Biocultural Memory

Farmers and families in arid regions have gained consciousness regarding the vital value of water being the main restriction to their lives, so they work to save water with all available techniques.

Image provided by Gisela Herrerías

Restoring Amaranth to the Tehuacán Valley: A Case Study in Biolcultural Memory

Amaranth is an ancestral, protein-packed superfood. It originated in the Tehuacán region—one of the leading centers of origin and diversification of crops like maize, beans, chile, tomato, avocado, and pumpkin.

Image provided by Gisela Herrerías

I had the privilege to meet Gisela Herrerías through the Global Network of Water Museums. Her organization, Agua para Siempre, has worked with indigenous local farmers to revitalize the land and grow crops suitable for the climate and their needs.

Herrerias and her partner Raúl Hernández Garciadiego realized that poverty in the Tehuacán Valley among the indigenous Popoloca community was less a result of the lack of money and had more to do with the lack of water. The local geology made drilling wells cost-prohibitive, so helping this community wasn’t that simple. Herrerias and Garciadiego took special care to avoid coming into a community and imposing their own visions and needs, and instead practiced radical listening. The two “used the method they learned in workshops led by José Luis Brito, who advocated a form of participative observation that required participant-observers to write notes in the exact words of the people with whom they interacted in an effort to exclude their own impressions.”

During this radical listening, someone mentioned a drought-resistant grain that had been grown in the Tehuacán Valley centuries ago: amaranth. The duo acquired some seeds and planted a field to test out the crop’s resilience. To their surprise, when they returned to check on the crop a couple months later, the field was completely cleared, with not a trace of the amaranth left behind. As it turns out, people from the nearest village harvested and ate the amaranth, without needing to be told that the crop was edible. The easy return of amaranth to the Tehuacan Valley is an example of biocultural memory being activated. This project was a success because it embraced indigenous knowledge as a foundation and responded to indigenous people’s embrace of that knowledge.