Judith returned to land that had waited.
Kevin Román is part of the same story — just a generation further on.
Kevin grew up in Lima, far from the pace of farm life. Like many Peruvians whose families migrated during the late twentieth century, he was raised in neighbourhoods shaped by those movements. Yet his family's roots lay deep in the mountains.
His great-grandfather, Maximiliano Quintana, arrived in the Huyro Valley in the 1940s to work on a large agricultural estate. Workers were often granted small parcels of land in exchange for labour.
It was on one of these plots that Kevin's family story began.
Stories from that time filled his childhood.
He heard how his aunts, as young girls, carried food to the guerrillas of Hugo Blanco — the agrarian reform leader whose movement spread through the valley during the years of unrest. He heard about the struggle for land. The reform that returned fields to those who worked them. And the Huyro Tea Cooperative — the structure that once held the valley's economy together.
When it collapsed, families left.
Other stories described Huyro as something else entirely.
Fruit trees. Vegetables. Fertile mountain land.
For Kevin, growing up in Lima, it sounded almost mythical.
"A paradise — a kind of promised land."
Lima, With Huyro Underneath
Kevin's mother left the valley to pursue university studies — the youngest of seven sisters, all of whom eventually migrated to Cusco or Lima. She had grown up without her own mother, raised by Kevin's grandfather, Teófilo Enríquez. Her plan had always been to study, then bring him to live with her.
Kevin grew up surrounded by other migrant families.
Although proud of his rural heritage, the identity of being a farmer's descendant was not always easy to carry.
"Children of farmers were often bullied at school," he remembers.
Still, the connection to Huyro never disappeared.
When he was four years old, his family returned to the valley for a year — the first time his mother had been back since leaving home. The memories remain vivid.
A green landscape filled with fruit trees and animals. Spring water running through fermentation tanks where coffee was processed. Drying patios where beans lay in the sun — and where Kevin played with his cousins.
After that year the family returned to Lima, but visits continued whenever they could manage the 30-hour journey across the Andes.
Six Soles
For much of his youth Kevin imagined his life unfolding entirely in the city.
He studied accounting and expected to pursue a professional career in Lima. Coffee remained part of family history rather than a personal vocation.
That changed during a visit to his grandfather.
Curious about the economics of farming, Kevin asked how much a kilo of coffee sold for at the farm gate.
The answer stunned him.
"Six soles. The same price as an espresso in Lima."
The disparity stayed with him.
How could something produced with so much labour be worth so little?
Kevin enrolled in a barista course at Bisetti Roasters, learning about specialty coffee and global markets. He began spending harvests on the farm, moving in with his grandfather to understand the land from the inside.
In 2021, his grandfather died at eighty-four.
Kevin had to ask himself a question he had been circling for years.
Did he truly want to dedicate his life to coffee?
Reciprocal Labour
In 2022 Kevin began working with coffee producers from the Huyro region who had submitted a lot to the Cup of Excellence competition. His role was simple: help them promote and sell their coffee in Lima.
Through that experience he saw both the potential and the limitations facing small producers.
The solution, he realised, was organisation.
In 2023 Kevin and ten producers established the AYNI Association.
AYNI — A Quechua principle of reciprocal labour and mutual support. Families and neighbours help one another with planting, harvest or construction, knowing that the labour will one day be returned. For centuries this system has sustained Andean agricultural communities. Today producers in Huyro are reviving ayni as the foundation of their coffee association.
The Day the Community Arrived
When Kevin became president of the association, the other members gave him a challenge.
If he wanted to work alongside them, he needed to become a farmer too.
The opportunity came through family land — a parcel his grandfather had once owned in Inkatambo, at 2200 metres above sea level. It was a neighbour and fellow producer, Luisa Zamalloa, who first led him there.
One afternoon they grabbed machetes and sacks and went to find it.
They crossed a stream running down from the ravine, walked along the road that connects Cusco to Quillabamba, and arrived at a plot so overgrown with weeds and grass it was impossible to walk through. They skirted the entire boundary, returned to the road, and stood there for a moment.
Then they laughed.
They'd be neighbours soon enough.
In 2024, Kevin began establishing what he calls Teo's Farm — named in honour of his grandfather Teófilo.
One day in particular remains vivid.
The day the community arrived to help.
Through the tradition of ayni, neighbours brought tools, food and labour. They cleared land together in the rain. At lunchtime they sat on freshly cut logs eating plantains brought from nearby farms. They shared coca leaves and chicha de jora, and offered a small ceremony to the Apus — the mountain spirits — asking protection for the land.
For Kevin, it felt like something larger than a farm beginning.
It felt like a community rebuilding itself.
Kevin's story — like Judith's, like Andrés's — begins with a connection to land that survived distance and time. But these producers are not working in isolation. As Peru's coffee farms come back to life, something else is shifting too: for the first time, the coffee they grow is being encountered, brewed and celebrated inside Peru itself. A domestic coffee culture is taking shape — and it's changing what it means to grow Peruvian coffee.
→ Read next: Coffee Comes Home — how Peru is beginning to drink its own
