The city of Mexico (AP) – Jasmín Ordóñez from a wooden boat to the water looks like it crosses a narrow channel connecting the chinampa maze, island farms built thousands of years ago by Aztecs.
“Let’s close our eyes and ask the mother’s water to swim at rest,” she said when the boat moves slowly, unlike the crazy Mexico traffic, just a few miles away.
Ordóñez owns one of the farms from these islands, first created with mud from the lakes that once covered the area. When the boat arrives on its island, it proudly shows the corn and leaf greens it grows. Her ancestors belonged to Chinamp, but she had to buy this because women traditionally did not inherit them.
“My grandmother didn’t get any land. Then most men left in the hands,” she said. On her side, Cassandra Garduño listens to attention. Nor did she inherit the family’s chinampa.
Today, both are small but growing women who have bought Chinamp, some sustainable growing, trying to preserve the ecosystem, which is increasingly at risk of urban development, mass tourism and water pollution.
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Editor’s Note: This story is a collaboration between Associated Press and Mongabay.
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It was not easy as men still dominate. In Chinampus, the cities of the town of Xochimilco and San Gregorio, the cities are unlikely to work on Earth.
“People think that men are (the only ones) who have their physical abilities to work,” said Garduño. The dirt paints its light pink shirts that match the shoes. She knows that her outfit gets a funny look of longtime men Chinampa staff, but instead of upset, she thinks it’s funny.
Many years later, she returned to San Gregorio in 2021 to devote himself to Chinampa for farming. She had gone to college and then spent a long time working in Ecuador for protection efforts to protect the manta rays and sharks. One day, she returned to San Gregorio and shocked it for the degradation of her own land: the water levels of the lower channels, increasing pollution, abandoned chinampa.
“That’s where I started to understand, ‘You are part of this space. And part of your responsibility is to protect it,” she said.
After saving a year, she bought a chinamp – and was shocked to find her in such a bad state. Clearing found for armchairs, TV and beer bottles. She tried to renew the channels, which were stumbled with garbage and began planting plants.
Neighbors’ distrust was tangible.
“They said, ‘Let’s see, this girl was never inclined to this place, no one knows her. And she’s already doing what she wants,” she recalled.
But she knew much more than they thought.
Garduño learned a lot as a little girl running around her grandfather’s chinamp – “paradise” full of flowers. She learned that the dirt from the bottom of the canals is the best fertilizer because it contains mineral -rich ash of volcanoes surrounding Mexico. She learned that when planting various plants, the cold prevents the destruction of the entire crop and that the flowers attract insects, so they do not eat cabbage or cabbage.
Share knowledge
“Chinamp can have up to eight rotations a year, while other systems can have two or three,” Garduño explained. That is why the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization recognized Chinamp’s one of the most productive agricultural systems on the planet. Today, its field is a color melting pot: light green broccoli to bright yellow calendula.
Since 2016 She cooperates with the Mexican National Autonomous University, advised other farmers who want to stop using agrochemicals and regain these traditional practices that also help preserve the ecosystem.
When traveling next to the planting bed, Garduño offers to lift it so that it does not wash when it rains. Ordóñez draws attention. She bought this Chinampa three years ago and is now seeking to acquire Etiqueta Chinampera, a sustainability label that the university has provided for manufacturers who use dirt as fertilizer, among other things, rather than agrochemicals. With this label, their products can be sold at higher prices.
There are 16 farmers who have received a label, including four women, said Diana Laura Vázquez Mendoza from the University Institute of Biology, adding that the project encourages women to “take their quin and produce”.
Channel cleaning
In chinamp supported by the University, filters made of aquatic plants are installed for cleaning and preventing carp and tilapia passing. In the 1980s, the city of Xochimilco was introduced, and these invasive species became the most distinguished predators of this ecosystem: the Mexican Salamander type Axolotl.
Today, this amphibian is a combination of disappearances due to these invasive species and channel contamination factors: discharge of sewage from urban growth in the area, mass tourism and use of agrochemical materials in many chinampas.
“Chinamp is an artificial agroecosystem that has been created to supply food before Spanish times for all residents. And it continues to this day,” Mendoza said. “So the way to preserve the Xochimilco is also to preserve the Chinampa.”
However, a walk around the area on any Sunday suggests that less quinampa is for agriculture. Every weekend, hundreds of people come here to play football on chinamp, turned into fields or drink in bright painted boats called “Trajinras”.
The impact of this transformation on the wetland is obvious: there were contaminants from heavy metals such as iron, cadmium and leading to oils, detergents and pesticides, according to Bojórquez Castro, an autonomous biologist at the University of Metropolis. According to Castro, most of them are from treatment facilities that release their water Xochimilco and the chinampi that use agrochemicals.
To save what is left of the past
“Look at the clarity of the water,” said Ordóñez when it reaches the channel where she installed her biofilter. She knows that water must be taken care of in order to preserve this ecosystem.
This wetland is the last remnant of what was once the great tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, built on lakes that once filled the Mexican Valley. Although today what is left of Xochimilco is only 3% of the original extension of those lakes, it is still the key to the stability of the city.
If it disappears, the average capital temperature can rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Farrenheit), says biologist Luis Zambran. Xochimilco and San Gregorio also reduce floods during the rain season, provide a natural carbon dioxide reservoir and live in hundreds of species such as garnish and Tlaaloc frog.
“Look at the red -haired birds in the lagoon!” exclaimed Garduño, driving home on the dimension of the dirt on the mud road after a long day at her chinampa.
For her, this is still the paradise she wandered with her grandfather. She is convinced that women are needed to preserve the chinamp and hopes that many of them will have and take care of them in 10 years.
“We can do what we want from the general work of women and men, that is what we have left as long as possible,” she said.
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