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Jasmine Ordoise appears out of a wooden boat in water as he crosses a narrow channel that adds a labyrinth of Chinapam, island fields that was produced by Agatech thousands of years ago.
“Let’s close our eyes and ask our mother’s water to allow peace to be raised peacefully,” he said that the boat slowly runs, opposite to the frantic traffic. Mexico The city is a few miles away.
Ordóñez is the owner of one of these islands farms, which was earlier built with mud from under the lakes which once covered the region. When the boat comes to her island, she proudly shows corn and leafy greens. His ancestors had Chinampus, but had to buy it because women traditionally not found them.
“My grandmother did not find any land. Then, mostly left in the hands of men,” she said. In his favor, Cassandra Gardno listened carefully. That too the family did not inherit Chinapam.
Today both are part of a small but growing group of women who bought Chinampus to continuously cultivate in an attempt to preserve an ecosystem, which is rapidly threatened by urban development, public tourism and water pollution.
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Note the editor: This story is a cooperation between Associated Press and Mongbay.
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Creating your way in one area is still not easy to dominate men. In the chinapam of Boro of Xochimilco and San Gregorio Atlapulco, hardly any woman works as a land.
,People It is as if there are men (only), who have physical abilities to work them, “Gardno said. Mud stained her yellow pink shirt, which matches her shoes. She knows that her dress looks strange to male chinampa workers for a long time, but instead of getting upset, she finds it entertaining.
After years away, she returned to San Gregorio in 2021, so that she could dedicate herself to Chinampa farming. She went to college and then spent a long time Ecuador Working in conservation efforts to protect manta rays and sharks. Then one day she returned to San Gregorio and was killed by erosion of her own land: the lower water level of the canals, rising pollution, abandoned chinapam.
“This is where I started to realize: ‘You are part of this place. And your responsibility is to secure it,” he said.
After saving for a year, he bought a chinampa – and was surprised to find it in such a bad situation. Armchairs, TV and beer bottles were found in one cleaning. He worked to reopen the canals that were crammed with garbage and started planting crops.
The mistrust between the neighbors was clear.
“He said: ‘Let’s see, this girl has never gone down for this place, no one knows her. And she is already doing what she wants,” she said.
But she knew much more than she thought.
Gardno had learned a lot as a little girl who ran around her grandfather’s Chinapam – a “a paradise” filled with flowers. He learned that mud from under the canals is the best fertilizer because it contains mineral-rich ash from volcano. Mexico CityHe learned that applying different types of crops to destroy an entire crop causes frost and attracts flowers, so they do not eat cabbage or bud.
Share knowledge
“Chinpas may have eight rotation per year, while other systems you may have two or three,” Gardno explained. This is the reason that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization recognized Chinapam as one of the most productive agricultural systems on the planet. Today its ground is a melting pot of colors: broccoli’s yellow green marigolds for the vivid yellow color.
Since 2016, she has been collaborating with the National Autonomous University in Mexico, advising other farmers who want to stop using agrochemicals and want to recover these traditional practices that also help to preserve the ecosystem.
While kneeling next to a planting bed, Gardno suggested that it would have to raise it so that there is no flood when it rains. Ordóñez pays attention. He bought this chinapam three years ago and is now demanding the stability tag “Iticatea Chinampar” given by the university to the producers, which, among other things, use mud as mud instead of agrochemicals, instead of agrochemicals. With this label, their products can be sold at high prices.
There are 16 farmers who have obtained the label, four of them, said that Diana Laura Wazke’s Institute of the University of the University said that the project encourages women to “withdraw and produce their chinapams”.
Cleaning of canals
In the chinapam supported by the university, filters made of aquatic plants are installed to clean the water and prevent carp and tilapia passage. In the 1980s, introduced into Xochimilco, these aggressive species became the predators of the most reputed inhabitants of this ecosystem: Salamander-like Exolotal of Mexico.
Today, this amphibian is on the verge of extinction due to a combination of these aggressive species and a combination of factors polluting canals: discharge of sewage from urban development in the area, mass tourism and the use of agrochemicals in many chinpas.
Mendoza said, “Chinpas is an artificial agricultural-conditional system that was designed to supply food for the entire population in pre-Hympanic times. And it ends till date,” said Mendoza. “So the way to preserve Xochimilco is also to preserve Chinampa.”
But on any Sunday, a walk through the area makes it clear that low chinapams are dedicated to agriculture. Each weekend, hundreds of people come here to play football on Chinapam that are converted into fields or ride on a bright painted boats known as “traders”.
The effect of this change on wetlands is obvious: from heavy metals such as iron, cadmium and heavy metals such as oil, detergent and pesticides, contaminants have been found, according to a study by Luis Bojorke Kastro, a biologist at the autonomous metropolitan university. Most treatment comes from plants that, according to Castro’s study, discharge their water in Xochimilco and consist of chinapus using anochemicals.
Preserve the remaining of the past
“Look at the clarity of water,” Ordoise said she reaches the canal where she has installed her biofilter. She knows that it is necessary to take care of water to preserve this ecosystem.
This wetland is the last relic of a one -time Great Tenocattilan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, once built on the lakes filling the Valley of Mexico. Although the remains of Xochimilco today represent only 3% of the original expansion of those lakes, it is still important for the stability of the city.
If it disappears, according to biologist Luis Zambrano, the average temperature of capital can rise to 2 ° C (3.6 Fahrenheit). Xochimilco and San Gregorio also reduce floods during the rainy season, provide a natural carbon dioxide reservoir and have houses of hundreds of species, such as Herons and Tlaloc frogs.
“Look at the red -headed birds in the lagoon!” Outkamd Gardno, after a long day in his Chinampa, a dirt was running home in the evening with a road.
For her, it is still heaven that she roamed with her grandfather. He is convinced that women need to preserve Chinampus and hopefully within 10 years, there will be many more and will take care of them.
“With shared labor of women and men, we can do what we all want, which we have left for long,” he said.
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