Alex Webb/Magnum

We were abusing our little Mexican rental car by clattering vigorously up a potholed road in southern Chiapas, where somebody had told us to get breakfast at a place called the Casa Grande. Around us stretched the coffee plantations, which were deep green and luminous and looked as though they had been poured down the slope of the great volcano, Tacaná. There were orchids, tangles of bougainvillea, flashes of white whenever large birds rose and took wing. "Where the hell is this Casa Grande?" asked Germán Romero, who was driving. Germán is Mexican but spent a year in Wisconsin during high school and learned excellent idiomatic English. He hairpinned left, sighed, and kept climbing.

The state of Chiapas is nearly the size and shape of South Carolina, with a long, zigzag southeastern border that separates Mexico from Guatemala. Various places in Chiapas attract foreign visitors by the busload: Palenque, in the north, which has Mayan temples in the jungle; San Cristóbal de Las Casas, in the central highlands, which has narrow colonial streets and exquisite mountain light. This was not one of those places. We were 20 miles from the city of Tapachula, where my hotel room had an outdoor clothesline, a rattling air conditioner, and wall lizards. I liked Tapachula because the narrow downtown sidewalks were full of bustling teenagers and businessmen striding along holding cell phones to their ears, and there was a big public pool where for 50 cents I could hang my towel over a rusty nail and swim laps in water that chemicals had turned the color of Windex. Every time I came back from the pool, Germán and my other co-worker, American photographer Alex Webb, observed me briefly to check for rashes and then went back to their laptops.

Alex gets up at dawn when he's working, and on this particular morning he and Germán had shoveled me out of the hotel at first light so we could drive to the Tacaná coffee country to find migrants harvesting the beans. We were interviewing and photographing along the southern Mexico border, where the thick daily drama is the northward-bound crossing of undocumented Central Americans. Most are passing through Mexico en route to the United States, but here in the plantations beneath the top of the volcano, Guatemalans arrive on foot at the beginning of every harvest season, having traversed the mountain on narrow dirt paths; they stay long enough to earn Mexican pesos, then return home. Already in the early-morning hours we had stopped the car twice at the end of dirt roads to climb out and trace a few of those footpaths, following the glint of machetes as groups of coffee workers hurried ahead of us into the growth. The plantings were as tangled and random as live oak along an untended California hillside. The air was damp. "Buzzing and butterflies," I had written into my notes. "Two young teenage sisters, indigenous, speak Mamean, no Spanish. Older sister maybe 4'10", long blue skirt, black hair gathered in silver barrette, reaches up, bends a huge tree limb down with one hand so she can strip beans from it with the other."

My notebooks were filling with these people—migrants, outsiders, men and women propelled into exile, temporarily or permanently, by the need to find paying work. In southern Chiapas the story was older and richer than I had understood before I came; in Tapachula we had met not only Hondurans and Guatemalans and El Salvadorans and Nicaraguans, but also Chinese Mexicans and Japanese Mexicans, the grandchildren of agricultural workers who came to Chiapas in the early 1900s and stayed. I had met coffee growers with German surnames, their own grandparents the founders of the turn-of-the-century Chiapas plantations for the beans that were then becoming so popular in Europe. The Casa Grande, in fact, had been constructed as a plantation house by a family named Braun. Then the grounds it had been built on were nationalized during World War II and Herr/Señor Braun went back to Germany. The house fell into disrepair and finally some local businessmen decided to renovate it into a restaurant.

Germán peered at a small road sign with an arrow. "OK, I think here," he said, and turned in toward a driveway in the trees. A long sweep of lawn opened out before us. At the far end of the lawn, set off not by coffee trees but by tropical landscaping forming a walkway, stood a three-story balconied edifice of burnished wood and stone, with gables and porticos and columns and dormer windows and a complicated, pointed roof that made the whole building loom above the grounds like a massive pagoda. I swore appreciatively in Spanish. Germán swore appreciatively in English. Alex hefted a couple of his cameras and we went in to get some food.

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