Teotitlán del Valle is an indigenous Zapotec community in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. I coordinated with a local women’s weaving cooperative, Vida Nueva, to establish an ethnomedicinal center in the village. In doing so, I sought to:
Help community members catalog culturally important plant species (incl. wild, semi-wild, and domesticated) and document uses.
Identify candidate species to be highlighted in medicinal center and explore cultivation strategies for local varietals of these species.
Evaluate any threats to the long-term survival of culturally important plants (climate change, overuse, etc.) and develop mitigation strategies for Teotitlán del Valle.
I am also working to establish climate models to forecast the capacity of these plants to survive amidst warming temperatures and drier growing seasons.
In 2025, our model predicts that a given household in Teotitlán del Valle has immediate access (either in home gardens or in nearby wild harvesting sites) to 9 of 12 test species. By 2075, the same household would only have immediate access to 6 species.
Working in collaboration with local women, we identified a list of over 150 culturally and medicinally important plant species. Many of these species are candidates for inclusion in the medicinal center.
Climate models are a tool alongside other forms of human adaptation. While plants may face stress, they can still be grown in cultivation or with dedicated irrigation. Climate suitability or predicted vulnerability alone are not enough to determine how well a plant will fare. Entanglements with human caretakers and users mean that some plants, although already facing climate disturbances, persist. In assessing risk as two separate constituent components, we can analyze both the existing demands in maintaining a plant and future changes to those conditions.
My work, in collaboration with professors at Carleton College at the women at Vida Nueva, is continuing to investigate how the agencies of people and plants are intertwined, and how socio-ecological resilience is mutually built.