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 homeplace, 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. Pablo Pablo’s 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 Cornell Nolan School of Hotel Administration, 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.

Credit: Ryan Young/Cornell University

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

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,” said Aaron Adalja, assistant professor in the Nolan Hotel School and Pablo Pablo’s food and beverage management professor.

He has guided her in how to develop marketing materials to showcase her product as well as in how to leverage connections she has made via Cornell. The coffee industry, he says, is a tough one.

“It’s such a global industry and one of the most highly traded global products. One of the challenges with the industry is the coffee changes hands so many times and many of the value-added processes typically happens outside the country in which the coffee is grown,” he said. “Nobody who is growing that coffee has a concept of what the value of that final product really is.”

In Guatemala, Pablo Pablo and her family roast beans in a pan over the fire and grind it with a machine, she said.

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

They sold their beans for a pittance to a middleman, she said, and her father, Modesto, often works as a laborer on larger coffee plantations to make ends meet. She hopes to show her community that people outside Todos Santos will buy their coffee at fair trade prices.

Guatemala is no longer one of the world’s major coffee producers by volume, but it maintains a reputation for high quality beans and more than 300 microclimates that give the beans nuanced flavors.

Her business has grown by incremental steps. This summer, she undertook a coffee project in which she imported coffee directly from her parents and community. She received support from Adalja and wine professor Cheryl Stanley, senior lecturer in the Nolan school.

Stanley says they started meeting and discussing the similarities between coffee and wine, talking about the supply chain logistics.

“Then she asked to have a meeting with me this spring and she told me what she was doing. I’m so excited for her – but any importing of an agricultural product is difficult,” Stanley said.

Pablo Pablo first brought some of her village’s coffee to the U.S. in 2020, turning to Red Bay Coffee in Oakland, California, for guidance.

“They helped me understand all sides of the business, the roasting, smelling and tasting,” she said. “When the coffee arrived from my village, we saw that it wasn’t high quality and that some beans were not great. We had to take out broken shells and little beans.

“My goal is to teach the people in my community how to harvest, store and sort the beans the right way,” Pablo Pablo said. 

Her journey from the mountains of Las Sierras de los Cuchumantantes to Ithaca has been a long one.

“I left home because there is so much poverty, we were starving. Girls routinely get married at 15 or 16 and have children. I said, I can’t stay. My mother, who never went to school and doesn’t speak much Spanish, said, ‘You’ve got to go, I’m letting you go.’ So, I took the bus to the Texas border with somebody from my village,” Pablo Pablo said.

She sought asylum at age 17 at the U.S. border and spent two months in a detention center in Texas, she said, eventually released into the custody of her brother Porfirio in Oakland, California. Martina and her sister were accepted into the Oakland Catholic Worker, which provides temporary housing and services to Latin American refugees. Martina found a permanent home with the Lassalle-Klein family in Alameda, California and received a scholarship to attend Holy Names High School, a private high school in Oakland.

She was then awarded a full scholarship to Cornell, where she hopes to take classes and make connections that allow her to open the door to fair trade for the Mam community. 

For right now, the venture is small. Pablo Pablo is selling only 200 bags of coffee directly to consumers. But there’s room for expansion in the future, Stanley said.

“The coffee is absolutely amazing, with sweet flavors reminiscent of a caramel pear muffin. It also has a little bit of chocolate to it, with great balance,” Stanley said. “I purchased my bags and I poured a sip for my husband, and we both said, ‘Wow, this is gooooood.’”