Xochimilco, una identidad recreada (review)

Xochimilco, una identidad recreada. By Beatriz Canabal Cristiani. Colección Ensayos. Xochimilco: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Unidad Xochimilco, 1997. Maps. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. 346 pp. Paper.

Xochimilco is the home of the intensive agricultural practice in which farmers build beds from the fertile soil of shallow lakes in the central valley of Mexico. These highly productive beds (chinampas) have supported the densely populated valley since before the days of the Aztec empire. Today, however, they and their caretakers, the chinamperos, confront the onslaught of Mexico City, the world's largest megalopolis. The challenges run the gamut from the channeling of the aquifers to the city; the increasing salinity and polluting of the water that remains; the spread of squatters, themselves recent migrants from their own ancestral lands; and the conversion of nearby farms and forest into recreational homes and golf courses for the urban elite.

An equal challenge of conceptualization confronts the principal author and her collaborators from the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Unidad Xochimilco. They are determined to avoid the simplistic dualism of conceptualizing the struggle as one being between "traditionalism" and "modernism." Neither the community nor the city responds to each other in an unidimensional matter. Some responses are mutually beneficial; others are clearly destructive. To document the dynamism and complexities of the exchange, the volume gives an overview of the region, details the cycle of agricultural practices and some of the cultural practices associated with them, and then traces the development of El plan de rescate ecológico de Xomchimilco (and the attending politics) up to 1996.

The academics at UAM's Xochimilco campus align themselves with ecologists and local inhabitants to defend the community against the onslaught of squatters, developers, and street venders, and author's concern for the local populace reveals itself time and again. She also supports her assessment with ample material drawn from earlier studies and, principally, from her own observations, surveys, and carefully specified interviews. To these data, she adds additional context gleaned from sources as varied as government documents, circulars, and radio programs. Several of her colleagues contribute chapters on local practices and religious celebrations.

From this careful combination emerges a detailed accounting of the daily strategies employed to constantly recreate, according to the author, an ongoing local identity. These strategies are both tested and augmented when periodic downturns of the economy bring former community members back to Xochimilco. Diversification of crops remains a strategy of many, but more and more chinamperos opt to concentrate on flores de corte (cut flowers), such as nochebuenas, which have an especially high demand on Christmas Eve (la noche buena). Greenhouses (inverdaderos) or "winter shelters" allow the growers to lengthen production of the more delicate plants. The flowering beds delight tourists who flood the area on bright weekends to ply the cluttered canals on launches whose exhausts adds to the ever present esmog that hangs over the valley.

While one might wish for an elaboration of how daily life establishes an espacio cultural (cultural space), in which the chinamperos create and recreate a continuing presence, Cristiani and her colleagues have provided local inhabitants and distant readers a rich account of a people whose storied past infuses their continuing efforts to keep the megalopolis at bay while tapping into its energies to support a livelihood in the twenty-first century.