’Ivoire to artisanal chocolatiers in Massachusetts, almost no one in the industry has emerged unscathed.
But here in Oaxaca, all of that feels far away. Cocoa has been grown in Mexico for nearly 4,000 years. Traditionally consumed as a beverage, it is still shared by family and friends in many Indigenous communities during celebrations and to mark important life moments.
“Eating chocolate is different from drinking it,” says Ms. Martínez, who is planning an upcoming baptism for two of her grandchildren, at which she’ll serve at least three cocoa-based drinks, including a traditional water-based hot chocolate.
Tejate reminds Ms. Martínez of her own childhood, when she and her seven siblings would be assigned roles in the kitchen to prepare the nutrient-rich beverage for her father to take out into the fields for lunch.
To her, drinking cocoa signifies family, community, and love. A square of chocolate, meanwhile, is just a treat.
“To understand cocoa culture, you have to forget about chocolate,” says Mr. Contreras, the biologist at Chima Cacao. “Chocolate is a product that is so dominant, so overwhelming, that it obscures the true origin.”
A defining feature of Mexican society is the coexistence of the ancient and the modern. Cocoa reflects that, too, says José López Ganem, executive director at the Institute for Cacao and Chocolate Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“We have cocoa in traditional pre-Hispanic or ancient Mesoamerican drinks in Oaxaca at the same time we have some of the best … European-style chocolatiers in the world,” he says. “You can’t get access to [both these extremes] in other places in the world.”
Ms. Martínez makes her tejate using a recipe handed down from her grandmother. She toasts cocoa beans, the seeds of mamey, and the blossoms of the “flower of cocoa” plant before grinding them into a paste on a black volcanic stone.
Selling tejate has helped put her children through school, including her only daughter, Gladys, who now works as an engineer.
“My generation started to lose the connection with tejate,” the younger Ms. Martínez says. But around age 16, she grew curious about the drink and ventured into her mother’s kitchen asking to learn the family recipe.
“I’ve come to realize it’s part of my roots,” she says. Cultivating tradition
Hours down a narrow, mountainous footpath, Reynalda García Juárez is tending to those roots, quite literally.
“God brought me to this life to work,” says Ms. García, who was a child the first time she wielded a machete to chop firewood and to help her parents on their subsistence farm in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca.
She grows cocoa, heirloom corn, and tropical fruits in the small Indigenous community of San Felipe de León. The cocoa trees on these plots, passed down generations and buried deep in the jungle on uneven terrain, grow alongside other endemic plants that provide the shade they need to flourish.
Though cocoa was first domesticated in Peru and Ecuador, and has been grown across Latin America for millennia, the majority of the world’s cocoa now comes from West Africa. Mexico is responsible for just 0.5% of today’s global production.
Most Mexican cocoa farming takes place on small plots of land like this one. For the roughly 400 inhabitants of San Felipe de León, cocoa farming is one of the few ways to make a living. Nearly 80% of the people in this rural municipality live in poverty. Many leave for the United States or other parts of Mexico.
For those who stay, the challenge is finding a way to make cocoa profitable. Ms. García and her neighbors have formed a small cooperative to sell their cocoa at a better rate than the market price. Together, the four dozen farmers can earn almost triple what intermediaries pay. But they are still barely scraping by. Some members also make their own chocolate bars in hopes that the endeavor will bring in more money than simply selling raw or fermented cocoa.
“We aren’t saving the world or changing the farmers’ lives,” says Mr. Hernández of Chima Cacao, which buys cocoa beans from local farmers in communities similar to San Felipe de León. “If anything … they are the ones changing our lives by producing high-quality cocoa.” 