Ethnobotanist Alejandro de Ávila dives into Oaxaca, Mesoamerican biodiversity [PART II]
“The garden isn't just about the past, Jenna. The garden is about the future. That's how we envisioned it with Francisco.”
Alejandro de Ávila, photo by Geovanni Martínez Guerra
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PART II
Oaxaca, photo provided by Alejandro de Ávila
I would love to know a little bit more about your, let's affectionately refer to them as ‘research obsessions,’ over the years. There are many different fields that you've studied. I'm curious if you could walk us through what you’ve focused on and gotten really excited about over the years.
As a kid, I was very drawn to plants. As I mentioned, I was growing orchids. We had a small house in Colonia Condesa in Mexico city, but it was close to Chapultepec, which is a park that goes back to pre-Columbian times, it was already a park then. It was where the drinking water of Tenochtitlan came from.
Chapultepec is a beautiful, huge park. And I loved to spend time there. And I remember Chapultepec from before the time when the National Anthropology Museum - Museo Nacional de Antropología was built.
When that museum opened, it was heaven for me.
I would beg my parents, “please allow me to go.” When I started visiting the museum, I was too young to go on my own. So somebody would take me, and I would spend hours just going through the exhibits. I loved spending time there. It was my treat to go to the museum. So I learned very early on about the cultural history of Mexico, and about the contemporary cultures in Mexico, at the same time that I was exposed to a huge urban park with all its native plant diversity.
I didn't really have much of a sense at that time of evolutionary history, but my father gave us, to all four of us children, a Spanish translation of Darwin's The Origin of Species. And we read parts of it, as much as we could understand. Since very early on, I started becoming conversant with evolutionary theory and became excited about it. It made sense to me.
I had a religious upbringing from my grandmother, not from my parents, but my grandmother - who was our Oaxacan matron who was very strong in my family as I portrayed. She would take us to mass. So we got exposed to Catholic creed, but I remember one night deciding that I wasn't going to follow, because it did not make sense to me.
I found peace, spiritual peace, in reading about natural history.
So that's been foremost in my upbringing, since early on, and I have to give the credit to my father.
My father was a physician, an anesthesiologist who had studied at the national university of Mexico - Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México - UNAM with great sacrifice, because the family was not very resourceful. He was very smart, and he worked himself through.
And here's something that you will like, Jenna. He paid for part of his studies by being the announcer on a radio station, specializing in classical music.
He loved that. He had a very good voice, a wonderful, modulated, very gentlemanly-sounding voice. He used it very effectively. He was very elegant in the way he spoke, and he had great success in the radio business. And so that's how partly he paid for his studies.
After my father graduated from UNAM, he went to work in Northwestern, Mexico. This is part of family history and may not sound germane to this story, but I think it is.
He went to Northwestern Mexico at a time when it was very isolated.
It took him days to get there, because he drove his own car. He had bought a car for himself, and he drove his car out there, but there were no bridges, and there were major rivers to traverse, so it had to be done by what were called pangas, which were rafters.
He eventually got to a place called El Fuerte, in northern Sinaloa, where he was the first physician trained at the national university to provide public health, because he wasn't charging people. This was a part of the social service in Mexico.
Still, to this day, when you want to graduate from a university in Mexico, whether it be private or public, you have to do social service. And that's something very good in the Mexican education system.
My father did two years of social service. He was supposed to do only one, but he loved it so well he stayed for an extra year. He did social service in Sinaloa and got to know the people of Sinaloa. It's a different culture from the rest of Mexico. It's the area that is most productive in agricultural terms. And today we associate it with the narco. That's where a lot of poppy and marijuana is produced. At that time, that industry was only in the beginning. We're talking about the forties, early fifties.
My father did very well there. He saved his “earnings” - people were very thankful, very grateful to him saving their lives - and he saved what had been given to him as gifts. With that money, he paid his way to travel to Washington state, where he did a residency in anesthesiology at King County hospital in Seattle.
And that was a wonderful opportunity for him to expand not only his medical training, but his cultural skills. He loved the time that he spent in the United States. He was very impressed with the educational system in the United States, so he decided that all of his children should have the same experience. He met my mother there in Washington state, and they went back to Mexico City and we were born and grew up in Mexico city, but he provided the funds for all of us to study in the United States. He had this certainty that we were going to benefit from it, and he wanted us to be exposed to it. And in fact, my two brothers and my sister stayed in the United States. They got married and now have their families in the states. I'm the only one who came back to Mexico.
I applied to study at Tulane University because of the Middle American Research Institute. MARI has a wonderful museum at Tulane University, and a research center that has done groundbreaking work in Mesoamerican archeology, ethnohistory, and ethnography since the early 20th century. Big names in anthropology are associated with MARI.
So I applied to Tulane and I went there. And while I was at Tulane, I have to say, I got a little bit disillusioned with the line of anthropology that I was being exposed to. I became restless, and I started exploring physiological psychology, evolutionary psychology, ethnology, and neurobiology.
So I started taking courses in biology, physiology, cell biology, but also many courses that were offered through the psychology department. And I ended up doing a double major in anthropology and physiological psychology. And I wrote two honors thesis. One was on the ethnography of the area where the de Ávila family came from, and the other paper was tracing the LHRH pathways, it's the luteinizing hormone, releasing hormone, a neurohormone, in the hamster brain. [Laughs]
So with that experience, I applied for a national science foundation grant, and I got it. I was very happy because I then went to Berkeley.
I had wanted to go to Berkeley in the first place, to be honest with you, but my parents thought Berkeley would be too radical for me. They were afraid that I was way too liberal, and that I was really going to be in a difficult situation in terms of my own safety.
My parents were concerned about me because I was kind of a wild kid, and they thought it wasn't a good idea to go to Berkeley right after high school. So that's one of the reasons I went to Tulane instead. But when I could make my own decision, because I didn't need to ask them for money anymore, I was financially independent since I had received this fellowship, I decided that now was the time to go to Berkeley. I did, and it was wonderful.
Going to Berkeley was really intellectual liberation for me. I cannot adequately describe to you how well I felt at Berkeley. I felt like I was arriving home. Berkeley was home for me. And I still feel that way. Berkeley is unique.
I did my master's at Berkeley in the eighties. Remember that's the time when Ronald Reagan was sending interventionist groups to Nicaragua. It was a time of the Sandinistas, the wars in El Salvador and Guatemala as well.
At the time there were of course still memories of the involvement of the United States and Vietnam and getting the US out of Vietnam. In Berkeley there was a bumper sticker, elsewhere in the United States, you would see bumper stickers that said, “Get us out of Nicaragua,” or El Salvador. And in Berkeley, there was a bumper sticker that said “Get the US out of Berkeley.”
That was the mood of the times. And I really resonated with that.
At Berkeley, with the support of the national science foundation fellowship, I did work in psychobiology. I was working with rodents. I continued to work with rodents, and I did my master's degree working in growth and neurobiology, no longer with LHRH, no longer with a neuropeptide that I had worked on for my undergraduate degree, but still in the same neuropharmacological field, I was working with enkephalins.
That was a very interesting time for me. It was a productive time, but there were two major factors that made me decide to no longer pursue this.
First and foremost, I felt restless. I felt homesick. For a time, I had toyed with the idea of staying in the U.S. like my siblings, but the pull to go back to Mexico became increasingly strong.
And, I learned that the laboratory where I was working, unbeknownst to me and to my fellow graduate students, was being funded by the U.S. military. The line of work we were doing had applications because of addictions. I thought it was so unethical that the researcher who led the laboratory hadn't told us, I felt very bad. So I put the two things together and said, this is it.
So I took a year off. I put the national science foundation fellowship on hold, and I went to Alaska.
I went to Alaska, and I worked at a salmon canning plant, Jenna.
For the first time in my life, I earned my bread from the sweat of my brow. It was horrible work. We got up at six o'clock and sometimes it was 10 o'clock and we were still working. You had to work fast because that was when the salmon came in.
And lucky for me, the company where I happen to have landed in Kenai, Alaska had joint Japanese-American ownership. And the Japanese people could care less about the flesh of the salmon, they were interested in the roe. A Japanese team chose me and trained me to select, process, and pack the salmon roe. And I learned the whole process.
It was really neat. It was working with my hands, but it was really backbreaking labor. I survived, thrived, earned more money in a six-week period than I have ever made in my life.
And with those earnings, I came here to Oaxaca with a backpack and my hair down to my shoulders. I started hitch hiking through the state of Michoacán and made my way to Oaxaca. And it was wonderful. It was safe back in that time. People were so generous to me, and I learned so much.
I decided that this was my life. This was my path. And I went back to Berkeley to finish my degree, and came to Oaxaca, and I've been here since.
You still continued to do research since then, right? Your research today is focused on different areas and aspects like textiles and plants, right? You wrote a book about plants, I think in 2006, La Espina y el Fruto.
That’s a book about the garden. It is a tribute to the poetry of Pablo Neruda, because he wrote very eloquently about Mexico, “Mexico, florido y espinudo.” And that is a theme for our garden, because the garden is full of thorns.
As you experienced when you visited, thorns for us are significant. I try to reflect it in the title of that little book.
The book portrays the beautiful photography of Cecilia Salcedo, a very gifted photographer. She did some photography at the garden, but mostly she took plant samples, seeds, fruit, and some blossoms to her studio and did very high quality black and white portraits of plant structures. And they're very beautiful. The essay that I wrote to accompany her photography developed the notion of thorns as the… how could I say it?
It's a leitmotif. Are you familiar with the term leitmotif? Of course you are, Jenna. Sorry for asking.
Spines, thorns, and spikes are a leitmotif in our garden. Our garden is full of thorns. And as a consequence, our garden is full of ghosts.
Thorns hark back to something that no longer exists. When you think about it, why is it that the plants of Mexico, and other areas of the neotropics, and even beyond the neotropics, why is it that the plants invest so heavily in thorns?
Agaves are full of thorns. Cacti are full of thorns. But also palms. Many palms in this part of the world are loaded with thorns. Also, for example, the kapok tree, the ceiba as we call it in Spanish.
Why does the ceiba have all these spikes on her trunk?
And why, group after group, family, after family? It's not that they are inheriting the spikes and the thorns from a common ancestor, but they have developed them independently.
Some thorns are derived anatomically from leaves. Other thorns are derived from roots as in some of the palms. And yet others are derived from protuberances, excrescences of the bark.
There are all kinds of origins, but the plants responded by defending themselves, arming themselves.
Why such an investment in defense? What's going on here? Because if you look at the current context, you say, “Why? Why invest so much, because a deer or a monkey isn’t going to harm the trunk of a ceiba? Why protect its green tissue, its green bark, from a monkey, tapir, or a rabbit? It makes no sense.”
The thorns evoke ghosts because they coevolved with megafauna that are no longer with us. [2]
That's what explains it. It’s the large mammals, with huge jaws. The plants needed to protect themselves. There were more large mammals here in the Americas in general, not just in Mexico, than in Africa today.
We are so familiar with elephants, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, giraffes, water buffalo, and so on. That's what draws the tourists to the Serengeti and to the photo safaris.
Well, here before human arrival, about 13, 16, thousand years ago, there were more kinds of megafauna than in Africa today.
Why are they no longer here? There's convincing evidence that humans wiped them out. And it wasn't so much hunting as environmental change. Humans arrived with sophisticated technology. In Africa the fauna had time to coevolve with humans, and develop social and cultural complexity.
Here in the Americas, the first wave of humans was already quite adroit, culturally and technologically. We often see them as rudimentary because they were hunting with bows and arrows, or with spears, but they were managing fire, and they had dogs.
They had domesticated dogs, Jenna.
So they really changed the scenario quite fast, and numerous lineages of large mammals, but also some large birds and reptiles became extinct as a consequence.
Now what we have are the ghosts. We have the thorns remembering, we have the plants’ memory reflecting in the garden. So that is a theme that I developed in that essay inspired by that line from Pablo Neruda, “Mexico, florido y espinudo.”
Dear reader: Here is an English copy of Alejandro de Ávila’s full essay in La Espina y El Fruto for you. It’s a beautiful read.
… In one of your interviews, you mentioned that Oaxaca exists all because of cochineal. And number one, is that true?
I wouldn't say Oaxaca walk exists because of cochineal, but the city became what we see today because of the economic bonanza of cochineal.
Cochineal is fascinating.
As I have worked on it, I have learned a lot more, thanks to a number of friends but especially a colleague whom I have yet to meet, but I have corresponded with him.
His name is Alex Vandam. He's my tocayo, meaning we have the same name, Alex.
Alex Vandam is an entomologist. He got his PhD from the University of California as well, but in his case at Davis, and he worked out the molecular sequence, the genetic sequence of domesticated cochineal. And he has also worked on the wild species of cochineal, and their distribution throughout the Americas. And he has clarified for us the natural history of cochineal, and the cultural history of cochineal.
The results are fascinating.
There are still some points where some critical voices, and I think they're overreacting perhaps because of a little bit of professional jealousy… he still has to work some points out, but the overall picture is increasingly clear and well-substantiated.
Let me try to portray it as I understand it, Jenna.
Cochineal is a neotropical lineage. The technical name for it is Dactylopius. Dactylopius is a lineage in the scale insects, the Coccoidea. These are Hemiptera, and are distantly related to aphids.
Aphids, as you know, are scourges of the garden. Every gardener hates aphids because they can really do a lot of damage in the garden. And Coccoidea, specifically wild cochineal, are similarly noxious, they can kill a plant.
But Dactylopius is very specific in the range of host plants that it will thrive on, it will not live on just any kind of cactus, but only on, what we call in Mexico, nopales.
Nopales at Jardín Etnobotanico de Oaxaca
The technical term for nopales is Opuntia. They and their relatives are a group of cacti that are quite distinctive in evolutionary history from the rest of the cactus family.
A researcher who is interested in plant taxonomy has worked out their evolutionary history.
The Opuntia originate in the Andes, but in Mexico, when they spread north, they found numerous opportunities to diversify. There is less depth, and you can see that in the molecular sequence and the gene sequence, there's less Opuntia genetic diversity in Mexico. But here Opuntia have had the opportunity to occupy very large areas, differentiated by climates, soil types, and geological substrate. They have flourished in Mexico and we now have more species in Mexico than in the Andes, which is remarkable. Anyway, the Dactylopius lineage exclusively feeds on nopales (Opuntia). They don't parasitize any other kind of cactus.
The Dactylopius occur from Southern California, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, all the way to Patagonia, the dry lands of Chile and Argentina.
Okay. There are at least 11 species of Dactylopius in the wild, but what we call cochineal, what was the source of a beautiful red dye, is a domesticated species. You don't find it in the wild. It has been looked for, and it hasn't been found anywhere. It's only known by people raising it. And for the longest time, people thought it originated in Peru. And I hate to say this, but some Peruvian colleagues are still absolutely sure that it is Peruvian in origin.
Well, Alex Van Dam has shown otherwise, because in doing the sequencing of the DNA, he found in three little farms here in the Valley of Oaxaca, more genetic diversity than in a stretch of 1,500 kilometers of the Andes from Peru all the way into Northern Argentina. The diversity that he found in the DNA of the Andean cochineal is nested within the Oaxacan diversity.
So it now looks, pretty conclusively, that cochineal was domesticated here, perhaps not in the Valley of Oaxaca, but in central and southern Mexico. This is where we have the greatest genetic diversity.
And here's the clincher to the argument. The same thing holds true for the host plant, Jenna.
In the Andes cochineal has been produced as a dye stuff since pre-Columbian times. It is well known in the textiles of the desert coast of Peru, which were so well preserved. There are lots of examples of alpaca, vicuña, and other Chamelidae fibers in the pre-Columbian textiles of coastal Peru. And so people thought Peru was where cochineal was domesticated, but cochineal was always grown, to this day, on a species of Opuntia that is not native to the Andes.
It was taken, to the south, from Mexico.
We have conclusive evidence, the same researcher who figured out the natural history of the genus opuntia also worked on the genetic history of the foremost species used as the host plan for domesticated cochineal, which is called Opuntia ficus-indica. Here in Oaxaca it’s called nopal de castilla, which is an indication of its quality because everything good had to come from Spain, of course. [Laughs] That’s bias, cultural bias, internalized colonization, if I may have an aside.
The host plant for cochineal, to this day in the Andes, is not an Andean Opuntia, it’s the Mexican Opuntia, which became naturalized in the south, along with cochineal, but it originated here.
So the genetic evidence is pretty conclusive, both the host plant and the insect parasite that produces the dye were domesticated here. But they’re cultural products.
And so the question becomes, if they’re cultural products, first of all, how could they have spread south, since they require a dry climate, and the intervening lands like coastal Columbia are incredibly wet. How did that come about?
The host plant and the insect cannot survive in drenching rain, the constant rain in that part of the trip.
It had to be - and this is something that Alex Van Dam works on and wrote about in his dissertation - it had to be long distance trade by seafaring canoes, doing a fast voyage from Mexico to Peru.
Isn't that amazing?
You just blew my mind. This is some serious 1491, Charles C. Mann type of stuff going on right now.
I think it's beyond it, Jenna. [laughs] I think it's beyond it, because it really changes our outlook on cultural communication in the past. But the proof is in the pudding, the cochineal is shared, and we know for a fact that this is not a colonial introduction, but it goes way back.
Okay. I have a silly question. Couldn’t someone just like, put it in a backpack and transport it through? Explain to me one more time how seafaring canoes are the way that this got to Peru, couldn't someone just put the plant in a jar or something, and transplant it there?
First of all, to carry the plant would have been very, very heavy to make the voyage all the way from Southern Mexico to the dry lands of Peru, where it can thrive. In the intervening lands it's too wet for the plant and the insect to thrive. It does not make sense for people to have carried it in backpacks. It makes sense because of the weight of the plant, for the survival, to have been through seafaring canoes.
If it were like maize, yes, because we know maize did the same journey, maize was domesticated in Mexico.
Again, some South American colleagues retain their pride. They say “no, it’s South America, no there's early maize from the Andes.” Sorry. The relatives of maize are only found here. There are no wild relatives of maize in the Andes, it had to be domesticated here, and then spread South.
But in the case of the maize, it could have been spreading north to south, farmer to farmer, over a long period of time, why? Because you can acclimate maize to drier areas or to wetter areas. You can acclimate it to cooler climates or to warmer climates. Maize is a very flexible genome. And we see that in the diversity of maize.
You made a point in your conversation with Malena Martínez that there are all these land races of potatoes that are so amazing. Well, maize, I believe, is even more diverse than potatoes, and maize thrives from sea level, all the way to 4,000 meters altitude in the Andes.
Potatoes don’t. You cannot grow potatoes in the tropical lowlands. They just don't do it. Maize does. Maize has an incredible story. That's another spiel that I can do, but…
Wait, but what about the nopales?
I'm getting there.
Okay, great.
Maize could have spread from farmer to farmer, over hundreds or thousands of years, from Mexico to Peru, and all the way to Argentina and Chile, but cochineal couldn't have gone that way. Why?
Because of the wet lowlands in between in Costa Rica.
In Guanacaste, northwestern Costa Rica, you still have a dry tropical climate where you can grow nopales, but from there on south, all the way to Tumbes, which is northwestern Peru, it's too wet to grow nopales. It's way too wet to grow nopales, and to carry them across with your backpack… it would have been a very heavy journey, for what? It doesn't make sense to explain it that way.
But if you think they were already organized in trading networks and they were doing this, regularly, year by year, it makes sense that it would have used the seafaring canoes to also ship down the plant, a heavy plant, with its insect parasites.
Now, why do I bring in the trade networks?
When Spaniards arrived on the Pacific coast of Mexico, at the mouth of the Balsas River - Atoyac River, what was called back then Saka Tula, today it is called Lazaro Cardenas, which is a big port, and also a place where there's an iron foundry. In Saka Tula, the first Europeans to arrive heard about a yearly expedition of big canoes. People came from the south, and they came to trade, and they had to stay for months, they couldn’t go back right away because they had to wait for the currents, the sea currents, to work in their favor. And this was something that they knew. This was something that they expected because they were trading. This was happening in the 1520s, when the first Europeans arrived, in that part of Mexico, where the canoe fleets were disembarking.
So we have the historical evidence, and we have the genetic evidence, and it congeals into a coherent story. Isn’t this beautiful?
Amazing. All the things you can learn when you study plant DNA. [Laughs]
Yes! But it’s not just the plant DNA. There is a further observation that I had made before I encountered the work of Alex Van Dam.
That's why I say, this is a bigger spiel. This is my cochineal spiel, Jenna.
I had made the observation that the linguistics point to the same thing, Jenna.
In Southern Mexico, you have names for cochineal independently coined in the various languages. It's not one term borrowed from one language to the other, but each language has developed their own term for cochineal. In the Andes you have one term. It’s called macnu or magno, and it's the same term, wherever Quechua or Aymara are spoken, which are the Peruvian highlands where cochineal is grown today - the inter-Andean valleys, the dry valleys, where the Mexican opuntia thrives and the insect that provides the dye stuff.
So why a single term? Why in the various languages, of which there used to be several before Quechua spread and took over, why is the term borrowed? And why do you have a stretch of thousands of kilometers having just one single term for cochineal?
It makes sense if this was introduced. [3]
Here's my counter example, to make the case further. We have the same happening in reverse in the case of cacao, which we have already spoken about with our shared addiction to chocolate, Jenna.
In the case of cacao, all the languages from Purépecha in Michoacán to the Mayan languages in the highlands of Chiapas, Guatemala, and in the Yucatán, have one term. They have borrowed the one term, which is the same term that the Spanish borrowed, cacao - cacahuatl in Nahuatl - and cognates in all the other languages.
They took the borrowed term. Why? Because cacao was introduced, it came from the Amazon. Cacao we know for sure is an introduction. It made the reverse journey of maize and cochineal. And today in all the as Mesoamerican languages, you have the borrowed term, not independently coined terms for cacao.
Do you see my argument?
I do see your argument!
Linguistics shows the same.
And furthermore, there's one more piece of evidence that I also point out.
In Oaxaca, and in Mexico in general, cochineal has several natural enemies, insect predators that feed on the cochineal, and they are a pain in the butt for the people producing the dye stuff. In the colonial accounts, the historical documents from the 1600s, especially the 1700s, when there was a peak in the market and the demand for cochineal, they describe endlessly how difficult it is to grow cochineal because the growers have to be called to constantly pick out the noxious insects that will feed on the cochineal. There are at least nine insect enemies that will feed on cochineal and are enemies of the producers of the dye stuff.
In the Andes, one has been recorded, one problem for the producers.
And in fact, the production of cochineal is totally different in the Andes from what it is here.
Here, it's a labor-intensive endeavor, caring for the plants, caring for the insects. In the Andes, it's a naturalized plant that is let grow wild. It is allowed to propagate by itself, both the plant and the insect. People in the Andes just harvest the insect, they don't need to worry about seeding the cactus or propagating the insect. They just go and harvest the insect like a wild resource, because apparently there's only one insect that will thrive on cochineal. Consequently this means that it’s a much less labor-intensive enterprise, so they sell their cochineal much cheaper. Oaxaca can no longer compete in the market. Here if you want to grow cochineal, you run against prices that you cannot compete with. And that is a fact. People here have tried to revive cochineal again, and again, and again, but the price of cochineal is down because in Bolivia, Chile, Peru, the Canary islands, and elsewhere they're taking it to the market much cheaper.
Why? Because they don't need to worry about insect pests that are attacking their crops. So that's another line of argument.
I didn’t know that there was such a rivalry between you guys - Peru vs. Mexico - I didn't know there's this kind of like back-and-forth thing going on.
There has been a rivalry among historians and people working on the folk art of both areas, especially in textiles since cochineal is used mostly, not exclusively, but mostly for textiles.
And for a long time, the verdict was Peru, Peru, Peru. “Peru has the most diversity” - there are even books you can read from people working out of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, publications as recently as 4 or 5 years ago, that say that the Andes are the area where cochineal was domesticated.
Sorry. No, not true.
Wow. Next question.
Before you pose the next question, Jenna, I want to say that it's not the issue of local pride of having a region-based attitude. It's understanding. It's understanding what's behind this. It's not just understanding what happened in the past, but it's also understanding what leads us to defend our position so staunchly, and to be so misguided and not willing to open our minds up to look at the evidence, to look at things more critically.
Yes. Wow.
You all have scientific research actively happening at the ethnobotanical garden. There's a greenhouse there where people are studying plants, right?
Not really, Jenna. I have to say that one of my major misgivings is that I haven't been able to put together a team because of lack of funding - I have to underline that - because of lack of funding. Because of lack of funding, I haven't been able to put together a team where we can really devote people to do full-time research. We do research on our spare time. And as limited as it is, the research that is happening is basically observations of how plants respond to our treatments. We keep track of all the plants that we're cultivating. We have extensive log books of how they're responding to various treatments, we keep track of when we have propagated them, how many progeny we were able to produce, how they have responded to heavy rains, when they have died, what diseases and what treatments we have had to subject them to. That's basically the research that we do at the garden itself.
Sounds like research to me!
It is research, but it's not taxonomic research.
Ethnobotanical research is basically my responsibility. I've been working with colleagues who are documenting indigenous languages of Oaxaca. There's much work being done here.
And here's another line that I would like to draw from your conversation with Malena…
[Laughs] Uh oh, there's another Peru versus Mexico…
No, no. [Laughs] It's more interesting than just a confrontation, Jenna. You said that there's 47 registered languages spoken in Peru.
Here's the information from the ethnologue, Jenna. I will give you the link. The ethnologue is a database that is constantly updated. The edition that I checked is the current edition, 2020. This is produced by the SIL, a big group of linguists working all over the world, but not the entire linguistic establishment agrees with them. They have a history of evangelism. These are linguists who started translating the scriptures, and they have their own methodology. Not everybody agrees with how they classify the languages, but it has the advantage of being a global database, and the further advantage of constantly being revised.
And from what I have read, they have taken criticism into account, and they have reclassified some of the languages. I can attest to that in the case of Mexico. So they're open to change, it's not like they're entrenched in their ways. Anyway, the advantage of the ethnologue is that you can compare different areas of the world, and following the same criteria of classification, whether you agree with them or not, they're consistent criteria of classification.
So I checked the ethnologue, and according to the ethnologue, there are 93 languages in Peru, spoken today. There are some languages that became extinct, but in Peru, according to the criteria of classification of the ethnologue, there are 93 languages. Okay. How many languages are spoken in Mexico? According to the Ethnologue, would you have a guess, Jenna?
300-something?
288. In Oaxaca, according to the ethnologue, there are 162, that's almost twice the number of the country of Peru, according to the criteria for classification of the ethnologue.
Now, this is not in any way belittling the cultural diversity of the Andes, or any other region of the world. It's just to point out that according to the criteria of classification, of the ethnologue, this region of the world stands out, and it is comparable to only three other areas in the world.
According to the ethnologue, it is by far the area of greatest linguistic diversity in the Americas. And for us, that also means cultural diversity, because language is not isolated from the rest of the culture, right? There are only three other areas of the world with comparable levels of linguistic diversity. One is the highlands that are shared by Nigeria and Cameroon. The other one is the Eastern Himalayas, in Northeastern India, Assam basically, Northern Myanmar, and Southern China. And finally, and foremost is Papua New Guinea, which has by far the greatest linguistic diversity in the world.
Now, you will then ask, how come those four areas?
I think that it has to do, Jenna, at least partly with plants.
It has to do with the roots of agriculture.
You gotta explain now. Just dive into it, go for it. Another spiel. Hit me.
It is not a coincidence. I think that Western Africa, especially those highland areas, Southeast Asia, but especially the Eastern Himalayas, and most saliently, highland New Guinea, are areas of plant domestication.
Think of it. Here is the birthplace of maize, beans, squash, amaranth, chia, agave, Opuntia cacti, and several others that are less well known for an English-speaking audience. In Papua New Guinea we have the birthplace of sugarcane, tarot, a root crop, bananas, and other less known crops. In the Eastern Himalayas, you are sharing, from what I have read, the area where rice was domesticated, or at least part of the region where it was first cultivated, where several other crops seem to have their origin. And in Western Africa, you have another assortment of crops that have their history right there, they're not brought in from the Mediterranean or Western Asia, but are local cultivars. One which comes to my mind right away is the yam. Yam as a crop is something that, from what I’ve read, comes from West Africa. It’s far away from the East African highlands, where you have a different assortment of crops in Ethiopia, which also happens to be an area of great linguistic diversity.
So what am I aiming for? And this is not something that I started, but other people have written about it. It looks like areas where agriculture arose are areas where those people who started cultivating those crops had an advantage, and could spread, and could gain ground at the expense of languages that waned, and those people who were spreading agriculture, who are successfully growing their foods in new geographical areas, were undergoing evolutionary diversification, which happens all the time.
Languages are constantly changing. The fact that we are able to read 16-century texts in English or in Spanish is because change has become lessened by the written word, but change is constantly happening in our languages. And so for each one of these areas, we have some language families that have spread, and flourished, and diversified incredibly.
And so in the case of Mesoamerica, you have one lineage, the Oto-Manguean languages, which happen to have their center of diversity right here in Oaxaca. And the Mixtec languages, which is the group of languages that I studied for my dissertation, are part of that family. In Papua New Guinea, you have actually several lineages that become very fragmented and very diversified.
In the case of the Eastern Himalayas, you can have several language families, but the Sino-Tibetan language family have their roots right there, as well as the Hmong-Mien language family, and other linguistic families. In the highlands of Nigeria and Cameroon, it looks like that is the birthplace of the most widespread language family in Africa, which is the Niger-Congo language family.
So there's a correlation between cradles of agriculture and linguistic and cultural diversity. That's their argument.
… Wow. You just blew my mind. [Laughs] Wow. Are you ever overwhelmed by how crazy-cool the world is? This is just insane.
There's so much that you study, and that you dive into - these different touch points with culture, with nature. Is it even fair to separate those two? It's all the same thing.
The point that we try to make here at the garden, is for people to gain a sense of that, and to become curious. It's too much information for a visit of even two hours, which is how long the tours last in French, German, and English, because in our experience, that's how much people want. For the Spanish tourist, people are restless after one hour, so we cut the tours in Spanish. There are so many people who are interested and want more, but mostly people just want to look at some sites. In the English, French, and German tours, or for people in the Spanish tours who want more, we devote more time. This is too much information for two hours, even for two hours, but you whet people's appetite and people then are invited to come back and go into the library.
The library for us is crucial. We are an ethnobotanical garden because we have a library, and the library is a gift of Francisco Toledo.
Francisco would ask me every two, three months, “Alejandro, where’s your list? Where's your book list?” He would buy an entire booklist like a Santa Claus. He would buy whatever books we wanted. Francisco had a network of people in Los Angeles, Mexico City, and elsewhere who were buying books for his libraries. This was part of a network of libraries that he was funding. The foremost library was the library of IAGO, Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca, the Oaxacan Institute of Graphic Arts, which is the prime art library in Mexico, perhaps in Latin America. To this day it is an incredible library and an incredible resource for students. We benefited from that, and we are so grateful.
The spirit of Francisco really lives on in the library.
Quararibea funebris, Flor de cacao, depicted in Codex de la Cruz Badiano under its Náhuatl name, cacahuaxōchìtl ('cacao flower')
Zan nixōchiyèēlēhuiā
Nixōchitlàtlapanaco tlālticpac
Noconyatlapāna in cacahuaxōchìtli
Noconyatlapāna icnīuhxōchìtli.
Sólo deseo flores con vehemencia
He venido a estar abriendo flores en el mundo
Ya voy y abro la flor de cacao
Ya voy y abro la flor de hermandad.
All I want are flowers, vehemently
I came to be, to bloom flowers into this world
I’m going to bloom the flor de cacao
I’m going to bloom the flower of unity.
Romances de los Señores de la Nueva España F3r, translated from Nahuatl
Cantares Mexicanos: Songs of the Aztecs
In a perfect world, in thinking about the future of Oaxaca, but the ethnobotanical garden and the textile museum in particular, what areas would you like to grow in apart from scientific research? If you could really have an unlimited budget, what would you do?
Okay. Here is something that I will be chastised by the state government officials once this is made public, you may want to edit it from the final product, but I have to say it, Jenna.
The garden is self-sufficient. The garden produces more than twice what we need to pay our payroll, to pay our operating expenses, and investment, but we don't get it. Why?
Because even though we do the upkeep of the garden, and we make it possible for social events, especially weddings to take place right here, all the income of that doesn’t go to the garden. All that income goes to the state government. Now the state government does provide our payroll, a very limited payroll. I have to tell you, I was getting more as a stipend as a graduate student from my fellowship than what I'm getting today as a salary from the garden. I survive thanks to the generosity of the Harp Foundation - Fundación Harp Helú, through the textile museum.
But the salary here at the garden after 22 years of service is miserable, and I am especially hurt, I have to say. This is something that hurts me, it is not just a fact, it is something that hurts me emotionally, and my fellow workers have been equally devoted. They are here from eight o'clock in the morning until 3:30 in the afternoon, every day of the week, and on Saturdays until one o'clock. Some of them have been here just as long as I have been, 22 years now, and they're earning peanuts. That is not fair, because the garden allows the state government to more than triple what we receive from the state government, for our budget - payroll and operating expenses.
Let me add to that. We have absolutely zero job benefits, no social security, no medical insurance, no paid leave, no vacations. Zero.
I have had to raise funds on my own to establish a solidarity fund in agreement with my fellow workers. All 24 of us have voted Yes. We’ve pooled money together, not money out of salary, but money that I have raised outside. And I have to give thanks to Mission Garden in Tucson, who is our sister garden. They have been very generous and have given us a big donation every year that has allowed us to capitalize this solidarity fund. With that solidarity fund, we've been able to face crisis, but we get zero from the government. If we were able to manage the funds that come through the social events that take place here, thanks to our work, thanks to the fact that we created this, people are attracted to get together, here, to get married and celebrate their wedding, because of the beauty of the garden.
We get zero, but we could be more than self-sustaining. We could be investing the surplus into finishing the garden because the garden is not finished.
So when you asked me, “what would you like to see?,” that's what I would like to see.
Now, I have to add that I have been doing work with the new federal administration almost two years now, but nothing there, in terms of that, has changed. We are very hopeful with the current administration, with all its contradictions, one of which was the Trump visit yesterday and the day before, but that's an aside. We are really hopeful, because we do see a change in political culture in Mexico. We do see the roots for true democracy. And we see the roots for social redress.
Our equivalent of the U.S. National Science Foundation, Conacyt - Consejo Nacional de Sciencia y Tecnología, has chosen us as the model to establish a network of ethnobiological gardens.
They put out a call for proposals nationally for requesting that every region in Mexico proposed an ethnobiological garden, we couldn't be more honored. And we participated in the call for proposals, and we have been awarded. We're still not working on it, but we have been awarded funding. And we're really hopeful because it's something that will be ongoing and renewed. We now see the possibility of doing a four year cycle, which would really allow us to finish the garden to bring to fruition the vision that we shared with Francisco from day one, which still hasn't happened because we haven't had the support. But now we know we can see that as a possibility.
The garden’s not finished?
No, it's not finished, it's not finished. There are still gaps in the garden.
We need services for visitors. We have facilities, bathrooms that are half-built. They're not functional because we didn't have the funds to finish them. They're almost done, but they require more investment.
We have benches in mind for people to rest.
We have whole sections devoted to children, and devoted to people who are blind, who cannot see, we want them to be able to approach plants and crush them and smell them and feel them.
We have a section devoted to the sacred plants, which we cannot have out in the open because some of them are illegal, and some of them would easily be the supply for somebody wanting to have a recreational experience at home. So we would need to have that area especially guarded. But these are one of the special interests of Oaxaca, something that was realized by Dr. Richard Evans Schultes at Harvard, who’s a legendary figure in ethnobotany. Schultes did his dissertation research here, in Oaxaca. And later on, he wrote, after having surveyed the entire globe, through the work of collaborators, not just himself, that Oaxaca is the area of greatest diversity of entheogens. Entheogens is a respectful term for what most people call drugs, or for what people call psychedelic drugs. You know what I mean - the hippie stuff. Oaxaca is, and this is something that Richard Evans Schultes stated, Oaxaca is the area of great diversity of entheogens. Isn't that amazing? People here have been open to using sacred mushrooms, but also sacred herbs, and sacred seeds, to experience an approach to the spiritual realm. And that's something we want to show for sure, but we don't have yet the means to do it. We need to enclose that area.
And we need to provide services for our workers. We don't have a shower, we don't have a place for them to change their clothes, to keep a locker. We have very rudimentary services. We want to provide dignified services for them. That's all in the making, Jenna, that's in the future. But we're hopeful now that we have this approval by Conacyt, we're in the process right now of an agreement to receive the funding.
So we're really hopeful that over the next four years, we'll be able to finish the garden as we envisioned it, with Francisco Toledo, in 1993, when we first dreamt of this.
Congratulations on receiving that recognition. So do I understand you correctly that you're going to help guide the process of creating more ethnobotanical gardens throughout Mexico now?
We're already doing that, Jenna. We're already doing that. We have received the visits of people interested in doing that in their home cities, in their home states, and some people who haven't been able to come because of the pandemic. In fact, we had scheduled a visit by people from Baja, California in May, which couldn't happen because everything dissolved into thin air with the pandemic, but that's in the future. And we're also exchanging information through the internet.
Wow. So in the next 15 to 20 years, there are going to be a lot more of these.
Well, hopefully sooner Jenna, Mexico has six year cycles. There's no reelection here, and there's no telling what's going to happen when this administration ends. We're hoping that there will be continuity, but there's no assurance. So we're hoping that by 2024, at least the seeds will have been planted for the network of ethnobiological gardens throughout Mexico. And some gardens are much more ahead in that sense. We hope other areas in Latin America would follow suit.
Yeah. For sure. Going back to what you were saying about biodiversity, the opportunity that you find throughout The Americas is just, you know, for this kind of work, incredible, right? There are also people that understand what those plants do and how they work in those areas.
It's not just the plants in the traditional way. It's not just becoming curious about what it was like in the past, but I would like to resonate with the interview that you had with Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, where you discussed the benefits of plant based nutrition. That is so important for us, Jenna.
Dr. Esselstyn drew the example of the Tarahumara people in Northwestern, Mexico, and he discussed the three sisters: maize, beans, and squash. The three sisters are known to the Tarahumara people, they're not exclusive to Mexico, but the three sisters originated here. The earliest archeological evidence and the greatest genetic diversity of maize under cultivation is here, in the state of Oaxaca. This has been widely documented. It may be that it was domesticated further West, there's debate about that. The earliest traces, in terms of people finding stuff, in early rock shelters, is from here, at least in terms of macro remains, there are earlier starch grains and pollen that have been found further West, but there's debate about that.
Perhaps most compelling is the evidence of the current genetic diversity of the maize that people still plant, Oaxaca stands out way above any other region in Mexico or Guatemala or further South in the number of land races of maize. A number of them are only found here, they're not grown elsewhere, but that's not the key point. I mean, that again seems to be a reflection of Oaxacan pride.
What I'm aiming for: this is not just a lesson for the past, and it is not a lesson just for foodies either. It's not about glorifying Oaxacan astronomy so that you go to expensive restaurants. No, we aim at the garden to educate ourselves about nutrition, but also about a sustainable lifestyle. We're growing foods that we think are crucial. And just for foodies, for everybody.
Dr. Esselstyn talked about the three sisters, but beyond the three sisters, which provide most of the carbohydrate - most of the protein, the minerals and vitamins come from green leafy vegetables, quelites as we call them.
Quelites are incredibly diverse. There are hundreds of species that are consumed as quelites. Quelites means “green leafy vegetable,” whether you eat it raw, or you eat it cooked.
The word quelite doesn’t have a Spanish equivalent. We borrow it from Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica people in Central Mexico. Most of the languages in Oaxaca have a term to identify quelites.
This is something that has really interested me. This was the focus of my dissertation - the terms for labeling green leafy vegetables. I already mentioned that earlier that quelite is how we talk about it in Spanish. But we had to borrow it from indigenous language because there's no equivalent in Spanish like there is no equivalent in English.
This. is. what. we. should. be. eating.
Yes bok choy, yes we hear about broccoli and brussels sprouts, like what Dr. Esselstyn said, but spinach is something that you buy in the market.
Quelites you grow, yourself. You have them in your backyard. They grow and come up spontaneously. They seed themselves, people harvest them. This is how we should be responding to cardiovascular disease.
Yes, it's good to know about bok choy, swiss chard, and spinach. But hey! We have our own! We have our quelites!
That's something we want to show in the garden.
And it’s not just about nutrition, Jenna. We are harvesting rainwater. The garden has the largest rain fed cistern in the state of Oaxaca.
Of course you do. It’s amazing because water shortages throughout Mexico have been happening for quite some time, and it’s previewing exactly what’s going to be happening in the next 10-20 years in other places around the world. It’s about time. We should all be listening to what you’re about to say about this because it is incredibly important.
Absolutely, absolutely.
And I have to say, I need to add a little historical side note here, Jenna, if you allow me to.
This was not planned. Originally, we were going to draw our water. This was Francisco's original idea, with others. We were going to clean sewage. That was the original plan. In fact, part of the initial investment went to an NGO that developed the project for an artificial swamp, where the sewage water was to be cleansed, so we could use it for watering the garden and for running the toilets.
Unfortunately, that was going to take over half of the space almost, and it was going to be smelly. So the consensus was, “That's not going to work.”
Next option, we said, “Let's do a well.” And we did geophysics studies to see if ground water could be used. And the geophysics study said, “yes, you'll get plenty of water at that point.” Turned out, no. We should have used one of those people who do the sticks, you know? Because we probably would have gotten better advice from them.
Anyway, we drilled, we invested in drilling the hole for the well, and no water.
So then we said, “well, what are we going to do?”
And we got a gift. This was a gift, and we have to thank and give credit to Diódoro Carrasco Altamirano. Diódoro was governor at the time, and he provided the funds. This didn't come through the trust fund that Francisco had established. This came separately, a fund to build a cistern 21 x 21 meters, almost four meters in depth.
We're now able to store 1,300,000 liters - that's about 400,000 gallons of water from the rain from the domes of the roof of Santo Domingo, the water drains to the garden, and we built a series of pipes to take the clean water from the vaults of Santo Domingo to the cistern, and we are able to store water when it rains.
This year it is raining very well. We were able to fill the cistern, we stored water and we are able to irrigate a garden for four or five, sometimes even more, months of the dry period, because we have prolonged drought.
And it's not just the wiring of the plants that need to be irrigated, but we use the water for the canals, which are a feature of our discourse. And we use the water for the greenhouse, and I will talk about the greenhouse in a moment. And we use the water for our facilities. We run the toilets and we wash our hands with water from our rain-fed cistern.
So, our number one message for sustainability: water. Number two: we have solar panels.
This building where I'm talking to you, the roof is covered with solar panels. We are generating, Jenna, more power than we use. I'm using electricity on my computer from the solar panels. We light our offices with electricity from the solar panels. We pump water for the garden with electricity that we generate ourselves, and there's a surplus. We no longer pay a utility bill. And the surplus we produce goes back into the network. The city benefits from the excess energy that we produce.
So that's something we also want to convey to the public. We should be installing, all of us, generators to feed ourselves electricity. If we can do it, why not homes? They have much smaller requirements of energy.
And finally, our greenhouse. Jenna, we're very proud about our greenhouse [The Orchid Educational Pavilion] because it received the 2018 Best of Design Award for Green Building. The garden got the Top 10 Award the previous year from the Canadian Gardening Council. And then the following year we got the green architecture award for the design of the greenhouse, and beyond the design, the ecological sustainability of the greenhouse we built.
The Orchid Educational Pavilion, Photo provided by Alejandro de Ávila
The greenhouse design was the original idea of Luis Zárate. That was the seed, which then a wonderful, talented Mexican architect based in Chicago, Francisco González Pulido, developed into the flourishing project that it is today.
Francisco González Pulido had the technical capacity, philosophy, and the heart to really do a beautiful project. He's a world class architect. He designed the Bangkok airport, the Tokyo post office, the public library of the University of Hanoi, et cetera.
He's a world class architect, and he designed this for us, and it was practically a gift. We're very thankful to him.
The greenhouse is a two chamber structure. One for tropical plants, which don't need to be cooled, and the other one for mountain plants, for high altitude plants, which require a lot of moisture, but cool temperatures.
With a glass structure, it gets to be like a steam bath. It gets very, very warm in there. So we're cooling it through geothermal cooling.
We're innovators - as far as we know, nobody else is doing it in a botanical garden, not only in Mexico, but apparently nobody else in Latin America, we're pumping air buried, we have a pipe that we put in, we put in the pipe as we built the foundations of the greenhouse, the foundations are very strong to withstand the heavy earthquakes that we have here, and along the foundations, we have this pipe that cools the air down, and the cool air comes out in the cool chamber.
And this is how we should be cooling ourselves rather than investing in air conditioning that is so wasteful in energy, and so expensive. This is the cheap way. This is the green way of cooling ourselves, and with global climate change, let's cool ourselves the green way.
We're presenting it to the public. We want to educate the public, and we want them to feel it, go inside the cool chamber. Feel it yourself! Feel the cool air coming out of the pipe, it is not air conditioning, it is not refrigerating compounds, it is just the air circulating, buried. You can do it at your home. Of course you can do it. You just need a fan to move the air.
The garden isn't just about the past, Jenna. The garden is about the future. That's how we envisioned it with Francisco.
Doesn't it make sense to have a larger space for the garden outside of the city? I’m envisioning a science campus outside of Oaxaca city.
That’s a beautiful idea - a science campus.
UNAM is starting a campus, by the way, in what used to be the military zone. And that's a beautiful project. We are not only involved in it, but rooting for it.
That’s work in process, again, it has been slowed because of the pandemic, but UNAM is gaining presence in Mexico. And I'm very happy to share with you that we have opened up space here at the garden for three branches of UNAM.
We have an office and research center of the Institute of Geography - Instituto de Geografía UNAM. We also have the office for the Institute of Historical Research - Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas UNAM. And most recently the Institute of Philology - Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas UNAM which is historical linguistics, but based on written documents.
All three institutions are very active, all three are very germane to our work. So we're very happy, and we're hoping that the next institution we can host can be the Institute of Biology - Instituto de Biología UNAM, that would really be wonderful if we can invite them here, if we can maneuver things with the state government to open up a space for them.
The expansion beyond the walls of Santo Domingo is something that again, we envisioned with Francisco, since the very beginning. He had the hope, and he really tried to negotiate the maneuvers with a neighboring community - San Augustín Etla. Jenna, did you visit San Augustín Etla when you were here?
You have to, next time you come, you have to, because that is Francisco's legacy, just as strongly as Santo Domingo.
There's a former textile mill in San Augustín Etla that oversees a beautiful town. The town is blessed with the biggest supply of water in the entire valley of Oaxaca. They have a whole watershed that they own, and it's beautiful. It's covered with forests, the tree of the little hands - el árbol de las manitas, which is one of the glories of the flora Mexico, grows there. It's the most inland population of that species, which is the icon of Mexican botanists.
I mean, it's mini paradise, okay? You have to visit it.
The former textile mill Francisco managed to convert into the most lively center for the arts in Mexico, but arts with a capital A and a capital G - Green Arts.
He envisioned a place where people could practice and teach graphic design, photography, textile art, all kinds of artistic expression, but sustainable.
Sustainable energy wise, sustainable water wise, and with zero pollution, because you may know that photography and graphic design in the traditional techniques were horrible. In fact, sadly, we fear that what brought about Francisco's demise was his lifelong exposure to these organic solvents used in the graphic arts, which are carcinogenic.
Anyway, Francisco was staunchly devoted to establishing a center where people could practice and learn alternative ways of producing an engraving, a photograph, a piece of jewelry, or a dyed fibers tapestry with zero pollution, with sustainable energy, and with wise use of water. Non wasteful. And he succeeded.
Centro de las Artes de San Agustín - the acronym, CASA, which means ‘home’ in Spanish, is the showplace for sustainable art. And Francisco envisioned an extension of our garden right there.
Unfortunately it hasn't happened for various conflicts, for various struggles that involve local politics, but also the lack of vision of people who could be funding us. It hasn't happened. It may happen in the future, we hope.
But what I can report is that we now have an extension, Jenna, in a place you may not have visited, which is Las Canteras.
Las Canteras is the navel for the city, in the sense that it's the quarry where the green stone came from to build the city of Oaxaca. The first phase of the city was not built with that green stone.
The first phase of the city, which you can see in San Pablo, you can see in the textile museum, used a different kind of stone, a harder stone in fact, piedra laja. But they realized later on that there was a quarry very close by and it's an easier stone to work with and it has a beautiful green color.
So they stop using piedra laja and they start using cantera verde [Oaxaca’s famous green stone]. The city is built out of cantera verde, in fact, it's an emblem of the city, the green stone. That quarry that yielded the building material to the city now lodges the memory of the city. It's a beautiful figure of speech, because it became a city park.
It used to be a huge, vacant lot. It used to be where the city threw the garbage, the old holes where the green stone had been extracted became filled in rubbish, but that was cleaned out over 20 years ago, and it became a city park. But it was not very active, not loved by the local neighbors, but it had potential for more. Francisco and especially Maria Isabel Grañén Porrúa and Alfredo Harp Elu envisioned building a new pole of cultural development for the city, beyond the limits of the historical city. And it's become another success story.
Las Canteras now has historic archive of Oaxaca - Archivo General del Estado de Oaxaca, designed by Ignacio Mendaro Corsini.
It’s a brand new building in this case, it's not restoration or anything historical. It's a concrete building, but beautifully colored, beautifully designed with an interplay with light that is just stunning. It now houses all the historical archives, documents, indigenous manuscripts, and all our historical memory in the place that gave birth to the city. The place that provided the green stone for building the city, as we see it today.
And the green spaces surrounding that initial building, but also the convention center, another building designed by Ignacio Mendaro, to hold congresses, convention conferences, big complexes, those green spaces are now under our responsibility.
So that's where the garden is expanding. And it's wonderful. It's wonderful because we have lots of space there. We have water, because the gaps in the stone where the quarry was worked are now filled with water, rain water that collects there, and we can use the water for irrigation.
There's potential there. We're starting to work there. Geovanni who you met is in charge of that project, he goes there every day, and it's really good to have a space where we can send plants that we have propagated. We are also collecting new plants, and are developing the theme for those spaces. Since we have the historical memory right there at the archive, we're developing a theme of plants that provide fiber, plants that provide ink, plants that are related to memory - long term memory, especially. And we have made a case for having a collection of cycads there.
Cycads are very interesting plants, as you know, because they harken back hundreds of millions of years. We have cycad fossils from the time of the earliest dinosaurs, over 250 million years ago, cycads were already at distinct lineage. And, here's a nifty bit of information, Jenna, Oaxaca boasts the highest cycad diversity in the world for a region of its size.
We have three genera of cycads, and two of them have their center of diversity right here. The genus Dioon, which spreads north as far as Sonora, and spreads south as far as Honduras, but here is where we have the greatest species diversity, and several of the species are exclusively Oaxacan, of that genus, Dioon. Dioon occurs in both the wet and dry areas, and the most interesting are in the dry areas.
And then the second genius is Ceratozamia. Ceratozamia has its center of diversity right here, again, several species of Ceratozamia are uniquely Oaxacan, endemic to Oaxaca. And in this case, here Ceratozamia is of wet areas, both cloud forests and tropical rainforests. The fact that we have two genera of cycads, having their greatest diversity here, I think speaks for itself.
It's not difficult to call you someone who is proud of Oaxaca, right?
Absolutely not, absolutely not. [Smiles]
It’s quite obvious, quite apparent. [Laughs]
Jenna, I hope you'll show the photo of my grandmother, as an actress in a theater play where she impersonated an indigenous princess, Ita Andehui, which means in the highland Mixtec language, the flower of the sky, or the flower of heaven. And she was very proud of that. And this happened before the revolution of 1910, this is before Mexico gained consciousness as a society of the importance of our indigenous past. My grandmother was part of a movement here in Oaxaca, long before the revolution changed our outlook on our own past. She was impersonating an indigenous princess, and she was proud of it. And her father Emilano spoke Zapotec, I'm very proud of that fact. Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of him to share with you.
So, we have an indigenous background in our family.
Ita Andehui, leyenda mixteca, 1910 in the Teatro Luis Mier y Terán. Refugio C. Cervantes, grandmother of Alejandro is 4th from the right. Photo provided by Alejandro de Ávila.
Thank you so much for this. I am so excited for everyone to hear from you really, especially people from Oaxaca. Thank you.
Thank you, Jenna. Thank you. I have to finish by saying that never before, have I felt like I feel, talking to you. It's sincere.
… Let's talk again very soon.
Si. Hasta la próxima.
This conversation is dedicated in memory of Francisco Toledo to the people of Oaxaca.
By Jenna Mari Matecki
Photo portraits of Alejandro de Ávila and Francisco Toledo by Geovanni Martínez Guerra
Woven portrait of Francisco Toledo by Noé Pinzón Palafox
Historical family photos provided by Alejandro de Ávila
Maize reading photo of Francisco Toledo, Alejandro de Ávila, Jesusa Rodríguez, Emmanuel Ortega, and a family from Huautla provided by Alejandro de Ávila
Historical garden construction photos provided by Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca
Historical textile photos provided by Museo Textil de Oaxaca
Note, this conversation is currently being translated into Spanish. Please subscribe to Down-To-Earth to be notified when the Spanish version comes out.
Footnotes & Extras from Alejandro de Ávila:
[1] "Mega-Mexico": this idea was developed by Dr. Jerzy Rzedowski, foremost expert on the flora of our country.
[2] The implications of the big megafaunal extinction: there were no large mammals left to domesticate in this region of the world as significant sources of animal protein, not even camelids like llamas and alpacas in the Andes, so people here were forced to develop a more vegetarian diet than anywhere else; that created a totally different scenario for devising the milpa as a multi-crop system to fulfill all nutritional needs, where each seed and each plant gets individualized attention.
[3] Why cochineal would have been domesticated here, long before loom weaving is attested: I propose that it was used initially as body paint, and became increasingly significant as a visual marker of ethnic and communal affiliation as cultural diversity increased, long before loom-woven textiles became prevalent. Its use as body paint would be bolstered by the fact that it protects the skin against harmful UV radiation better than other dyestuffs, and it is also effective as an insect repellant.
[4] Mariano López Ruiz’s “Ita Andehui, leyenda mixteca” (Ita Andewi in the modern orthography of the Mixtec languages): BOOK. As you'll see, the introductory text mentions the play, performed in 1910 in the Teatro Luis Mier y Terán (later renamed Teatro Macedonio Alcalá). That matches perfectly with the information on the photos in my grandmother's album.
[Extra] Recordings of birdsong at Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca, by Manuel Grosselet and his collaborators:
Turdusrufopalliatus, Icterus spurius, Haemorhous mexicanus, Haemorhous mexicanus, Turdus grayi, Icterus spurius, Tyrannus melancholicus, Zenaida asiatica
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Down-To-Earth, an online series about an offline world.
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