Morning in Pensamiento Liberal, in Oaxaca's Sierra Mixteca. All photos are by Greg Rainoff '81 unless noted.
IN THE MIXTECAN FIELD: Greg Rainoff '81 While field researchers concerned with the habits of animals need to watch from a distance, finding a way to take notes unobserved, the fieldwork of a person interested in other humans is all about communication. Greg Rainoff '81 is currently creating Burning Paradise, a film about the indigenous peoples of the Sierra Mixteca who live in the steep mountains southwest of the Mexican city of Oaxaca. The people here are called hijos de maize, children of corn, because it was through ancestral hands in this place that corn was biodiversified (a term Greg prefers to domesticated). Here too, is where some of Mexico's earliest writings were found, codices created more than seven hundred years ago. But centuries of intrusions, beginning with the introduction of sheep and goats by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century, continuing with massive charcoal production during the nineteenth century, fertilizer dependence begun with the Green Revolution of the 1960s, and the recent influx of subsidized, low-cost corn from the United States under the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, have all contributed to massive social and environmental degradation. In places, as much as five meters of topsoil have eroded and some 80 percent of the people have left their homeland for the city of Oaxaca and points north—including the US. Yet others remain, eking out a subsistence livelihood in villages, or pueblos, with strong
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communal traditions, including expectations for mutual assistance during harvests and cooperative governance. Greg's film focuses on a human ecology conundrum. The farmers can feed themselves on the corn, beans, and squash they grow, but they need something that will bring in cash. Before NAFTA, that something was corn. Today, unable to sell their crops at a profit, those who stay frequently resort to the environmentally problematic job of creating charcoal, obtained by cutting hardwood in an infamously deforested region, and slowly burning the cut trees in large, cone-shaped, underground ovens to be sold in the city—earning maybe sixty dollars per tree for an eight-day work week. But burning charcoal is illegal, as the forests are protected zones. So they say their choice is one illegality—charcoal—or another: migrating to the States. Ultimately this story—and its larger implications of environmental policy, cultural diversity, and the clashes they sometimes cause—will be told in whole cloth, but it has come to Greg in bits and pieces, as life often does, beginning when he was hired to document the building of a new community center in the region. Gradually the people in that pueblo came to know him; gradually he gained their confidence, learning of their hopes, dreams, fears, and
COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE