ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Agroecological Muck-raking: Swamp Farming the Neo-Chinampas of Southern Mexico, 1975-1989

• In Event: Plural Epistemologies and The Role of Time in the History of Waterscapes

English Abstract

This paper examines two development projects by Mexican government agencies in the 1970s and 1980s to revive or reinvent the ancient practice of chinampa agriculture. Government biologists were reacting to the socioeconomic and ecological effects of industrial agriculture imported from the US. One project, led by biologists including Arturo Gómez-Pompa, attempted to translate the chinampa swamp gardens from the central highlands to the tropical lowlands of Veracruz and Tabasco under the guidance of traditional chinampa farmers. The other project, organized by Mexico’s National Institute of Indigenous Peoples and its Tabasco state head, the future president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, was loosely based on the original chinampas, but sought to accelerate and enlarge the construction of raised beds by using heavy machinery. Different technological choices were rooted in different epistemic frameworks concerning the proper or natural elemental relationship between earth and water. The Northern technoscientific episteme valued a neat ontological delineation between the two. In contrast, the indigenous Chontal-Mayan ontology, disobedient to this environmentally-reductionistic elemental orderliness, embraced muckiness, both material and epistemic. The developers, who hoped to expand the ancient chinampas, inspired by recent 1970s developments in Mesoamerican archaeology which demonstrated a much higher Classic Maya population density, called their project “an old answer to the future.” Such projects I consider under the rubric of “retrotechnics,” involving the resurrection of dormant technologies from historical or archaeological sources or their reintroduction from a contemporary but distant epistemic reservoir. Retrotechnics afford historians an opportunity to see the trajectory of technoscientific change, often construed as linearly progressive, muddied.

Author

• Paul Vieth, University of Oklahoma