585118

research-article2015
LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X15585118Latin American PerspectivesNarchi and Canabal / CONSTRUCTIONS OF NATURE AND TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE

Subtle Tyranny
Divergent Constructions of Nature and the Erosion of
Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Xochimilco
by
Nemer E. Narchi and Beatriz Canabal Cristiani

Neoliberal reforms and social constructs that legitimate the full exploitation of
nature intersect with political power to produce an inherently violent social atmosphere
in which economic development is based on exclusion, submission, and dispossession of
rural and indigenous communities. Historical ecological study of Lake Xochimilco
reveals the way in which imposed constructs of nature that exclude traditional ecologi-
cal knowledge have transformed landscapes and livelihoods to the detriment of all the
inhabitants of Mexico City.

Las reformas neoliberales y las construcciones sociales que legitiman la explotación

plena de la naturaleza se cruzan con el poder político para crear un ambiente social inhe-
rentemente violento en el cual el desarrollo económico se basa en la exclusión, el someti-
miento y el despojo de las comunidades rurales e indígenas. El estudio histórico de la
ecología del Lago de Xochimilco revela la manera en que las construcciones de la naturaleza
impuestas que excluyen el conocimiento ecológico tradicional han transformado el paisaje
y los medios de subsistencia en detrimento de todos los habitantes de la Ciudad de México.

Keywords: Environmental Orientalism, Traditional ecological knowledge, Xochimilco,

Chinampa agriculture, Periurban agriculture

The ways in which different societies use nature depend on cultural adapta-
tions derived from the ways they perceive, imagine, and understand the natu-
ral world. While based in biophysical reality, nature becomes a system of
representations framed by political and economic forces that render it a subjec-
tive and ungeneralizable construct (Latour, 2002) whose components vary from

Nemer E. Narchi is an associated researcher with Centro de Estudios en Geografía Humana - El

Colegio de Michoacán. He developed this paper as a postdoctoral fellow at Mexico’s Universidad
Autónoma Metropolitana–Unidad Xochimilco, where he analyzed the relationships between
urbanization and ethnobiological knowledge erosion. His long-term research goal is a synthesis
of biocultural research and conservation. Beatriz G. Canabal Cristiani is an associate professor at
the UAM-X, where she teaches courses on the peasantry and rural-urban relations, and the author
of Rescate de Xochimilco (1991), Xochimilco: Una identidad recreada (1997), Los caminos de la montaña
(2001), and Agricultura urbana en México (2000). They are grateful to the people of Xochimilco for
providing them with empirical and historical information over the years. They thank Arli De
Luca-Brown, Toben Lafrancois, and Benjamin T. Wilder for helpful comments and Marjorie Bray,
George Leddy, and David Barkin for improving the manuscript with thoughtful recommenda-
tions. This work was supported by UAM’s Agua y Recursos Naturales en la Historia y Culturas
del Campo Mexicano Project and its postdoctoral fellowship program.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 204, Vol. 42 No. 5, September 2015, 90–108
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X15585118
© 2015 Latin American Perspectives

90
 Narchi and Canabal / CONSTRUCTIONS OF NATURE AND TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE   91

culture to culture (Cronon, 1996; Descola, 1996). The diversity of notions of

nature results in a wide range of strategies for assessing and exploiting the
materials that nature provides. Similarly to the way in which Orientalism (sensu
Said, 1978) became a way of exerting authority over North African and Asian
cultures by depicting them as inferior, the imposition of a single culture’s
notion of nature attempts to subdue others. The hegemonic representation of
nature is presented as unequivocal and objective knowledge by authorizing
particular ways of describing, teaching, and ruling over it.
Pálsson (1996) identifies three general epistemes regarding the use and
appreciation of nature: Orientalism, paternalism, and communalism.
Orientalism sees nature as a composite of elements over which there is legiti-
mate ownership and the right to its full exploitation and transformation.
Paternalism also claims some ownership over nature but differs in considering
that humans have a duty to preserve nature, at least partially. Finally, commu-
nalism promotes generalized reciprocity between humans and nature, of which
humans are part.
When societies come into conflict, their conceptions of nature collide as well.
The culture that emerges as dominant imposes, along with many other values,
its notions of nature on those subject to domination. This imposition is linked
to the introduction of particular extractive schemes. In this article we focus on
the imposition of environmental Orientalism on rural and indigenous societies.
Environmental Orientalism is pervasive throughout Mexico (see Toledo,
Garrido, and Barrera-Bassols in this issue) and highly visible throughout Latin
America, where mining (e.g., Gordon and Webber, 2008; Munarriz, 2008), water
management and hydroelectric power generation (e.g., Bartolomé, 1993), log-
ging (e.g., Southgate et al., 2000), and other mega-projects (see Grandia, 2013)
impose concepts of nature and the economy on indigenous and marginal pop-
ulations. Turner and colleagues (2008) have argued that the ideological clash
arising from differences in cultural uses of nature has psychological, physical,
and cultural consequences when local conceptions are not included in policy
making. Thus environmental Orientalism acts as a vector for social and envi-
ronmental violence.
Contemporary capitalism suggests that the sole purpose of societies should
be steady increase in the gross domestic product (Bauman, 2007). Gross domes-
tic product has been discursively constructed as the only objective measure
available for determining the health of the human community (Graeber, 2011).
In this scheme, the depletion of natural resources is seen as inevitable for eco-
nomic development and serves as the foundational argument for the imposi-
tion of environmental Orientalism. When a particular construction of nature is
imposed instead of being mediated, it destroys people’s social, cultural, and
environmental assets and reduces them to petty consumers.
Environmental Orientalism is inherently violent. It makes use of physical
violence to impose a particular notion of nature and dispossess societies of their
resources and traditional ecological knowledge (Toledo, 2013). The violence
becomes structural (sensu Galtung, 1969) when the values and interests of dom-
inant economic systems are imposed on the marginal societies and cultures of
the world (Shiva, 2002). Significant and sustained economic growth is illusory
because the fundamental premise of Orientalism, infinite economic growth,
92   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

demands the exhaustion of finite natural resources (Naveh, 2000). Orientalism

exerts violence by compromising the ability of environments to provide people
with enough resources to thrive.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge

Traditional ecological knowledge is a cognitive system made up of knowl-

edge, practices, behaviors, and beliefs by which local populations internalize
the structure and ecological functioning of the geographic zone from which
they get natural resources to fulfill their needs (Berkes, Colding, and Folke,
2000). These resources are not limited to the materials for creating clothing,
food, and tools (Schultes, 1992) but also include the materials to fulfill housing
(e.g., Speck and Dexter, 1952), ornamental (e.g., Johnston, 1968), medicinal
(Berlin and Berlin, 2005), ludic (e.g., Ruan-Soto, Garibay-Orijel, and Cifuentes,
2006), and sexual (e.g., Andrade and Costa-Neto, 2005) needs, among others.
Traditional ecological knowledge has helped local populations to maintain the
ecological processes and biodiversity of their immediate surroundings. In
addition to providing adaptive strategies of vital importance, by offering prag-
matic ways of encoding ecological notions and ways of handling nature’s life
support systems it is a potential alternative to prevailing conservation schemes
and the so-called sustainable exploitation promoted by neoliberal capitalism
(Pierotti and Wildcat, 2000).
However, within the Orientalist scheme, ruled by the logics of environmen-
tal modernization (Hajer, 1995), alternative constructs of nature, including tra-
ditional ecological knowledge, are integrated into relatively homogeneous
representations that are treated as inferior, invalid, mythological, archaic, irra-
tional, and nonscientific (see Bonfil, 1989; Pérez Ruiz and Argueta Villamar,
2011) and are not given due importance in policy making. The violence that the
global economic system generates around traditional ecological knowledge is
not limited to the erosion of that knowledge but has social and environmental
impacts ranging from loss of identity to the dismantling of entire habitats.
An ideal empirical referent for understanding how violence operates on tra-
ditional ecological knowledge is the urban evolution undergone in the Basin of
Mexico and particularly in Xochimilco. The area has suffered substantial
anthropogenic alteration for 2,000 years. This alteration has resulted in a drastic
reduction of vegetation coverage (Merlín et al., 2012), an apparent alteration of
rainfall patterns (Narchi, 2013), diminishing groundwater availability
(Bojórquez et al., 1998; Espinosa and Mazari, 2007; Ezcurra et al., 1999), and a
drastic reduction in biodiversity, including the extinction of several species
(Contreras et al., 2009).

Environmental Deterioration Around Lake Xochimilco

The municipality of Xochimilco has 128.1 square kilometers and represents

8.9 percent of the Federal District. It contains seven mountainous towns, a
downtown made up of 17 original barrios, a peripheral barrio of relatively
 Narchi and Canabal / CONSTRUCTIONS OF NATURE AND TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE   93

recent formation known as Barrio 18, and seven towns that border the lake.
Topographically, it can be divided into three major areas (Cordero, 2001): a
mountainous area shaped by the Ajusco-Chichinautzin range, which extends
along the southern edge of the lake; Topilejo–Milpa Alta, also mountainous, in
which the basaltic soils are less permeable and conditions drier; and an area of
lacustrine and alluvial deposits that is the iconic zone for the entire biome. Lake
Xochimilco is the most emblematic feature of the municipality.
Lake Xochimilco is a 25-square-kilometer remnant of a five-lake system orig-
inally occupying 920 square kilometers in the Basin of Mexico (Zambrano et al.,
2009). The area has been occupied since 20,000 BCE (González et al., 2006;
Lorenzo, 1981; Peralta, 2011), with incipient agriculture emerging around 1500
BCE (Peralta, 2011). Like other agroecosystemic landscapes, the lake is consid-
ered important for reflecting specific techniques built upon traditional ecolog-
ical knowledge for achieving sustained land use (UNESCO, 1996). In contrast,
agro-industrial landscapes (Naveh and Lieberman, 1984) are conceived as
merely fulfilling the economic premise of maximizing gains in the short term,
with little or no consideration for overarching ecological processes (Farina,
2000).
Ezcurra (2003) suggests that the first anthropogenic modifications of true
significance occurred when the Paleo-Indian population extinguished most of
the megafaunal species around the basin, driving its inhabitants to adopt incip-
ient agriculture. However, the most dramatic modification that Lake Xochimilco
has suffered as a result of human activity occurred ca. 500 CE with the introduc-
tion of chinampas, a traditional-ecological-knowledge-based agroecosystem
that completely changed the lacustrine landscape (Frederick, 2007). Chinampas
are artificial garden islands constructed by overlapping layers of organic mat-
ter, mineral-rich soil, and organically rich silts. Chinampa agriculture was orig-
inally not dependent on irrigation; all the watering was administered through
adsorption, and plots were fertilized with a mixture of aquatic plants and
organically rich muds dug from the lake’s floor. The agroecosystem spread
throughout the basin from 1200 to 1500 CE (Peralta, 2011), transforming the
relatively homogeneous and barren surface of the lake into a complex network
of islands and channels—a cultural landscape (sensu Sauer, 1963). Armillas
(1971) conservatively estimated that the total area of land reclaimed from the
lakes for constructing chinampas amounted to 120 square kilometers.
The combination of organic foundations, uninterrupted watering, and con-
stant and rich fertilizing enabled the pre-Columbian peoples to build a highly
productive agroecosystem that could easily produce maize yields of more than
5.0 tons per hectare (Rojas, 1993; Scialabba and Hattam, 2003). The contempo-
rary national average (1996–2005) for all other maize agricultural systems com-
bined is 2.59 tons per hectare. (These statistics cover only grain and not the
maize by-products and other vegetables associated with maize production on
the chinampas [Aguilar, Illsley, and Marielle, 2007].) The introduction of
chinampas reshaped the lacustrine environment into a semiartificial and inten-
sively managed agroecosystem in which the division between natural and cul-
tural environments was hard to discern.
During colonization, the government of New Spain decided to drain the
lakes in order to foster European-style farms and production. This occurred in
94   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

spite of strong opposition by José Antonio Alzate, the only man with the vision
to recommend the use of indigenous techniques to manage the lakes (Ezcurra,
2003). The conquistadores appear to have been eager to mimic the arid environ-
ments of their Extremadura homeland in this recently conquered landscape
(von Humboldt and Black, 1822). Nonetheless, much of the lacustrine environ-
ment remained relatively undisturbed until the late nineteenth century except
for an increase in crop diversity (Canabal, 1997).
Major ecological impacts in Lake Xochimilco began in the early twentieth
century, when Xochimilco’s groundwater was exploited to provide Mexico
City with water (Torres-Lima, Canabal, and Burela, 1994). Deforestation rates
increased with the growth of the timber, paper, and coal industries, and by the
1940s Lake Xochimilco had almost dried up. During the 1960s the construction
of new infrastructure opened new periurban areas to urbanization (Lozada
et al., 1998). Rapid urbanization and overexploitation of groundwater caused
differential soil subsidence in much of the lacustrine area. The government
compensated for the lack of water by injecting partly treated sewage from a
nearby plant into the lake. As water quality declined, food production was
replaced by flower production (Torres-Lima, Canabal, and Burela, 1994). To
attract moisture, a reforestation campaign was implemented, but the campaign
made use of introduced species that consumed much more water and displaced
native vegetation (Lozada et al., 1998).
In 1987, the agrarian landscape of Lake Xochimilco was included on
UNESCO’s World Heritage List (ICOMOS, 1987) as the sole remnant of tradi-
tional land use before European occupation (UNESCO, 1987). UNESCO’s dec-
laration voiced strong concerns for the site’s preservation, viewing the whole
area as threatened by the advance of urbanization. Mexican President Carlos
Salinas responded by implementing an official conservation program (Wirth,
2003). The Plan de Rescate Ecológico de Xochimilco (Ecological Recovery Plan
for Xochimilco) called for better water quality, expansion and support of agri-
culture, intensive studies of Lake Xochimilco’s agricultural systems, and better
urban services for its inhabitants. It also included an end to urbanization of the
chinampería (the lacustrine zone in which chinampa agriculture is carried out),
prevention of differential flooding, and a restoration of ecological equilibrium
(Wirth, 1997). It included the expropriation of 1,100 hectares of land from peas-
ants to create a reserve of around 2,600 hectares (DOF, 1992).
While the federal government touted its creation of a 160-hectare ecological
park in which native flora and fauna are protected (DDF, 1989) and tourism is
permitted (DuBroff, 2009), the conservation program has been considered an
attempt to privatize and eventually urbanize communal productive lands
(Legorreta, 2005; Zabaleta, 2010). Conceptions of nature imposed from else-
where have turned into political power. Unable to see the areas bordering Lake
Xochimilco as anything other than barren land, two of the most important
political parties, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional and the Partido de la
Revolución Democrática, have encouraged illegal land occupation in the area
for at least two decades, prioritizing residential over agricultural land uses
(Canabal, 1997). Currently, in spite of expensive conservation efforts, Lake
Xochimilco is in peril (see Stephan-Otto, 2005). Current estimates suggest that
the total chinampa coverage is 22 square kilometers (UNESCO, 2006). (Other
 Narchi and Canabal / CONSTRUCTIONS OF NATURE AND TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE   95

estimates [Alcántara, 2005] calculate it as 0.25 square kilometers.) With poor

and insufficient water resources, land use coverage has rapidly changed from
agricultural to urban, resulting in a decline in food production. These changes
have caused a significant reduction in the quality and quantity of the ecological
systems that have long supported large human populations in the Basin of
Mexico (Merlín, 2009).
In 2003 the World Heritage Committee decided to support a new initiative,
as suggested by the Mexican authorities, to update the conservation strategies
by encouraging the participation of the people of Xochimilco (WHC, 2003;
2006). However, local government was criticized for the purely theoretical
nature of this participation. Zabaleta (2010) argues that the citizen participation
was useless because the technical and political bodies running the new conser-
vation plan did not fully consider the concerns of Xochimilco’s inhabitants in
the planning and implementation of mitigation and conservation policies.

Simulated Conservation

Since European contact, the ecological integrity of Lake Xochimilco has dete-
riorated as a result of successive imposition of exogenous perceptions of nature
and methods for exploiting it not only within the lacustrine area but also in the
mountains that surround it and keep it alive with runoff. The ways in which
exogenous notions of nature have conceptualized Lake Xochimilco have had
little or no concern for achieving sustained use of the area. In recent times, and
in spite of a better-informed ecology, efforts to preserve the lake have largely
ignored the cultural aspects of this landscape. First, the cultural links between
the lacustrine area and its surroundings have been overlooked. This neglect has
decoupled the productive forces of the 14 towns of Xochimilco from the social,
economic, and environmental context that bound them together as a diverse
and productive society (see Barkin, 2012 [1999]). Secondly, the potential of the
chinampa agroecosystem as opposed to industrial agriculture has not been
addressed. The incapacity of local and regional governments to understand the
local concepts of nature by which Lake Xochimilco has been managed for cen-
turies has had deleterious consequences for the biological diversity and pro-
ductivity of the area. Consequently, as in other parts of the world (see Shiva,
2002), environmental deterioration has transformed self-sufficient producers
into consumers of seeds, agro-chemicals, and nonadaptive agro-industrial
technologies.
The conservation schemes for Xochimilco are neoliberal-Orientalist, consid-
ering the preservation of nature worthwhile only if it produces immediate eco-
nomic profit (Büscher et al., 2012). The concept of nature that the authorities
have imposed upon Lake Xochimilco is shallow and incomplete. The real prob-
lems of the area include low water quality and quantity, differential subsidence
of the chinampas, clandestine sewage discharge, and exotic-species invasion. If
these core issues were taken into account in conservation planning, govern-
mental agencies and nongovernmental organizations could charge environ-
mental taxes, trade carbon bonds, and benefit from the revenues of the
so-called environmental services1 provided by Lake Xochimilco (water uptake,
96   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

air purification, carbon dioxide sinkage, etc.). Deriving such benefits from con-
servation would fit squarely within the neoliberal conception. Instead, the con-
servation plans for Lake Xochimilco include the creation of flower markets,
athletic fields, artificial lakes, and interpretative parks.
The parks are without any doubt the most ill-founded of all the conservation
proposals for Lake Xochimilco. Customarily presented as a way of preserving
the lacustrine biota, their various formats bear little or no relationship to the
agroecology of the lake. A 2008 project consisted of a water park and a six-story
aquarium hosting marine mammals and a live coral exhibit (Ramos, 2008).
Four years later the project proposed to rescue the lacustrine habitats by build-
ing a 3,000-square-meter artificial lake surrounded by 8,000 square meters of
parking space (Royacelli, 2012). The area allocation makes one wonder what is
really being recreated when the local authorities consider activities such as
ziplining, rappelling, visiting a petting zoo, riding a tractor, and riding a mini-
train appropriate for enabling visitors to get close to and learn about the vibrant
culture of Xochimilco. Far from representing, reenacting, or preserving
Xochimilco, projects like this are aimed at disengaging both visitors and the
local community from its landscape, traditional ecological knowledge, and cul-
tural assets. The presence of an out-of-context park that misrepresents the area
will gradually reshape the notions of nature pertaining to Xochimilco. The
developers are professionals who know very well what they are doing despite
the detrimental and violent nature of their actions (Ascher, 1999). The case of
Lake Xochimilco is remarkably similar to Fletcher’s (2001) “capitalism of
chaos,” in which capital harnesses crises to which it has contributed in order to
expand from them.
The poor quality of the water of Lake Xochimilco has pushed farmers to
search for new technologies. In the late 1970s one of the most common alterna-
tives for increasing yields was the use of greenhouses, which were placed on
top of the chinampas but displaced their function. The system worked for a
while, but the chinamperos (chinampa farmers) began to depend on irrigation
systems, modified seeds, and chemical fertilizers to maintain their production.
As a short-term consequence, the water became eutrophic as farmers stopped
managing the aquatic plants previously used as fertilizers, and in the long term
it became polluted, since greenhouses require more herbicides and pesticides
that ultimately ended up in the lake (Torres-Lima and Burns, 2002). Despite the
fact that greenhouse revenues amount to 2.03 pesos for every peso invested
while chinampas yield an average of 2.26 (Merlín, 2009), the local authorities
are still promoting the use of greenhouses. A recent conservation proposal with
a total budget of US$30,131,025 allocates US$1,667,500 to chinampa mainte-
nance and twice as much to greenhouse subsidies (GDF, 2011). While the
chinampa funds will be used for repairs, the items budgeted for greenhouse
expenses are intended to subsidize the construction of greenhouses over 10
hectares, the introduction of a watering system, and the purchase of agricul-
tural inputs and materials to be distributed among greenhouse owners. This
lack of equity makes greenhouses appear more productive and discourages the
use of traditional ecological knowledge. Among chinamperos there is a feeling
of betrayal and abandonment so strong that some have felt discouraged from
continuing with their livelihoods and sold their agricultural land when they
 Narchi and Canabal / CONSTRUCTIONS OF NATURE AND TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE   97

had a chance to do so. JG, a part-time chinampero and chronicler of Xochimilco,

says that the local administration and the city and national agencies “will only
support introduced technologies. There is no fostering of traditional agricul-
ture, which is treated as obsolete and inefficient.”
Besides imposing a neoliberal construct of nature, the conservation schemes
for Lake Xochimilco have a strong component of dispossession. Originally, the
towns and barrios of Xochimilco produced specific goods that were traded
with other settlements by well-established chains of exchange, often following
kin ties. For example, people living in Xochimilco’s mountains thrived by
exchanging corn, lima beans, forage crops, and livestock, several types of fruit,
and an unrecorded number of wild edibles (Olivares, 2010) for products of the
lacustrine area. Throughout the twentieth century Xochimilcans, particularly
those living in mountain settlements, managed to preserve this type of exchange
by resisting the construction of large projects such as penitentiaries (Rudiño,
2010), golf resorts (Nájar, 1996), housing projects, and chain grocery stores (of
which downtown Xochimilco has just one). However, the new administration
of the municipality has granted permission to construct a 16,000-square-meter
grocery store in Santiago Tepalcatlalpan (Salgado, 2013) that local farmers
believe will devastate the economy and productivity of the area (Quintana and
Chávez, 2013).
The introduction of chain grocery stores is a general problem among farming
communities, and it may be argued that this claim is typical of small business
owners everywhere. In Xochimilco, however, there is a strong division of opin-
ion on the subject. LS, who considers herself an active blogger in favor of mod-
ernization, says that chain stores will not affect local producers, since most of
the people in Xochimilco have always traveled to Villa Coapa to buy preserved
foods, specialty groceries, and cookware while buying their fresh produce
directly from producers in Xochimilco’s central market. Others, such as AG,
claim that “there will be serious social and economic consequences for the peo-
ple coming from all of Xochimilco’s neighborhoods to sell their products once
a week.” It has long been known that patterns of material production are
strongly linked to the production of social relations (Marx and Engels, 1970
[1846]). On the one hand, the introduction of chain stores might obliterate tra-
ditional patterns of production and the social processes that emanate from
them. On the other hand, the social relations established in Xochimilco have
historically been key factors in providing enough cohesion for people to claim
a livelihood and an identity and mount resistance to external impositions.

Xochimilco’s Resistance

The people of Xochimilco have constructed their culture around traditional

agricultural production. The intensive input of labor required by the chinampa
agroecosystem has fostered an extended-family assemblage, and the extended
family has woven an intricate and sound social organization. In addition,
morality and strong religious beliefs are important components of resource
management strategies (sensu Anderson and Anderson, 2011), strengthening
people’s identity by keeping alive the observance of religious dates and rites
98   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

(Cordero, 2001). Their identity helps the people of Xochimilco to engage in

intense cultural exchange with the core of Mexico City, a city that they consider
their own but that has assaulted them with constant pressure for urbanization
seeking to feed off Xochimilco’s land, water, air, landscape, and culture. The
people of Xochimilco have resisted antipeasant agrarian policies, unfair com-
petition, greenhouse production, chain store encroachment, and lack of recog-
nition of a traditional ecological knowledge that has helped sustain one of the
biggest cities in the world for more than 1,000 years. They have not given up
their land because of the deep cultural and emotional attachment they have
developed to a place that has provided them with a sui generis livelihood and
a landscape that enables them to engage with nature in a way that is intelligible
to them (Stephan-Otto, 1998).
Globalized modernity is characterized by the production, standardization,
and reproduction of a ubiquitous consumer society transcending geopolitical
borders and cultural frontiers in the pursuit of economic growth. Policy makers
in Mexico City will continue to push for so-called modern projects and visions
despite the existence of valuable pragmatic livelihoods that are adapted to
exploiting the landscape in ways that have proven sustainable and highly pro-
ductive. Globalized modernity and its development models dismantle any
livelihood that may offer an alternative to the pursuit of productivity, competi-
tion, and profitability (Bauman, 2005). Alternative livelihoods are discursively
portrayed in mainstream culture as inferior, primitive, complicated, and
impoverished, producing barely enough material goods to make it through the
day. Yet it is clear that poverty is relative to values often tied to means of pro-
duction (Sen, 1983). Despite a lack of commodities, social groups may generate
and accumulate capacities for food sovereignty and economic independence,
among them the traditional ecological knowledge behind food production and
the moral economies that help to distribute resources outside of formal market
schemes. These capacities, still vibrant in Xochimilco’s communities, are con-
stantly being attacked by the formal market economy because they pose a
threat to its foundation, the logic of pure economic growth (Bauman, 2007).

Violence Beyond Xochimilco

The violence exercised throughout the twentieth century against the peoples
and environments of Xochimilco is not limited to the loss of a landscape and
the assault on their conceptions of nature. Damage to subsistence practices is
not limited to the loss of native vegetables but extends to Xochimilco’s original
fauna. The disappearance of animals that were once extremely important in the
diet of the inhabitants of the villages of Xochimilco (Rojas and Pérez, 1998) has
had an immediate impact on protein intake. Combined with the effects of ever-
increasing integration into the market and the resulting changes in diet, this has
meant increasing rates of cardiovascular, mental, and degenerative diseases
(Belino, 2009). The number of deaths per hundred thousand inhabitants today
is led by cardiovascular disease (64.9) and diabetes mellitus (64.4) (Carmona,
2000). With increasing urbanization, Mexico City has lost the capacity to be
self-sufficient in terms of food production (Rico and Reyes, 2000). Besides the
 Narchi and Canabal / CONSTRUCTIONS OF NATURE AND TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE   99

cost of production, there is an increase in food prices based on transportation

and storage costs (see Nelson, 2009), a situation that is particularly worrying
for a city in which at least half of the population is malnourished because of low
income (Torres, 2002).
According to Alberto González Pozo, 50,000 chinampas survive in all of the
lacustrine area (Vértiz, 2013). Of these, only 6 percent have been catalogued in
some way (Villanueva, 2011), and this makes it extremely difficult to estimate
the potential production of the cultural landscape. In spite of the uncertainties
about their actual number and productive condition, local authorities have
argued that the remaining 22 square kilometers of chinampería are insignificant
for food production. This argument is based on Sanders’s (1993 [1957]) calcula-
tions of Xochimilco’s original capacity for food production, some 3,000 kilo-
grams of corn per hectare per year. Sanders assumes that chinampas are capable
of producing only corn. However, chinampa agriculture depends on polycul-
ture, which almost doubles the amount of food produced per unit of land
(Gliessman, 1998). Canabal (1997) provided a list of at least 13 cultivars still
grown on chinampas in 1995. There has been no official update in the number
of cultivars produced, but R, a fair-trade marketer specialized in chinampa
products, told us that 78 of the 120 different products he sells are generated
from chinampa agriculture, and A, one of the youngest chinampa producers in
all of Xochimilco, offers 17 different vegetables to his clients.
Sanders also fails to consider the tremendous amount of animal protein avail-
able from 38 species of waterfowl (Sahagún, 1975), 12 species of fish (Berres,
2000) of which at least 3 were eaten by humans (Rojas and Pérez, 1998), 2 species
of amphibians (Rojas and Pérez, 1998), 2 species of reptiles (Niederberger, 1979),
numerous edible insects (Ramos and Pino, 1989), one crustacean (Rojas and
Pérez, 1998), and domestic poultry. Animal species have played an extremely
important role in the nutrition of Xochimilco’s inhabitants, especially in times of
famine. Rojas and Pérez (1998: 101) provide us with an account of people’s deal-
ing with the postrevolutionary scarcity of food by eating wild edibles and game.
Therefore, anyone taking Sanders’s estimates at face value will neglect the func-
tioning of the municipality as a large-scale cultural landscape in which people
have survived by understanding the environment, developing specialized pro-
duction, and engaging in constant material exchange.
The productive technologies of Lake Xochimilco have been acknowledged
ever since European contact, making it one of the better-known agroecosys-
tems in the world. Paradoxically, the lack of recent and trustworthy data on the
food production capabilities of Xochimilco’s chinampería suggests that it is one
of the world’s least-studied agroecosystems today. Torres-Lima et al. (2010)
have pointed to the scarcity of studies focusing on urban agriculture, which
may partially explain the increasing abandonment of agricultural land in
Mexico City (Torres-Lima and Rodríguez-Sánchez, 2008). Just 6,000 of the
nearly 500,000 people living in Xochimilco are engaged in chinampa agricul-
ture (Delavaud, 2009). PR, a 45-year-old man, explained:

There are no chinamperos anymore. For good or for bad, our parents gave us
the opportunity to get better education, so now it is much easier to go and
work elsewhere, even for minimum wage, than to come here and bust one’s ass
100   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

working the land. That is why there are no young farmers anymore. Living off
the land represents a good income, but working in agriculture is too damn
hard.

If there is genuine interest on the part of the government in restoring and

maintaining the natural presence of a lacustrine city (e.g., Kalach, 2010),
Xochimilco’s agroecosystem is certainly capable of offering considerable
amounts of vegetable and animal foods at lower cost than imported edibles.
Nonetheless, the most valuable aspects of preserving this cultural landscape
lie in the fact that urban agriculture contains increasing urban sprawl (Torres-
Lima, Rodríguez-Sánchez, and García, 2000), preserves one of the most bio-
logically rich agroecosystems known today, allowing us to understand how
flora is managed and used and creating in situ repositories for domesticated
and nondomesticated plants alike (Jiménez and Gómez, 1991), provides the
people of Mexico City with very much needed green spaces (Delavaud, 2009),
offers alternative livelihoods and incomes (Canabal, 1997), serves as a natural
sanctuary for 212 bird species (Meléndez, 2012) and 29 mammal species
(Hortelano and Cervantes, 2011), and provides an integral life support system
that sinks carbon, captures water, stablilizes microclimates, generates oxy-
gen, reduces soil erosion, adds aesthetic and recreational value, attenuates
land collapse and fracturing, and reduces the risk of severe flooding (Merlín,
2009). If these reasons are compelling enough to advocate for the preservation
of the area, the planning and implementation of conservation strategies will
have to acknowledge that Xochimilco has been shaped and maintained by
traditional ecological knowledge. If there is no change in official policies
toward including traditional ecological knowledge in development plans for
the area, we can only hope to be overestimating the environmental and social
consequences.

Final Remarks

Our species has lived on this planet for some 180,000 years. Throughout this
period, in every latitude and in every ecosystem humans have thrived by
developing traditional ecological knowledge systems suitable for the habitats
they occupy. Societies using unsuitable cultural strategies may be selected
against and collapse (Diamond, 2005). We have described the severe deteriora-
tion in the quality and size of the natural environment of Xochimilco through-
out the last century as a consequence of the implementation of an Orientalist
development model. We highlight that the development strategy in question
has proved unsuitable for the long-term maintenance of this environment, in
contrast with chinampa agriculture, a surviving agroecosystem established
some 1,500 years ago in the Basin of Mexico that hosts a cornucopia of plant and
animal species capable of meeting the needs of human beings in a sustainable
way. We have attempted to show that the effects of imposing an Orientalist
view are not limited to eroding traditional ecological knowledge—that they
create a halo of social and environmental violence that extends beyond
Xochimilco to include all the inhabitants of Mexico City.
 Narchi and Canabal / CONSTRUCTIONS OF NATURE AND TRADITIONAL KNOWLEDGE   101

We provide evidence that environmental Orientalism is still being imple-

mented despite its potential long-term ecological consequences. We have
shown that the development scheme being used by the local authorities is not
an unintended consequence of naive decision making but the result of thought-
ful planning aimed at extinguishing a particular notion of nature that is still
pervasive in the minds of Xochimilco’s chinamperos, who have suffered attacks
on livelihoods based on moral economies and local consumption. The goal of
imposing a particular view of nature upon the area’s inhabitants is economic
profit alone.
It is not our intention to argue against a given economic system, as it is obvi-
ous that any economic paradigm, whether overt neoliberalism or pristine
Marxism (see Burkett, 2003), that does not take into account ecological and
environmental constraints will face ecological degradation. However, human
adaptive responses to environmental deterioration may cloud the perception
of ecological collapse, making it slow, gradual, and intangible until it is too late
to turn back. On the one hand, Xochimilco’s potential collapse is masked by the
fact that a number of chinamperos have adapted their chinampas to massive
flower production and others have diversified their crops and introduced more
resistant species, giving the impression of a still healthy environment. On the
other hand, and in addition to a long history of environmental deterioration,
the collapse is masked by the actions of a local government that, in an effort to
impose a particular notion of nature that would allow for total transformation
of the landscape, has allowed at least 591 illegal settlements (Delavaud, 2009),
21,000 clandestine sewage pipes (PAOT, 2008), and a series of extravagant proj-
ects lacking any ecological logic or ecosystemic engineering that could match
the environmental requirements of the place.
One would think that the primal ecological settings of the area could be
restored by applying traditional environmental knowledge regardless of gov-
ernmental restraints. However, it seems as if the pursuit of eternal growth in
the gross domestic product generates fear for freedom and life, with freedom
emerging from moral economies and life emerging from traditional ecological
knowledge. For a neoliberal scheme to work in Xochimilco and elsewhere, tra-
ditional ecological knowledge needs to be discarded unless it is converted into
a commodity either by patenting it and its products or by transforming the
whole ecosystem. The process is structurally and physically violent. It is
imposed instead of being mediated; it destroys people’s social, cultural, and
environmental assets and generates inequality, dependence, and submission.
As A puts it, “Earlier, peasants could make a profit because everything they
used was self- produced; they hardly spent on anything.” The process we have
outlined for Xochimilco is also manifest in other places and economic spheres
(e.g., Ibarra et al., 2011).
An Orientalist approach promotes an artificial obsolescence of traditional
ecological knowledge and a detrimental transformation of the landscape. It
diminishes the opportunities for passing traditional ecological knowledge on
to future generations by extinguishing their biocultural experience (sensu
Nabhan and St.-Antoine, 1993). JG explains succinctly: “Without chinampas,
there are no chinamperos, and without chinamperos, the whole chinampería is
doomed.” The extinction of experience subjects people to imposed views of
102   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

nature without an alternative construct to compare them with. When environ-

mental Orientalism prevails, it erodes social ties, transforms cultural practices
(especially food systems), weakens local economies, and extinguishes species
and ecosystems, leaving the human inhabitants of a landscape under a subtle
tyranny.

Note

1. “Environmental services” is a token aimed at describing a commodity. We prefer the term

“life support systems.”

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