Brasso Seco Village, nestled in the eastern hills of Trinidad’s Northern Range, is home to approximately 300 people. The majority are descendants of Cocoa Panyols, who came primarily as peons from Venezuela after slavery was finally abolished in Trinidad in 1834, and who propped up the cocoa industry. In the heart of this quiet village, a group of dedicated community members are working to revitalize their local cocoa industry, the spark of possibility ignited by collective memory and fueled through innovation. Brasso Seco’s community-based model aims to transform connections between cocoa farmers, processors and manufacturers, not only within Brasso Seco, but also in neighboring villages of the Northern Range.

At the visitor’s center, Kelly Fitzjames greets me. She and her husband Carl are directors of the Brasso Seco Chocolate Company, and she is also a member of the newly formed North Ridge Cocoa Cooperative. Kelly first came to Trinidad twenty years ago in 1998, to conduct baseline studies in ethnobotany research. “Nobody was doing anything with cocoa,” she recounts of the then dormant cocoa industry, and the village’s Tourism Action Committee, TAC, had also recently formed, adopting the buzzword ecotourism as its mandate. Fresh out of college and eager to be a part of something as it was just starting, Kelly returned the next year and has never left. She and Carl are deeply invested in community transformation. She proclaims to me: “What a difference it makes when the community is in charge of what they’re doing, and even if that in charge means there are different groups in charge of different things.”

Although many have left the village in search of broader opportunities, there is a magnetism to Brasso Seco that is difficult to escape, and therein lies the crux. Carl Fitzjames is no exception to this. As a young child in Brasso Seco, Carl would daydream of flying out of the country every time he saw a plane go by. With a pickaxe, his grandfather helped dig the road leading into the village in the early 1900s when he came to Brasso Seco from Caura at the tender age of 10, thereafter spending the remainder of his life working on various cocoa estates in the area. Carl’s mother also worked in cocoa, and was picking up pods under the trees from an early age. Without a formal education herself, she impressed upon her children the necessity of pursuing an education in order to get a “good job”. A couple decades later, Carl is a skilled scientist, a special metal expert welder working with a nuclear energy company in Canada. He reminisces, “One day I remember driving, somewhere around Montreal, and it hit me like a ton of bricks, I was happy as a little boy in Brasso Seco. And from that day onwards, I wanted to come back.”