The offers he turned down
October 2026
Roberto has been offered work in the city several times. Twenty-six years in the trade bring offers. He has turned down every one.
His reasoning is not sentimental. It is an inventory: where he lives there is safety, there is good food, and his family is with him. «We have everything,» he says. Coming from someone who worked in Tamaulipas and Veracruz before returning to San Luis Potosí, that comparison is not naive.
An uncle got him started
He was eighteen when an uncle took him to work the palm. They put him on sorting, separating good leaf from bad at a facility.
You would expect someone that age to treat it as a stopgap job. The opposite happened: «I know it is work that asks for a lot of care, and I liked it from the start.»
In time, some neighbours invited him to cut. He began going into the forest plots and turned out to be good at it: he came to gather between thirty and forty rolls a day.
Two trades, not one
Today Roberto does both. On weekdays he cuts in the field; on weekends he sorts at the facility.
That combination is less common than it sounds, and it has a practical consequence: someone who has spent years pulling bad leaf off a table recognises from the stem what is not worth cutting. The sorting judgement moves into the field.
That work supports his wife and four children, and keeps all of them in school.
The pickup
Roberto has one concrete goal: to buy a pickup.
It is not a whim. Without his own vehicle, how much he can bring out of the forest is decided by whatever transport is available, not by how much he can cut. The pickup is, in his terms, the difference between the work he does and the work he could do.
He believes palm has a future and is willing to bet on it. At forty-two, after more than two decades in the trade, that confidence says something about the trade itself.
The conversation took place in Ahuatitla, San Luis Potosí, where Roberto lives with his family.