La Melchor :: Weblog

les dejo el link y un pedaso de un artículo del New York Times donde se publica la investigación que uno de mis tíos (Luis Zambrano) está llevando a cabo. Creo que es muy interesante, y debo admitir que me siento orgullosa de que a pesar de que Nueva York esta muy lejos, se ha publicado el trabajo que lleva tantos años haciendo mi tío.

On Capital’s Edge, Gardens That Once Fed an Empire
By ELISABETH MALKIN
Published: October 8, 2008
MEXICO CITY — Five hundred years on, it still takes a canoe to reach the fields that fed this city when it ruled a great empire.

On the map, Xochimilco’s gardens are a tiny wedge of green in the southern reach of the Mexican capital’s expanding urban sprawl. Along the area’s maze of canals, the raised farming beds are the last living vestige of the city’s Aztec past.

Anastasio Santana still farms here, growing herbs and vegetables on five acres surrounded by water. Tall willow trees abut the canal that flows past his house and fields. Instead of the city’s sounds, he hears bird calls.

But he is 50 years old and fears that his is the last generation to grow food here. “People used to plant, but now they get a hold of a job with the government and they leave,” he said.

Though the Spanish conquered the Aztecs and set about draining the vast lake basin at the center of the vanquished empire, the canals and their raised farming beds, called chinampas, have managed to survive.

But they are under siege. Scattered among some 110 miles of channels may be no more than an estimated 1,000 chinamperos, as the farmers are called, raising crops with traditional methods.

One of them, Rigoberto González, dredges mud from the canal bed with a long-handled net to create a nursery for his seeds. He grows lettuce, cilantro and arugula, irrigated by the canals. It is so fertile here that he can harvest five times a year. But the work is labor-intensive and it cannot compete with the more mechanized farming.

“The problem is, we don’t have a market,” said Dionisio Eslava Sandoval, a chinampero who leads a small group of farmers, including Mr. González, in seeking ways to earn enough from their farming to keep doing it. More than market forces are working against the growers. The ecosystem that supports the chinampas, a mat of reeds and their roots that is loaded with mud and plant waste, is fragile. For a hundred years the city has been diverting the natural springs that fed the canals. Instead, semi-treated wastewater from a city treatment plant flows in, along with organic waste and bacteria.

Illegal settlements on the chinampas lack proper sewage lines, and their waste also goes into the canals.

Misguided efforts at creating fisheries 30 years ago introduced carp and tilapia, which have driven away native species, including a small type of salamander called the axolotl. Prized for its meat and its medicinal qualities, the axolotl is a symbol of the lake and it is close to extinction in the wild.

Working in cooperation with the farmers, Luis Zambrano, a biologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, is trying to conserve the axolotl….