Ixcatec Ethnobotany: Human-Plant Interactions and Challenges for the Maintenance of a Rich Biocultural Legacy

Peoples’ knowledge about their natural surroundings is tightly linked with practices to appropriate natural components, ecological processes, and ecosystems, and to their cosmovision. Peoples and their surroundings are mutually transformed through management practices and the influence of landscapes on peoples’ culture. A portion of the peoples’ knowledge is codified by languages as names, classification systems, word meanings, and the contexts in which these words are pronounced. The loss of languages, therefore, leads to the risk of losing an essential part of peoples’ memories. Santa María Ixcatlán is a town located in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, with a population of nearly 500 inhabitants, with an alarming risk of disappearance of the Ixcatec language (only eight Ixcatec speakers) and the loss of knowledge about the environment that it implies. Ethnobotanical documentation may contribute to safeguarding the invaluable memory of the Ixcatec people. In this chapter, we provide a summary of our records about the people-plant interactions in this town. Our study attempts to understand how a rich biocultural legacy has been built in one of the most biodiverse zones in the semiarid mountains of Mexico. Also, to knowing the challenges the Ixcatec people face to maintain this legacy and provide an account of the ways in which they confront them. We reviewed the literature with information about the Ixcatec people and their interactions with plants, and analyzed the published and unpublished results of ethnobotanical and ethnoecological work conducted by our research team from 1999 to the present. In Santa María Ixcatlán, agriculture is the axial activity around which all other productive activities and the community’s ceremonial life are organized. Local farmers grow the basic staple foodstuffs consumed throughout the year like maize, beans, and supplementary crops like wheat and squash. They also manage edible weedy plant species that are essential for the local gastronomy. They use a total of 627 plant species to satisfy food, medicine, construction, handcrafts, fodder, and other needs. We analyze these aspects in this chapter. In addition, they manage 401 species through practices for ensuring their availability including tolerance (206 spp.), protection (251 spp.), transplanting (139), enhancement (34 ssp.) and ex situ propagation (155 spp.), and the gathering of 299 spp., and the foraging of 243 spp. by livestock. People mentioned 94 plant names corresponding to 129 species that are considered essential for living, and we centered our attention on these species. The Ixcatec ethnobotanical knowledge is possibly the most deeply documented in the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán region. However, we identified a process of loss of local knowledge associated to the substitution of local products for others, the loss of knowledge codified in the Ixcatec language, and the high rate of migration, especially the young people. Improving the conditions of interchange through organizational processes as well as the innovation of productive practices to generate profitable products is a viable way to enhance people to remain linked to the community. We refer to the initiatives of Xula Palma Artesanal collective and the Ixcateco collective brand, which have provided new opportunities to improve the lives of some households and demonstrated to be effective to maintain appropriate ways to manage plants and vegetation and to value the Ixcatec culture. For the members of Xula and Ixateco, their experience may be the base to strengthening customs and cultural aspects that give identity to their products. This illustrates the importance of documenting, understanding the local productive processes through ethnobotanical studies, so that the work of ethnobotany contributes to the well-being of communities and to support the local efforts to improve life and maintain the valuable biocultural heritage of the Ixcatec people.