Bioregionalism Meets Local Autonomy in Mexico
Peter Berg
She squatted over another woman lying on the grass
beside the parking area. The blood red cloth holding back her black hair was exactly the
same color as her blouse, a long black skirt matched her hair. She chanted and passed her
hands a few inches from the sides of the prostrate woman while smoke rose thinly in the
sunny morning air from incense sticks stuck in the ground beside her patient's head.
Hunched forward and jerking her elbows vigorously outward, all of the curandera's
energy seemed to be concentrated on the task of pulling some invisible entity from the
other woman. It was too embarrassingly private and mysterious a scene to witness as an
uninvited spectator except that a little girl stood several feet apart and watched with
such rapt attention that it became a curiously public event.
A few minutes later, more than three hundred people
standing for the opening ceremony of the day's program at the November 1996 Turtle Island
Bioregional Gathering (TIBG) in Tepoztlán, Mexico watched the same curandera enter
the open-sided main meeting tent. She held a goblet fuming with large chunks of incense
and was followed by two male assistants. After an incantation that included a request for
a beam of the light of truth and understanding from the center of the universe, she
approached each person in the assembly, moved the goblet up and down in front of their
bodies, and intoned thanks to Tonantzin, Aztec deity of the earth. Blessing each person
this way took a long time but the curendera maintained the same quick athletic
intensity as when she squatted over her patient like a wrestler. She continued to chant
"Gracias, Tonantzin." To conclude, the attendants dipped large bouquets of
branches into pails of water and whipped bursts of spray into the air above the crowd.
Then the curandera and her crew walked out as promptly as they had appeared.
This visitation by a folk healer from a barrio in Puebla was the kind of
illuminating incident that gave a portentous air to the week-long encampment that in
addition to being the seventh TIBG was also known as the sixth Consejo de Visiones (Vision
Council) and first Bioregional Gathering of "The Americas." In spite of the
multiplicity of titles (or maybe because of it), with about eight hundred attendees it was
by far the largest bioregional gathering to date. It also produced precedent-making
foundations for future continental gatherings and provided definite guides for the
bioregional movement in general.
Three distinct streams of activism blended together
in the Meztitla camp site where the Gathering was held beneath the vegetated cliffs that
ring the town of Tepoztlán. Bioregionalists who base their concerns in harmonizing with
the natural ecology of the places where they live were there to create a "ceremonial
village" so that ecocentric values, all-species representation, sustainable living
techniques, gender balance, consensus decision-making, and other aspects of previous local
and continental gatherings could be manifested. They came from such diverse places in the
Western Hemisphere as Canada, U.S., Guatemala, Costa Rica, Belize, Brazil, Argentina, and
Chile. Some European representatives from England, Denmark, Germany, and Catalonia were
welcomed as well.
A different current of activism, the Consejo de Visiones, Mexican "earth guardians" range from a nation-wide network of local
environmental organizations to cultural and spiritual revivalists including costumed
conchero
ritual dancers. Besides co-sponsoring the Gathering, the Consejo was responsible for
staging it in Mexico for the first time and generated most of the attendance through
various kinds of publicity including a bus tour with stops as far away as Chiapas and
Guatemala. The Consejo worked on all aspects of the Gathering, but some unique
contributions were sunrise conch shell blowing rituals, shamans leading sweat lodge
ceremonies, workshops on environmental conditions in Oaxaca, Vera Cruz and Yucatan, native
healing plants identification walks, and a medical team that included acupressure,
massage, and the curandera from Puebla in addition to medical doctors.
The third partner in this union was the courageous
town of Tepoztlán representing the place itself. This community carried out successful
resistance to outsider-led corporate land developments centered around a planned golf
course resort that has been dubbed, "The Golf War." It was an intense campaign
that involved many demonstrations, killing and wounding of some townspeople, removal of
corrupt officials from the town council, and eventual secession from the State of
Morelos.
Participants at the Gathering hailed Tepoztlán for
the first bioregional rebellion carried out by a whole community. Residents unstintingly
declare that their revolt had a primarily ecological basis stemming from unreasonable
water requirements for the proposed developments, threats to agricultural use of the land,
the overall impact of greater human numbers on native ecosystems, and loss of the
traditional lifestyle of the local people. Members of the newly elected "Free,
Constitutional and Popular Municipal" council, farmers from Cuauhnahuac Bioregion
where Tepoztlán is located, and other veterans of the struggle made several
presentations. They told how they had fought and where the town now stood in main circles
and workshops at the Gathering. An alliance with Tepoztlán townspeople was initiated both
in public statements and practical ways such as the creation of teams of dozens of
participants from the Gathering that went out to assist work at a local ecologically
oriented school and planting native vegetation at a watershed restoration project.
Several hundred additional attendees ranged from New Agers and Rainbow
Family members to "gypsy" entertainers, inner city youth, students, and
political representatives from both the zapatistas and the liberal electoral reform
party. They added fiesta-like elements of nearly constant drumming circles, political
banners, Middle Eastern style costumes, a market place selling jewelry and folk art,
spontaneous dancing, stilt-walking performances, and propaganda films.
A vast amount of valuable information about useful
resistance techniques and new methods of achieving sustainability was exchanged at this
singular event (despite a few inevitable collisions of style or content), and a new
dimension of contemporary political culture was revealed. The first Bioregional Gathering
of "The
Americas" showed that deeply ecological bioregionalists, Earth-spirit revivalists,
and land-defending townspeople are integral to a larger worldwide trend.
Without the arguesome baggage of a political
ideology, new forces for change in political-cultural consciousness have begun operating
in response to present world realities. Principal among the new facts of political life is
that the previously unquestioned importance of the nation-state as a governing force is
fading. Some powers formerly reserved for national governments have begun flowing upward
to supra-national economic and political configurations ranging from the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the
European Union (EU). Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher spoke the practical truth
regardless of her party affiliation when she said that Britain's entry into the EU meant
surrendering its national sovereignty.
At the same time that authority regarding trade and
legal jurisdictions is being taken over by larger entities such as GATT, NAFTA and
EU,
national governments are losing their grip on internal populations and local governments.
Smaller forms of governance of the type that existed before modern nation-states gobbled
them up are re-emerging. Headlines report the harshest versions of this worldwide process
as it is played out by ethnic groups in the Balkans, Russia and Africa, but there is
actually a much broader movement in the same decentralist direction that takes on many
different forms.
A thick slanted column of black smoke persisted in
the dirty blue sky above Mexico City for days before the Gathering. It might have been
from a volcano given the large size of the smoke plume, the geological history of the
region, and reports of a few puffs from some lava peaks surrounding the city earlier in
the month. But the odor of the smoke gave away this latest addition to what is possibly
the worst average air pollution on the planet as an oil fire. Unbelievably, on the tenth
anniversary to the exact day of a similar explosion and fire in the same location, two
huge holding tanks in a Pemex national petroleum company refinery had begun to burn, and
the fires continued unchecked for the greater part of a week. The column of smoke was a
symbolic proclamation of the present Mexican regime's inability to deal with the
country's acute
social and ecological problems.
Confusion over whether the calamity was a natural
event or caused by humans is typical in Mexico. The sheer pressure of human numbers alone
causes effects that can simulate forces of the earth. For example, water mining from
beneath Mexico City with its population of around 25 million causes buildings to tilt as
though they were pushed by an earthquake. At a time when ecological considerations in
general have an increasingly high profile everywhere, in Mexico they have become utterly
urgent and inseparable from other social considerations. This country presently hosts at
least a half-dozen active locally-based uprisings against the highly centralized national
government. Since its inception, the nation has been controlled by a single, increasingly
remote, political party.
The Turtle Island Consejo Bioregional Gathering of
"the Americas" that inaugurated an appreciation of common values between three
branches of the decentralist movement also changed the direction of bioregionalism in
significant ways. The practice of holding all workshops and meetings bilingually in
English and Spanish, although it seemed a small and obvious alteration when first
suggested, had a surprisingly major effect on speakers of both languages.
"Northerners" waited for translations in equality with "southerners"
rather than enjoying the tourists' privilege of speaking English that has previously lent
an air of superiority even to progressive meetings. A high level of participation by
everyone resulted, sometimes in refreshingly unexpected ways such as a moving address by
farmers who supplied food for the Gathering and wanted to attend more of the meetings but
had to return to mind their crops. "Northerners" experienced the wealth of human
and cultural values that abounds in the Spanish-speaking Americas in a direct way
undistorted by economic or social lenses. "Southerners" were released from
restrictions on speaking their own language and expressed themselves as fully as they
wished. No future continent-wide assembly of bioregionalists can fail to accommodate both
languages and have any claim to legitimacy.
The most important development for the bioregional
movement is that it has started to advance beyond its initial circle of adherents and is
becoming more mainstream. Previously, the concept of a bioregion (in its
contemporary expression) was more or less restricted to activists who had been exposed to
various other forms of ecological thinking. Bioregionalists deliberately chose this
holistic view of the place where they lived to inform their work of bringing about
beneficial changes. Some Gathering participants certainly fit this description. Many
others, though, came to learn about bioregionalism. Incidentally, they brought some
significant new aspects of it with them. Tepoztlán townspeople provided an excellent
example of this when they saw a new use for a rudimentary map-making exercise that has
been a staple of the bioregional movement in the U.S. and Canada. Map-makers in workshops
are asked to use different colors to draw simple natural features such as land forms,
watersheds, soils, and native plants and animals. They are also required to include the
best and worst things humans are doing in regard to these features. The individual maps
are invariably unique personal creations but they usually exhibit a general sense and view
of local places as well. Besides causing "aha" reactions of revelation from
their makers, these drawings have often served as a useful basis of common understanding
for initial bioregional organizing by local groups. The Tepoztlán activists watched a
Mexican volunteer who had never been exposed to this exercise draw a map during a
demonstration. They immediately seized on map-making as a way for those local people who
do not read and write to express themselves. It was an effective way to identify what they
knew and the problems they thought were most important. This adaptive leap was obvious to
them because of their practical sense of bioregionalism. However, it had never before been
stated (or recognized, probably) as a valuable use by any of the thousands of people who
have participated in the map-making workshop.
Tepoztlán isn't "mainstream" in major
respects, but it does closely mirror cultural traditions and land-use conflicts that exist
in much of the Western Hemisphere, north and south. The fact that Tepoztlán townspeople
and farmers easily accept and use bioregional ideas and language signals the inception of
a much wider popularity and usefulness for the bioregional movement than existed before.
The concept of a bioregion is proving to be a practical tool that can communicate older
concerns in contemporary terms. It represents a life-raft for survival and a new basis for
alliances between land-based groups to counter a rising tide of global monoculture.
