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JUNGLE LABORATORIES

Duke University Press

Chapter One

In July 1964, Isidro Apolinar woke up at dawn, strapped on his huaraches, and walked into the jungle that surrounded his small hut. He carried a tree branch whittled to a sharp point, three tortillas with salt, and an empty sack. The spearlike branch would help him dig in the moisture-heavy dirt, the tortillas and salt would ward off his hunger, and, if he were lucky, the sack would bulge with wild yams before he returned home that evening. When money ran out, which was often, or work was not available, which was becoming more frequent, these tubers were the only means he had to feed his family. But his family did not eat them. Instead, Apolinar sold them to waiting local buyers who swiftly shuttled them out of the region. He would not learn until a decade later that pharmaceutical laboratories were using barbasco, the wild yam, to meet the growing global demand for oral contraceptives.

The daily life of Isidro Apolinar offers a glimpse into how the barbasco trade changed the lives of southern Mexican peasants. In this chapter, we explore the historical context of the barbasco-rich Papaloapan region with its centuries-old harvesting of regional cash crops that transformed local labor and social relations into a stereotype of monoculture. This chapter also looks at how local rulers and federal politicians dreamed of harnessing the region's potential and bringing progress to the area in the nineteenth century and twentieth. But in embracing projects such as tobacco and, later, dams and indiscriminate logging, local and national policy further exacerbated centuries-long ethnic divisions which allowed a small and mestizo minority to thrive off the labor of the indigenous majority.

The Region-Oaxaca's Papaloapan

Isidro Apolinar grew up in San José Chiltepec, a speck of a village in eastern Oaxaca. The area of the Chinantla, the third largest tropical forest in Mexico, spans an estimated 80,000 hectares of jungle. The region boasts seven climatic zones and incredible botanical diversity in a mere 9,623 square kilometers. But the rugged, undulating topography, with its seemingly endless hills and crevasses, also served to isolate pockets of indigenous settlements from the arrival of politically driven "modernity and progress" that sought to transform the area in the nineteenth century and early twentieth. The remoteness of certain indigenous settlements posed a particular problem that was publicly addressed as early as 1848, when the governor of the state of Oaxaca, Benito Juárez, noted "the absolute necessity to open ports and roads for the progress of commerce, industry and agriculture." An anonymous letter, written more than twenty years later, again encouraged another Oaxaca native, President Porfirio Díaz, that building roads "was one of the first steps in the progress of a nation." Even so, it would not be until 1952, more than a century after Juárez's initial request, that the first road connecting Chiltepec to the rest of the region was finished. However, although roads would eventually be built and railroad track laid, this would not benefit everyone in the region. Instead, the arrival of infrastructure would speed up the removal of the region's wealth. Additionally, paved roads also made it easier to differentiate between mainly indigenous and hard-to-access places and the more urban and mestizo towns.

The Papaloapan Basin's 46,517 square kilometers stretch into three states: Oaxaca, Veracruz, and Puebla. Fifty-one percent of the region is in Oaxaca, 37 percent in Veracruz, and 12 percent in the state of Puebla. Within this territorial expanse the landscape shifts from the eroded lands of the Mixteca Alta, where "there is no way that man or beast can live off the land" to the lush vegetation of the Valle Nacional. It was not uncommon for normally dreary government reports to turn to hyperbole when attempting to describe the endless green of the lower Papaloapan in Oaxaca. As one official wrote in 1952, "As we continue to climb the vegetation becomes more exuberant, dense, and tangled until it becomes sheer vitality.... The Cuenca's wealth in forestry products is immense, it is here where one can find precious woods like cedar, caoba [mahogany], nogal [walnut], fresno [ash]." Sentence after sentence of government reports list the commercial goods found in the area.

The Oaxacan portion of the Papaloapan is home to at least five major ethnic groups, among them Chinantecos, Popolucas, Mixe, Mixtecos, and Zapotecos. Yet a 1949 federal report identified eleven major indigenous languages spoken in the region. Describing the region as a "mosaic," it provided a racially tinged description, when the writer claimed that some of these indigenous groups "by their miserable circumstances live almost forgotten by the world," and were "still living in a stone age." The writer went on to add that in contrast to these indigenous Mexicans there were other communities in which "modern life exists in a similar way to that of large cities." With "progress" localized in the larger towns, the author of the report was certain that in 1949 the Papaloapan was in a constant struggle between the "primitive and the modern."

One palpable manifestation of this struggle was the lack of healthcare in the midst of endemic diseases linked to poverty, with river blindness (onchocerciasis), malaria, and hookworm among the most common. As a young boy Isidro Apolinar recalled traveling two and half hours by foot to Tuxtepec to receive a foul-tasting dosage of medicine "for worms." The Apolinar children then shared a Coke to wash away the bitter taste. It remained a vivid memory for Isidoro because it was the only medical attention that he recalled receiving as a child. It may well be that Apolinar was given a dose of chenopodium combined with carbon tetrachloride, as part of the hookworm campaigns organized under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, which in 1931 sponsored a health unit in Tuxtepec.

Another marker of marginalization was the absence of basic infrastructure that by the 1940s was spreading throughout Mexico. Growing up in Chiltepec in the 1930s, Isidro Apolinar was not familiar with paved roads, light bulbs, or running water. He traveled on footpaths and obtained water for drinking, cooking, and washing by hauling small buckets from the lazy Río Nacional, a river that inched its way through the jungle that was constantly reclaiming the borders of Apolinar's village. Nearly all of his neighbors spoke only Chinanteco, and although some also spoke Spanish, the local language, or regional dialecto, was, as he explained, the preferred way of communicating. But not everyone in Chiltepec was Chinanteco: These fertile lands attracted men and women from as far away as central Mexico. Despite their varied origins, nearly all of Apolinar's neighbors were farmers. A 1952 report from the federal Commission of the Papaloapan River Basin, where Chiltepec is located, reported that just over 84 percent of the basin's population relied on "agriculture and related activities" for subsistence. However, around that time, Mexico entered a period of food crisis, and even farming became a precarious profession. Unable to subsist, campesinos found it necessary to seek out day-labor jobs on nearby ranches and plantations or odd jobs in construction to feed their families.

As a child, Apolinar rarely ate meat. Instead, he feasted on the tropical fruits-pineapples, mangos, grapefruit, bananas-that grew plentifully in the jungle, as well as the vegetables cultivated on his father's plot of land. Any maize that the family did not use for subsistence they sold to one of two men who paddled down the river from Tuxtepec every eight days. Negotiating a fair price was impossible because the lack of roads impeded competing buyers from reaching Chiletepec. Those who came by boat paid a meager ten centavos per kilo of corn, whereas a small bag of animal crackers, a rare but treasured treat, cost twenty centavos. Consequently, Apolinar's family had limited access to cash. They were not alone. A 1949 study revealed that 76.8 percent of the Oaxacan part of the Papaloapan (926,672 people) lived in shacks (jacalitos), an indicator of poverty.

Defying 1940 census data, which placed Oaxaca's illiteracy rate at nearly 80 percent, Apolinar went to school for three years-enough to know "when middlemen were cheating him," as he put it-though buying a notebook or a even a pencil was a financial strain on his family. Nearly seventy years later, he clearly recalled the anxiety of shaving off the remaining lead from a pencil stub or carefully erasing the pages of a used notebook to do his homework. His family was by all measurable standards poor, but he said they managed to get by, primarily by taking on extra jobs. For example, Apolinar's mother washed neighbors' clothes and made fresh tortillas to sell, and his father worked on a farm tending a lemon grove. In addition, outsiders would occasionally buy palmita (a type of decorative frond), rubber, or local plants through the middlemen, who on their weekly trips to the region told locals of any goods that the outside demanded. Apolinar's first job, like that of most children of Chiltepec, was to thread leaves of tobacco on the remaining plantaciones for twenty centavos a day.

He also helped his father clear the family's minuscule plot of land by throwing away pesky tubers called barbasco, whose vines twined their heart-shaped leaves around the family's precious stalks of corn.

Historical context

Since the 1400s outsiders have coveted the wealth in what was once the Gran Chinantla-where Chiltepec, Tuxtepec, and Valle Nacional are now located. In 1455, the Mexicas, having already established their Aztec empire in central Mexico, came into the region. They transformed nearby Tuxtepec into a garrison of the empire and exacted tribute in the form of cotton, natural dyes, cacao, bird feathers, and gold-items that were already staples of trade in the area-from the surrounding ethnic groups, mainly the Chinantecos, Mazatecos, Cuicatecos, and Popolucas. Although the Aztecs allowed some religious and cultural autonomy, the people of the Gran Chinantla engaged in regular uprisings. By the early 1500s, the Chinantecos were one of several subjugated groups that continuously contested Aztec rule.

The first Spaniards arrived in the area in 1520 in search of gold. Allegedly Aztec emperor Moctezuma, knowing the Europeans' lust for gold and wanting to teach the rebel region a lesson, pointed the foreigners in the direction of the Chinantla. Within a few years, forced labor and epidemics reportedly reduced a thriving population of nearly 100,000 Chinantecos to less than 2,000. The riches of the Chinantla were so obvious that Hernán Cortés claimed the region for himself and tried unsuccessfully to make it part of his daughter's dowry. By 1534 the Gran Chinantla was directly under the jurisdiction of the Spanish crown, but the region would never come completely under Spanish domination. The rugged terrain did not aid imperial ambitions and neither did the complex local languages. Missionaries pled unsuccessfully with the Spanish crown to enforce the region's use of the indigenous lingua franca, Nahuatl. Nevertheless, shortly after the conquest, the Chinantla became one of New Spain's most important agricultural regions, producing native cotton as well as European staples, mainly wheat, rice, sugarcane, apples, and grapes.

In 1821, after a protracted eleven-year war, Mexico achieved independence from Spain. The fledgling nation, however, spent much of the remaining century defending its borders from Spain, France, and, unsuccessfully in 1846-48, from the United States. Militarily defeated, an exhausted Mexico continued an internal political, and often armed, struggle to try to determine which political future-empire, monarchy, republic, or federal statehood-should be the correct path. Benito Juárez, a Zapotec Indian from Oaxaca, would rise to the presidency, and bearing the calling card of liberals, he would demand separation of church and state. Liberal reforms targeted both corporately owned church property and communally held indigenous land. These were expropriated and sold to wealthy private owners. This shift in land ownership gave rise to the powerful haciendas, fincas, and plantations that concentrated thousands of acres of fertile land in the hands of a single, usually mestizo, family and transformed thousands of indigenous groups into peons on the lands they formerly held. By the late nineteenth century, much of Tuxtepec's lands were mid- or large-sized haciendas devoted to coffee, tobacco, or cacao monoculture. Smaller plantations dedicated to rubber, cotton, pineapple, sugarcane, and wheat production also thrived. In 1910, Tuxtepec had the highest concentration of commercial agricultural properties in Oaxaca, with 202 haciendas totaling 769,830 hectares (an average of 3,800 hectares per hacienda), which represented more than 27 percent of the state's total. Porfirio Díaz's iron-fisted rule (1876-1911) brought simmering calm to Mexico. During the Porfirian era, national interest focused on the region and investment in plantaciones of tobacco, banana, sugarcane, and cotton increased. Recent scholarship has contested the belief that Oaxaca remained isolated from Porfirian modernization and the effects of the regime's implosion, the 1910 Revolution. The noted Oaxacan historian Francie Chassen-López argues that Oaxaca was a central recipient of Porfirian funding, but the focus was on ports and urban spaces, while much of the remaining region languished.

As early as the 1880s the Tuxtepec region in the Papaloapan Cuenca had already prompted visionary politicians and businessmen to write about it. A Mexican ambassador to Washington and yet another Oaxaca native, Matías Romero, extolled the virtues of its cotton and coffee. But he also added that the area lacked "human labor (brazos) and a salubrious climate." As Romero explained in his study of the region, "The scarcity of labor made it necessary to turn to the people of the sierra and the valleys of Oaxaca, who come attracted by a daily wage of fifty cents.... Despite this there is still scarcity of labor in Tuxtepec and often the cotton harvest, or part of it, is lost because of insufficient labor." Nearly a century later, a 1958 report echoed Matías Romero's study when it described how "drawn by the illusion of fertile land, the settlers instead carry the weight of tropical diseases." Furthermore, "the climate of the Cuenca is in its majority tropical and unsanitary, and hence ... is a vector of illnesses that have for centuries sapped the strength of men," making it a challenge to reap profits from this fertile land. The climate is so extreme that summer temperatures often reach an oppressive 100 degrees in the shade. Thus, finding laborers to work in the fertile valleys has been a constant struggle for landowners since the nineteenth century. Labor shortages were also a bane in one of the basin's microregions, Valle Nacional.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from JUNGLE LABORATORIES by Gabriela Soto Laveaga Copyright © 2009 by Duke University Press . Excerpted by permission.
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