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Indigenous student aims to help her parents and neighbors command a better price for their beans

Editor’s note: This story was condensed from a feature in the Cornell Chronicle.

By Laura Reiley

Martina Pablo Pablo ’26 started picking coffee beans when she was five years old, on her father’s small plot of land in a remote area in Guatemala. Although her home, in the mountains of Sierra de los Cuchumatanes, has a unique microclimate that yields exceptional coffee, three-quarters of the Mam Maya people in the area suffer from poverty.

Her parents and neighbors struggle to make ends meet as subsistence farmers, even as global coffee prices have risen 65% since the beginning of 2021.

Pablo Pablo, who is studying hotel administration in the Nolan School, is hoping to change that. She’s the creator and owner of Martina’s Mayan Coffee, which sells coffee directly from her family farm in Todos Santos in Huehuetenango.

“My hope is to empower Indigenous farmers,” she says. “Inequality there is so bad. They have no power to negotiate.”

My hope is to empower Indigenous farmers. Inequality there is so bad. They have no power to negotiate.

Her fledgling business honors the complex experiences of those who grow and harvest the coffee in her home country, and leverages the newfound entrepreneurial and marketing chops she has honed in the classroom and via mentoring.

“She wants to shed light on the story of where she came from and address inequity in order to provide some social good,” says Aaron Adalja, an assistant professor in the Nolan Hotel School.

Adalja, who taught Pablo Pablo’s food and beverage management class, has guided her in developing marketing materials to showcase her product, as well as in leveraging connections she has made via Cornell.

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“One of the challenges with the industry is the coffee changes hands so many times and many of the value-added processes typically happen outside the country in which the coffee is grown,” he says. “Nobody who is growing that coffee has a concept of what the value of that final product really is.”

Pablo Pablo’s journey from the mountains of Sierra de los Cuchumatanes to Ithaca has been long.

After taking the bus to the U.S. border at age 17 with someone from her village, she says, she sought asylum and spent two months in a detention center in Texas before being released into the custody of a brother in Oakland, CA.

“I left home because there is so much poverty; we were starving,” she says. “Girls routinely get married at 15 or 16 and have children.”

Eventually, Pablo Pablo received a scholarship to a private high school in Oakland before being awarded a full scholarship to Cornell.

“The first time I went to a Starbucks, I was shocked,” she recalls. “I got a mocha, which was delicious—and when I found out it was $6, I was like, ‘Oh my goodness.’ My parents had been paid so little.”

The first time I went to a Starbucks, I was shocked.

Her business has grown by incremental steps. She received support from Adalja and wine professor Cheryl Stanley ’00, a senior lecturer in the Nolan School.

“I’m so excited for her,” Stanley says, “but any importing of an agricultural product is difficult.”

For now, the venture is small: Pablo Pablo is currently selling only 200 bags of coffee directly to consumers. But there’s room for expansion, Stanley says.

“The coffee is absolutely amazing, with sweet flavors reminiscent of a caramel pear muffin,” she says. “It also has a little bit of chocolate to it, with great balance.”

(Photos by Ryan Young / Cornell University.)

Published September 25, 2024

Hotelie Markets Coffee from Her Rural Village in Guatemala

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