The day nothing is cut
October 2026
Before his crew goes into the hills, Rotilio spends a full day walking the coffee groves without cutting anything. He carries no tools. He goes to look.
«You have to take a day, you have to go checking the coffee groves,» he explains. «You check first, and only then do you send your people in to cut the good palm.»
We asked whether it would not be simpler to go straight in and cut. The answer came at once: «No, honestly no. Because sometimes the leaf comes out yellow, or it comes out bitten.»
That day of reconnaissance produces nothing. No rolls at the end of it, nothing to weigh. It is time spent on ruling out: knowing where not to go.
Eighteen years reading the hills
Rotilio has been cutting palm for eighteen years and sorting it for sixteen. In that time he has worked tepe, cambray and chamal. «We work with many kinds of leaf,» he sums up, and that sentence holds nearly half his life.
Today he leads a crew of four, sometimes five. Gathering a day’s rolls takes them around six hours.
He built that crew on a rule of his own: every one of them had to have worked as a sorter first. «They already have the experience. They were sorters, that is why I bring them. Because they hand me quality leaf too.»
It is a less obvious decision than it looks. A cutter who also knows how to sort discards in the field what would otherwise travel to the facility only to be discarded there. Sorting begins before the leaf is cut.
The patrón
There is a moment when Rotilio names himself. «Now, since I am the patrón, I have to see, I have to check first before I send my people in.»
He says it without emphasis, as someone stating an obligation rather than a title. Being the patrón, in his definition, is not giving orders: it is going first and carrying the decision of where everyone else will work.
What he asks for
At the end of the conversation we asked what he would say to the person receiving his work on the other side of the world. He thought for a moment and answered two things.
The first: «This is what we do. We are going to send you a good leaf.»
The second we did not ask for; he added it himself: «That there be more orders, so we have work here.»
The conversation took place in the Huasteca of Hidalgo, in the coffee grove where Rotilio and his crew were cutting that week.