MEXICO
People and Plants has a long-term and extensive involvement in many areas of Mexico, including the central states of Puebla, Veracruz and Guerrero, as well as in the Selva Maya area of the Yucatán peninsula.
Roughly 80% of the forests of Mexico are community-owned. As tropical forests in Mexico and elsewhere have become valued, commoditized and subject to increasingly complex forms of legislation and intervention by external agents, it has become increasingly difficult for many local communities to continue using and managing their forest resources. In order to legally, and ultimately effectively, utilize their territories and natural resources, communities need to navigate through important, novel yet shifting institutional, policy, and market contexts; contexts over which many rural communities have no control and limited awareness and understanding.
People and Plants Associate José Antonio Sierra, assessing a polewood order with forest technician Gonzalo Tzuc May (in memoriam) in a communally managed tropical forest. (Photo: Karen A. Kainer)
In Mexico, People and Plants supports communities’ management of forests, including sustainable management and marketing of resources, and strengthening traditional knowledge and practices, local institutions and self-governance. We help community-owned forests remain in the able hands of the people who have lived in, used, and stewarded them for so long. Much of our work focuses on youth, enabling and promoting inter-generational knowledge transmission, training programs, and teaching materials.
Projects
BIOCULTURAL FOOD SECURITY AND IN SITU CONSERVATION OF NATIVE CORN IN THE SIERRA TARAHUMARA
Activities in this region include milpa and seed festivals, seed exchanges, workshops on the importance of native seeds and agricultural practices, and creation of a community seed bank and community butterfly farm to conserve the four-mirror butterfly. An on-going series of knowledge exchange materials are produced to share results with communities and others, and People and Plants partners have developed strategies to combat food insecurity.
Click here to watch a short video about the project.
Preparing the land to plant corn. Sierra Tarahumara. (Photo: Adolfo Rebolledo)
Planting corn in a community owned milpa. Sierra Tarahumara. (Photo: Adolfo Rebolledo)
The climate of the Sierra Tarahumara includes temperatures that range from -10°C in the mountains in winter, and up to 40°C in the ravines. Rainfall is scarce throughout the year, and there are long dry periods which significantly impact the crops of Indigenous peoples, and can result in famine. A strategy to ensure food security is critical.
The Warijö and Rarámuri indigenous groups of the lower Tarahumara region share traditional corn farming systems, which is the basis of their diet. This project has identified traditional varieties of corn that can best withstand droughts and other extremes in weather, and supports communities to conserve and use these varieties and traditional farming practices.
Native corn varieties of the Sierra Tarahumara. (Credit: Adolfo Rebolledo)
CALENDARS FOR REFLECTION ON THE CHALLENGES FACED BY LOCAL FOOD SYSTEMS IN THE SIERRA DE ZONGOLICA
Activities in this region include a series of workshops with campesinos, weavers and charcoal producers to facilitate collective reflections on local traditional food systems. Workshops include use of the Nahua calendar as a tool to understand climate change and its impact on traditional food systems. Educational activities to explore local food systems with elementary school students, teachers and supervisors, as well as secondary education and university students, are also facilitated.
Click here to watch a short video about the project.
Changes in rainfall and temperature patterns impact milpa and other agroforestry systems that support local food production by the Nahua inhabitants of the Sierra de Zongolica. Climate change also threatens useful native species and genetic diversity, including timber and non-timber forest products; food security and sovereignty; local livelihoods; as well as associated traditional knowledge and governance practices.
Family-owned milpa in the Sierra de Zongolica. (Photo: Miguel Ángel Vega)
Fortunata Panzo holding the nahua seasonal calendar. (Photo: Gabriela Alvarez)
In Mexico, regions with high biological, cultural and agrobiodiversity – many in mountainous areas like the Zongolica mountain range – are also those most impacted by climate change. These impacts include extreme weather conditions and gradual but sustained climate change, leading to average temperature increases, flooding, landslides, extreme rainfall, tropical cyclones, and severe storms.
Textile production in Zongolica is one of the activities most impacted by larger-scale socio-ecological phenomena, such as land use change or climate change. Drawing from community-based workshops and exchanges, a textile calendar was produced. This textile calendar brings together the memory and practices of the weavers: the varieties of native sheep and the plants and lichens most used as natural dyes, framed in the Nahua conception of the annual cycle (Xiwitl) and its three seasons of Tonalko (hot season), Xopantla (rainy season) and Tlasesexkan (cold season). This calendar also acknowledges the female weaver and her worldview as the center of the activity, and includes an information table weaving communities can use to reflect on change, loss and resilience. Download here.
Another region where the work team has scope is the state of San Luis Potosí, in a semi-desert area known as the Altiplano Potosino. This is a territory where the tropics and the northern temperate zones border. Despite being an arid region, it has a culinary tradition based on its wild flora and fauna. As part of the project “Calendars for community reflection on the challenges of local food systems” this infographic was created to recover the current biocultural memory and illustrate some of the most notable elements of the semi-desert as a culinary ecosystem.
TRADITIONAL SYSTEMS OF CHARCOAL PRODUCTION IN THE SIERRA DE ZONGOLICA
In Sierra de Zongolica, Veracruz small holders have traditionally created and managed a diverse and shifting mosaic of environments as a way of meeting multiple subsistence and market needs, and coping with uncertainty and change. This landscape, which includes a patchwork of fields, pastures, agroforestry plots, shade coffee groves, silvicultural plots and managed forests, contains most of the remaining forest cover and biodiversity in the region. As part of our work, and in partnership with communities, postgraduate students are undertaking research to document and share the traditional ecological knowledge of elders, including traditional charcoal production systems in the pine-oak forests of the Sierra de Zongolica.
Process of making charcoal in a traditional bell-type earth oven made with a stack of oak wood logs. Production of Don Justo Xocua. Cotlajapa, Veracruz. (Photo: Carmen Pérez)
Don Justo Xocua, accompanied by his grandchildren Mauricio and Jesus, are breaking the oven and removing the charcoal for the cooling process. (Photo: Carmen Pérez)
The Team
Citlalli López, Belinda Contreras Jaimes, Miguel Angel Vega Ortega, Adolfo Rebolledo Morales, Jesús Ubaldo Jiménez Moreno, Fortunata Panzo Panzo, and Patricia Gerez.
The Warijö and Rarámuri indigenous groups of the lower Tarahumara region.
Partners
