Maya Forest Gardens on Film: Competing Discourses of Indigeneity and Agroforestry

• In Event: ¿Un cine interrogante?: Film, hegemonic cultural discourse and visions of (making and remaking of) indigeneity

Abstract

Several mid-to late 20th century documentary and fictional films about indigenous peoples in Mexico (México: la revolución congelada; Juan Pérez Jolote; La noche de los mayas; When the Last Tree is Cut: Lacandones in the Modern World) mirror the hegemonic tendencies of official or state-sponsored indigenismo. By turns, these films represent indigenous peoples as living icons of humanity’s past, intriguing yet unfathomably remote, and as abject wards of its present, waiting in line for assimilation to modern mestizo culture and agro-industry. On the surface, Raices mayas para la restauración de las selvas (2013) adopts some of the discursive strategies and cinematic techniques we associate with these earlier films and with the Mexican indigenista cultural imaginary as a whole; yet in privileging the first-person persectives of Maya milperos in the Yucatán Peninsula and in the Lacandon Rain Forest, this documentary film proposes a radically different basis on which to understand what it means to be indigenous and to practice traditional Mayan agroforestry. Hegemonic discourses of rural development and environmental protection create a hierarchy between farmland and forest, placing modern humanity’s fate squarely within the former. However, the Maya milperos who tell their stories in this film show how they have cultivated their thriving forest gardens across many generations. Raices mayas turns the indigenista discourse of agro-industrial development on its head, demonstrating how traditional Maya forest stewardship contrasts with current transborder agro-industrial policies and holds important lessons for ameliorating deforestation and global warming in and beyond these regions.

Author

• Analisa Taylor, University of Oregon