Through a case study born from archaeological fieldwork in Tlaxcala, Mexico, this article provides an example of place-based foodways that have been used to transmit belief systems and ways of life that resist dominant frameworks of power across time. Foodways, as a site of daily engagements with the full food cycle, can be used to concretize dominant systems of power (e.g., industrial agriculture) but can also be used to build countersystems. Using the example of milpa agriculture and “Maíz Culture,” this case study demonstrates how key ecological philosophies have served as effective and resilient adaptive strategies from which to respond to shifting threats across time—from Aztec and Spanish colonialism to contemporary resistance to neoliberalism. Although agroecology is rooted in indigenous origins, the global adoption of agroecology often focuses heavily on what is planted but fails to center the how—the relationships and values that indigenous ecologies embody. To adopt the planting principles of agroecology without centering indigenous philosophies results in food systems that replicate colonial extraction. While these philosophies are rooted in locally defined practices, they also serve to support a broader unlearning of colonial worldviews within the systems that overshadow the day-to-day experiences of researchers. Using foodways to bridge the time between the archaeological past and agroecological present unmasks normalized worldviews, such as capitalism, neoliberalism, and industrialism to show that, while they are dominant, they are not inevitable nor singular. Please refer to Supplementary Materials, Full text Spanish version of this article, for a full text Spanish version of this article.

The clunk of a loose tail pipe against the uneven packed dirt road broke the predawn silence as we rode the field truck up the steep hill toward the site of Tepeticpac—a sprawling hilltop fortress that was the urban core of the Late Postclassic state of Tlaxcala (1325–1519 CE). As the truck doors opened, we met with terraces that angled down the hill, cradling tall green stalks of corn. Beans wound up the stalks, aromatic tangles of gordolobo and arnica filling the air in between. At the terrace edges, blue-green maguey dewy from the morning mist held tight to the eroding soil. These milpa—terraced networks of both agricultural and wild plants—were the site of our excavations.

Five hundred years before, many milpa had served a similar purpose, but we were drawn to those that held remnants of the architecture—austere temples, workshops, residences, and patios–that shaped life for Late Postclassic Tlaxcalteca. Slowly and arduously, we removed compacted dirt to reveal pieces of hearths and adobe block walls. By 11 AM, the sun beat down, and we would break beneath the spindly shade of a mesquite tree. When not working on the project, many of the team members owned or worked these very same terraces. From them, I learned to festoon tree branches with hanging backpacks to ensure no ants found our food and to keep an eye out for seasonal snacks—the sticky sweet flesh of a sun-ripened zapote or the treacherous spiky green of the thirst-quenching tuna (cactus fruit).

Archaeologists look to the past to think about how things were, yet for those of us living within industrial cultures, our eyes (and bodies) are clouded with daily lived relationships to land that are very different from a precolonial past. Although our fieldwork had excavation as its central goal, from the workers we saw firsthand how campesino relationship to place kept the ancient terraces alive by adapting past practices to current realities.

Agroecology centers the work and experiences of contemporary campesinos and peasants who seek to maintain holistic relationships between food production and land within contexts of increasing globalization and neoliberalism (Altieri and Nicholls, 2017). While the roots of Latin American agroecology are based in systems of agrobiodiversity designed by pueblos originarios1 (Xolocotzi, 1988; Díaz León and Cruz León, 1998; Figueroa-Helland et al., 2018), the global adoption of agroecology often focuses heavily on what is planted but fails to live into the relationships and values that local indigenous ecologies embody. To adopt the planting principles of agroecology without centering indigenous philosophies results in food systems that replicate colonial extraction. Additionally, turning to agroecology as a contemporary solution or “discovery” negates the long-standing work of communities who have kept indigenous agrobiodiverse practices alive for millennia, despite the competing and dominant food systems that emerged with European colonialism. Through a case study born from archaeological fieldwork in Tlaxcala, Mexico, I provide an example of place-based foodways that have been used to transmit belief systems and ways of life that resist dominant frameworks of power across time. Foodways were a key tool of adaptive responses to Aztec and Spanish colonialism and continue to shape tactics within contemporary campesino resistance to neoliberalism (Merçon, 2015; Peréz Sánchez and Monachon, 2015; Noreiro Escalante and Massieu Trigo, 2018).

Food is a daily necessity for all living beings, and as such, becomes a “hub” (Whyte, 2016) or daily ritual around, which values or beliefs about the world are transmitted and by which realities are made concrete. While the term “foodways” may be used to refer to food traditions and cultural practices (Brulotte and Di Giovine, 2014; Counihan, 2019), food’s life-giving characteristics irrevocably align it with systems of power (Patel, 2012; Gálvez, 2019). In this article, I refer to foodways as acts of daily engagements with the full food cycle that go on to influence human relationships and relationships to land and other-than-human living beings. Foodways concretize systems of power but can also be used to build counterworlds or worlds within or parallel to dominant systems. Using foodways to bridge the time between the archaeological past and agroecological present unmasks normalized worldviews, such as capitalism, neoliberalism, and industrialism, to show that, while they are dominant, they are not inevitable nor singular.

This building of alternative worlds can also be understood through the term “food sovereignty,” defined by La Via Campesina in 1996 as the right to local autonomy to participate in and define the entire food chain—what will be grown or produced, under what conditions, and with what values (Patel, 2009). Whyte (2016) further argues that because of food’s role as a cultural hub, food sovereignty also refers to capacities for adaptation, particularly in resistance to or negotiation of relationships to dominant systems. Taken in this context, food sovereignty becomes about the right to create adaptable and varied approaches to survival. By looking at foodways in Tlaxcala across time, my goal is not to romanticize indigeneity as unchanging and timeless. Rather, I demonstrate how key ecological philosophies have served as effective and resilient adaptive strategies from which to respond to shifting threats across time. Additionally, I argue that while these philosophies are rooted in locally defined practices of pueblos originarios, they serve to support a broader unlearning of colonial worldviews within the systems that overshadow the day-to-day experiences of researchers.

This case study is set just 2 h east of bustling Mexico City, in Tlaxcala, the smallest state in contemporary Mexico at 1,5512 miles. Shamed nationally for its alliance with Spanish colonizers and role in the fall of the mighty Aztec Empire, in pop culture, it is often mocked as the “forgotten state,” a history which birthed the local motto “¡Tlaxcala sí existe!” (Toulet, 2010). Defiance is a historical trait of the Tlaxcalteca, known as one of the last holdouts against the expanding Aztec Empire in the Late Postclassic (1325–1519 BCE; Berdan et al., 1996; Berdan and Smith, 2003; Carballo, 2020), an early and key ally to the Spanish (Abasolo, 1996) and contemporary leader in campesino agroecology and resistance to industrial agriculture (Holt-Giménez, 2006; Merçon, 2015; Noriero Escalante and Massieu Trigo, 2018). Archaeologically, Fargher et al. (2011; 2016) attributed Tlaxcala’s sovereignty from the Aztecs to a rejection of traditional Nahua hierarchical models of power, opting instead for a collective social organization, or republic. Building on this hypothesis, in 2015, I began a bioarchaeological research project in Tlaxcala to explore whether this alternative social organization was reflected in the diets of individuals buried in the core city of Tepeticpac, a hilltop site overlooking contemporary Tlaxcala City. Open-ended interviews conducted with 3 campesino producers and 3 cocineras tradicionales in Tlaxcala between 2018 and 2019 added depth to the interpretations of diet, by providing the examples of how food maps onto day-to-day activities and social and ecological networks. The interviews used in this article focus specifically on the work of campesino producers.

To look at diet in the past, many research models inadvertently depend upon food webs—maps of possible foods and how they were consumed—that reflect Western assumptions about foodways. These research biases mask the wide range of possible lived experiences—for example, an understanding of “agriculture” that focuses heavily on cultivated, but not foraged, foods. Starting from traditional paleodietary methods of analysis, my project explored plant microfossils found within dental plaque and dietary isotopes found in enamel and bone (Alcántara, 2020). Dietary isotopes reflect individual diets through ranges of values of carbon and nitrogen that map onto a simplistic food web model, so that an individual can be said to be eating broad categories of foods, like marine animal, riverine animal, land animal, or a binary of maize versus wheat diets (Bogaard and Outram, 2013). While a traditional reading of diet at Tepeticpac would be interpreted as a population that ate an exorbitant amount of maize (the most likely agricultural cultivar from a modern industrial lens), interviews with contemporary producers helped me understand that ancient milpa, like those of today, were likely intercropped with diverse plants with similar isotopic values (like amaranth, and cacti like nopal and maguey) and supplemented with foraged wild foods. In fact, a range of milpa foods—maguey, sweet potato, maize, and wild and domesticated bean—were found in the dental plaque of the burial population (Alcántara, 2020). More recently, the analysis of ancient DNA from the same dental plaque samples showed that diet also included sunflower, chia, tomato, pineapple, cacao, peppers, squash, peanuts, grasshoppers, freshwater mollusks, fish, ducks, pheasants, and turkey (Mendoza, 2023). These results show the evidence of foraging and consumption of wild foods, like grasshoppers and corn fungus, characteristics of “Maíz Culture” or “milpa foodways,” discussed in more detail in the section “Defining Maíz Culture.” Importantly, these findings emphasize that Tlaxcalteca resistance to imperial trade blockades (Berdan et al., 1996; Carballo, 2020) was strengthened not only through internal collective social organization but also through ecological relationships. As the paper argues, a comparison across time emphasizes the effectiveness and adaptability of relationship-centered food sovereignty used by both ancient and contemporary growers in Tlaxcala.

A brief history of food sovereignty in Tlaxcallan

In contrast to Aztec Imperial expansion, which sought to create tributaries while leaving local cultures and governments generally untouched (Berdan et al., 1996), the Spanish colonial projects of the 16th and 17th centuries had as a central aim the elimination and/or replacement of pueblos originarios and their worldviews, also known as settler colonialism (Wolfe, 2006; LeFevre, 2015). Whyte (2016) labels the settler colonialism of the Americas as an “embedding” of new ecologies made concrete through new origin myths, like Christopher Columbus “discovering” America, and “…religious and cultural narratives, social ways of life, and political economic systems (eg. property)” (p. 13). Colonial infrastructures grew in power by enacting the policies of cultural genocide that erased local language, history, and traditions, while also displacing communities from their lands and rupturing relationships of reciprocity embedded within foodways (Mailer and Hale, 2018; Hernández, 2022).

The “food sovereignty” tactics that allowed the Tlaxcalteca to resist Aztec imperialism continued in some form into the colonial period, made possible by their early alliance with the Spanish in 1519, which protected Tlaxcala’s Late Postclassic borders (Gibson, 1952; Muñoz Camargo, 1986; García, 2014). As an early Spanish ally, it became a state comparatively less besieged by colonial practices of cultural erasure. A “gobierno de Indios,” early colonial Tlaxcala was governed by Tlaxcalteca nobility who adapted the prehispanic state to fit within the structures of New Spain, while maintaining many aspects of their original political, economic, and social structures (Martínez Baracs, 2014). As Gibson (1952) notes, “the original policy of Spanish government had been to exclude white civilian colonists from the province of Tlaxcala” (p. 79), physically limiting settler colonialism in the state. However, a series of plagues in the latter 1500s vastly reduced the native population, forcing the majority of Tlaxcaltecans to abandon their hilltop residences and terraces (like the site of Tepeticpac) for lack of labor to maintain them, instead settling in the newly established colonial center of Tlaxcala City.

Yet while many middle- and upper-class Tlaxcaltecans adapted to mestizo lifestyles, the lower-class remained heavily dependent on milpa agriculture (Gibson, 1952)—a nod to its utility as a sustainable foodway that does not require financial capital to maintain. During this key moment of cultural genocide, Colonial-era campesinos served as seed keepers, maintaining the lineage of biodiversity in their milpa, while Spanish wheat fields and cattle ranches slowly eroded centuries of well-tended soil. As Gálvez (2019) argues, campesino communities continued to be structured around milpa foodways until the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was passed in 1994. More than any other colonial project, NAFTA pushed a dominant neoliberal ideology that forced farmers to shift to a framework of food as money that supports a global market rather than local well-being. This is the current ideological system against which the contemporary campesinos and growers interviewed for this article organize.

Drawing from a series of conversations with growers and producers from Tlaxcala, Mexico, I contextualize archaeological foodways as a living lineage rather than a broken or forgotten history. The oral histories used in this narrative stem from 3 individuals with varying ancestral ties to Tlaxcala—mestizo lineages that demonstrate the blurred line of settler/indigenous histories (Knight, 1990; Bartra, 2008; Bueno, 2009). There is no direct, pure link between late postclassic foodways and contemporary campesino food sovereignty movements. In fact, most of the interviewees rejected the term “indígena” due to its racial stigma within Mexican history (Brading, 1988) and its origins in Spanish homogenization of culturally, linguistically, and ecologically diverse pueblos originarios, instead choosing the term “campesino” to define their cultural identity. Even so, this lineage could be seen peeking out through Nahua last names and Nahua and Otomí terminology used to describe milpa technologies and foodways. When presented in the context of an archaeological past, indigeneity seemingly became apolitical, with interviewees seeing and acknowledging how their practices and teachings were like what I was finding among the Late Postclassic Tlaxcalteca. The link between past and present, then, is a cobbling together of multigenerational ecological knowledge adapted to contemporary realities.

Within this adaptation, colonial dynamics also permeate, such as the gendered division of labor, which resulted in male family members being more closely tied to activities in the campo, and women’s responsibilities being aligned with the kitchen and household (Christie, 2004; Grey and Patel, 2015; Gálvez, 2019). To explore how generational knowledge and indigenous philosophies permeate the kitchen and household is a key question, but beyond the scope of this article. Focusing instead on the expression of key philosophies within the campo (outlined in the next section), the following conversations with Jaime Gaspar García of Herencia del Magueyal, a household maguey business, Zeferino Manohatl Tetlalmatzi, a nopal farmer and food sovereignty activist, and Felipe Nava Ahuatzi, an archaeologist and household gardener, demonstrate the daily agroecological practices that “draw inspiration from the past” (Clifford, 2013).

Many indigenous foodways across the Americas share a common theme of kin-centric ecologies that recognize the interconnectedness of human and other-than human life and center regeneration, balance, biodiversity, and local investment in relationships to place (Brondizio et al., 2021; Pesantubbee and Zogry, 2021; Hernández, 2022). Settler foodways, in turn, were shaped by the drivers of European colonialism—the need for expansion into agriculturally productive or resource-rich lands, to extract and produce goods that could be turned into capital for European monarchies (Villanueva, 2021). Under the settler colonialism from which our current global food systems stem, human relationships to land center production, creating a worldview that masks the interconnectivity between human well-being and ecological well-being—what Hernández (2022) calls “ecocolonialism.” For these systems and worldviews to dominate as they do, others that are in conflict must be erased or made invisible, as well as the alternative futures that they promise. Settler colonialism seeks to replace Indigenous worldviews, pushing them to the margins, and labeling them as backward and without a future (Whyte, 2016). Yet, as I demonstrate in this article, foodways can become a conduit of adaptation and cultural resilience.

Defining Maíz culture

This article uses the framework of “Maíz Culture” (Rodríguez, 2014) to consider how land, and those that work closely with it, shape social, spiritual, and physical ecosystems that counter settler colonial, capitalist, and neoliberal values of extraction and globalization. The history of early human relationship to place is one of coevolution with ecology—the plants, animals, insects, and other life that made human survival possible. In Mesoamerica, maize has been a nutritional anchor, a drought-tolerant grass, turned into a reliable crop through millennia of human tending. In “Our Sacred Maíz is our Mother,” Rodríguez (2014) outlines the ways in which daily engagement with the tending of maize created “Maíz Culture”—a shared cosmovision, religion, and set of cultural norms that ultimately defined lifeways across Mesoamerica and shaped perceptions of time, seasonality, community, and spirituality. Maíz culture is kept alive through the milpa, both a physical growing space and a site of ritual and sociality (Johannesen and Hastorf, 1994; Aguilar et al., 2003; Fitting, 2010; Gálvez, 2019). While maíz is often the central crop of a milpa, the milpa is better defined as an ecological community of planted complementary crops (squash, beans, tomatoes, peppers, and amaranth), wild foods (verdolagas, quintoniles, fungi, and insects), and year-round plants (maguey and nopal cactus and fruit trees like capulin and tejocote). The networked plants, animals, insects, and fungi not only provide a nutrient-rich diet for humans but anchor a biodiverse and adaptable ecosystem. As a foodway, Maíz Culture is both a localized, communal structure, centered on a deep and long-standing understanding of region-specific ecosystems, and a model that exists in endless iterations across Mesoamerica (and arguably, across the Americas; Johannesen and Hastorf, 1994; Staller and Carrasco, 2010; Mailer and Hale, 2018).

Understanding Central Mexico as a Maíz Culture is important to understanding how the actions and relationships surrounding food production (tending to the milpa, harvesting, storing, distributing, and cooking) create a particular worldview and culture of values that continue to be drawn upon as alternatives to dominant political, social, and economic frameworks. In this article, I focus specifically on tracing the following values and their iterations across time in Tlaxcala:

  1. Well-being found within collaborative and reciprocal relationships. Rather than centering control and extraction, these relationships are slow and adaptable, acknowledging the agency of other-than-human beings, like plants and insects, and the value of social networks.

  2. Embodied knowledge. Taught through sensory engagement with place and foodways. This can include walking through the milpa and noticing changes to the environment but is also built into rituals like harvest, preparation, and consumption of heritage foods and social experiences like drinking pulque while sharing stories.

  3. Multigenerational knowledge networks. Importantly, these networks are often tied to a return to and reinvestment in place rather than an unbroken relationship to land.

Campesinos of Tlaxcala have been central to the ongoing maintenance and transmission of Maíz Culture and cosmovisions that stand in opposition to global projects of food system industrialization. In fact, early agroecology was strongly influenced by the work of a Tlaxcaltecan agronomist, Efraím Hernández Xolocotzi, who migrated to the United States from his small campesino community of San Bernabé, Amaxac de Guerrero, Tlaxcala in childhood. After studying agriculture at Cornell, he returned to shape early agroecology in Mexico as a professor at Chapingo Autonomous University (Díaz León and Cruz León, 1998). Xolocotzi is an example of how Indigenous philosophies are relearned and repurposed within contemporary contexts of migration and globalization. This can further be seen in the widescale grassroots organizing within Tlaxcala, such as Grupo Vicente Guerrero, a group of campesinos who came together in the 80s and 90s to share and grow Indigenous farming methodologies, and in 2013 successfully filed a class action to block the farming of genetically modified corn in Mexico (Holt-Giménez, 2006; Merçon, 2015; Noriero Escalante and Massieu Trigo, 2018; Rodríguez González, 2022). Additional groups like the Mercado Alternativo de Tlaxcala (Pérez Sánchez and Monachon, 2015) organize around the principle that ecology, food sovereignty, and traditional foodways are intimately connected to political autonomy.

All 3 interviewees share ties to the Mercado Alternativo de Tlaxcala: 2 as vendors (Jaime and Zeferino) and 1 as a regular attendee (Felipe). Held weekly in the quiet plaza of the Jardín de San Nicolás, the Mercado Alternativo is a grouping of just 15 stands or so with an array of local honey, vegetarian meats, made of mushrooms and soy, groceries like Zeferino’s nopal stand, and social spaces, like Jaime’s pulque and taco stand. A Margaret Mead quote greets visitors to the Mercado’s website: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” This co-op was formed in 2003 (Pérez Sánchez and Monachon, 2015), originally focused on the discussion of topics of food rights—their tagline is “El derecho a una alimentación sana, segura y soberana” or “The right to healthy, secure, and sovereign food.” The Mercado Alternativo is a hub for individuals interested in agroecological production, a term recently adopted by campesino producers to make the ecologically sound and sustainable legacy of campesino (and historically pueblo originario) visible and accessible outside of the campo communities (Rosado-May, 2015; Altieri and Nicholls, 2017). While each interviewee is networked within these broader histories of campesino and pueblo originario organizing in Tlaxcala, the strength of their narratives lies in exploring how the tenets of Maíz Culture are woven into distinct day-to-day realities.

1. Well-being found within collaborative and reciprocal relationships

Don Jaime greets guests to his stand at the Mercado Alternativo, in a white sombrero and plaid flannel shirt, big gray mustache dipping down the sides of his mouth. When I first approached the green tent, with its jars of maguey honey, and small cellophane wrapped packets of seasoned grasshoppers, he was uninterested in my awkward questions about whether he had any fresh insects I might freeze dry to take back to the lab. I bought a jar of honey and stepped aside amid the calls for another round of pulque and a taco de gusano de maguey. The next time I visited, I ran into a neighbor, having a late morning pulque on the long table setup next to the stand. I joined, slowed down to absorb my surroundings and enjoy the varied pulque flavors: piñón, coco, and apio. I returned for a third week, and at market close, Don Jaime greeted me with a pint of pulque—an experimental strawberry tomato that he offered up freely to the guests that remained—and began to talk to me about how he became more heavily plant-based when he found out he had diabetes.

Don Jaime’s interest in pulque came from the family knowledge that it is beneficial to those suffering kidney disease and diabetes. His family had long worked with maguey, and the insects that call it home, but the need for a dramatic lifestyle change led Don Jaime and his wife Adriana to become curious about how these campesino foods mapped onto the dietary changes prescribed by his doctor. He and Adriana met in Mexico City, where they worked in factories. The city was loud, dirty, and full of too many people, so shortly after they were married, they decided to return to land Jaime’s family owned in La Españita, Tlaxcala, forfeiting consistent (though minimal) paychecks for greater control over their environment and health. As they began to reengage in maguey farming, they became further involved in the local organization Grupo Vicente Guerrero, as well as a network of alternative markets. Their day-to-day lives changed dramatically, a rhythm I witnessed by shadowing Jaime during his daily tasks.

Leaving my apartment in Tlaxcala City at 4 AM, I arrived to La Españita as the sun peeked over the mist-covered mountains, to take part in the first act of Don Jaime’s day—the raspado de maguey. Dawn and dusk, Jaime visits each of the 30 or so plants that dot the hill, scraping the center of the maguey plant to collect the liquid aguamiel that accumulates. When fermented, this becomes pulque. While our morning was silenced by the completion of the tasks at hand, hours blurred with nonstop movement, by 8 AM we returned to the house to eat, and Don Jaime explained:

…it is difficult work because you have to be all day from very early doing different activities and give a lot of time to the campo but fortunately, well, the campo gives us food.

And indeed, breakfast was a delicious guisado de quiote, or maguey flower, steamed inside a richly flavored mixiote—the skin of the maguey leaf. I thought back to my archaeological research, and the maguey fibers we found in the dental plaque of burials. While the presence of the plant cells told us maguey had been consumed, to say “they ate maguey” is to misrepresent the early morning hours of tending and visiting with this plant. It is difficult, demanding work, but for Don Jaime, it is also work rooted in a family history and culture that he speaks of with pride:

Well, our work is very beautiful, we inherited this culture since my great grandfather, my grandfather, my father, and now even my children and my grandchildren love and enjoy all of these maguey things, my grandchildren for example, instead of drinking soda well they drink a glass of pulque they don’t drink soda, we drink aguamiel, we drink pulque, we make little teas out of herbs or sweeten coffee with maguey honey or bee honey .…

For Don Jaime, this lifestyle provides a path to the physical well-being of his family, who have access to food that will reduce their chance of diabetes and other illnesses. While the labor is heavy, his enjoyment of and respect for the campo is clear, viewing it as a collaborator that allows him to live this lifestyle.

In an analysis of the sustainability of milpa systems, Sánchez and Romero (2018) found that robust social and ecological networks are the central benefit of milpa farming, not financial return. Gálvez (2019) complements these findings by showing that social and ecological relationships that emerge from milpa agriculture are tied to physical and mental well-being and resilience. When these communal relationships are ruptured, for example, through the NAFTA-driven industrial farming and reliance on global rather than local networks, individual well-being is sacrificed for global wealth. Jaime’s job in Mexico City was “work” that created products for an amorphous market, not for individual consumption, but other types of exchange exist, and on Don Jaime’s land, his energy and time are met with a reciprocity of food both cultivated and “gifted” by the campo and the building of familial and community relationships. Additionally, his involvement in Grupo Vicente Guerrero and the Mercado Alternativo connects him to broader social, economic, and knowledge networks that buffer his financial risks through alternative economic frameworks, like exchange. The pints of pulque he often fails to charge for are investments in the future of his social networks or reciprocity for past exchanges.

Don Jaime’s “work” isn’t just active physical labor but also the moments of observation and engagement with the landscape. Although his central area of engagement is not technically a “milpa,” many of the principles of Maíz Culture apply. Between raspados, Don Jaime uses a machete to poke at a dark bruise on a penca, the telltale sign that a gusano de maguey may have recently entered to create a nest within the flesh. He is an expert at identifying the abandoned nests from the new, gently slicing into arm of the maguey, and with a thorn pulled from the same plant, pulls forth the juicy white body of the maguey worm on the elegant tip. He’s adeptly aware of the seasonality and life cycles of the campo and respectfully mediates his harvest, taking only when insects are in abundance. After getting an opportunity to watch how fastidiously Don Jaime seeks out and gathers the insects that he will share at his stand, I rethink the brusqueness of my ignorance in requesting that such a gift be unceremoniously ground up and analyzed as an isotopic data point. While I entered with a mindset of transaction, I left realizing that each taco de gusano can only exist because of his stewardship of the space, because of the hours he dedicates to tending, watching, and caring for the gusano’s home. The campo feeds Don Jaime, both literally with high-quality nutrients, but also with meaning, connection, and autonomy. The deeply reciprocal and interconnected nature of “work” like Don Jaime’s draws from legacies of knowledge that find meaning in long-term investment in relationships. Within the community of the Mercado Alternativo, his investment is reciprocated and recognized by his peers and regulars.

2. Embodied knowledge

The Mercado Alternativo and its partners, like the Centro de Investigación de Cocina Tlaxcalteca, often lead intimate tours—for restauranteurs, researchers, culinary students, and hipsters—people looking for an entry point to “authentic” Tlaxcalteca cuisine. Having joined such a food tour, we pulled up to Don Zeferino’s huerta, a large rectangular field with rows and rows of nopal cactus. Leaning on the reed gate, in a frayed straw hat and worn green button up embroidered with the logo of the Mercado Alternativo, he led us through the rows, pointing out small differences in the size of the penca, or leaf, the clustering of the thorns, the color of green. What at first looked like hundreds of the same plant was in fact, dozens of different varieties from across Mexico. Curious about this biodiversity I never knew existed but limited by the din and speed of the tour group, a few weeks later I returned alone, taking a combi van from the center of Tlaxcala to his pueblo of Huitznáhuac. Reflecting on the lessons of reciprocity and relationship learned from Don Jaime, I offered to help Don Zeferino with tasks in the huerta. He showed me how to distinguish and remove the invasive grasses brought over on the shoes of construction workers from nearby fraccionamientos, housing tracts that are slowly replacing the milpa.

During a break in our work, he began to slice me samples of each penca, or leaf—some tasted like watermelon rind, others like cucumber; some were thick and succulent, while others were woody and hard to chew. Through this act, he offered me the chance to “get to know” these plants, not through books or agricultural models but by meeting different species, noting their textures, flavors, sounds, and relationships (Kimmerer, 2013; Gross, 2021). This is how his own introduction to plants began—through the shadowing of his elders:

When I was four, five years old, we went with my father’s family, and I watched what [my grandmother] did. I understood that she spoke with the plants. But the language wasn’t spoken. I made a mistake in saying spoke—she communicated, then. And communication isn’t necessarily verbal. And I learned …seeing what she did, I did it also.

What Zeferino describes is embodied learning or learning through experience and engagement with the entire being. This type of learning and relationship building can only be replicated through action, by physically engaging with an ecology over time, and through the shared embodied knowledge of others. As Figueroa-Helland et al. (2018) state, a decolonization of food systems requires exactly this type of “connectedness” made possible by a very local, personal, and sustained relationship to the land.

As we carefully clear the brush between nopal plants, Zeferino looks out at the cacti, and the fruit trees that serve as borders between his property and the maize stalks and squash vines that haphazardly fill the gaps between the nopales. As he explains to me, the interspersed and overlapping plants in his fields are intentional and crucial to the well-being of the lives this land supports. This system is thousands of years old, with the Nahuatl name of “metepantle” (metl—maguey, pantle—wall, or surrounded). Roots of the maguey help to reduce erosion on the edges of steep terraces, keeping surface nutrients from being washed away during heavy rains. In the 1960s, an increase in beer production reduced the popularity of maguey-derived alcohol production (Cervantes, 2022), but as Zeferino recounts, contemporary climate crises are leading industrial production companies to “rediscover” the metepantle or milpa systems. As Zeferino laments, the appropriation of this knowledge strips it of its history and relationships.

…two or three years ago, a group of experts wanted to impose on me a way [of organic farming] and I told them that it isn’t the only way and that there were others even more balanced, the more complex is the metepantle and within it other species of vegetables and animals intervene. So, the milpa system, or the metepantle system, or both, is really that, the diversity and how things work together .…So, the fact that so much knowledge has existed in each pueblo of the world and has been absorbed by others, they steal it, they register it and call it their own. That bothers me, that bothers me a lot.

His point is that the metepantle system is about more than its agricultural model. Ecologies are a system of intertwined organisms, and humans form one part of that network. Within an embodied framework, humans do not control ecology, but rather are in a constant feedback loop of observation, engagement, and adaptation—observations that can be shared with family or community members and passed down to form a rich testimony of localized history. Zeferino argues that this ecological knowledge is part of the legacy that allowed the Tlaxcalteca to remain sovereign during both Aztec and Spanish imperialism:

…that is why the Tlaxcalteca survived, that is why other cultural groups in other parts of the world survive, because they adapt with the plants, they adapt with the animals, there is communication and they work in a coordinated, not a subordinate, manner.

It is clear how this reflection shapes his own adaptive strategies—passed on first through his family networks, and now through grass roots organizing of campesino activists, and peer teaching programs.

By inviting tours and intercambios (knowledge exchanges) to his huerta, the local can become networked to the global. This is the case with Zeferino’s vast diversity of nopales, which come from exchanges with campesinos across Mexico, made possible by his involvement in various grassroots organizations that have taken him as far as Ecuador. In addition to belonging to the Mercado Alternativo, he is a co-founder of Tijtoca Nemilitzli (Nahuatl for “We Sow Life”), a group of campesinos who peer-teach and certify one another in agroecological strategies. His experiences are an outgrowth of the legacy of the Movimiento Campesino a Campesino in Tlaxcala (Holt-Giménez, 2006). Originating in Maya campesino adaptation of Kaqchikel agricultural approaches and passed on through “hands-on technical training, farmer-led workshops, cross visits, field days, and soil conservation fairs” (p. 5), in 1978, the Movimiento Campesino a Campesino brought the Grupo Vicente Guerrero to Guatemala to participate in an intercambio. Central to the effectiveness of these exchanges were their “people-centered” approach, which in effect used embodied learning to share on-the-ground strategies, rather than “rules” or “models” that assume uniform experience. Taken at a global level, embodied learning, or teaching through doing, allows people to access and apply lessons to their own local contexts and day-to-day realities, a “decentralized” approach that breeds diverse solutions and adaptability.

3. Multigenerational knowledge networks

While Jaime and Zeferino are currently deeply embedded in direct daily work of the campo, there were moments in their early life that led them to seek out employment in Mexico City. Punctuated relationships to land are part of the history of Tlaxcalteca agroecology, and the reality of living both alongside and within dominant economic systems. The lineage of Tlaxcalteca foodways is not unbroken through time, but rather fragments of its potential are passed down through both familial and social networks. The awareness of the possibility of Maíz Culture, then, is an invitation to adapt its philosophies into daily practice. To quote Armando Bartra (2008), “Campesinos are not born campesinos, they turn themselves into campesinos: They invent themselves as collective actors in the course of doing, in the movement that brings them together, in the action that affirms a peasantry that is always a work in progress” (p. 10, translation by author2). The following interview focuses on the metaphorical seeds through which Maíz Culture is kept alive, even in moments where daily practices are fleeting and symbolic, rather than a full-blown food system.

An archaeologist employed by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Felipe is deeply familiar with the landscape, both archaeological and ecological, of Tlaxcala. He has worked on both large-scale excavations, like the one where we met in 2015, but also on “salvamento,” or salvage projects, where he is hired a month or two at a time to quickly document and extract archaeological materials in areas where urban development will destroy or bury the site. He currently works documenting sites in the path of the Tren Maya in the Yucatán, far from his family and his patch of land. His work for the state sometimes connects him to the destruction of the very ideologies he attempts to keep alive within his personal life—a contradiction that he takes in stride, seeing it as something he can’t really control. Yet, what draws him to archaeology is the opportunity to spend days outside, unearthing pieces of his ancestors past, and putting what he learns into practice in his own life, when he can—little figurines that he carves from stone, the adobe-walled home he built himself, and the milpa-style garden that surrounds it.

Felipe’s family is from Tlaxcala. Once, when I asked for Felipe’s help collecting water samples for my dissertation research, he took me deep into the hillsides to a locally known spring. On our trek, he told me stories about how he grew up curious about the landscape and would spend time after school exploring the hills and deep arroyos. His career in archaeology is built out of embodied experiences—the feel of smooth, polished black on orange ceramic fragments picked out of the dusty footpath home, the familiarity of a thick-rimmed fragment, so like the large ollas used to feed dozens during the fiestas of today. The ancestral knowledge and traditions he carries come from a mix of archaeology school (the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia), experience at sites, curiosity about nature, and bits of teachings passed through family interactions. He explains of his lineage:

…my paternal grandparents were Nahua, they were authentic Nahua and all the time they would speak in Nahuatl …a lot of people think that someone who speaks an Indigenous language, well they don’t know anything about the world, but in reality, it is the opposite, they know the real world, the world of plants, the world of the countryside, of traditional medicine.

Although Felipe laments never having learned Nahuatl himself, the language of plants has become a linking thread that connects him to the knowledge and experiences of his antepasados. Although the landscape has changed over the past 500 years, many of the same plants remain, serving as portals to teachings about Nahua and Otomí philosophies.

My interviews with Felipe took place at his home. On a piece of land inherited from his wife’s family, located in the small town of Atlihuetzia just outside of Tlaxcala city, they began by building an adobe brick home inspired in part by his archaeological findings and in part by contemporary ecological architecture. Surrounding his home, an oversized yard is fenced in with stacked cement blocks. As we weave between clusters of plants, birdsong fills the air, punctuated by the yelp of neighbors’ dogs as they protect their designated rooftop. Every so often, the rumble of a semi braking on the highway cuts our conversation off. Felipe can walk a full loop of his yard in about 2 min, but even this small space is crammed rich with life. His garden is a medicine cabinet, grocer’s market, and artist’s palette, all in one. The scarlet red of the ayocote beans (whose name Felipe reminds me, comes from the náhuatl, “ayocotl”) twines up an arch made of reeds, creating decorative shade and producing a hearty legume the size of a lima bean, as well as filling the soil with nitrogen. Within a single plant, pods can yield colors that range from a dark walnut to blush pink. A range of green from herbs like epazote and hinojo (fennel) dapple the space, grown both intentionally, and sprouting abundantly from compost heaps and forgotten corners. “Some things you plant, and some plant themselves,” he comments. Both are welcome remedies for digestion and can be collected and dried as teas or added to recipes (like beans) to reduce gas. Growing from a slab of volcanic basalt that defines the edge of the garden, the thick spiky leaves of the sábila, or aloe vera is used to soothe cuts and burns but can also cure from within, drunk as tea to detox the nervous system. Felipe’s most recent experiment is amaranth, which grows tall and leafy, topped with a mohawk of dark maroon seed fronds. On a tarp, he lays the fronds out to dry, then rubs them within his gloved hands to release the miniscule black seed from its spiky husk. Amaranth seeds puff like mini popcorn and have been used for millenia as a high-protein cereal. Ancient Mesoamericans would craft deities from the dough of amaranth mixed with honey, placing them on altars (Montúfar, 2016). Felipe grows his garden in part to have a nutrient-dense array of fresh food, but just as important is the opportunity to cultivate connections to these culturally important plants, observing and interacting with their growth, harvest, and uses.

These are lineages he wants to pass on to his daughter, who toddles along in the background, absorbing information about the land, the plants, and her relationship to them. She points to a vine.

Here come …these ones

Those are coming, but they need to grow, daughter

When they come …I’ll eat them all!

Do you want a carrot? Let’s go get a carrot …and we have to offer one to Keit, right?

We continue walking along, taking a roundabout way toward the carrots. As we pass by a patch of grass, he deftly collects a selection of wild greens, or quintoniles, handing pieces of leaves to me, and to his daughter, for both of us to try. For Felipe, it is important that his daughter learn to observe and be curious about the natural world, even at the age of three. For him, learning also happens outside of school and is central to teaching new generations how to sense information about the world around you, not just read about it. As he explains:

One learns by playing, by sowing seeds and sticking your hands in the dirt …education is always important from the very first years, food education because now kids eat what their parents have at hand, sugars, pastas, flours, and it satisfies their hunger, and you might grow the same, but you grow empty too without any root to hold onto.

Here Felipe touches on a key theme addressed by many Indigenous food sovereignty activists—food as a spiritual anchor, or a “root to hold onto.” Interaction and engagement with the land is about more than just harvesting foods to eat—the act of creating space to commune also becomes a moment of self-reflection, of positioning oneself within a network of life that anchors and extends far and beyond a single lifetime (Crawford O’Brien and Wogahn, 2021). In contrast to the “sugars, pastas, and flours,” which Felipe mentions as an example of food stripped of lineage, being in relationship with the plants he interacts with connects him to histories of place, both through the genetic information stored in seeds, and by being taught by the plant itself. A seed placed in soil will grow itself, and through observation, can become a site of re-learning.

While he creates moments to enjoy the land as his teacher, he acknowledges that there are many ways in which ruptures occur within cultural lineages—immigration, displacement, urbanization, or economic pressures, like having to take a job far away from your land.

…I learned this from my father, my father learned from my grandfather and these are generational wisdoms that for no reason need to be cut or broken but many times this happens with people who immigrate or who don’t have a piece of land or who are denied or kicked off for many reasons, so it is important that even if it’s just a bucket, planting a corn to see how that plant grows …it’s about making it happen, and starting from almost nothing and bit by bit you learn from the very earth .…

In looking at the deep-time lineage of Tlaxcalteca foodways, human knowledge networks play an important role, but just as important are the ecosystems that they collaborate with, listen, and respond to.

Felipe’s work as both archaeologist and grower is a work of rediscovery. Seeds can lay dormant for thousands of years—forgotten, lost, and invisible—and still yield life once restored to a world of relevance. His garden is sometimes abandoned for years, yet as Felipe and others show, the idea that traditions are lost when no one does them anymore is just as simply reversed by the act of doing. Through the ebb and flow of human doing, ecosystems also hold the history of a place and can become a backdrop for reclaiming past paths through something as simple as observing how a bucket of dirt can cradle the spark of life in a new seedling or relearning the name and history of a plant on the landscape. We end the visit with Felipe giving me herbs to take home to my mother, seeds for planting, and a few extra for research.

While the above dialogues began as a way to strengthen and reimagine interpretations of ancient diets, they also served to validate the historical depth and rootedness of campesino worldviews. Agroecology and the principles behind it are not new but stem from Indigenous foodways that have demonstrated their sustainability and adaptation across centuries of cultural change. These foodways are more than a methodology or economic framework—they are a living network that connects the past, present, and future. Their survival is tied to their interconnectedness with value systems—ways of existing in the world that are carried out both within and beyond practices directly tied to food production. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2017) aptly states in “As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance”:

…how we live, how we organize, how we engage in the world—the process—not only frames the outcome, it is the transformation. How molds and then gives birth to the present. The how changes us. How is the theoretical intervention. (p. 19)

This case study of Tlaxcala shows a version of sustainability that is not about maintaining sustained production rates and financial return (values centered in an industrial lens), but about deep, lasting relationships to local ecologies and social networks that generate a range of adaptive responses. Whether through days spent in maguey fields, or a few minutes gathering herbs from a home garden, intentional shaping of activities builds and integrates ecological relationships into day-to-day actions. The implications are an agroecology that is centered on fundamentally changing not just the methods of food production, but the social, political, and economic systems that coalesce from our food systems. The implications are an agroecology that changes us, as well.

Archaeology, when used as a lens from which to contextualize the present, has the capacity to emphasize the longevity and depth of worlds outside of capitalism and colonialism, becoming an “emancipatory science” (Rose, 1983) that can shift our very research frameworks and ways of being in the world. An emancipatory archaeology can be a reminder of the limited time depth of our current world, and the freedom to imagine and enact alternative futures—archaeology as a healing practice (Atalay, 2020). The above interviews reframed the precolonial past not as an irrelevant, dead thing, but as lived experiences that continue to inform the present. Our conversations emphasized the entanglement of the past and present, reframing archaeology as a decolonial act of “intentionally dismantle[ing] and reframe[ing] colonial forms of knowing” (Rizvi, 2020). A traditional archaeology looks at the past to understand how things were, often assuming that the researchers’ lens is the most adequate and capable of recreating past worlds, but when placed in dialogue with the present world, a deep-time lens allows us to question worlds we have normalized, opening an array of adaptive possibilities. Time isn’t linear but rather forms a tangled tapestry from which to trace and follow and pull from well-worn threads. To create change, to find solutions, and to heal our own wounds of colonization, is to seek out the relevant threads and reweave them into existence.

There is no public data associated with this publication. IRB protocols and interviewee requests are to maintain interview records as unlisted documents, only to be used for publications.

The supplemental files for this article can be found as follows:

Full text Spanish version.DOCX

Spanish translation of text by Wendy Alcántara.

Agradezco a la comunidad agroecológica que me ha apoyado tanto con mi investigación a través de los años: los miembros del Mercado Alternativo de Tlaxcala, Cecilia Baroccio de Consumo Consciente, y Irad Santacruz Arcienega del Centro de Investigación de Cocina Tlaxcalteca. Agradezco a los entrevistados (Don Jaime, Don Zeferino y Felipe) y sus familias por recibirme a mi y a mi curiosidad.

This research was made possible through funding from: Comexus Fulbright-García Robles; Proyecto Arqueológico Tepeticpac and INAH Tlaxcala; The Tepeticpac Archaeological Project; the Wenner Gren Foundation (Engaged Anthropology Grant Gr-EAG-150 “Food and Resistance in Ancient and Contemporary Tlaxcala”; Dissertation Fieldwork Grant #9448: The Diet of Sovereignty: Bioarchaeology in Tlaxcallan) and Vanderbilt University (College of Arts and Sciences Professional Development grant, Russell G. Hamilton Graduate Leadership Institute Dissertation Enhancement Grant to support Ethnographic fieldwork). The oral history interviews collected for this piece were obtained under IRB #191184 “Foodways in Contemporary and Ancient Tlaxcala, Mexico.”

There are no known competing interests in the submission of this manuscript.

Sole author of conception and design: KA.

Sole acquisition of data: KA.

Sole contributor to analysis and interpretation of data: KA.

Sole contributor to draft and revision of article: KA.

Sole approval of submission for publication: KA.

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The term “pueblos originarios” or “original peoples” recognizes the diversity of cultures and identities that existed in the Americas. This diversity is lost under the umbrella term of “indígena,” the Spanish term for “indigenous,” which was used to group hundreds of distinct groups into a social category of control. When possible, I use “pueblos originarios” to refer to the culturally distinct but regionally and historically grouped native peoples subject to Spanish colonialism. At the same time, “indigenous” is a term tied to native-led and defined movements in English-speaking countries and serves the purpose of referring to both connectedness to place and philosophies of connectedness that appear across cultures of original peoples globally. Thus, in this article, “indigenous” is used to refer to these broader philosophies.

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How to cite this article: Alcántara, K. 2023. Milpa ecologies: Transgenerational foodways in Tlaxcala, Mexico. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 11(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2022.00099

Domain Editor-in-Chief: Alastair Iles, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

Knowledge Domain: Sustainability Transitions

Part of an Elementa Special Feature: Agrobiodiversity Nourishes Us/La Agrobiodiversidad Nos Nutre: Action Research for Agroecological Transformations

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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