Homegrown Foodways Film Premiere: El Motor: Coffee and the Heart of Puerto Rico

This year’s American Folklife Center Homegrown Foodways Film Series, among other programs and events, is dedicated to celebrating the Center’s Community Collections Grants (CCG) program recipients, their projects, and community traditions. As part of the year-long celebration, we collaborated with CCG awardee and filmmaker Russell Oliver whose film, El Motor: Coffee and the Heart of Puerto Rico, premieres today on the Library of Congress YouTube channel and right here, below! The film is based on Oliver’s 2022 CCG Project, Documenting the Stories, Agricultural Traditions, and Culture of Specialty Coffee Farmers in Puerto Rico.

As Russell notes, “El Motor: Coffee and the Heart of Puerto Rico captures the challenges of farming alongside moments of triumph, revealing how Puerto Rico’s coffee farmers preserve tradition while adapting for the future. From the careful selection of ripe cherries to the rhythmic drying of beans under the Caribbean sun, witness how coffee sustains families and fuels the island’s spirit. More than a crop, coffee emerges as el motor—the enduring engine of cultural pride, community resilience, and hope for generations to come.”

In honor of the premiere, I was able to interview Russell about the film and larger project.

The last time we interviewed you, your Community Collections Grant project, Documenting the Stories, Agricultural Traditions, and Culture of Specialty Coffee Farmers in Puerto Rico, on which the film is based, was about halfway underway …and it is now long finished. Let’s first start with what it focused on and how it turned out.

The project focused on preserving the legacy of specialty coffee farmers and producers in Puerto Rico. Over the past few years spent in the island’s coffee highlands, I earned the trust of local farmers—true coffee masters who uphold generations of tradition and persevere despite economic and climatic challenges. Through their stories, I documented the agricultural practices and production methods shaping the island’s coffee culture and its future.

I positioned myself in the heart of it all—Yauco, Guayanilla, Adjuntas, Jayuya, Maricao, Lares, Utuado—places so deep in the mountains a phone goes straight to ‘No Service’ and leaves one to his thoughts. Turns out, being unreachable is the best way to truly be there: present for farmer’s stories, laughter, and the quiet rhythm of their life between the work. I documented everything—the pride in their voices, the daily grind (pun intended), even tools worn smooth by decades of use.

The result was 28 interviews, 2,000 photographs, and hours of footage—including drone shots that captured coffee farms clinging to Puerto Rico’s mountainous region, with their rows following the natural contours of the land. But the real value emerged in stories like that of José Bernardo Morales—an 88-year-old farmer whose life embodied Puerto Rico’s agricultural soul. His memories reveal both the fragility and tenacity of this way of life; of women harvesting coffee while men tended the land, of hurricanes devastating crops just as they were recovering, and of generations sustained by the rhythm of the harvest.

Now to be safeguarded in the American Folklife Center archives, these materials ensure the voices of Puerto Rico’s farmers will endure—a testament to their resilience, and a call to protect what remains.

So, based on your project, you have created the film, El Motor: Coffee and the Heart of Puerto Rico. Congratulations! What were you trying to capture in the film?

My film El Motor: Coffee and the Heart of Puerto Rico is a rich and heartfelt exploration of Puerto Rico’s specialty coffee industry, weaving together personal narratives, cultural heritage, and the challenges and triumphs of coffee farming. Through the voices of farmers and producers I explored themes of heritage, resilience, and passion, showing how coffee is not just a crop but a sacred tradition that sustains communities and identities. While celebrating their pride in producing quality coffee the film highlights challenges—labor shortages, economic hardships, and the delicate balance between modern efficiency and traditional methods. I wanted to convey the artistry behind every step, from seed to cup, and the deep sense of purpose that drives these farmers, even when the work is grueling and the rewards are modest. Ultimately, the film is a tribute to coffee as the lifeblood of Puerto Rico’s mountainous regions and a testament to the enduring spirit of those who dedicate their lives to it.

Documenting people’s traditions and practices can be quite different from making an edited and polished film. I wonder if there are any differences in your approach to making El Motor?

Absolutely. Documenting traditions and practices in their raw form is fundamentally different from shaping them into a polished film, and El Motor required a balance of both approaches. On one hand, I approached this as an ethnographic project—capturing unfiltered voices and practices exactly as they existed. The interviews were open-ended, the footage observational. When a farmer described coffee as sacred or demonstrated the painstaking process of selective harvesting, those moments weren’t directed; they emerged naturally, complete with pauses, imperfections, and the ambient sounds of farm life.

Yet to make these experiences resonate with audiences, I had to shape this raw material into a cohesive narrative. The edit became an act of careful curation—finding through-lines between personal stories and universal themes, like how tradition collides with economic realities. I preserved the authenticity of each voice while creating rhythm and emotional arcs. For instance, juxtaposing a farmer’s pride in his farm with his frustration over labor shortages revealed deeper truths about cultural preservation.

The magic happened in maintaining that balance—letting the footage breathe with documentary integrity while structuring it to illuminate larger truths about Puerto Rico’s coffee culture. The farmers’ stories remained uncompromised, but through editing, their individual experiences became part of a collective portrait.

Turning back to the larger project, as it is currently being processed to become an archival collection in the AFC archives (and made available online, on the Library of Congress website), I am curious about your reflections on its importance …what stories does it tell?

The project is a profoundly important endeavor, and its preservation in the American Folklife Center (AFC) archives at the Library of Congress ensures that it will be accessible to future generations.

This project preserves living history—the kind that echoes in Roberto Atienza’s voice when he speaks of his grandfather. A boy arriving from Spain, hands already calloused from planting Jayuya’s first coffee trees. “He dedicated his life to growing coffee,” Roberto recalls, and in that simple phrase, we hear the weight of generations. Puerto Rico’s coffee culture is more than agriculture; it’s identity carved into mountainsides, resilience rooted in the soil, and knowledge passed down like a family heirloom. But this heritage risks being forgotten. When Remy Rodriguez calls coffee “tradition, culture, community,” he speaks to something far greater than a crop—he speaks to the heart of Puerto Rico’s highlands. His journey, from studying soil science to reviving hurricane-ravaged farms, mirrors the resilience of the very shade-grown coffee he cultivates. By archiving these stories in the AFC, we ensure these voices are not footnotes, but essential threads in the fabric of American heritage.

This collection preserves farming wisdom—like Pablo Muñoz’s hard-won lessons from reviving Hacienda Santa Clara, where he learned that specialty coffee demands “not just 20 pounds at $1, but 1 pound at $20.” This shifted the farm’s entire ethos from commodity production to specialty cultivation, proving that economic viability lies in excellence, not volume. It documents the impacts of climate change and economic shifts, and offers lessons in sustainability. And by making it accessible online, we invite the world to engage—whether as researchers, policymakers, or simply someone savoring a cup of Puerto Rican coffee, wondering about the hands that brought it to life.

Ultimately, this is more than preservation. It’s a bridge to the future—one Pablo built when he taught his children, just as his father did for him; that coffee is about cherishing both land and labor. When farmers see their stories preserved by the Library of Congress, it affirms their legacy—and inspires the next generation to carry these traditions forward. That is the power of documentation: it turns memory into movement.

Thank you, Russell. And congratulations, again, on your beautiful film. We look forward to when your project collection goes online for all to enjoy!

Don’t forget to watch the first film in this year’s AFC Homegrown Foodways Film Series, Bayous, Buddha, and Padaek: Southern Louisiana’s Lao Foodways, by filmmakers and CCG awardees Phanat Xanamane, Sami Haggood, and Ba Badar. Both films are also available on the Library of Congress YouTube channel.