Climate Change in Context
Pisté is a large town of about 5,000 people located in the northeast of the the Yucatán Peninsula. The majority of the residents share indigenous Maya heritage, and especially older generations of Pisté residents speak Maya––not only in their homes, but on the busy streets , shops, and markets, in the t-shirt and artisanry vending booths of the archaeological site of Chichén Itzá just down the street from the center of town––where many Pisté residents work––and in the the kitchens of restaurants that serve thousands of tourists that visit the World Heritage site.
Contrary to the outsider’s perception that Maya cultural heritage is centered on the famous pyramids of Chichén Itzá, for the contemporary Maya people in Pisté it lives in the everyday use of Maya language and in other practices found in the relationship to the natural environment––in the relationship to both farm and forest.
Until the mid- to late 1980s, nearly every family in Pisté had their livelihood deeply intertwined with the productivity of the “milpa” or subsistence corn plot (which also grow a variety of other crops including beans, squash, melons, and hot peppers. “As a child everything we ate came right from the milpa,” and the animals we ate (chicken and pork) came from our own patio” says one sixty-five year old resident of Pisté. “When we ate from the milpa all of the food was clean and healthy.” Now, only a small percentage of families use their ejido (or communally held land plot) to “make milpa.” The tourist boom at the nearby UNESCO World Heritage site of Chichén Itzá changed the local economy to one based in the provision of tourism services. As Chichén Itzá became a international tourism destination, young men sought out entrepreneurial opportunities as artisans making wood carvings as souvenirs. Men and women alike, young and old, began working in a hotels and restaurants. Life as a farmer held less and less appeal, especially for the younger generation. Scores of families moved away from making milpa over the past generation.
Around the same time that other opportunities for making a living and supporting a family started to come along, “the land stopped giving” as one ejidatario put it. Sometime around thirty years ago (multiple famers agree) the signs began to show themselves with more regularity. “The sun starting getting hotter, the soil started getting drier, and the rain started to fall with less regularity. I started to lose my crop year after year. “They call it ‘climate change’,” he said.
Even though 1) there was a notable decline in milpa production and 2) many people had already moved out of the regular practice of making milpa, this research shows that the practice (and the land) is more central than ever to everyday life in Pisté. This takes at least three expressions:
whereas other communities across the country have opened their privatization, ejido land used for milpas is carefully protected in Pisté. Ejido landholders, the majority of whom do not cultivate, consider the land itself patrimony, an inheritable form of wealth that can be passed to the next generation
The governance, financing and decision-making around local agricultural production reveals tensions between not only the local community and state bureaucracy but also involves multinational corporations and even organized crime syndicates. Agriculture is a hotspot where tensions between different constituencies are particularly fraught and communities are especially vulnerable.
a renewed consciousness about the importance of healthy food and eating is connected to traditional Maya footways and local food production (and traditional medicine including herbs) that comes from the milpa
Climate change compromises all of these––at the same time compromising environmental security––not only for the Yucatec Maya community, but regionally and beyond.