My guest today is Lucia Bawot, a coffee photographer, content creator, and author of the book, “We Belong: An Anthology of Colombian Women Coffee Farmers.” Initially dreamed up as a photography book, the final version of the book shares the stories of 25 women coffee farmers and pickers in Colombia, who speak not so much about their experiences in coffee but reflect on how they were raised. Many recount being forced to grow up too fast, not being allowed to go to school, and being silenced in favor of the men in their lives.
Lucia’s book is both beautiful and illuminating, capturing stories that are rarely ever told because many coffee actors simply fail to ask. Many of the interviews Lucia conducted were transformative—most of the women said they’d never been asked these kinds of questions or shared these stories before, and some noted that they felt completely different after spending time with Lucia. Beyond being a source of knowledge and insight about women coffee workers in Colombia, Lucia’s book is about the power of transformation, and how critical it is for us to ask questions and listen deeply. This interview is so good, and Lucia has so much to share, that it’s about 25% longer than most episodes.
I recommend scrolling through this transcript to see some photos from the book—and some behind-the-scenes snaps as well. Here’s Lucia:
Ashley: I was wondering if you could start by introducing yourself.
Lucia: Sure. So my name is Lucia Bawot. I do have a funny last name because I married with an American guy and I was not forced to take on his last name, but I took it as an opportunity to give myself an artistic name and a name that no one else had because his last name is not a common last name—it’s actually a Polish word that got mistyped when one of his great-grandfathers came to the U.S.
I'm a Colombian creator. That's how I like to call myself. I was born and raised in Colombia, in Quindío, which is the tiniest state in Colombia, and it’s traditionally known for coffee. I had the pleasure of being born there and raised there. Such a nice place. I always like to call it the heaven of this planet because it's so little, but it is so pretty.
I have spent the past 10 years of my life working in coffee, creating photography and video content for more than 12 leading companies in the coffee industry. Most of them are American-based.
I've been traveling throughout Central and South America, visited and documented more than 600 stories of coffee farmers and coffee families. I like to spend most of my time reading. I love just moving my body and working out. I really feel like, without that, I don't know how to be alive and I'm pretty passionate about just learning, learning about the family history of people and about languages.
I find those two so connected to who I am. I left Colombia when I was 16 years old. I moved to China and then I moved to Argentina to become a professional photographer. And now I'm here in the U.S. I always had issues with this concept of belonging. I always felt like so detached from my culture, from my country.
I always felt like I didn't belong anywhere. So that has been my quest: trying to find where I belong and how to finally answer that question for myself, so that's who I am
.Ashley: It's funny that you basically made the perfect segue into the title of your book. Which is called “We Belong.” I was wondering if you could give people the elevator speech of what your book is about.
Lucia: This is always a hard question because it's been evolving since I launched my book and since I landed my book because there is a big difference between launching and landing a project. But I would like to call my book an artistic exploration of the lives of 25 women, Colombian women—coffee farmers and coffee pickers.
This book is divided in seven chapters and each chapter has from three to four stories where we explore their lives through this humanistic approach. And we learn about what they do, where they come from, where their dreams are, what their struggles are, and the photography is pretty intimate and the texts are pretty straightforward, but also poetic—and yeah, I think that's what my book is about.
Across the pages, you're gonna travel from one human struggle to the other one. But then you also have this human flourishing, as I like to call it, which is something we all humans experience. I think that's what my book is about.
There's no other book like mine, and it's not to call myself like an innovative person, but it's because we need more of this in coffee. I feel this book is so unique. So that is what my book is about.
Ashley: I was wondering, did you grow up with coffee in your life?
Lucia: Did I grow up with coffee in my life? Well, I was born in a region that has been traditionally known for coffee production, right? But funny enough, I knew on my mother's side of the family, I had a lot of connections to coffee. My grandfather founded a coffee town in Colombia that still exists, it's called Buena Vista. So I knew they had all this history in coffee but I didn't have the pleasure of meeting my grandfather. And he was also like a coffee merchant, he had a lot of coffee farms and his story seemed always so inspirational to the entire family, men and women.
I knew my grandmother was also from a coffee region in Colombia. So in that sense, you could say, yes, coffee was part of who I was, but really for me, I didn't feel a lot of connection to coffee in my household. We didn't really drink coffee or value coffee. We didn't know much about coffee.
So I will say I didn't grow up knowing about coffee. In fact, the first time I went to a coffee farm was when I was 21 years old in El Salvador.
Ashley: Oh wow.
Lucia: Where I'm from is like the tiniest little region in Colombia. So you can go to a farm from my home where I grew up—it’s 20 minutes to go to a coffee farm, but I never went to a coffee farm, so yeah, it is pretty funny.
I was like embedded inside this coffee region, but I never got to explore coffee until I was 21.
Ashley: What made you want to write this book? You mentioned that this book ended up evolving and taking on a different shape than maybe you had originally planned. So I'm wondering, when you first proposed the book “We Belong,” which I'm sure wasn't even called “We Belong” when you first proposed it, what were you thinking about?
Lucia: So that was back in 2019. I was living in Colombia, in my hometown, and I was feeling so frustrated with the coffee industry, so frustrated and upset because at that point I had been working in the coffee industry for eight years, but still I felt like an outsider. I felt like I was never gonna get granted the key to belong into the coffee industry, just because I was a photographer and just because I was a content creator, so no one in the coffee industry saw me as a coffee person.
That really made me upset because, throughout these years, I've become so passionate about coffee, even more than photography—photography now is an excuse to me, but coffee is really what I strive for and I just love learning more.
So I had the, I've taken the time to learn—I’d taken barista courses, I’d taken cupping classes, I'd taken sustainability courses. I really spent a lot of my time learning, but still, I wasn't called a coffee person.
Rather than taking that frustration and feeling so upset and saying, “You know what? I'm just gonna leave the coffee industry,” I was like, “I guess I cannot wait anymore. I have to find my own path and my own platform to speak up and to share my opinion and to show through my lens what I think and value about the coffee industry.”
That is really the drive that took me on this path of making a book about women coffee farmers. When I had this frustration and I was like, “I really feel I need to create something on my own and it has to be something connected to my expertise and my language,” which is photography.
I started going through my portfolio just trying to see what is the best way to approach or what is the best topic to talk about in a book or to document, and I realized that most of the stories that I have documented photographs of were stories of men coffee farmers.
Women were in some of the photos, they were in family portraits, they were in photos in the kitchen, but they were not the ones telling the stories. It was always men telling the stories, and they were the protagonists of the stories.
I am a big believer that stories are the narrative of our culture. I felt like, as a woman, as a Latina, and as a woman working in coffee, it was my responsibility to change that and to start telling the new stories and shifting this part of them, of what coffee farming is, right. That's when I decided to make a book about Colombian women, coffee farmers, and coffee pickers.
The funny thing is the book has been called “We Belong” since day one, and I have no idea how this name came to my mind. It was kind of magical.
I remember when I decided, “Okay, I'm gonna make a book.” And I saw this idea just being so … huge in my mind. I was like, “This is gonna take me years to make.” But it's something that I was really sure of, is it was gonna be named “We Belong.” And I remember when I started structuring the book and creating the content with my team, we had a discussion because they were not so sure about the name.
They told me, “I don't know if ‘We Belong’ is the right name for the book.”
And I was like, “You guys can change anything about my book. You can tell me that this photo doesn't fit or that this story has to be rewritten. But you cannot change the name of this book. It is ‘We Belong.’” I don't know how this name came to me, but now that I've finished the book, now that I’ve had some months after it is been published, I feel that the name couldn't fit the book in a better way.
Ashley: Yeah, especially considering what you said earlier about trying to find your place in the coffee industry, and one of the things that we were saying before we started recording is that it's interesting how stories that don't start out as autobiographical end up becoming deeply autobiographical.
In the introduction of this book, you talk about your grandmother and you talk about this idea of her being the protagonist of her own story and that theme flows throughout the entire book.
And I was wondering if you could maybe speak more to this idea of the protagonist, of women being the central figures, being the main characters of the story. Just to give folks a couple of really quick facts—I feel like these are things that have maybe been shared on Boss Barista before—but something like 70% of the labor done on coffee farms are done by women, and oftentimes that gets ignored because maybe they're not the landholders, maybe they're not the ones making the financial transactions.
And also just because of patriarchy, of the way that we've been conditioned to tell stories and the way that we've been conditioned to center the narratives of men over stories of women who often become the secondary characters, like you were saying in photography. Sometimes they end up being the person in the family photo or the person in the kitchen, but they're not the person telling the story. So how did you really think about putting women as the protagonist of their story?
And furthermore, how did you see that with your own grandmother?
Lucia: I feel like, as you were saying that, there's so much data that back all this up, so many studies that put so much pressure on women, and I feel like that's good to a certain extent—knowing that, because it's not only about knowing that on most coffee farms, female coffee farmers are doing most of the labor in the farms.
But on top of this, they're also taking care of the children, taking care of the house, cooking for the farmers—for the workers, sorry. But we don't see this as part of being a coffee farmer. It's separated.
Ashley: Right. We don't see that as labor.
Lucia: Exactly. It's, “Oh, that's what women do on farms.” That's one part of the story.
The other part is I feel like they're betting on women for the future of the coffee industry. And you read this everywhere: It’s like, “If we give the power to female coffee farmers, if they're the ones in the decision-making roles, we could grow the coffee industry.” Because it's been shown that they know how to maintain a family. They will reinvest in the farm.
I do feel this is a lot of pressure to put on women coffee farmers. Because they haven't been exposed to a lot of the trainings. They haven't been exposed to the real markets where you sell coffee, where you negotiate.
So for me, why it was important to publish a book where women coffee farmers were the protagonists is because we haven't even heard their stories. We don't even know who they are. We don't even know what they want. We don't even know how they feel. So how can we as a coffee industry design women coffee projects and put all this pressure on women coffee farmers if we don't even know who they are?
So for me, I think that is the starting point—knowing who these humans are—because that's the only way that we could work with them to build projects that are focusing on what they need. That really was one of the goals behind this book and why I thought it was really important for women to be the protagonist of this book.
Ashley: I wanna jump in because I wanna talk about your grandmother maybe separately from this, even though it's related to this question, but I think you're absolutely right to pull that idea of data out because you're right—there's all this data that says if we reinvest in women-owned farms, they can do all these things because we know X, Y, and Z.
That's great. That's good information to know. But I think something that you do talk about in your book is that the data is really limiting because it kind of lumps everybody together. And like you were saying, it doesn't consider the humanity of the people that we're talking about.
We're lumping in groups of people without asking them, “What do you need?” And treating people as individuals.
Lucia: Exactly. I totally agree with you. I feel like a lot of how we approach the supply chain is we know better—we know better than them, and we know what they need. And we are hiring experts and they're telling us all this data. So this is the way we're gonna do it, but really we don't know.
A lot of the identity behind rural women, not only in Colombia, in a lot of South America it's something that—I like to call it the stories that is the narrative of our culture. We are really at a point where we need to know first what they believe, the stories they've heard, and the stories they're passing on to their children to be able to say, “Are you sure this is the story you wanna keep telling yourself?”
So yeah, I completely agree with you.
Ashley: In the introduction, you talk a lot about your grandmother, and one of the quotes that I wrote down is, “My grandmother's stories and my inability to truly see her…”
It seems like that really fueled your approach to this book—obviously we're talking about these big macro ideas of how data is interpreted, how we make decisions in coffee based on this [idea of] “we think we know better” when we look at actors in the supply chain.
But there's this point too, in the very beginning, where the book is incredibly, deeply personal. And it's not just about you necessarily telling stories about yourself and your grandmother, but it's about a transformation for you. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that: When did you realize that you hadn't fully seen your grandmother and what was that changing point?
What was that transformation point for you? When you were like, “This is me fully seeing her?”
Lucia: Yeah, that's a great question, Ashley. When I began “We Belong” the project, I never thought it was gonna be about me or it was gonna touch me so deep in my heart and it was gonna be about my family and how I felt as a woman. I never thought that this is what this book was gonna become.
But when I was halfway through my travels—I visited 62 farmers and pickers, so it was like halfway, I was living in Medellín with my husband. We moved around Colombia while I was making the book. So I took some time halfway just to sit down and basically digest all the interviews because, at that point, the book was not gonna have any text. It was gonna be just a photography book, like a pure photography book, only photos.
But, but I felt so emotionally charged and like I heard so many stories at that point that I felt so heavy and I was like, “I need to like dump all this feeling somewhere.”
So I sat down in a cafe for a month, every single day in the afternoon, just writing and writing and writing. Basically things that I heard, things that they were telling me in between lines. It was not so clear, but I knew what they were telling me and when I started doing this exercise, I was like, “I heard this before. This seemed so familiar to me.”
Stories like, “I couldn't finish high school,” “My grandfather, my father didn't let me finish school,” “I became the mother of my siblings when I was eight,” “I've been working since I was 10 years old.” All of this felt familiar to me.
And one day when I was writing the story of Juana Ramírez, which is the first story of the book, it dawned on me. I was like, “Oh my God, this is the story of my grandmother. Theres are the stories that she's told me so many times.”
I like to say that, at some point when my grandmother was like 85, I had the pleasure of sharing so much time with her, I was getting tired of hearing the same stories, of her telling me, “Yeah, I really wanted to study, but my father didn't let me because I was the oldest and then I became the mother of the family because my mother was sick,” and when it dawned on me, I started crying—in this cafe full of people—and I had to call my mom and I was like, “How is it possible that we've never honored my grandmother?”
She was also a coffee farmer and it was thanks to her that this huge family—because my mom has 20 siblings—was able to raise these 20 children. It was because of her, because she was the one in charge and she was the one raising them and putting all these thoughts of education being crucial for their future.
So I was upset. Upset with my mom, upset with my family, because in that exact moment I realized that all my life, my family had told me stories about my grandfather and how I had to see him as the hero, as the star of the show. And my grandmother was always the one sitting behind and smiling and saying, “Yes, your grandfather was amazing.”
So that's really when it happened, and that really shook me because at that time I had a structure for the book. And it got to a point that I was like, “Maybe this book is not gonna be about Colombian women coffee farmers. Maybe this book is gonna be only about one Colombian women coffee farmer, which is my grandmother.”
But then I was like, “No, I think she embodies a lot of the things that these women have told me. So I'm just gonna embrace that, those sections of my grandmother's life into the stories of these women.” That's when it happened. And still to this day, I feel guilty that I never saw her as more than a loving grandmother, which is, as you were mentioning before, is part of the patriarchy because I was not raised in a family where women were not considered or listened [to].
In fact, my family was completely the opposite. My mom was the boss of the family. She was the one making more money. She was the one owning a company. She was the one always speaking up. But unfortunately, I was raised in a culture that is still super traditional. So you have all these preconceived notions that—they're unconscious.
That's when this transformative feeling began. I was like, first I need to relearn who I am as a woman first. I need to dig into these feminine roots in my own family, to be able to write this book and to be able to listen to these women how they deserve to be listened to.
Ashley: Speaking of listening to the women that you interviewed, I found it so mind-blowing—at one point you mentioned in the book that you're not a writer and that you didn't intend for this to be a book that had stories in it—but every single person that you photograph has a story, has details that you heard from them, or quotes that you heard from them.
And they're deeply personal on kind of both ends: on the details that these women graciously provide, but also on your end. I found myself being really moved in moments when you were like, “I spoke to this woman in Spanish, but she told me that she didn't speak Spanish very well because she speaks an Indigenous language and I presumed incorrectly that we would speak the same language,” or when you were trying to build trust in certain situations, how that looked. Or even the first interview that you did, you mentioned feeling nervous and the woman that you interviewed just kept talking and making that easy for you.
What was that interviewing process like and how did you try to build connection and trust? Because as a person who's interviewed a lot of people, I still don’t know the answer to that, and I still find myself being really humbled every time I interview somebody. But I find that experience of interviewing to be probably the most electrifying experience I've ever had the honor to feel, if that makes sense?
Lucia: I think it all narrows down to vulnerability, right? I feel like each visit, I didn't have any expectations because something that I pretty soon in this journey that I realized was I'm gonna be meeting women that maybe they don't inspire me at all. And then maybe I'm gonna be surprised, or in shock by some of the stories that these women are telling me. So really soon in this journey, I was like, “I just have to go to each of these farms with no expectations.”
I think that really helped me because the first question was like, “We're not here about to talk about coffee. We're not here about to talk about how you grow coffee or if you like it—we're here to talk about your childhood.” I feel that is really what unlocked trust because I think for all of us, childhood is the place where we develop a lot of our values, or even where we experience most of our traumas.
That that is the place where we build who we are for the rest of our lives. Because that's where we are like sponges, right? We're just learning and absorbing everything, so for them, that was mind-blowing. All of them told me—all of them told me—”No one has ever taken the time to ask me about my childhood, and more than that, to listen actively.”
They felt like I care and I truly care about just listening to their stories. So I think that really helped me. The other part that helped me was being a woman, being a Colombian woman, and being married, funny enough. So I got married in 2020 during the pandemic, and I came back to Colombia in 2021—I had to pause my project one year because of the pandemic. So I never thought that being married was gonna open up more doors because they were like, “Ah, you relate to me because you're also married.” So that helped me in some ways.
Also, my camera was always in my bag for the first five hours. I was not worried about taking photos immediately. I was just curious to learn about them—and they were so curious to learn about me as well, which is funny, right? You are the interviewer, but sometimes you get interviewed by people before you can interview them. And I think that also opens up this place where they feel like equals. “Okay, now I know about her, now I can tell her about me.”
So yeah, that's how I will answer that question.
Ashley: I like the way that you capped that: “That's how I’ll answer that question.”
It's hard because I think you're right: There's this assumption that when you're the interviewer, that you're the person asking questions, but you're really making space for vulnerability. You're making space for really deep and pointed questions, which is why I love interviewing.
It's like the opposite of small talk, which feels surface-level, or you're trying to be polite, or you're trying to, I don't know, create common ground in a way that maybe feels comfortable. But being vulnerable in interviewing is like the opposite of that because you're uncovering things or maybe asking questions that nobody has ever asked another person.
Was there a point where you realized the tenor of the questions that you needed to ask? Did your questions change and transform as you kept interviewing people? Because you interviewed a lot of women.
Lucia: Yeah. I've never been scared of asking questions, and this is something that I will have to thank my mom.
She's always told me: “Asking questions is for brave people—ask questions.” The worst that can happen is they tell you, “I'm not gonna answer it or I don't wanna talk about it.” So I feel that's why I was never scared of touching on issues or topics that were tough, like domestic abuse or losing a loved one.
And it's because we all gone through stuff like this. I've lost loved ones. I was born in Colombia, so I was also also touched by violence. I feel that that helped me a lot, and they didn't feel like I was trying to dig or to take advantage. It was more like, “No, she's genuinely trying to learn and genuinely asking because she wants to hear what we have to say.”
Ashley: Are there any stories or anything that somebody told you that—I don't wanna say that you still think about today, because I have to imagine that you think about everybody's stories in different ways—but I wonder if there was anything that shook you more than you expected?
Lucia: I think two things, and I think this is something I heard from many of them. It is not a particular story, and the first one is this idea of not feeling enough and not feeling worth it. I heard so many times during these travels from different women that they had such low self-esteem. And they were always telling me, “No, I really don't know how to answer this question,” or, “I don't wanna be photographed. I don't like the way I look. I look so ugly,” or, “No, I don't wanna be the one in charge of the finances of the farm because what do I know? My husband is gonna do it better for me.”
That's really something that I still, to this day, I think about, because this is also a struggle of mine. And I think a struggle of most women, we always feel that we are incapable, that we are inferior. And it's because that is the foundation stories that our culture shows: that women are weak, women are inferior, we're not capable of doing the same things that men do. So that's the first one.
The second one is this idea that these women have gone through so many traumatic experiences and they've never had the chance to even put sound and cadence to those experiences. So in almost half of the interviews I did, I always receive comments like, “This is the first time I'm telling this. This is the first time I'm sharing this. Oh my God, I feel so light. I feel like I was carrying a heavy thing in my back, and finally I put it down.”
So this is related completely to mental health, and I've been a survivor of depression, of severe depression. I never—or it was not something I thought was gonna be shown through this interviews. Like my biggest fear, mental health, my biggest monster that chased me for so many years, was gonna come into this project.
Those two things. Mental health and low self-esteem. As I mentioned to you before, that's when you realize that no matter who we are, where we're from, what we do, what our work or profession is, we're all being touched by human struggles.
That is the universal, the common ground. We suffer, but we also flourish, but we also have dreams. We just wanna get better. We wanna accomplish things. I think those two topics are topics that are still, to this day, I cannot stop thinking about them.
Ashley: I feel like for the fact that there's so many photos in this book—we haven't talked about the photos as much, and I want to go back to that because I think something that you said that some of these women didn't feel like they were worthy of being photographed, or they were hesitant about the way that they looked.
How did you have to approach the photography in any different way? Because I think there's something—I don't wanna say easy, and maybe this is just me being naive because I'm not a photographer and I'm an interviewer—and I can imagine the scenario of interviewing somebody. I can imagine the process of building trust and you said you stayed with a couple of these women for days, so that process unfolds, it happens over time.
How did you approach photographing people, because that feels like a completely different intimate process?
Lucia: Funny enough, you have to start with a conversation. So you start without having a camera, but that is part of the photographic process, talking. So I will say most photographers—we’re also interviewers. Interviewers because if you see a photographer that immediately pulls out the camera and starts shooting, they don't know what they're doing.
You first have to learn about the subject you're gonna photograph. So for me, that is a key part of this photographic process. That really puts these women in a more comfortable situation.
The second thing is I will never start with photos that are posed.
I will always start with exploring their houses, the places they like on the farm, and just taking photos of things, not them. So they feel like, “Okay, she wants to learn about how my kitchen looks or she wants to see my family photo album”, so that immediately detaches this idea that photography is only about you posing in front of me.
Also telling them how important this is, telling them, “This is your platform to not only talk, but to be listened to. So you have the responsibility to share in the most genuine way who you are, because who you are is also related to a lot of the women behind that are not gonna be part of this project.”
So I think that really helped. They knew, “Oh my God, I'm the advocate here” and they get to show who Colombian women coffee farmers are. And then just being playful. That is part of being a photographer as well. Letting people just play around, be goofy. For me, that really helps.
Photography is not about looking pretty. Photography is not about looking perfect because there is no such a thing. Photography—and when you really capture a photo that tells the story, it's because you capture the soul of that person. So I told them, “You guys have to detach from this idea of ‘I wanna look a certain way.’ You have to show who you are inside in these photos.” That's what I want from this photographic process.
For me, that's the way I work with these women and at the end they wanna be photographed because they feel important. They feel finally, “I'm having an opportunity to be listened and I feel I'm the protagonist. So, okay, I'll do it. Maybe it's tough, but I'll do it.”
By the end of each of the visits, they will tell me, “Lucia, can you wait a minute? I wanna put on some lipstick,” or, “I wanna fix my my hair,” or, “I wanna change my clothes because I wanna look certain way.” And that's fun. That's fun to see that just by approaching someone, listening to her story, telling them what you wanna do and why you wanna do it immediately, that shifts their mindset and they're like, “Okay, I think I can do it, but I wanna do it in my own terms.” And I love that because at the end, the subject has the power. It's not the photographer, it's the subject that has the power.
Ashley: I love that. I love that idea of giving the subject the power, because I think that just ties into all of the themes of your book about making women the protagonist, hearing their stories, and I think one of the things that really touched me in this book, and you kind of hit on it a little bit, is the idea of transformation and change.
How often the stories that you tell aren't static stories. They're not like, “This is this person and this is what they do.” They're stories that move and that reflect, “I was in this place at one point in my life and now I'm here and these are the lessons that I've learned along the way,” which, as I look at the book again, and these snippets are maybe between 200 and 600 words, you capture so much movement.
Lucia: Thank you.
Ashley: And I think that that's part of—I don't know if de-stigmatizing is the right word, but kind of removing this idea of women as a statistic, as a data point. “We see this data, so we're gonna do X, Y, and Z.” Because that's static. That just stays in one place versus the stories that you tell are stories of transformation and change.
And I wonder if that was always obvious or did that come as you were writing?
Lucia: When you decide to embark on such a huge project, you know by the end of the project, you have to change, right? And I've changed so much and the book—what I thought of the book was gonna look like changed. Tremendously.
But the other thing—and this is something that recently I've been thinking more and more—and is that, so when I published the book, there's some information for each farmer. We decided to put the age, the size of the farm, the region where they're from. And all of these things at that time were more to give some context.
When I launched the book in Colombia, in Bogota, on March 15th of this year, I decided to invite two of the protagonists of the book, one farmer and one coffee picker.
At the end, I was like, “This book is not about me. So if we're gonna launch this book and we're gonna celebrate this book, they need to be part of the celebration. If not, we cannot celebrate. What are we celebrating here? If they're not part of this—” I’m not being coherent to this idea that they need to be part of the project. To be able to say, “Yeah, they know what we're doing and they're giving their opinion.” Two companies helped me and we brought them to Bogota.
Why I'm telling you this story is because the coffee picker that came to the event, she's Cristina Álvarez. She's in the book. She was one of the youngest women that I interviewed and photographed. When I interviewed her, the whole time, she kept telling me, “I am scared to talk to you. You seem way more educated than I am. I don't think what I have to say is important.”
And I kept telling her, “No, it's not about the way you speak. I'm interested and curious about your story. Your story is as important as mine.”
So we kept just talking and talking and talking and she told me that her biggest dream was to study, but she knew that she wouldn't be able to study. So she basically settled with the life she has.
At some point she told me that her biggest dream was to come to the capital of Colombia, Bogota. So she was right there in Bogota, sitting across from me in this cafe full of people ready to listen to what she had to say, because we had a Q&A session during the book launch event where people got to ask the women whatever they wanted to ask.
She told me at the end of the event, “Lucia, I don't know what I'm gonna do now.”
And I was like, “What do you mean?”
And she told me, “I just achieved my biggest dream, the only dream I had, which was to come to Bogota. So what am I gonna do now?”
I was kind of speechless for a little. I was like, “What am I supposed to tell her?”
I was like, “You know what? Let's open the book. Let's go to your story and let's read it again. You're not the same woman I photographed. You're not the same woman I interviewed and you're not the same woman from this story—this is Cristina from last year. And you can see it because your age changed, what you're saying here has changed.”
This whole long story is just to tell you that the stories of this book, all these women are now different. They're now different because their story has been read by so many people. They not only have voices now, but their voices are being heard and they're realizing that they can dream bigger.
That they don't have to settle with the life they have, that they don't have to settle with the way they thought about themselves, but that they can change. I feel this book could be written today again, and I know these stories will be different, and that's the beautiful thing about creating from an artistic approach because that just lets you touch on things that otherwise you wouldn't be able to.
I've been getting so many comments from agronomists that travel with me, from people, from companies that supported my work telling me like, “I don't know what you did when you went there, but this woman seems different. They're talking in a different way,” and I keep in touch with them and they keep telling me, “You coming here really change how I feel about myself.”
We send the photos back because a lot of them have had the chance to look at the book, and when they see themselves there, they're like, “I'm different now. I feel different now.” And for me, that's the biggest gift from this book.
Ashley: I wanna touch on two things that you said while you told the story. So I went to Cristina’s page as you were talking, and I'm glad that you talked about her because she said maybe the most devastating thing I've ever read, especially in this book. This quote that she has—I had to read it a couple of times.
So there's a point she says, “I wish I had someone to support me, but now it is late. I currently believe that dreams will remain dreams.” And then you say, “It feels like Cristina has a flat acceptance of the life she was offered.” That line—”Cristina has a flat acceptance of the life she was offered”—and then hearing the story of her saying, “I achieved my biggest dream,” and you then going back and saying, “You're different, you're a different person.”
I think that there's something so beautiful about small moments of transformation, that we often overlook how a conversation can be transformative. How asking a question that nobody has ever asked can be transformative, and I think that we think of life-changing moments as these big, grandiose things, but conversations are life-changing, moments of care are transforming and they can be that small.
They can be as small as asking a question. I love that you pointed out that this book, if you wrote it today, it would be different. It would be different stories. The women would be different. I don't know, there's just something to be said about just taking the time to truly sit and listen to people and how transformative that can be.
And that's something that we also talked about in the beginning before we started recording, was how powerful it is to listen and to become a listener and to have a conversation where it isn't just two people talking to each other, it's two people deeply taking in what the other person is saying and responding to that and reflecting it back and—I don't know, there's just something so beautiful about …
Yeah—you get in there.
Lucia: I feel like sometimes we take for granted this idea of being listened to, but when you look at like therapy, the traditional therapy, basically, that's what it is. No one really listens to us, and that is something that all humans need.
So now we pay people to listen to us. That is how sad it is. So the biggest gift you can give someone, the most valuable gift is just to really sit down and listen, not to advise someone, just to listen to someone.
I feel like a lot of the, as you were saying, when we think about change and changing the world and making an impact in this planet, we see it as a huge thing. But I think with this small little things and impacts, it's even more powerful. I feel like a lot of the issues with Colombian women, coffee farmers, and coffee pickers is this idea of mindset.
I think like they have a mindset and because they haven't been able to explore it and to express how they feel, they haven't questioned themselves because they don’t have the tools to change and to shift that mindset and to realize, “Oh my god, yes, I'm capable of doing this. Oh my god, yes. Things have to change in this farm. I cannot let my husband be the one making all the decisions,” or, “This is what I wanna do,” or, “This is how I feel.”
But because they haven't had the chance to express this and be listened [to], they haven't questioned this. I do feel like a lot of this the process of asking yourself questions, this internal work is more powerful than anything.
You can be given all the opportunities in the world. You can be the luckiest person in the world, but if you don't understand who you are and you don't have a good relationship and an honest relationship with yourself, how can you then see everything you deserve and how can you pave the road to know where you wanna go to?
It all boils down to mindset and it all boils down to being physically, emotionally, and mentally healthy. I feel it's not about the coffee, it's not about the beverage, it's not about paying more, it's not about climate change because if we don't have healthy coffee farmers and coffee families, we won't have any coffee industry at all.
So for me, it's about the humans, and this is something we need to remind ourselves and we need to find places where we can see the other person, even if it's a roaster, or even if it's a barista, or even if it's a photographer, a coffee photographer, we see each other as the same, the same humans.
We're the same. We just happen to be born in different places. We just happen to have different professions and different dreams. But at the end, we're all the same, no matter how much money we have, no matter how difficult our lives are. For me, I think that is what is really transformative and that is what, as an artist, that's what I strive for, which is creating art that is universal and art that can tie us together.
Ashley: I think that's such a powerful takeaway. To realize how important being listened to and expressing your feelings and telling your story is, and it seems like you've taken that lesson from writing the book to continue further work. So I was wondering if you could talk about the Beans to Minds project that you're working on.
Lucia: I'm so excited about this. So at the beginning I told you that my book was launched in March 2023, but at that point it was just launched, it was not landed right? Because when you create a project, you launch the project and this only means that you finish the task and it's out. But really what, as the creator behind this project, when you feel like the real satisfaction is when you land the project and landing the project means was it successful? Did you accomplish the goals after publishing? So did people like it? What is the feedback? Did you sell books?
But one goal that I had to be able to say that I had landed this book was a promise that I made all these women.
So when I visited each of these women, we signed a contract. This contract was really important to me because in this contract it was pretty clear how I was going to use these photos, how I was going to use these stories, for how long. And the other thing is I was committed to donating a percentage of the proceeds from the book sales and that I was gonna give it back to them at some point after publishing the book.
I think most of them forgot about that because the reality is when companies go to coffee-producing countries to create content, they often say, “Yeah, you're gonna become famous. That's why we need your photo. This is the way that we're gonna sell more coffee.” They often see this idea of taking photos like, “Ugh, this is just fake. We know that we're getting nothing out of this.”
So I think all of them forgot about it, but it was something in my mind constantly, in my mind, “Okay, what am I gonna do?” So what I decided to do is that all my book launches, which were four events, I collected all the earnings from the book sales to donate it back to them. So each of the book launches were really important to me because that's really when I got to talk about the book and receive feedback immediately. So in all of these book launches, I mentioned the mental health part and how I thought it was really crazy that there's not a, maybe there are a [in a] few companies, but most coffee companies haven't invested in mental health for their farmers.
I thought that this could be a transformative tool and this could be really where if you want farmers to change their mindset, to understand that this is bigger, to be more open to new ideas: it all narrows down to mental health. I'm a big believer that you cannot wait for things to be done and I cannot wait for companies to do something about it. I was gonna do it myself.
What I decided to do is, with this money that I collected and I'm donating back to them, I'm structuring a pilot project that is called Beans to Minds. This project aims to provide mental health and wellness support to all the women that participated in the creation of “We Belong.”
So I'm structuring this project with the help of two psychologists. The two of them are women and they have experience working with rural communities in Colombia. We're gonna implement this project in the next few months, and we're gonna implement it virtually. And right now, we have 80% of the funds to be able to implement it.
I just launched a donation campaign because when I started structuring the project and looking at the budget, I was like, “No, we need a little bit more money to be able to implement this project successfully.” This is what I'm gonna start doing in the next few months. And right now, 40 women confirmed that they wanna participate.
The most like mind-blowing thing out of this is that when I talk to each of these women, 80% of them told me, “I know how important mental health is and I know I need it.” So this shows that they need it and they know they need it. This is what I'm doing right now and I feel this is really what is gonna make me [feel like I’ve] accomplished publishing this book.
Because it's not about just selling books. It's not about receiving comments. It's about really making an impact in the lives of these women that have given me so much.
Ashley: Lucia, thank you so much for taking time to chat with me. I could ask you like 7,000 more questions and maybe at some point we'll do like a more writing-focused one because I wanna ask you more questions about interviewing and photography and all of that.
Thank you again for taking the time to chat with me.
Lucia: No, thank you Ashley. It's been lovely conversation and I always like to say thank you for giving me time out of your day on a platform to speak up about all these crucial issues that are so unspoken. So thank you.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Lucia Bawot Redefines the Protagonist of the Story