Los ojos de la milpa

Self-portrait

Los ojos de la milpa (The eyes of the milpa*) is a community memory that captures, through images and voice recordings, a moment of transition in these complex times. It all takes place somewhere in the mountains of the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, Mexico, in a community where the elders tell stories to the youth about how maize was planted many years ago: without fertilizers or sophisticated technology. The young ones listen as they witness how maize can no longer grow without chemical fertilizers, nor survive without synthetic pesticides. This is a place where the precious pace of the passing seasons coexists with a growing pressure to produce more, to extract from the earth not only nourishment, but also more and more profit.

But there are newcomers in the milpa: in the community of Santa María Tlahuitoltepec Mixe, Oaxaca, peach trees have recently made their appearance. This is thanks to the MIAF system (Milpa Intercropped with Fruit Trees), an agroforestry management proposal developed by researchers from the Postgraduate College of Agronomy. In addition to traditional crops such as maize, beans and squash, the MIAF system introduces fruit trees in the milpa to satisfy a number of needs. By forming a live barrier, they help to protect the soil from erosion caused by runoffs, a major problem in Tlahuitoltepec, where arable land is mostly found on hillsides. The trees contribute to carbon sequestration, an important strategy in the context of climate change. Finally, they also strengthen the livelihoods of farmers and their families who eat or sell the fruits, in this case peaches. However, new knowledge, skills and technologies come together with these benefits, involving a tough learning process, an increase in the amount of required labor, and the danger of a greater dependency on external inputs.

In this scenario, Los ojos de la milpa seeks to reveal the tense interweaving of the old and the new. Throughout a crop-growing cycle, families from the Juquila and Santa Ana ranches use smartphones to capture images and record sounds of whatever happens in their milpas, and to post them on this website. By doing this, they share their knowledge, their concerns, their ways of doing and their ways of thinking. They make themselves present by presenting their stories to us, by showing us how they live and work in a community which resists as it transforms. Through their own words and points of view, they leave a testimony of a crucial moment in which the urgency of finding a balance between nature and technology, between culture and productivity, can be felt.

(http://sautiyawakulima.net/oaxaca/about_more.php)

Description

The Eyes of the Milpa (Los Ojos de la Milpa) is an initiative to build a community memory, sharing knowledge and experiences through images and voice recordings of the Mixe communities in Oaxaca, Mexico. Oral and written testimonies recorded in Mixe, Spanish and English are shared through the OjoVoz open source tool, an app designed by the poet, programmer, social artist and project leader Eugenio Tisselli. With the app, farmers can use mobile technology to document and share snapshots of their work, knowledge of the field and other observations. Eugenio Tisselli had previously implemented the project in collaboration with farmers in Tanzania, under the name “Sauti ya wakulima”, or “The voice of the farmers”.

A part of the Sustainable Hillside Management Program (PMSL in Spanish), the people of the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca have started using the MIAF system (Milpa Intercropped with Fruit Trees), developed by the Postgraduate College of Chapingo. The project consists of planting fruit trees in addition to maize, beans and squash with the purpose of forming a live barrier that helps protect the hillside soil from erosion and improve the environment with the fruit tree’s carbon sequestration process.

In light of the helpless competition with industrial farming methods, local farmers are forced to leave their land in search of other means of survival or move to the cities. Thus these experiments and proposals to document activities, knowledge, seasonality, rhythm and personal input are part of an effort to incorporate traditional agriculture and new technologies and help these communities keep existing and producing, surviving changes in food production, distribution and consumption.

Interview

Eugenio Tisselli http://dpya.org/en/index.php/Eugenio_Tisselli

Links

URL: http://sautiyawakulima.net/oaxaca/about.php

Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://sautiyawakulima.net/oaxaca/about.php