Eroding Diversity, Eroding Heritage: The Mayan Milpa amid Economic Pressures, Public Policy, and Climate Change

Presenter: Prof. Javier Becerril (Wangari Maathai Visiting Professor 2025)

This presentation provided an overview of the Mayan Milpa as both an agricultural system and a living cultural heritage. It highlighted how economic pressures, climate change, and neocolonial public policies threatened the Milpa.

The presentation argued that the Mayan Milpa should not be understood simply as a traditional farming method. Rather, it was presented as a complex knowledge system that carried ecological, cultural, spiritual, and political meaning. It was described as a living archive of resistance because it preserved Indigenous Mayan knowledge, seed diversity, land-use practices, and ways of relating to human and non-human life.

The presentation highlighted several dimensions of the Milpa, including its ontological dimension, where humans and non-humans were understood as co-subjects; its biocultural dimension, where memory was preserved through seeds, soils, and landscapes; its epistemic justice dimension, where Mayan knowledge challenged colonial forms of knowledge erasure; and its agroecological dimension, where knowledge was produced through adaptive and collective land management.

A major part of the presentation situated the Milpa within a longer history of colonialism, land dispossession, capitalism, and public policy in Mexico. It traced pressures from the conquest, independence, the Mexican Revolution, land reforms, NAFTA, and more recent development models such as maquila industries, mega-projects, tourism, and export-oriented economic policies. These processes were shown as contributing to the erosion of Milpa systems by pushing rural communities toward migration, wage labour, land sales, and dependence on external markets.

Check out our E-Learning video on this topic here.