Planting Empowerment and Flavor in Oaxaca
By Daniela Sclavo
Taydé and Josefina planted all sorts of vegetables and local crops for their own consumption and that of the whole family: onions, chile peppers, tomatoes, miltomate, carrots, coriander, lettuce and squash. Photo by Zoe Schaeffer on Unsplash.
It was a warm July morning in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca. The air carried a scent of brushwood and humidity. I gazed at the mountains in Santo Domingo Tomaltepec, glazed with the rising sun and its nuances of orange, and I felt alive. Sharon, my closest friend and fieldwork colleague, was with me. Together, we approached the door of Taydé’s and Josefina’s plot.
Having met through the food sovereignty project Cocina Colaboratorio, where Sharon and I collaborated, they’d invited us the day before to help with the daily tasks on the agroecological cultivation system they’d built in a piece of land their family owns. They met every day at 7 a.m. to maintain their crops’ health: watering them, removing harmful weeds and collecting harvest for consumption. Sharon and I filled some buckets with water and started to distribute it along the cultivated rows. We then tried to pull out harmful weeds. Not surprisingly, our inexperienced hands rendered us clumsy at the task. Realizing we would not be very helpful, Taydé and Jóse politely suggested we sat down to grab some warm atole.
Agroecology in Santo Domingo Tomaltepec
Taydé and Josefina were born and still live in the Zapotec-heritage town of Santo Domingo Tomaltepec in the state of Oaxaca. This region is particularly rich for its biocultural diversity and culinary practices, and for its people’s dedication to preserving their heritages. One of the poorest states of the country, it has also suffered significant marginalization, which has exacerbated migration rates and the abandonment of local landrace production. This, in turn, has caused dietary changes that promoted both the consumption of commodified and highly processed foodstuffs and a gradual erosion of local culinary knowledge.
Aunt and niece, embodying two generations, Taydé and Jóse decided about a year ago to implement an agroecological system on a family-owned terrain. This consisted of planting a combination of nonhybrid seeds from the region using natural fertilizers, taking into account the ecological dynamics of the soil (water, insects, type of sediments, herbs) and the local environment. As they explained, they sought to a cultivation modality where their food was sourced naturally, and with this they meant without any chemicals, or intensive agriculture. The two of them cleared the heavy vegetation, prepared the soil and, with time and patience, planted all sorts of vegetables and local crops for their own consumption and that of the whole family: onions, chile peppers, tomatoes, miltomate, carrots, coriander, lettuce and squash—all main ingredients in the local diet and vital for cooking most traditional regional dishes such as higadito, moles, enchiladas, and a range of salsas, salads and soups.
Between sips of atole, Sharon and I asked why they decided to undertake such a task, and how. They explained they’d had the idea for a long time but got the motivation when they got involved in a local initiative. The project Cocina Colaboratorio was forged in 2016 as a joint interest of locally linked academics, artists and, later on, a broader set of interdisciplinary participants, to push for a more just and healthy food system, consumption, and production in the community. Since then, the collaboration has focused on analysing the state of food resources, developing horizontal strategies for biocultural conservation, including the revalorization of local culinary knowledge, the evaluation of soils, community building, and promoting courses on agroecological systems on the close-by agroecological villa Tierra del Sol. Only 20 kilometers from Oaxaca City, Tierra del Sol offers a range of workshops centred on agroecology and permaculture for local farmers in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca, many who are interested in changing to a more crop diverse and environmentally friendly production system in their lands or to improve their already multi crop plantations. Taydé and Jóse decided to attend the latter, a two-week intensive course on local crop production paired with techniques for soil regeneration and organic food production. There, they learned how to build the agricultural system that was later implemented in their plot.
The main reason, they told us, was to have access to healthy and nutritious food, for various reasons. Worried about the health problems that other members of the family had recently suffered, Taydé, Jóse and their family decided to implement drastic changes in their household diet. Moreover, both envisioned the economic benefits of obtaining their own food: They could produce for consumption, save money and sell the surplus or give it to other people in the community. For now, they produce enough for the family unit and sometimes they have a little bit more, but the plan is to increase production as they have not used the whole plot. Both women state that the project, as a part-time activity, has helped save more of their main incomes, as they have commerce-related jobs in the town. Also, that they do not depend on volatile prices or on buying their vegetables elsewhere.
“It brought the family together,” Jóse says. “It has changed how we all eat and support each other; it gives us a sense of community.”
After little more than a year working on their plot of land, the impact was already visible: They managed to push for local seed and plant exchange with family members and neighbours, and her sister-in-law, who regularly assists on the plot, implemented a worm-compost system.
Implementing an agroecological system on a family-owned terrain consisted of planting a combination of nonhybrid seeds from the region using natural fertilizers, taking into account the ecological dynamics of the soil and the local environment. Photo by Daniela Sclavo.
Perspectives on the Future, Change, and Loss
For Taydé and Josefina, then, access to healthy foods meant taking care of their bodies, their family, but also, preserving their heritages and building a brighter future. As we sat chatting, Jóse’s two daughters played at the edge of the plot.
“I want this for them,” she says.
Food and culinary traditions play a central role in Santo Domingo’s culture and livelihoods. But despite the importance cuisine holds in the community, this knowledge has been lost in younger generations, as older women and other community members have repeatedly shared with Cocina Colaboratorio. This phenomenon can be seen in other regions of Oaxaca and of Mexico more generally. As Alyshia Gálvez explains in her book Eating NAFTA, some influencing factors over the last decades are the rise of neoliberal policies, extensive migration to urban centers and the U.S., the growing commodification of foodstuffs and increasing ideals of modernization that have pushed younger people to reject or distance themselves from their traditional or indigenous heritages.
Jóse and Taydé, two generations, had distinct approaches to culinary knowledge, to food, and to the ingredients they were growing in their lot. For one, Taydé knows how to cook most local dishes, and thus, the vegetables they produce are easily integrated in her everyday cooking.
On the other side, Josefina did not learn the latter while growing up, partly as a way of resisting dominant gendered roles, and because she left for university and worked away from home for many years. Back in Santo Domingo, she experienced a renewed interest in learning about local cuisine, motivated partly by growing her own crops and knowing how to use them, and she wanted to re-appropriate her heritage.
For both, the ideal of perpetuating culinary traditions—with a few innovations along the way—and growing their own harvest, was an important legacy for the children, and more widely, for Santo Domingo itself. In their own words, they wanted to promote “the culture of planting our own food,” which children “see and imitate, they play and imagine,” and so they will “learn to be more conscious about where their food comes from, and how it grows… it is something that humanity needs.”
In this sense, Josefina and Taydé are re-creating, re-imagining, and grasping their heritages by planting many, many seeds.
Women, Resistance and Food
During our conversation, I assumed that the culinary knowledge we were speaking of was gendered—a ubiquitous but often unrecognized state of things. In Santo Domingo and in many other places in the world, it is mostly women who perpetuate culinary knowledge and then pass it on to their daughters, mainly through words and practice. It is, thus, through many women that flavors, ingredients, stories, experiences, culture, biocultural diversity and, in a way, communities, are held together.
In my research and fieldwork, I came to find that this transfer of knowledge is hardly detailed in conservation books or food studies, as this expertise is frequently thought of as an unprofessional and unintellectualized endeavour. Yet, this knowledge is alive and real, and it matters.
In this sense, Josefina and Taydé’s project reflects resilience, by producing local ingredients and reappropriating cuisine, heritage and health. Their endeavour spans the field, the kitchen, the house, the town itself. From seedlings to mole, to the whole family around a table, from small dietary changes to community seed exchanges.
Moreover, it means a space for themselves too.
“In this place, I am happy,” Josefina says. “Here, all the rest doesn´t matter, I feel peace when I take care of the plants, when I transplant, when I water them.”
Taydé expressed the satisfaction she feels when working on the plot, and from watching the plants grow.
“I feel a sense of plenitude,” she says. “The taste is so much better, and everything is freshly harvested.”
Their harvest and its quality are pivotal to their sense of empowerment, not just in terms of food self-sufficiency, but for perpetuating cultural legacies, for self-determination, independence, and personal fulfilment. In this way, their project was threaded through and by emotion, by mutual partnership, by love.
Two hours—and uncountable conchas—had passed since the first sip of atole and coffee. We were all a little too hot, sweaty from the heat, a bit emotional from conversation, and maybe a little too full with maize elixir and sugar. It was in the rawness of that moment, though, that I could grasp a sense of their everyday reality: On the ground, it takes more than agroecological and technical knowledge to instantiate changes in local food systems. It takes family, memories, stories, empowerment, emotions, imagination, community, hands, work, senses of belonging and loss, and a lot, a lot, of tears and laughter.
