From Obra to Oaxaca: A Stalk Contrast

After spending 13 hours in transit, much of which was on winding winding mountain roads, we arrived at San Pedro Sochiapan. Sochiapan is a Indigenous town, where everyone speaks mostly Chinanteco, the native language. Almost all the people in Sochiapan do at least some subsistence corn farming, and their milpas, or plots of land, are usually a 1 - 3 hour hike away from their houses. Whereas in Guanajuato, most farmed several hectares and either sold their corn or fed it to the animals they raised, in Sochiapan all of the corn was used to feed the farmers´families. We stayed with the wonderfully warm and hospitable family of Marta, who works in our Mexico City house.



Marta´s mother at the kitchen table.



Cristina, Marta´s sister makes a stack of tortillas almost everyday. And she taught us how to make them! I would say we are officially tortilla-maker-masters, but unfortunately ours turned out super feas. Fugly, in other words.

Felix and Cristina took us to their farm. Many women farm in Sochiapan as well. As one of the women we interviewed, Marina, said, the farms take a lot of work. Of course they´re going to help out.

Takin´a rest. As we said, the hikes can be pretty tough.

A casa de maiz. They keep corn houses of mazorca - mature corn - out by their farms, to take back to their houses little by little.

And firewood! We crossed paths with cow above. Felix said the cow must be thinking what are they doing here?! We gringas felt pretty useless (firewood-less, of course) on our hike down. Kate carried Cristina´s empty purse, and Felix refused our offer to carry his machete. Luis, Cristina´s 10 year old nephew above (and big UNO aficionado as we found out) carried a machete of his own and a slingshot to try to hit birds with pebbles. Nice.

Cristina´s mother makes aprons... see her lovely models several pictures below.

These are the very traditional and beautifully embroidered Mahals that people still sometimes wear for special occasions. The woman on the left sews them by hand and said that each takes about 2 and a half months.

Marta and Cristina´s quite ancient grandmother with her walking stick. And without anyone´s help she still uses the latrine and bucket showers etc. There are five generations of the family alive right now. Angel - great great grandson and potentially the cutest child on the planet - is in the apron-modeling picture.

Cristina grinds the corn in a motorized molina. Her mother and grandmother used to grind it with a stone.

We went with Erica and her dad, Francisco, a neighbor and as we later learned a distant relative, of course, on a 2 hour speed hike each way. It would have been beautiful (and definitely was when it was just us and the kids on the way back) had we not been huffin and puffin the whole way there and looking at our feet so as not to slip on the mud. Here, Francisco is loading up the donkey.

The clouds often settled low with us high up above them.

Francisco spraying watered-down pesticide. When we went to interview him later, we realized that he doesn´t speak much Spanish; so we were really lucky that his wife was there - again, Marina - who talked about the importance of education, how she wished she had been able to continue with school, and how she hopes her children will.

The farming plots were mostly crazy vertical. Farming them seemed pretty impossible to us. See the tiny man farming in the distance? Crazy!

Modeling Margarita´s aprons! And that is Angel. As Nora pointed out, he kind of looks like the biker in Triplets of Belville when he was a little boy. Anyone? He was scared of us at first, but warmed up to us when we gave him a rubber toy frog - a super rad toy, actually. Everyone in the family says he´s always content and really sweet. His mom works up north in Monterrey, and he lived his first two years in Mexico City, so he speaks more Spanish than Chinanteco.

Please note the weird sweet bread (that we´ve come to know and love and eat daily) in this still- life painting that we saw in a road-side restaurant in Cuicatlan. The vans - colectivos - that go out into the mountains leave from Cuica... we didn´t expect a four hour semi-nauseating drive through the mountains, but it´s certainly better than no road at all! Just ten years ago, there was still no road, and it would take a full day for people from Sochiapan to walk into town to get whatever they needed. Marina said that most went barefoot, and their feet would bleed from the long hikes.

And last but not least - a full bag of super rico mangos for 20 pesos!!! ...$1.50

Here are exerpts from some of our interviews in Guanajuato. Please excuse the delay; we´ve had some technology ish.

Joel Hurtado Rosillo:

I am a primary education teacher, but I’m the son of a campesino, and I live in this community. So, for that reason, since I was little, there was also born in me this agricultural practice, I liked it. In my free time, after work – in the afternoons – I farm, and I also raise a lot of animals. I’m not an ejidatario, but I work part of my time in the farm plots, renting. Farming is nice. Unfortunately the costs of farming are very expensive. This year, we are trying to fertilize three times. But the cost is rising a lot…

And so what happens? Well that family stays very poor, always...That is the problem that the country has – if farming were modernized, it would be a different story. Because we have good land, good soil. But a lot of the time, a plant requires fertilizer, but the owner of the land does not have the means to buy it. What happens? Tomorrow, I´ll see if I can get it, and tomorrow I´ll see if I can get it, and tomorrow I´ll see if I can get it. The plant has passed its time for fertilization because the plant has already grown old.

Gerardo López Moreno:

We do farming on a contract basis, almost like the United States. All in contracts, as a matter of price – cost and benefit. I know that here, agriculture is more difficult than almost anywhere else in the world. There are no subsidies. Sometimes, people risking what little they have, soon enough won´t have anything. Yes, there are people, who have a guaranteed harvest, but very few. We have faith in the Lord. We have faith in God that nothing awful will befall us and take away everything here.

Previously, the grocer there and those who are in towns like Acambaro and Selvatierra – there, there are people who comply, and who have been dedicated for a long time and run a good business selling corn. They bought ours. But there came a time here in Mexico, when, if the corn was worth two thousand pesos, they would say, well, give them one thousand five hundred. And so the farmer is really unprotected. There is no one regulating. Not even the government regulates.

The commercialization of corn is just starting to be regulated. Now they are fixing a price. They say to the vendors, ¨You know what? Who consumes the corn… the white corn?¨ We are producers and consumers of corn – we eat it. And we don´t like yellow corn, we like white corn. And the yellow corn is more nutritious, but we like the white. And so, because we are the only ones who consume white corn, it doesn´t have a price on an international level. And so either the government or the industrialists fix the price.

We saw a corn-ucopia of farms in Guanajuato!

Sorry we haven´t posted in so long! We´ve had a very busy week. We arrived in Acambaro, where Tere´s cousin Ricardo picked us up and took us to the town of Obrajuelo, where we stayed for the next week. He also introduced us to Octavio, the farmers´ representative in the community. While in Obrajuelo, we stayed with Ricardo´s brother, who works for Corona (and is wary of competition) and his very exuberant and unique wife, Beatriz. That night we drove five hours for a communion party that was long over, but we were rewarded with some fine Mole... mm.




Oh wait! We forgot to mention our day in the city... we spent the day seeing art and losing a flipflop (and buying new ones). This is Nora in the Museum of Modern Art. Lots of Mexican artists, including Juan O´Goreman.





Sunday we started the day with a tour of the corn fields and then to our first community event - a cattle branding and vaccination rodeo that the whole town comes out for every few months. Men had lasso in one hand, beer in the other, and cigarette in mouth.

We thought we got tan that day, but it was really just a layer of dust kicked up by the running cattle. Afterwards we went to a picnic on the river, which was kitchen included; ie they brought a fugon ((basically a stove), and we ate and napped by the river. Afterwards, we went horseback riding!! Nora´s dreams were fulfilled and our groins ached for days. Our ride included a tour of the cow and horse graveyard. And we learned to gallop! At the end of the day, we were dropped off at our doorstep on horseback, which is not an uncommon site in Obrajuelo.



This is Ruben and his horse! Monday, we shadowed Ruben bright and early, while he plowed the field old school style - with a yunta, an animal, instead of a tractor. In his interview, he talked about how kids often learn to farm from when theyre little, but fewer seem to be wanting to farm nowadays.





We spent the rest of the day with the super fast talker, Gerardo (above), who enabled awkward conversations with three other farmers. He was really interesting to talk to because he both sells seeds and is a farmer himself. He talked about the growing use of hybrid seeds and yellow corn, but Mexicans apparently are still very attached to eating white corn. Everyone has been really positive about the hybrid seeds, which was somewhat of a surprise to us.





We spent Tuesday with Alejandro at his biggish corn farm and cow village outside of Acambaro. Alejandro grows all of the corn that he feeds to his cows, which he milks (with machines) twice a day, at which point he gives the milk to his brother who makes CHEESE!!! But who´s excited? We each at about half a wheel of queso fresco and queso oaxaca, made from milk milked that morning.

During our farm time with Alejandro, we also learned how to inseminate a cow, where we can buy bull semen... from a catalogue called Semex, which lists the statistics and names of the different bulls. Not as yummy as the cheese. Why dont they have such a catalogue for humans?




That night, we were invited to a delicious dinner at his parents´ house, full of different things made from corn! In the above picture, there are tamales dulces, atole (sp?) - a drink made of corn meal and cocoa, tostadas, and please note the cheese in the back, which also originates from corn (via cow feed)!! Ricardo came and we talked politics and Mexican phone service, Telmex, where Ricardo works.





Wednesday, we spent more time with Octavio - interview and photos. We also made good friends with his family, who practically force fed us. Eat, eat, eat. It was muy rica, though. At the end of our stay, some family members gave us sparkly, fun decorated notebooks and pens with our names on them!




That night, we hiked up to Santa Cruz with a beautiful view of the town, and an interesting cross. Kate learned that they perform crucifiction reenactments on their Saints Day with that cross.



Thursday morning, we got a tour of a farm that uses well water irrigation but sanz pipes. The above picture is Alejandro turning on the well to fill up the pool, which filter out to the corn fields after 20 minutes.





This last picture is Kate and Ricardo enjoying corn and talking shop. We each had two cobs and a small Corona! Que bueno!

Schucks, Que Padre!

We´ve been going back and forth between Rio Hondo (just outside of the city proper) and San Luis, where our host sister, Mariana, goes to an amazing 12-student Montessori school. They do small planting, have an amazing herb garden, and used to have animals that were all eaten by the region´s fauna! Ps lunch time conversation was dominated by the largess of Nora´s plugs. Horacio, who is in charge of the grounds and plants at the school, was an amazing help, and we tried to return the favor by trimming branches with a machete and clippers.


The main reason we were out there was to interview and photograph community corn farmers. Unfortunately, many of them have cleared out due to lack of resources, including water and seeds. They now are mostly workers in the city or have passed away. We DID however, have a PLANTASTIC time with the ever-charming and quite saucy Don Gaudencio (below).





Don Gaudencio showed us around his different farm plots - mostly corn, but also fruit trees, squash, and alfalfa. He boasts six pure bred beagles, two horses, a dauschund (sp? hotdog dog), a smattering of other animals, and his supposedly odious 90 year old suegra - mother-in-law, Margarita.



Since our first somewhat intimidating encounter, he has greatly warmed up to us, saying we are good people, make him feel young again, and he cheekily calls us his girlfriends. He spouted a plethora of wisdom about equality, acceptance, witches, and devils. He also taught us Mexican sayings, including: If you create a crow, it will peck your eyes out... english equivalent, You reap what you sow.. how appropriate!




Much to our delight, he invited us to share a few glasses of pulque with him at his cousin´s house. Pulque is a traditional Mexican drink made from fermented Maguey juice. He was trying to get us red-faced. Dee-lish. And the family was very sweet. We will return soon at his bequest to have a meal with him and an interview.


In addition to the photographs, we have transcribed and translated the tail end of our interview with three faculty from the Montessori school. Their comments on corn are as follows!

Vanesa: Corn has been, from the time of our ancestors – and it continues to be - a primary source of nourishment… It is a food that you will find in ninety percent of the country´s kitchens – on a large or small scale. Perhaps for a family in the city, it might be ten per cent of their nourishment or five. It is like an accessory to their nourishment. However, while that is how they cook, in many areas, in places farther from the city, it adds up to eighty per cent of their food - Mexican will always have tortillas in the refrigerator.

Nelly: Before, if someone didn´t farm, he didn´t eat. Now one can get tortillas in other ways. You can get tortillas in the supermarket, while before in Mexico, it was the tortillería. And so, as the cost of agricultural supplies is rising, it is not worth it for people to farm. You may know how to farm a lot of land, but to go and buy a tortilla that is easier to obtain, that´s not as tasty and not with the same properties as corn cultivated in your home, it is still more accessible. So, the land that has been cultivated, has been left alone… and I think that it is really sad to see deserted fields; there doesn´t exist the same farming that there was ten years ago – not so far back, right?