“Back then, we worked the land and the harvests were plentiful. Good harvests—no chemicals,” says a man in his late 70s, during a workshop on green manure in the northern part of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Oaxaca, Mexico. He speaks slowly, as if trying to recall something that is about to be lost. Around him, high school students and farmers listen.  

The scene is described by Eugenio Ángel Molina, a field technician with the Union of Indigenous Communities of the Isthmus Region (UCIZONI) who, with the support of the International Indigenous Women’s Forum (FIMI) and funding from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), through its Indigenous Peoples’ Assistance Facility (IPAF), has launched a conservation project that seeks something seemingly simple: to return to eating as we did before. This includes the recovery of plants that used to grow among the cornfields and ancestral farming methods that do not require the use of chemicals.

But recovering what was lost has been quite a challenge in a region that, for decades, has faced pressures far greater than the use of agrochemicals. The Isthmus of Tehuantepec is a geostrategic area due to its location between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. This has historically led to disputes over land and its resources. Currently, projects such as the Tehuantepec Isthmus Interoceanic Corridor seek to transform this region into a logistics and industrial hub connecting ports, railways, and industrial parks.

The Oaxacan Isthmus strip is home to a strong indigenous presence of Huave, Mixe, Zapotec, Zoque, Mixtec, and Chontal peoples. Cities such as Matías Romero, Juchitán, and Tehuantepec coexist with scattered communities whose access to basic services is limited. According to Amnesty International’s report Community Resistance in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the installation of more than 2,000 wind turbines in the region has had an impact on community life, including economic changes, environmental pollution, rising costs of services, and the transformation of traditional ways of life.

UCIZONI currently works with ten Mixe, Mixtec, and Zapotec indigenous communities in the Isthmus. Five groups are made up of farmers; the other five, of high school students. Every two months, representatives from around 60 communities meet to discuss issues and proposals in the Isthmus region. It was there that a concern began to be voiced repeatedly among residents: the food had changed—and not for the better.

“With everything that’s happening—since we now consume foods or products that come from other regions, from other states—the communities have said: ‘Well, why don’t we revive our edible plants, like chipil, purslane, quintonil, the various types of quelite, or bejuco?’” Rubicela Toribio, program coordinator at UCIZONI, explains.

According to Rubicela, these plants did not disappear by chance. The widespread use of agrochemicals transformed the milpa into a monoculture. What was once a diverse system where corn, beans, chili peppers, and edible herbs grew, has become a uniform field that now depends on fertilizers and herbicides.

The project led by UCIZONI has involved setting up 20-by-20-meter gardens, providing training in agroecological practices, collecting seeds, and, eventually, documenting traditional recipes from the region. Putting this into practice has led them to face both technical and social resistance.

One of the first challenges was the communities’ expectation of financial income. “They thought they were going to be given cash incentives,” Rubicela says. Many residents were familiar with government programs like Sembrando Vida, where producers receive monthly payments for developing agroforestry projects.

In contrast, the organization’s work has been to provide materials such as water tanks, shade cloth, and hoses so that the residents themselves can set up their gardens. This brought about a positive shift in community participation, from immediate income to a mid-term benefit. “Now the residents are encouraging one another,” Rubicela says. “They realize that this isn’t work for someone else, but a benefit for themselves.”

On the other hand, Eugenio explains that the communities have already grown accustomed to using agrochemicals as a way to save time. But the project focuses both on reviving agroecological techniques and on fostering community reflection on the use of chemicals. They have held workshops on climate change, pollution, and health using simple questions: Why doesn’t it rain like it used to? Where does the drought come from? What’s happening to the soil?

In every community, there are elders who remember how the land was worked before chemicals, and their presence in the workshops has been key. The case of a farmer who spoke about “green cotton” (a legume used as natural fertilizer) is one of the most frequently cited by the UCIZONI team. Especially because of the effect it had in reinforcing the other villagers’ confidence in the restoration process ahead of them. This type of intervention, Eugenio notes, fosters a different kind of understanding within the communities, as it is a shared experience.

One of the fears at the start of the project was that this knowledge would not be passed on to the younger generations. But youth participation has been significant, partly due to the work UCIZONI has done in secondary schools with groups of students aged 12 to 15. Joining them in the communities are mainly women. They are the ones who organize the shifts in the gardens and sustain daily work.

The gardens are small, and their priority is self-consumption. Many of the communities are already setting up their own, and the changes in production, though at a small-scale, are visible. As Rubicela explains, during her visits to the communities, she has been served quelites with beef bones, quelite tamales, and holy basil with chicken. “That’s nice because it reminds you of what you used to eat,” she says. That experience is reshaping the region’s relationship with food. As Eugenio adds, “it’s like going back a few years, to how our ancestors worked and ate.”

For most of the communities where UCIZONI works, food has become a public health issue. While the project does not solve all the existing needs, it does seek to integrate itself into them to address them as much as possible. As the project wraps up, Rubicela explains that the plan is to create a cookbook of wild edible plants, but the work does not end there. The organization aims to replicate this experience in other communities, other schools, and even at lower educational levels.

The UCIZONI team emphasizes that the intent of their project differs from that of programs that bring money to communities and leave once funding runs out. Here, the approach is different: what is sown on earth and in memory can sustain itself. “It’s a change that won’t happen overnight, but it can be achieved,” Eugenio says.

In the workshops, when an elder speaks up and describes how things were cultivated in the past, change ceases to be just an idea. It becomes, at least for a moment, something concrete, steeped in memory, and which, through collaborative and organized work, can come to life again.