Regional Culture and Urban Agriculturalists of Mexico City

Abstract

Keywords: rural economy, urban economy, urbanization, Mexico, agriculture, technology, labour IntroductionThe need for innovative and coherent research centered on the relationship between human activity and environment has increased as ecological problems intensify worldwide. Particularly, the processes that occur dynamically in modern societies are testing the vulnerability of social groups to respond to economic, environmental and cultural changes. Anthropologists have used the spatial dimension of cultural processes in studying developmental transitions in societies. The construction of theoretical schemes for regional studies has been useful to elucidate relationships among cultural systems, economic changes and ecological processes (Altamirano and Hirabayashi, 1991; Halperin, 1989; Hilhorst, 1990; Orlove, 1980).The theoretical and practical issues of regional studies may illuminate the economic and ecological variations which allow us to evaluate particular hypotheses concerning sociocultural change, space and time in local populations (Ellen, 1979; Van Young, 1992). An examination of cultural systems must include the overlapping of the infinite number of continually generating cultural systems and the constantly changing hierarchical relationships between them, which result from differential access to a wide variety of regional resources. Regional territory is the space of discourse that serves as a domain and an object of economic relationships, political practices and cultural systems, where the systems of interconnections are thought of as a hierarchy (Lomnitz-Adler, 1991). Thus, this interdependent system itself has been based on systems of unequal exchange of goods, labour, resources and capital.It is common to think of Mexico City only as a macro urban settlement with monumental problems pushing its population toward major environmental and economic crisis. However, if one approaches this ancient city from the south, patches of rural landscapes can be seen within its urban hinterland. This is notable in the vegetable and ornamental flower growing area of Xochimilco and the corn-cactus belt of Milpa Alta, which still convey a classic rural environment. The social reality of these regions is demonstrated in the interplay between the segments of rural society that are connected to both the family-based agrarian system and the urban wage economy.Agricultural production in both Xochimilco and Milpa Alta face essentially the same problem in maintaining agronomic and economic strategies near or within urban concentrations. Today, urban agriculturalists can earn wages in factories, work for governmental institutions, sell agricultural products at urban markets or cultivate ancient agricultural land as typical peasants. Urban agriculturalists' understanding of the regional landscape, the dynamics of Mexico City, the state, national and international economics and politics, religion, community, family, friends and self is mediated by cultural systems, which are reproduced by agricultural practices and urban routines, knowledge, language and identities of a particular regional setting.Urban agriculturalists of Mexico City are principally sojourners who traverse regional frontiers as easily as they traverse the conceptual boundaries fabricated by social scientists. The cultural orientation of these urban-rural scenarios and their social structure is ambiguous and contradictory from the perspective of most theoretical frameworks. To study the nature of the urban agriculture framework of Mexico City requires the depiction of distinctive types of social organization and cultural systems. This requires an elucidation of the regional realm more thoroughly than other studies of contemporary urban agriculture contexts (Mougeot, 2000; Smit et al., 1996), which have originated from either the perspective of urban studies or that of agricultural technology. Perhaps because conventional sociohistorical analysis depends on a clear demarcation of agrarian and industrial societies, few studies have been able to capture the dynamic interplay and complex characteristics of the urban agriculturalists' social life. …