Alcántara, K. 2023.

Milpa ecologies: Transgenerational foodways

in Tlaxcala, Mexico. Elem Sci Anth, 11: 1. DOI: https://doi.org/
10.1525/elementa.2022.00099

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Milpa ecologies: Transgenerational foodways

in Tlaxcala, Mexico
Keitlyn Alcántara1,*

Through a case study born from archaeological fieldwork in Tlaxcala, Mexico, this article provides an example
of place-based foodways that have been used to transmit belief systems and ways of life that resist dominant
frameworks of power across time. Foodways, as a site of daily engagements with the full food cycle, can be

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used to concretize dominant systems of power (e.g., industrial agriculture) but can also be used to build
countersystems. Using the example of milpa agriculture and “Maı́z Culture,” this case study demonstrates
how key ecological philosophies have served as effective and resilient adaptive strategies from which to
respond to shifting threats across time—from Aztec and Spanish colonialism to contemporary resistance
to neoliberalism. Although agroecology is rooted in indigenous origins, the global adoption of agroecology
often focuses heavily on what is planted but fails to center the how—the relationships and values that
indigenous ecologies embody. To adopt the planting principles of agroecology without centering indigenous
philosophies results in food systems that replicate colonial extraction. While these philosophies are rooted in
locally defined practices, they also serve to support a broader unlearning of colonial worldviews within the
systems that overshadow the day-to-day experiences of researchers. Using foodways to bridge the time
between the archaeological past and agroecological present unmasks normalized worldviews, such as
capitalism, neoliberalism, and industrialism to show that, while they are dominant, they are not inevitable
nor singular. Please refer to Supplementary Materials, Full text Spanish version of this article, for a full
text Spanish version of this article.

Keywords: Foodways, Campesino, Agroecology, Archaeology, Mexico, Mesoamerica

Prologue: An embodied archaeology
The clunk of a loose tail pipe against the uneven packed
dirt road broke the predawn silence as we rode the field
truck up the steep hill toward the site of Tepeticpac—
a sprawling hilltop fortress that was the urban core of the
Late Postclassic state of Tlaxcala (1325–1519 CE). As the
truck doors opened, we met with terraces that angled
down the hill, cradling tall green stalks of corn. Beans
wound up the stalks, aromatic tangles of gordolobo and
arnica filling the air in between. At the terrace edges, blue-
green maguey dewy from the morning mist held tight to
the eroding soil. These milpa—terraced networks of both
agricultural and wild plants—were the site of our
excavations.
Five hundred years before, many milpa had served
a similar purpose, but we were drawn to those that held
remnants of the architecture—austere temples, work-
shops, residences, and patios–that shaped life for Late
Postclassic Tlaxcalteca. Slowly and arduously, we removed
compacted dirt to reveal pieces of hearths and adobe
1
Department of Anthropology, Indiana University,
Bloomington, IN, USA
* Corresponding author:
Email: kalcant@iu.edu
block walls. By 11 AM, the sun beat down, and we would
break beneath the spindly shade of a mesquite tree. When
not working on the project, many of the team members
owned or worked these very same terraces. From them,
I learned to festoon tree branches with hanging backpacks
to ensure no ants found our food and to keep an eye out
for seasonal snacks—the sticky sweet flesh of a sun-ripened
zapote or the treacherous spiky green of the thirst-
quenching tuna (cactus fruit).
Archaeologists look to the past to think about how
things were, yet for those of us living within industrial
cultures, our eyes (and bodies) are clouded with daily
lived relationships to land that are very different from
a precolonial past. Although our fieldwork had excava-
tion as its central goal, from the workers we saw firsthand
how campesino relationship to place kept the ancient
terraces alive by adapting past practices to current
realities.
Introduction
Agroecology centers the work and experiences of contem-
porary campesinos and peasants who seek to maintain
holistic relationships between food production and land
within contexts of increasing globalization and neoliber-
alism (Altieri and Nicholls, 2017). While the roots of Latin
Art. 11(1) page 2 of 12 Alcántara: Milpa ecologies: Transgenerational foodways in Tlaxcala, Mexico
American agroecology are based in systems of agrobiodi-
versity designed by pueblos originarios1 (Xolocotzi, 1988;
Dı́az León and Cruz León, 1998; Figueroa-Helland et al.,
2018), the global adoption of agroecology often focuses
heavily on what is planted but fails to live into the rela-
tionships and values that local indigenous ecologies
embody. To adopt the planting principles of agroecology
without centering indigenous philosophies results in food
systems that replicate colonial extraction. Additionally,
turning to agroecology as a contemporary solution or
“discovery” negates the long-standing work of communi-
ties who have kept indigenous agrobiodiverse practices
alive for millennia, despite the competing and dominant
food systems that emerged with European colonialism.
Through a case study born from archaeological fieldwork
in Tlaxcala, Mexico, I provide an example of place-based
foodways that have been used to transmit belief systems
and ways of life that resist dominant frameworks of power
across time. Foodways were a key tool of adaptive
responses to Aztec and Spanish colonialism and continue
to shape tactics within contemporary campesino resis-
tance to neoliberalism (Merçon, 2015; Peréz Sánchez and
Monachon, 2015; Noreiro Escalante and Massieu Trigo,
2018).
Food is a daily necessity for all living beings, and as
such, becomes a “hub” (Whyte, 2016) or daily ritual
around, which values or beliefs about the world are trans-
mitted and by which realities are made concrete. While
the term “foodways” may be used to refer to food tradi-
tions and cultural practices (Brulotte and Di Giovine,
2014; Counihan, 2019), food’s life-giving characteristics
irrevocably align it with systems of power (Patel, 2012;
Gálvez, 2019). In this article, I refer to foodways as acts
of daily engagements with the full food cycle that go on to
influence human relationships and relationships to land
and other-than-human living beings. Foodways concretize
systems of power but can also be used to build counter-
worlds or worlds within or parallel to dominant systems.
Using foodways to bridge the time between the archaeo-
logical past and agroecological present unmasks normal-
ized worldviews, such as capitalism, neoliberalism, and
industrialism, to show that, while they are dominant, they
are not inevitable nor singular.
This building of alternative worlds can also be under-
stood through the term “food sovereignty,” defined by La
Via Campesina in 1996 as the right to local autonomy to
1. The term “pueblos originarios” or “original peoples”
recognizes the diversity of cultures and identities that existed
in the Americas. This diversity is lost under the umbrella term
of “indı́gena,” the Spanish term for “indigenous,” which was
used to group hundreds of distinct groups into a social
category of control. When possible, I use “pueblos originarios”
to refer to the culturally distinct but regionally and
historically grouped native peoples subject to Spanish
colonialism. At the same time, “indigenous” is a term tied to
native-led and defined movements in English-speaking
countries and serves the purpose of referring to both
connectedness to place and philosophies of connectedness that
appear across cultures of original peoples globally. Thus, in this
article, “indigenous” is used to refer to these broader
philosophies.
participate in and define the entire food chain—what will
be grown or produced, under what conditions, and with
what values (Patel, 2009). Whyte (2016) further argues
that because of food’s role as a cultural hub, food sover-
eignty also refers to capacities for adaptation, particularly
in resistance to or negotiation of relationships to domi-
nant systems. Taken in this context, food sovereignty
becomes about the right to create adaptable and varied
approaches to survival. By looking at foodways in Tlaxcala
across time, my goal is not to romanticize indigeneity as
unchanging and timeless. Rather, I demonstrate how key
ecological philosophies have served as effective and resil-
ient adaptive strategies from which to respond to shifting
threats across time. Additionally, I argue that while these
philosophies are rooted in locally defined practices of
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pueblos originarios, they serve to support a broader
unlearning of colonial worldviews within the systems that
overshadow the day-to-day experiences of researchers.
Historical and archaeological background:
Tlaxcala sı́ existe
This case study is set just 2 h east of bustling Mexico City,
in Tlaxcala, the smallest state in contemporary Mexico at
1,5512 miles. Shamed nationally for its alliance with Span-
ish colonizers and role in the fall of the mighty Aztec
Empire, in pop culture, it is often mocked as the
“forgotten state,” a history which birthed the local motto
!
“ Tlaxcala sı́ existe!” (Toulet, 2010). Defiance is a historical
trait of the Tlaxcalteca, known as one of the last holdouts
against the expanding Aztec Empire in the Late Postclassic
(1325–1519 BCE; Berdan et al., 1996; Berdan and Smith,
2003; Carballo, 2020), an early and key ally to the Spanish
(Abasolo, 1996) and contemporary leader in campesino
agroecology and resistance to industrial agriculture
(Holt-Giménez, 2006; Merçon, 2015; Noriero Escalante
and Massieu Trigo, 2018). Archaeologically, Fargher et
al. (2011; 2016) attributed Tlaxcala’s sovereignty from
the Aztecs to a rejection of traditional Nahua hierarchical
models of power, opting instead for a collective social
organization, or republic. Building on this hypothesis,
in 2015, I began a bioarchaeological research project in
Tlaxcala to explore whether this alternative social orga-
nization was reflected in the diets of individuals buried
in the core city of Tepeticpac, a hilltop site overlooking
contemporary Tlaxcala City. Open-ended interviews con-
ducted with 3 campesino producers and 3 cocineras tra-
dicionales in Tlaxcala between 2018 and 2019 added
depth to the interpretations of diet, by providing the
examples of how food maps onto day-to-day activities
and social and ecological networks. The interviews used
in this article focus specifically on the work of campesino
producers.
To look at diet in the past, many research models inad-
vertently depend upon food webs—maps of possible foods
and how they were consumed—that reflect Western
assumptions about foodways. These research biases mask
the wide range of possible lived experiences—for example,
an understanding of “agriculture” that focuses heavily on
cultivated, but not foraged, foods. Starting from tradi-
tional paleodietary methods of analysis, my project
Alcántara: Milpa ecologies: Transgenerational foodways in Tlaxcala, Mexico
explored plant microfossils found within dental plaque
and dietary isotopes found in enamel and bone (Alcántara,
2020). Dietary isotopes reflect individual diets through
ranges of values of carbon and nitrogen that map onto
a simplistic food web model, so that an individual can be
said to be eating broad categories of foods, like marine
animal, riverine animal, land animal, or a binary of maize
versus wheat diets (Bogaard and Outram, 2013). While
a traditional reading of diet at Tepeticpac would be inter-
preted as a population that ate an exorbitant amount of
maize (the most likely agricultural cultivar from a modern
industrial lens), interviews with contemporary producers
helped me understand that ancient milpa, like those of
today, were likely intercropped with diverse plants with
similar isotopic values (like amaranth, and cacti like nopal
and maguey) and supplemented with foraged wild foods.
In fact, a range of milpa foods—maguey, sweet potato,
maize, and wild and domesticated bean—were found in
the dental plaque of the burial population (Alcántara,
2020). More recently, the analysis of ancient DNA from
the same dental plaque samples showed that diet also
included sunflower, chia, tomato, pineapple, cacao, pep-
pers, squash, peanuts, grasshoppers, freshwater mollusks,
fish, ducks, pheasants, and turkey (Mendoza, 2023). These
results show the evidence of foraging and consumption of
wild foods, like grasshoppers and corn fungus, character-
istics of “Maı́z Culture” or “milpa foodways,” discussed in
more detail in the section “Defining Maı́z Culture.” Impor-
tantly, these findings emphasize that Tlaxcalteca resis-
tance to imperial trade blockades (Berdan et al., 1996;
Carballo, 2020) was strengthened not only through inter-
nal collective social organization but also through ecolog-
ical relationships. As the paper argues, a comparison
across time emphasizes the effectiveness and adaptability
of relationship-centered food sovereignty used by both
ancient and contemporary growers in Tlaxcala.
A brief history of food sovereignty in Tlaxcallan
In contrast to Aztec Imperial expansion, which sought to
create tributaries while leaving local cultures and govern-
ments generally untouched (Berdan et al., 1996), the Span-
ish colonial projects of the 16th and 17th centuries had as
a central aim the elimination and/or replacement of
pueblos originarios and their worldviews, also known as
settler colonialism (Wolfe, 2006; LeFevre, 2015). Whyte
(2016) labels the settler colonialism of the Americas as
an “embedding” of new ecologies made concrete through
new origin myths, like Christopher Columbus
“discovering” America, and “ . . . religious and cultural nar-
ratives, social ways of life, and political economic systems
(eg. property)” (p. 13). Colonial infrastructures grew in
power by enacting the policies of cultural genocide that
erased local language, history, and traditions, while also
displacing communities from their lands and rupturing
relationships of reciprocity embedded within foodways
(Mailer and Hale, 2018; Hernández, 2022).
The “food sovereignty” tactics that allowed the Tlaxcal-
teca to resist Aztec imperialism continued in some form
into the colonial period, made possible by their early alli-
ance with the Spanish in 1519, which protected Tlaxcala’s
Art. 11(1) page 3 of 12
Late Postclassic borders (Gibson, 1952; Muñoz Camargo,
1986; Garcı́a, 2014). As an early Spanish ally, it became
a state comparatively less besieged by colonial practices of
cultural erasure. A “gobierno de Indios,” early colonial
Tlaxcala was governed by Tlaxcalteca nobility who adapted
the prehispanic state to fit within the structures of New
Spain, while maintaining many aspects of their original
political, economic, and social structures (Martı́nez Baracs,
2014). As Gibson (1952) notes, “the original policy of
Spanish government had been to exclude white civilian
colonists from the province of Tlaxcala” (p. 79), physically
limiting settler colonialism in the state. However, a series
of plagues in the latter 1500s vastly reduced the native
population, forcing the majority of Tlaxcaltecans to aban-
don their hilltop residences and terraces (like the site of
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Tepeticpac) for lack of labor to maintain them, instead
settling in the newly established colonial center of Tlax-
cala City.
Yet while many middle- and upper-class Tlaxcaltecans
adapted to mestizo lifestyles, the lower-class remained
heavily dependent on milpa agriculture (Gibson, 1952)—
a nod to its utility as a sustainable foodway that does not
require financial capital to maintain. During this key
moment of cultural genocide, Colonial-era campesinos
served as seed keepers, maintaining the lineage of biodi-
versity in their milpa, while Spanish wheat fields and cat-
tle ranches slowly eroded centuries of well-tended soil. As
Gálvez (2019) argues, campesino communities continued
to be structured around milpa foodways until the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was passed in
1994. More than any other colonial project, NAFTA
pushed a dominant neoliberal ideology that forced farm-
ers to shift to a framework of food as money that supports
a global market rather than local well-being. This is the
current ideological system against which the contempo-
rary campesinos and growers interviewed for this article
organize.
Drawing from a series of conversations with growers
and producers from Tlaxcala, Mexico, I contextualize
archaeological foodways as a living lineage rather than
a broken or forgotten history. The oral histories used in
this narrative stem from 3 individuals with varying ances-
tral ties to Tlaxcala—mestizo lineages that demonstrate
the blurred line of settler/indigenous histories (Knight,
1990; Bartra, 2008; Bueno, 2009). There is no direct, pure
link between late postclassic foodways and contemporary
campesino food sovereignty movements. In fact, most of
the interviewees rejected the term “indı́gena” due to its
racial stigma within Mexican history (Brading, 1988) and
its origins in Spanish homogenization of culturally, lin-
guistically, and ecologically diverse pueblos originarios,
instead choosing the term “campesino” to define their
cultural identity. Even so, this lineage could be seen peek-
ing out through Nahua last names and Nahua and Otomı́
terminology used to describe milpa technologies and
foodways. When presented in the context of an archaeo-
logical past, indigeneity seemingly became apolitical, with
interviewees seeing and acknowledging how their prac-
tices and teachings were like what I was finding among
the Late Postclassic Tlaxcalteca. The link between past and
Art. 11(1) page 4 of 12 Alcántara: Milpa ecologies: Transgenerational foodways in Tlaxcala, Mexico
present, then, is a cobbling together of multigenerational
ecological knowledge adapted to contemporary realities.
Within this adaptation, colonial dynamics also perme-
ate, such as the gendered division of labor, which resulted
in male family members being more closely tied to activ-
ities in the campo, and women’s responsibilities being
aligned with the kitchen and household (Christie, 2004;
Grey and Patel, 2015; Gálvez, 2019). To explore how gen-
erational knowledge and indigenous philosophies perme-
ate the kitchen and household is a key question, but
beyond the scope of this article. Focusing instead on the
expression of key philosophies within the campo (outlined
in the next section), the following conversations with
Jaime Gaspar Garcı́a of Herencia del Magueyal, a house-
hold maguey business, Zeferino Manohatl Tetlalmatzi,
a nopal farmer and food sovereignty activist, and Felipe
Nava Ahuatzi, an archaeologist and household gardener,
demonstrate the daily agroecological practices that “draw
inspiration from the past” (Clifford, 2013).
Foodways and world-building
Many indigenous foodways across the Americas share
a common theme of kin-centric ecologies that recognize
the interconnectedness of human and other-than human
life and center regeneration, balance, biodiversity, and
local investment in relationships to place (Brondizio
et al., 2021; Pesantubbee and Zogry, 2021; Hernández,
2022). Settler foodways, in turn, were shaped by the dri-
vers of European colonialism—the need for expansion into
agriculturally productive or resource-rich lands, to extract
and produce goods that could be turned into capital for
European monarchies (Villanueva, 2021). Under the set-
tler colonialism from which our current global food sys-
tems stem, human relationships to land center
production, creating a worldview that masks the intercon-
nectivity between human well-being and ecological
well-being—what Hernández (2022) calls “ecocolonialism.”
For these systems and worldviews to dominate as they do,
others that are in conflict must be erased or made invisible,
as well as the alternative futures that they promise. Settler
colonialism seeks to replace Indigenous worldviews, push-
ing them to the margins, and labeling them as backward
and without a future (Whyte, 2016). Yet, as I demonstrate in
this article, foodways can become a conduit of adaptation
and cultural resilience.
Defining Maı́z culture
This article uses the framework of “Maı́z Culture” (Rodrı́-
guez, 2014) to consider how land, and those that work
closely with it, shape social, spiritual, and physical ecosys-
tems that counter settler colonial, capitalist, and neolib-
eral values of extraction and globalization. The history of
early human relationship to place is one of coevolution
with ecology—the plants, animals, insects, and other life
that made human survival possible. In Mesoamerica,
maize has been a nutritional anchor, a drought-tolerant
grass, turned into a reliable crop through millennia of
human tending. In “Our Sacred Maı́z is our Mother,”
Rodrı́guez (2014) outlines the ways in which daily engage-
ment with the tending of maize created “Maı́z Culture”—
a shared cosmovision, religion, and set of cultural norms
that ultimately defined lifeways across Mesoamerica and
shaped perceptions of time, seasonality, community, and
spirituality. Maı́z culture is kept alive through the milpa,
both a physical growing space and a site of ritual and
sociality (Johannesen and Hastorf, 1994; Aguilar et al.,
2003; Fitting, 2010; Gálvez, 2019). While maı́z is often the
central crop of a milpa, the milpa is better defined as an
ecological community of planted complementary crops
(squash, beans, tomatoes, peppers, and amaranth), wild
foods (verdolagas, quintoniles, fungi, and insects), and
year-round plants (maguey and nopal cactus and fruit
trees like capulin and tejocote). The networked plants,
animals, insects, and fungi not only provide a nutrient-
rich diet for humans but anchor a biodiverse and adaptable
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ecosystem. As a foodway, Maı́z Culture is both a localized,
communal structure, centered on a deep and long-standing
understanding of region-specific ecosystems, and a model
that exists in endless iterations across Mesoamerica (and
arguably, across the Americas; Johannesen and Hastorf,
1994; Staller and Carrasco, 2010; Mailer and Hale, 2018).
Understanding Central Mexico as a Maı́z Culture is
important to understanding how the actions and relation-
ships surrounding food production (tending to the milpa,
harvesting, storing, distributing, and cooking) create a par-
ticular worldview and culture of values that continue to be
drawn upon as alternatives to dominant political, social,
and economic frameworks. In this article, I focus specifi-
cally on tracing the following values and their iterations
across time in Tlaxcala:
1. Well-being found within collaborative and
reciprocal relationships. Rather than centering
control and extraction, these relationships are slow
and adaptable, acknowledging the agency of other-
than-human beings, like plants and insects, and the
value of social networks.
2. Embodied knowledge. Taught through sensory
engagement with place and foodways. This can
include walking through the milpa and noticing
changes to the environment but is also built into
rituals like harvest, preparation, and consumption
of heritage foods and social experiences like drink-
ing pulque while sharing stories.
3. Multigenerational knowledge networks. Impor-
tantly, these networks are often tied to a return to
and reinvestment in place rather than an unbroken
relationship to land.
Tlaxcaltecan agroecology
Campesinos of Tlaxcala have been central to the ongoing
maintenance and transmission of Maı́z Culture and cos-
movisions that stand in opposition to global projects of
food system industrialization. In fact, early agroecology
was strongly influenced by the work of a Tlaxcaltecan
agronomist, Efraı́m Hernández Xolocotzi, who migrated
to the United States from his small campesino community
of San Bernabé, Amaxac de Guerrero, Tlaxcala in child-
hood. After studying agriculture at Cornell, he returned
to shape early agroecology in Mexico as a professor at
Alcántara: Milpa ecologies: Transgenerational foodways in Tlaxcala, Mexico
Chapingo Autonomous University (Dı́az León and Cruz
León, 1998). Xolocotzi is an example of how Indigenous
philosophies are relearned and repurposed within con-
temporary contexts of migration and globalization. This
can further be seen in the widescale grassroots organizing
within Tlaxcala, such as Grupo Vicente Guerrero, a group
of campesinos who came together in the 80s and 90s to
share and grow Indigenous farming methodologies, and
in 2013 successfully filed a class action to block the farm-
ing of genetically modified corn in Mexico (Holt-Giménez,
2006; Merçon, 2015; Noriero Escalante and Massieu Trigo,
2018; Rodrı́guez González, 2022). Additional groups like
the Mercado Alternativo de Tlaxcala (Pérez Sánchez and
Monachon, 2015) organize around the principle that ecol-
ogy, food sovereignty, and traditional foodways are inti-
mately connected to political autonomy.
All 3 interviewees share ties to the Mercado Alternativo
de Tlaxcala: 2 as vendors (Jaime and Zeferino) and 1 as
a regular attendee (Felipe). Held weekly in the quiet plaza
of the Jardı́n de San Nicolás, the Mercado Alternativo is
a grouping of just 15 stands or so with an array of local
honey, vegetarian meats, made of mushrooms and soy,
groceries like Zeferino’s nopal stand, and social spaces,
like Jaime’s pulque and taco stand. A Margaret Mead
quote greets visitors to the Mercado’s website: “Never
doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens
can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever
has.” This co-op was formed in 2003 (Pérez Sánchez and
Monachon, 2015), originally focused on the discussion of
topics of food rights—their tagline is “El derecho a una
alimentación sana, segura y soberana” or “The right to
healthy, secure, and sovereign food.” The Mercado Alterna-
tivo is a hub for individuals interested in agroecological
production, a term recently adopted by campesino produ-
cers to make the ecologically sound and sustainable legacy
of campesino (and historically pueblo originario) visible and
accessible outside of the campo communities (Rosado-May,
2015; Altieri and Nicholls, 2017). While each interviewee is
networked within these broader histories of campesino and
pueblo originario organizing in Tlaxcala, the strength of
their narratives lies in exploring how the tenets of Maı́z
Culture are woven into distinct day-to-day realities.
1. Well-being found within collaborative and
reciprocal relationships
Don Jaime greets guests to his stand at the Mercado Alter-
nativo, in a white sombrero and plaid flannel shirt, big
gray mustache dipping down the sides of his mouth.
When I first approached the green tent, with its jars of
maguey honey, and small cellophane wrapped packets of
seasoned grasshoppers, he was uninterested in my awk-
ward questions about whether he had any fresh insects
I might freeze dry to take back to the lab. I bought a jar of
honey and stepped aside amid the calls for another round
of pulque and a taco de gusano de maguey. The next time
I visited, I ran into a neighbor, having a late morning
pulque on the long table setup next to the stand. I joined,
slowed down to absorb my surroundings and enjoy the
varied pulque flavors: piñón, coco, and apio. I returned for
a third week, and at market close, Don Jaime greeted me
Art. 11(1) page 5 of 12
with a pint of pulque—an experimental strawberry tomato
that he offered up freely to the guests that remained—and
began to talk to me about how he became more heavily
plant-based when he found out he had diabetes.
Don Jaime’s interest in pulque came from the family
knowledge that it is beneficial to those suffering kidney
disease and diabetes. His family had long worked with
maguey, and the insects that call it home, but the need
for a dramatic lifestyle change led Don Jaime and his wife
Adriana to become curious about how these campesino
foods mapped onto the dietary changes prescribed by his
doctor. He and Adriana met in Mexico City, where they
worked in factories. The city was loud, dirty, and full of too
many people, so shortly after they were married, they
decided to return to land Jaime’s family owned in La
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Españita, Tlaxcala, forfeiting consistent (though minimal)
paychecks for greater control over their environment and
health. As they began to reengage in maguey farming,
they became further involved in the local organization
Grupo Vicente Guerrero, as well as a network of alterna-
tive markets. Their day-to-day lives changed dramatically,
a rhythm I witnessed by shadowing Jaime during his
daily tasks.
Leaving my apartment in Tlaxcala City at 4 AM, I arrived
to La Españita as the sun peeked over the mist-covered
mountains, to take part in the first act of Don Jaime’s
day—the raspado de maguey. Dawn and dusk, Jaime visits
each of the 30 or so plants that dot the hill, scraping the
center of the maguey plant to collect the liquid aguamiel
that accumulates. When fermented, this becomes pulque.
While our morning was silenced by the completion of the
tasks at hand, hours blurred with nonstop movement, by 8
AM we returned to the house to eat, and Don Jaime
explained:
. . . it is difficult work because you have to be all day
from very early doing different activities and give
a lot of time to the campo but fortunately, well, the
campo gives us food.
And indeed, breakfast was a delicious guisado de quiote,
or maguey flower, steamed inside a richly flavored
mixiote—the skin of the maguey leaf. I thought back to
my archaeological research, and the maguey fibers we
found in the dental plaque of burials. While the presence
of the plant cells told us maguey had been consumed, to
say “they ate maguey” is to misrepresent the early morning
hours of tending and visiting with this plant. It is difficult,
demanding work, but for Don Jaime, it is also work rooted
in a family history and culture that he speaks of with pride:
Well, our work is very beautiful, we inherited this
culture since my great grandfather, my grandfather,
my father, and now even my children and my
grandchildren love and enjoy all of these maguey
things, my grandchildren for example, instead of
drinking soda well they drink a glass of pulque they
don’t drink soda, we drink aguamiel, we drink
pulque, we make little teas out of herbs or sweeten
coffee with maguey honey or bee honey . . . .
Art. 11(1) page 6 of 12 Alcántara: Milpa ecologies: Transgenerational foodways in Tlaxcala, Mexico
For Don Jaime, this lifestyle provides a path to the
physical well-being of his family, who have access to food
that will reduce their chance of diabetes and other ill-
nesses. While the labor is heavy, his enjoyment of and
respect for the campo is clear, viewing it as a collaborator
that allows him to live this lifestyle.
In an analysis of the sustainability of milpa systems,
Sánchez and Romero (2018) found that robust social and
ecological networks are the central benefit of milpa farm-
ing, not financial return. Gálvez (2019) complements
these findings by showing that social and ecological rela-
tionships that emerge from milpa agriculture are tied to
physical and mental well-being and resilience. When these
communal relationships are ruptured, for example,
through the NAFTA-driven industrial farming and reliance
on global rather than local networks, individual well-being
is sacrificed for global wealth. Jaime’s job in Mexico City
was “work” that created products for an amorphous mar-
ket, not for individual consumption, but other types of
exchange exist, and on Don Jaime’s land, his energy and
time are met with a reciprocity of food both cultivated
and “gifted” by the campo and the building of familial and
community relationships. Additionally, his involvement in
Grupo Vicente Guerrero and the Mercado Alternativo con-
nects him to broader social, economic, and knowledge
networks that buffer his financial risks through alternative
economic frameworks, like exchange. The pints of pulque
he often fails to charge for are investments in the future of
his social networks or reciprocity for past exchanges.
Don Jaime’s “work” isn’t just active physical labor but
also the moments of observation and engagement with
the landscape. Although his central area of engagement is
not technically a “milpa,” many of the principles of Maı́z
Culture apply. Between raspados, Don Jaime uses
a machete to poke at a dark bruise on a penca, the telltale
sign that a gusano de maguey may have recently entered
to create a nest within the flesh. He is an expert at iden-
tifying the abandoned nests from the new, gently slicing
into arm of the maguey, and with a thorn pulled from the
same plant, pulls forth the juicy white body of the maguey
worm on the elegant tip. He’s adeptly aware of the sea-
sonality and life cycles of the campo and respectfully med-
iates his harvest, taking only when insects are in
abundance. After getting an opportunity to watch how
fastidiously Don Jaime seeks out and gathers the insects
that he will share at his stand, I rethink the brusqueness of
my ignorance in requesting that such a gift be unceremo-
niously ground up and analyzed as an isotopic data point.
While I entered with a mindset of transaction, I left real-
izing that each taco de gusano can only exist because of
his stewardship of the space, because of the hours he
dedicates to tending, watching, and caring for the gusa-
no’s home. The campo feeds Don Jaime, both literally with
high-quality nutrients, but also with meaning, connection,
and autonomy. The deeply reciprocal and interconnected
nature of “work” like Don Jaime’s draws from legacies of
knowledge that find meaning in long-term investment in
relationships. Within the community of the Mercado Alter-
nativo, his investment is reciprocated and recognized by
his peers and regulars.
2. Embodied knowledge
The Mercado Alternativo and its partners, like the Centro
de Investigación de Cocina Tlaxcalteca, often lead intimate
tours—for restauranteurs, researchers, culinary students,
and hipsters—people looking for an entry point to
“authentic” Tlaxcalteca cuisine. Having joined such a food
tour, we pulled up to Don Zeferino’s huerta, a large rect-
angular field with rows and rows of nopal cactus. Leaning
on the reed gate, in a frayed straw hat and worn green
button up embroidered with the logo of the Mercado
Alternativo, he led us through the rows, pointing out
small differences in the size of the penca, or leaf, the
clustering of the thorns, the color of green. What at first
looked like hundreds of the same plant was in fact, dozens
of different varieties from across Mexico. Curious about
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this biodiversity I never knew existed but limited by the
din and speed of the tour group, a few weeks later
I returned alone, taking a combi van from the center of
Tlaxcala to his pueblo of Huitznáhuac. Reflecting on the
lessons of reciprocity and relationship learned from Don
Jaime, I offered to help Don Zeferino with tasks in the
huerta. He showed me how to distinguish and remove the
invasive grasses brought over on the shoes of construction
workers from nearby fraccionamientos, housing tracts that
are slowly replacing the milpa.
During a break in our work, he began to slice me sam-
ples of each penca, or leaf—some tasted like watermelon
rind, others like cucumber; some were thick and succu-
lent, while others were woody and hard to chew. Through
this act, he offered me the chance to “get to know” these
plants, not through books or agricultural models but by
meeting different species, noting their textures, flavors,
sounds, and relationships (Kimmerer, 2013; Gross, 2021).
This is how his own introduction to plants began—
through the shadowing of his elders:
When I was four, five years old, we went with my
father’s family, and I watched what [my
grandmother] did. I understood that she spoke with
the plants. But the language wasn’t spoken. I made
a mistake in saying spoke—she communicated, then.
And communication isn’t necessarily verbal. And
I learned . . . seeing what she did, I did it also.
What Zeferino describes is embodied learning or learn-
ing through experience and engagement with the entire
being. This type of learning and relationship building can
only be replicated through action, by physically engaging
with an ecology over time, and through the shared
embodied knowledge of others. As Figueroa-Helland
et al. (2018) state, a decolonization of food systems
requires exactly this type of “connectedness” made possi-
ble by a very local, personal, and sustained relationship to
the land.
As we carefully clear the brush between nopal plants,
Zeferino looks out at the cacti, and the fruit trees that serve
as borders between his property and the maize stalks and
squash vines that haphazardly fill the gaps between the
nopales. As he explains to me, the interspersed and over-
lapping plants in his fields are intentional and crucial to the
Alcántara: Milpa ecologies: Transgenerational foodways in Tlaxcala, Mexico
well-being of the lives this land supports. This system is
thousands of years old, with the Nahuatl name of
“metepantle” (metl—maguey, pantle—wall, or surrounded).
Roots of the maguey help to reduce erosion on the edges
of steep terraces, keeping surface nutrients from being
washed away during heavy rains. In the 1960s, an
increase in beer production reduced the popularity of
maguey-derived alcohol production (Cervantes, 2022),
but as Zeferino recounts, contemporary climate crises are
leading industrial production companies to “rediscover”
the metepantle or milpa systems. As Zeferino laments,
the appropriation of this knowledge strips it of its history
and relationships.
. . .two or three years ago, a group of experts wanted
to impose on me a way [of organic farming] and
I told them that it isn’t the only way and that there
were others even more balanced, the more complex
is the metepantle and within it other species of
vegetables and animals intervene. So, the milpa
system, or the metepantle system, or both, is really
that, the diversity and how things work together
. . . . So, the fact that so much knowledge has existed
in each pueblo of the world and has been absorbed
by others, they steal it, they register it and call it their
own. That bothers me, that bothers me a lot.
His point is that the metepantle system is about more
than its agricultural model. Ecologies are a system of
intertwined organisms, and humans form one part of
that network. Within an embodied framework, humans
do not control ecology, but rather are in a constant feed-
back loop of observation, engagement, and adaptation—
observations that can be shared with family or community
members and passed down to form a rich testimony of
localized history. Zeferino argues that this ecological
knowledge is part of the legacy that allowed the Tlaxcal-
teca to remain sovereign during both Aztec and Spanish
imperialism:
. . . that is why the Tlaxcalteca survived, that is why
other cultural groups in other parts of the world
survive, because they adapt with the plants, they
adapt with the animals, there is communication
and they work in a coordinated, not a subordinate,
manner.
It is clear how this reflection shapes his own adaptive
strategies—passed on first through his family networks,
and now through grass roots organizing of campesino
activists, and peer teaching programs.
By inviting tours and intercambios (knowledge
exchanges) to his huerta, the local can become networked
to the global. This is the case with Zeferino’s vast diversity
of nopales, which come from exchanges with campesinos
across Mexico, made possible by his involvement in vari-
ous grassroots organizations that have taken him as far as
Ecuador. In addition to belonging to the Mercado Alter-
nativo, he is a co-founder of Tijtoca Nemilitzli (Nahuatl for
“We Sow Life”), a group of campesinos who peer-teach and
Art. 11(1) page 7 of 12
certify one another in agroecological strategies. His experi-
ences are an outgrowth of the legacy of the Movimiento
Campesino a Campesino in Tlaxcala (Holt-Giménez, 2006).
Originating in Maya campesino adaptation of Kaqchikel
agricultural approaches and passed on through “hands-on
technical training, farmer-led workshops, cross visits, field
days, and soil conservation fairs” (p. 5), in 1978, the Movi-
miento Campesino a Campesino brought the Grupo Vice-
nte Guerrero to Guatemala to participate in an
intercambio. Central to the effectiveness of these
exchanges were their “people-centered” approach, which
in effect used embodied learning to share on-the-ground
strategies, rather than “rules” or “models” that assume
uniform experience. Taken at a global level, embodied
learning, or teaching through doing, allows people to
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access and apply lessons to their own local contexts and
day-to-day realities, a “decentralized” approach that
breeds diverse solutions and adaptability.
3. Multigenerational knowledge networks
While Jaime and Zeferino are currently deeply embedded
in direct daily work of the campo, there were moments in
their early life that led them to seek out employment in
Mexico City. Punctuated relationships to land are part of
the history of Tlaxcalteca agroecology, and the reality of
living both alongside and within dominant economic sys-
tems. The lineage of Tlaxcalteca foodways is not unbroken
through time, but rather fragments of its potential are
passed down through both familial and social networks.
The awareness of the possibility of Maı́z Culture, then, is an
invitation to adapt its philosophies into daily practice. To
quote Armando Bartra (2008), “Campesinos are not born
campesinos, they turn themselves into campesinos: They
invent themselves as collective actors in the course of
doing, in the movement that brings them together, in the
action that affirms a peasantry that is always a work in
progress” (p. 10, translation by author2). The following
interview focuses on the metaphorical seeds through
which Maı́z Culture is kept alive, even in moments where
daily practices are fleeting and symbolic, rather than a full-
blown food system.
An archaeologist employed by the Instituto Nacional
de Antropologı́a e Historia, Felipe is deeply familiar with
the landscape, both archaeological and ecological, of Tlax-
cala. He has worked on both large-scale excavations, like
the one where we met in 2015, but also on “salvamento,”
or salvage projects, where he is hired a month or two at
a time to quickly document and extract archaeological
materials in areas where urban development will destroy
or bury the site. He currently works documenting sites
in the path of the Tren Maya in the Yucatán, far from
his family and his patch of land. His work for the state
sometimes connects him to the destruction of the very
ideologies he attempts to keep alive within his personal
2. “Los campesinos no nacen campesinos, se hacen
campesinos: se inventan a sı́ mismos como actores colectivos en
el curso de su hacer, en el movimiento que los convoca, en la
acción que ratifica una campesinidad siempre en obra negra.”
(Bartra, 2008, p. 10)
Art. 11(1) page 8 of 12 Alcántara: Milpa ecologies: Transgenerational foodways in Tlaxcala, Mexico
life—a contradiction that he takes in stride, seeing it as
something he can’t really control. Yet, what draws him to
archaeology is the opportunity to spend days outside,
unearthing pieces of his ancestors past, and putting what
he learns into practice in his own life, when he can—little
figurines that he carves from stone, the adobe-walled
home he built himself, and the milpa-style garden that
surrounds it.
Felipe’s family is from Tlaxcala. Once, when I asked for
Felipe’s help collecting water samples for my dissertation
research, he took me deep into the hillsides to a locally
known spring. On our trek, he told me stories about how
he grew up curious about the landscape and would
spend time after school exploring the hills and deep
arroyos. His career in archaeology is built out of embodied
experiences—the feel of smooth, polished black on orange
ceramic fragments picked out of the dusty footpath home,
the familiarity of a thick-rimmed fragment, so like the
large ollas used to feed dozens during the fiestas of today.
The ancestral knowledge and traditions he carries come
from a mix of archaeology school (the Escuela Nacional de
Antropologı́a e Historia), experience at sites, curiosity
about nature, and bits of teachings passed through family
interactions. He explains of his lineage:
. . . my paternal grandparents were Nahua, they
were authentic Nahua and all the time they would
speak in Nahuatl . . . a lot of people think that
someone who speaks an Indigenous language, well
they don’t know anything about the world, but in
reality, it is the opposite, they know the real world,
the world of plants, the world of the countryside, of
traditional medicine.
Although Felipe laments never having learned Nahuatl
himself, the language of plants has become a linking
thread that connects him to the knowledge and experi-
ences of his antepasados. Although the landscape has
changed over the past 500 years, many of the same plants
remain, serving as portals to teachings about Nahua and
Otomı́ philosophies.
My interviews with Felipe took place at his home. On
a piece of land inherited from his wife’s family, located in
the small town of Atlihuetzia just outside of Tlaxcala city,
they began by building an adobe brick home inspired in
part by his archaeological findings and in part by contem-
porary ecological architecture. Surrounding his home, an
oversized yard is fenced in with stacked cement blocks. As
we weave between clusters of plants, birdsong fills the air,
punctuated by the yelp of neighbors’ dogs as they protect
their designated rooftop. Every so often, the rumble of
a semi braking on the highway cuts our conversation off.
Felipe can walk a full loop of his yard in about 2 min, but
even this small space is crammed rich with life. His garden
is a medicine cabinet, grocer’s market, and artist’s palette,
all in one. The scarlet red of the ayocote beans (whose
name Felipe reminds me, comes from the náhuatl,
“ayocotl”) twines up an arch made of reeds, creating dec-
orative shade and producing a hearty legume the size of
a lima bean, as well as filling the soil with nitrogen.
Within a single plant, pods can yield colors that range
from a dark walnut to blush pink. A range of green from
herbs like epazote and hinojo (fennel) dapple the space,
grown both intentionally, and sprouting abundantly
from compost heaps and forgotten corners. “Some things
you plant, and some plant themselves,” he comments.
Both are welcome remedies for digestion and can be
collected and dried as teas or added to recipes (like
beans) to reduce gas. Growing from a slab of volcanic
basalt that defines the edge of the garden, the thick spiky
leaves of the sábila, or aloe vera is used to soothe cuts
and burns but can also cure from within, drunk as tea to
detox the nervous system. Felipe’s most recent experi-
ment is amaranth, which grows tall and leafy, topped
with a mohawk of dark maroon seed fronds. On a tarp,
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he lays the fronds out to dry, then rubs them within his
gloved hands to release the miniscule black seed from its
spiky husk. Amaranth seeds puff like mini popcorn and
have been used for millenia as a high-protein cereal.
Ancient Mesoamericans would craft deities from the
dough of amaranth mixed with honey, placing them on
altars (Montúfar, 2016). Felipe grows his garden in part
to have a nutrient-dense array of fresh food, but just as
important is the opportunity to cultivate connections to
these culturally important plants, observing and interact-
ing with their growth, harvest, and uses.
These are lineages he wants to pass on to his daughter,
who toddles along in the background, absorbing informa-
tion about the land, the plants, and her relationship to
them. She points to a vine.
Here come . . . these ones
Those are coming, but they need to grow, daughter
When they come . . . I’ll eat them all!
Do you want a carrot? Let’s go get a carrot . . . and
we have to offer one to Keit, right?
We continue walking along, taking a roundabout way
toward the carrots. As we pass by a patch of grass, he deftly
collects a selection of wild greens, or quintoniles, handing
pieces of leaves to me, and to his daughter, for both of us
to try. For Felipe, it is important that his daughter learn to
observe and be curious about the natural world, even at
the age of three. For him, learning also happens outside of
school and is central to teaching new generations how to
sense information about the world around you, not just
read about it. As he explains:
One learns by playing, by sowing seeds and sticking
your hands in the dirt . . . education is always
important from the very first years, food education
because now kids eat what their parents have at
hand, sugars, pastas, flours, and it satisfies their
hunger, and you might grow the same, but you grow
empty too without any root to hold onto.
Here Felipe touches on a key theme addressed by many
Indigenous food sovereignty activists—food as a spiritual
anchor, or a “root to hold onto.” Interaction and
Alcántara: Milpa ecologies: Transgenerational foodways in Tlaxcala, Mexico
engagement with the land is about more than just harvest-
ing foods to eat—the act of creating space to commune also
becomes a moment of self-reflection, of positioning oneself
within a network of life that anchors and extends far and
beyond a single lifetime (Crawford O’Brien and Wogahn,
2021). In contrast to the “sugars, pastas, and flours,” which
Felipe mentions as an example of food stripped of lineage,
being in relationship with the plants he interacts with con-
nects him to histories of place, both through the genetic
information stored in seeds, and by being taught by the
plant itself. A seed placed in soil will grow itself, and
through observation, can become a site of re-learning.
While he creates moments to enjoy the land as his
teacher, he acknowledges that there are many ways in
which ruptures occur within cultural lineages—immigration,
displacement, urbanization, or economic pressures, like
having to take a job far away from your land.
. . . I learned this from my father, my father learned
from my grandfather and these are generational
wisdoms that for no reason need to be cut or broken
but many times this happens with people who
immigrate or who don’t have a piece of land or who
are denied or kicked off for many reasons, so it is
important that even if it’s just a bucket, planting
a corn to see how that plant grows . . . it’s about
making it happen, and starting from almost nothing
and bit by bit you learn from the very earth . . . .
In looking at the deep-time lineage of Tlaxcalteca food-
ways, human knowledge networks play an important role,
but just as important are the ecosystems that they collab-
orate with, listen, and respond to.
Felipe’s work as both archaeologist and grower is a work
of rediscovery. Seeds can lay dormant for thousands of
years—forgotten, lost, and invisible—and still yield life
once restored to a world of relevance. His garden is some-
times abandoned for years, yet as Felipe and others show,
the idea that traditions are lost when no one does them
anymore is just as simply reversed by the act of doing.
Through the ebb and flow of human doing, ecosystems
also hold the history of a place and can become a backdrop
for reclaiming past paths through something as simple as
observing how a bucket of dirt can cradle the spark of life
in a new seedling or relearning the name and history of
a plant on the landscape. We end the visit with Felipe
giving me herbs to take home to my mother, seeds for
planting, and a few extra for research.
Conclusion
While the above dialogues began as a way to strengthen
and reimagine interpretations of ancient diets, they also
served to validate the historical depth and rootedness of
campesino worldviews. Agroecology and the principles
behind it are not new but stem from Indigenous foodways
that have demonstrated their sustainability and adaptation
across centuries of cultural change. These foodways are
more than a methodology or economic framework—they
are a living network that connects the past, present, and
Art. 11(1) page 9 of 12
future. Their survival is tied to their interconnectedness
with value systems—ways of existing in the world that are
carried out both within and beyond practices directly tied
to food production. As Leanne Betasamosake Simpson
(2017) aptly states in “As We Have Always Done: Indigenous
Freedom Through Radical Resistance”:
. . . how we live, how we organize, how we engage in
the world—the process—not only frames the
outcome, it is the transformation. How molds and
then gives birth to the present. The how changes us.
How is the theoretical intervention. (p. 19)
This case study of Tlaxcala shows a version of sustain-
ability that is not about maintaining sustained production
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rates and financial return (values centered in an industrial
lens), but about deep, lasting relationships to local ecolo-
gies and social networks that generate a range of adaptive
responses. Whether through days spent in maguey fields,
or a few minutes gathering herbs from a home garden,
intentional shaping of activities builds and integrates eco-
logical relationships into day-to-day actions. The implica-
tions are an agroecology that is centered on
fundamentally changing not just the methods of food
production, but the social, political, and economic systems
that coalesce from our food systems. The implications are
an agroecology that changes us, as well.
Archaeology, when used as a lens from which to con-
textualize the present, has the capacity to emphasize the
longevity and depth of worlds outside of capitalism and
colonialism, becoming an “emancipatory science” (Rose,
1983) that can shift our very research frameworks and
ways of being in the world. An emancipatory archaeology
can be a reminder of the limited time depth of our cur-
rent world, and the freedom to imagine and enact alter-
native futures—archaeology as a healing practice (Atalay,
2020). The above interviews reframed the precolonial
past not as an irrelevant, dead thing, but as lived experi-
ences that continue to inform the present. Our conversa-
tions emphasized the entanglement of the past and
present, reframing archaeology as a decolonial act of
“intentionally dismantle[ing] and reframe[ing] colonial
forms of knowing” (Rizvi, 2020). A traditional archaeol-
ogy looks at the past to understand how things were,
often assuming that the researchers’ lens is the most
adequate and capable of recreating past worlds, but
when placed in dialogue with the present world,
a deep-time lens allows us to question worlds we have
normalized, opening an array of adaptive possibilities.
Time isn’t linear but rather forms a tangled tapestry from
which to trace and follow and pull from well-worn
threads. To create change, to find solutions, and to heal
our own wounds of colonization, is to seek out the rele-
vant threads and reweave them into existence.
Data accessibility statement
There is no public data associated with this publication.
IRB protocols and interviewee requests are to maintain
interview records as unlisted documents, only to be used
for publications.
Art. 11(1) page 10 of 12 Alcántara: Milpa ecologies: Transgenerational foodways in Tlaxcala, Mexico
Supplemental files
The supplemental files for this article can be found as
follows:
Full text Spanish version.DOCX
Acknowledgments
Spanish translation of text by Wendy Alcántara.
Agradezco a la comunidad agroecológica que me ha
apoyado tanto con mi investigación a través de los años:
los miembros del Mercado Alternativo de Tlaxcala, Cecilia
Baroccio de Consumo Consciente, y Irad Santacruz Arcie-
nega del Centro de Investigación de Cocina Tlaxcalteca.
Agradezco a los entrevistados (Don Jaime, Don Zeferino y
Felipe) y sus familias por recibirme a mi y a mi curiosidad.
Funding
This research was made possible through funding from:
Comexus Fulbright-Garcı́a Robles; Proyecto Arqueológico
Tepeticpac and INAH Tlaxcala; The Tepeticpac Archaeolog-
ical Project; the Wenner Gren Foundation (Engaged
Anthropology Grant Gr-EAG-150 “Food and Resistance in
Ancient and Contemporary Tlaxcala”; Dissertation Field-
work Grant #9448: The Diet of Sovereignty: Bioarchaeol-
ogy in Tlaxcallan) and Vanderbilt University (College of
Arts and Sciences Professional Development grant, Russell
G. Hamilton Graduate Leadership Institute Dissertation
Enhancement Grant to support Ethnographic fieldwork).
The oral history interviews collected for this piece were
obtained under IRB #191184 “Foodways in Contemporary
and Ancient Tlaxcala, Mexico.”
Competing interests
There are no known competing interests in the submis-
sion of this manuscript.
Author contributions
Sole author of conception and design: KA.
Sole acquisition of data: KA.
Sole contributor to analysis and interpretation of
data: KA.
Sole contributor to draft and revision of article: KA.
Sole approval of submission for publication: KA.
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How to cite this article: Alcántara, K. 2023. Milpa ecologies: Transgenerational foodways in Tlaxcala, Mexico. Elementa:
Science of the Anthropocene 11(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.2022.00099

Domain Editor-in-Chief: Alastair Iles, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA

Knowledge Domain: Sustainability Transitions

Part of an Elementa Special Feature: Agrobiodiversity Nourishes Us/La Agrobiodiversidad Nos Nutre: Action Research for
Agroecological Transformations

Published: November 1, 2023 Accepted: September 5, 2023 Submitted: July 26, 2022

Copyright: © 2023 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
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