by Dwight Wayne Coop

Chocolate is a nearly universal affinity, so there was nothing odd about Antonio Chávez liking it. But two things set him apart: his Mexican forebears had gobbled chocolate centuries before Europeans even had sugar; and his freakish devotion bred a chocolate dynasty.

Berta and Guadalupe de Izás remain today
as managers emeriti.

The word is rooted in Nahuatl, the tongue of raiding Toltecs who scourged the Mayan world with violent immigrations in the 14th and 15th centuries. They conquered places with names like Xelajú and gave them new names like Quetzaltenango. Among their provisions was a pleasantly bitter drink, xocolate; in time, they were growing it in the humid coastal plains.

A later migration of chocoholics, roughly following the same path, took place around 1897 when the Chávez brothers — José, Baltasar and Antonio — arrived in Xelajú from Michoacán State for reasons unknown. But they did join Xelajú’s Ladino elite, and Antonio fell for a local girl named Aurora. She lived in the big house of the Anzenona family — even after she wed Antonio.

So big was this house that Antonio filled the unused space in its kitchen with his imagination. In it, he saw a chocolate factory and — when he embellished the vision — his father-in-law did as well. So it was that in the year 1900 the aroma of ground cocoa began wafting from the house that still stands a few blocks east of Xelaju’s central park. But electrification, and the automation then possible with it, was still a generation away even in Guatemala’s second city. With all the excitement over chocolate, one would think that its manufacture involves an arcane battery of formulas and techniques. After all, weapons of mass destruction cannot be made by just anyone; why should chocolate — which to dieters is the weapon of mass autodestruction — be so easy?

4th and 5th generation chocolatiers Rubén
and son Vincente at work.

In principle, it is simple. The cocoa beans are soaked, fermented and dried; then they are toasted, the better to pop them from their bran husks. Next, they go through a grinder three times. The first pass reduces beans to butter; in the second, the butter is mated with sugar to become “pasta;” in the third, flavoring is added. Finally, the pasta is poured into moulds, where it cools into bricks of Superior-brand confection. In 25 words or less, this is — to extend the analogy — your basic homemade dietary weapon of mass autodestruction.

The details are the secret part of the recipes: the time the beans are roasted; where they come from and in what ratios they are blended; and the precise metering of secondary flavors — cinnamon, milk, almonds or vanilla. These specifications were finetuned at the Chávez-Anzenona house over decades into a product now exported to five continents. Though often eaten, this chocolate is more suitable — because of its coarse, large-grained texture — as a drink or as a condiment to hot cereals and atoles. Much of it goes into desserts.

This cottage-industrialism was the trail of footsteps Antonio and Aurora put down over a century ago for their 14 children to retrace. Three daughters survive: Christina, 94; Guadalupe, 83; and Berta de Izás, 79. The last two remain as managers emeriti, but the factory’s day-to-day oversight passed to Berta’s son Raúl Izás years ago. Raúl’s own sons are today broadening the scope of the family’s enterprises and civic activities, of which the Superior factory is only the oldest.

Pieces from the lunar collection at Café la Luna

A second dynasty, nearly as old as the first, exists among the factory’s employees. “My mother, Romelia, still makes chocolate here,” confectioner Rubén Choxom explains. “Her mother, Doña Alejandra, did the same. And before that her mother also made chocolate, though not at this factory.”

Rubén cannot remember the name of the employee-dynasty founder, his greatgrandmother. “I’ll have to ask my Mom.”

Wrapping bricks of chocolate across the table from Rubén is his ten-year-old son, Vicente — a fifth generation chocolatier. “My daughter, Sara also wants to make chocolate,” Rubén says. “But she’s only six.”

What became of the big house — apart from the factory? It is today a provincial Smithsonian, an attic for the State of Los Altos which, before its absorption by Guatemala, was briefly a sovereign nation in the years following independence. Xelajú was — and is — its capital city. A family that lives in one spot for a very long time, as the Chávez clan has in this capital, is bound to acquire stacks of old things. They also had a streak of coleccionismo to go with all this. But Raúl Izás, the current patriarch, no longer really collects; receives may be the better word.

“People just bring me old stuff and photos,” he says, “without my asking them.” Thousands of these items hang from the walls and ceiling of Café la Luna, the restaurant-museum separated by an internal wall from the factory. The café’s tables are shellacked over with old photos, news clips, broadsides, documents, and other Los Altos significa. Café la Luna is a cage where Los Altos lives on in revered, if disheveled, captivity.

Raúl established Café la Luna seven years ago in the other half of his ancestor’s kitchen. It is today an institution of Altense patriotism, complete with an old photo of Paco Pérez — creator of Xelajú’s (and Los Altos’) special anthem, Luna de Xelajú. The grizzled image hangs near a boxy old phonograph in an alcove that was once a scullery (and is today a dining room and museum exhibit). Behind the lock in this antique appliance rests a scratchy 45-rpm vinyl record of the song, sung by Pérez himself.

Like the miscarried country he wanted to belong to — Los Altos — Pérez diedpoignantly young, at 32. But his legacy, through the song, was the emergence of La Luna (the Moon) as the “national” symbol of Xelajú and its hinterland. Yet the crescent seen throughout the city also recalls the motif on the flags of Muslim countries.

“That’s only coincidence, of course” explains Raúl Izás with a grin. “Paco was no Muslim, or anything near it. He loved the Moon for its own sake.” Visitors who are aware of this will know what they are seeing in Xelajú’s windows, barroom walls and Spanish-school bulletin boards. La Luna is ubiquitous.

Nowhere is this truer than at Café la Luna, perhaps the world’s most eclectic — if not also the largest — collection of lunar stuff. Raúl estimates that the innumerable Moon items — ranging from cookie cutters and Christmas lights to buckles, candeleros and chocolate moulds — come from over 40 countries. The cosmopolitan outlook of Quetzaltecos — as people of Xelajú are known — compels them to travel. Those who go abroad and happen upon a Moonmotif item are prone to buy it and bring it to Café la Luna as a matter of patriotic duty.

There is more to see. Start with the tile plaque on the wall outside, commemorating the centennial of the Superior marque’s founding by Antonio and Aurora. In the year 2100, a second plaque might be recessed next to it.

Inside are old weapons, tools and domestic implements of every type. There are hundreds of appliances from an age before miniaturization. Most importantly, there is the paper trail of Xelajú itself. One of many glass cases holds an ancient schedule from the ill-fated Railroad of Los Altos, ripped from its sidings in 1933 by a wicked storm only three years after its construction. Raúl Izás is as knowledgeable about such things as any professional curator and, in the rare moment you can catch him, ready to answer any question. Mention a topic, and he will lead you to the wall or tabletop in Café la Luna’s half-dozen rooms that chronicles it for posterity.

The chocolate factory had its first and latest automation a little after World War I, when Don Rubén’s grandmother, then an adolescent, began her career there. The roaster is gas-fired and covered, inside and out, with a silky black soot so fine it stains your fingertips like ink. Its ramshackle little motor is backed up by muscle power whenever the lights go out. The chocolate pang, among those afflicted by it, waits for nothing — least of all for the lights to go back on.

Raúl’s octogenarian mother and aunt — who have been around as long as that roaster —still work everyday among the riotous clutter of their nearby tienda as if they had no tie to the factory. Their Mexican heritage is now a distant abstraction; indeed, the sisters are celebrated as models of “Quetzalteca” values. The local Kónica franchisee photographed them with their elder sister, Christina, then hung the portrait in his store near the northeastern corner of the park.

These values live on in succeeding generations of the Chocolate Dynasty. Raúl Izás was recently elected deputy mayor — perhaps as prelude to a higher perch from which to ply patriotic stewardship. He and his sons never miss an opportunity to advance inclusion in a community scarred by centuries of ostracism. When Xelajú’s Minerva Zoo announced a contest to name its new Capuchin monkey, the city’s newspapers eagerly publicized it. But the Chávez-Izás family was first in line to pony up for the prize, a children’s encyclopedia.

A visit to Café la Luna will make your Xelajú trip more complete; but having gone once, you will want to return. Each time you go, you see something you did not notice before. For mortals, it is as timeless and effectively eternal as the dynasty that wrought it; we can believe it will be around much longer than anyone now living who manages to visit it. •