Participatory mapping empowers patrimony: a team of geographers and archaeologists are collaborating with indigenous communities in Tiltepec, Mexico to put their lands and languages on the map.

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In his account of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Bernal Diaz del Castillo tells us that in 1521 Hernan Cortes dispatched him and Gonzalo de Sandoval from Tenochtitlan south to the Provincia de los Zapoteccas. Cortes instructed the conquistadors to investigate Moctezuma's claim that he received tributes of gold from that region's inhabitants. Sandoval and Diaz del Castillo's party marched eastward out of the Valley of Mexico and southward down the Gulf coastal plain to Tustepeque, now know as Tuxtepec, a journey of 250 miles. After gaining control of Tustepeque, Sandoval sent a party of 100 Spaniards and 100 Indians to pacify Zapotec communities in the mountains to the southwest and to search for gold. Led by Captain Briones, the party marched ten leagues, approximately 35 miles, into the rugged mountainous region today known as the Rincon of Oaxaca's Sierra de Juarez. There, on the steep slopes of Cerro Negro, the Zapotecs of Tiltepec ambushed the Spaniards and drove them over a cliff. One third of the party was wounded and they retreated. Back in Tustepeque, Briones recounted a fierce battle waged on tortuous terrain that rendered their horses useless. The captain claimed that his previous battles against Turks and Moors were preferable to warfare with the savage Tiltepecanos. Tiltepec's remoteness and its people's martial skills prevented them from being pacified for another decade.

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In the summer of 2006 a team of Mexican and US geographers traveled four hours of rough road from Ixtlan de Juarez to the still isolated community of Tiltepec. Rather than gold, they sought cooperation. They hoped to persuade the Tiltepecanos to join an innovative project, Mexico Indigena, which would enhance the community's management of its natural resources and help it to preserve its cultural patrimony. After much debate within the community and several more visits by the geographers, in July 2007 Tiltepec elected to participate in the project. By joining the Mexico Indigena project, Tiltepecanos agreed to become geographers of their own lands. This article describes the work of Mexico Indigena and its experiences working with the community of Tiltepec.

Mexico Indigena is a participatory mapping project. The research team includes geographers and archaeologists from Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, the University of Kansas, and the Universidad Autonoma de San Luis Potosf, Mexico. Peter Herlihy of the University of Kansas and Derek Smith of Carleton University head the team and direct the research of both the undergraduate and graduate students from San Lnis Potosf and Kansas and the local investigators in indigenous communities in San Luis Potosi and Oaxaca. Mexico Indigena has focused its work on indigenous committees which have maintained their traditions of communal land management within the ejido system of land tenure established after the Mexican Revolution. Mexico Indigena is investigating the effects of a government land titling project on indigenous ejidos. The project, known by the acronym PROCEDE which stands for Programa de Certificacion de Derechos Ejidales y Titulacion de Solares, has the potential to lead to the privatization of indigenous peoples' ancestral lands. Researchers worry that this privatization will lead to the further marginalization of Mexico's indigenous communities.

Participatory mapping is a research methodology that combines the tools of geography with the geographical knowledge of local residents. It is based on the premise that local inhabitants possess expert knowledge of their local habitats and that they organize this diverse knowledge in a geographic framework. Therefore, they can be taught to represent the local knowledge of their lands by means of conventional cartography. Mexico Indigena utilizes participatory mapping to understand how indigenous communities manage their communal resources and how PROCEDE has affected local resource management. Further, Mexico Indigena employs participatory mapping to empower indigenous communities. The maps that indigenous participants create are valuable records of local history and land use. Because the maps meet acceptable standards of cartographic accuracy they have utility outside of the local community. Local leaders can use these maps to promote their community's interests in matters of regional and national governance.

Tiltepec is a small, isolated Zapotec community. The settlement is part of the Municipio of Ixtlan de Juarez, which was named after the region's most famous resident, Benito Juarez. Tiltepec's geography and history are dramatic. The village's approximately 300 residents inhabit 85 houses that are clustered on a perch high above the Rio Vera and just below Cerro Negro, the sacred mountain that newly elected village officials visit every December 31 to offer alms to ensure a successful year.

Though small in number, the people of Tiltepec have a lot of land. Their borders encompass approximately 23,475 acres of rugged volcanic slopes deeply etched by a complex network of streams. Tiltepec's topography is simple to visualize, but difficult to traverse. The land is a great eastwest trending trough and the two mountain slopes that define it. The village of Tiltepec sits at an elevation of just over 3,800 feet on the southern slope of the trough opposite the densely forested northern slope. These two slopes contribute their water to the Rio Vera in the bottom of the trough. Its waters flow into the Rio Cajonos and then the Rio Papaloapan, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico. The lowlands along the river are known by locals as tierra caliente; the area is tropical with warm humid air and lush rainforest vegetation. This tropicality contrasts starkly with the temperate cloud forests that crown the surrounding slopes.

The people of Tiltepec are bilingual. Zapotec is their first language and is the language most commonly heard in the village. While all of the residents live clustered in a small urban setting, they are farmers. They practice swidden agriculture to grow a variety of crops suited to the different environments found on their mountainside: mangos, chiles, and sugar cane in the warm lowlands and corn, beans, coffee, and potatoes in the highlands. They also raise small herds of cattle. Most of the farming occupies the community's southern slope, the same slope on which the village sits. Because Tiltepec is an ejidal community, their farm lands are the property of the community not the individual. Individual community members have a right to farm land but not to own it.

Much of the Tiltepecanos' labor also belongs to the community. Tiltepec, like many Zapotec settlements in the Sierra de Juarez, has preserved its tradition of obligatory community service. Service can be divided into two categories, the cargo and the tequio. Cargos are responsibilities that adult males assume to establish themselves as official members of the community. Cargos support the community's public and religious institutions and the management of their natural resources.

Tequios are tasks by which Tiltepec's men participate in communal labor. Tasks range from labor provided to community projects, like building an annex to the elementary school, to labor provided to fellow farmers in the community. Tiltepec's dense settlement pattern facilitates efficient organization of tequios, especially those that involve group projects. Two loudspeakers in the center of the village regularly resound with calls for laborers that can be heard throughout community. The combination of cargos and tequios engage community members in all aspects of village life. Thus, the Mexico Indigena team sought participation in a community where traditions have made participation the norm.

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The Mexico Indigena team had to be persistent to gain Tiltepec's cooperation. Several times during the course of eighteen months, researchers traveled to Tiltepec to explain their proposal. The effort culminated in a three-hour long village assembly on a Sunday afternoon during which all adult community members crowded into a small school building to sit in small folding chairs and listen to Mexico Indigena's proposal for the final time. In the front of the room the three commissioners of the community's natural resources committee sat at a table. The chairman of the committee presided over the meeting. His responsibility is to manage the natural resources that his community holds in common including forested lands, agricultural lands, grazing lands, springs that provide the community's water supply, and others. That position is his cargo. He began the meeting by announcing the agenda and calling the roll. He then introduced the project and the leaders of Mexico Indigena. Herlihy and Smith explained the project, showed the community maps that resulted from their work with the Huasteca in San Luis Potosi, and emphasized the power of maps by describing how the Huastec communities had used maps.

After the presentation, community members discussed the proposal in the Zapotec language while the research team sat oblivious to the final outcome. That discussion lasted two hours. After everybody had had their chance to speak, the chairman called for a vote and asked for the Mexico Indigena team to leave the building. After several minutes, the team was invited back inside and informed that the assembly had approved the project.

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Once approval was received, the chairman of the natural resource committee appointed two young men to be the project's local investigators. The next step was to have Tiltepecanos begin to fill in the blank spaces on their map. And official maps of Tiltepec are truly blank. One aspect of Mexico Indigena's proposal that worked to the group's advantage was that they showed current government maps of Tiltepec to the village assembly. The lack of information on these maps is startling. Beyond contour lines, the village's name and a web of unnamed streams, there is no other information about Tiltepec on the map. Mexico Indigena's description of a map, complete with place names in the Zapotec language intrigued the community.

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In the evening after the assembly, Mexico Indigena and community representatives began work on a sketch map. Tiltepec was represented by the two local investigators and the several of Tiltepec's so-called ancianos. By the light of a single bulb and several flashlights, Mexico Indigena, the local investigators, and community elders began a fascinating process of collaborative mapmakiug. Herlihy and Smith initiated the process by describing features that are commonly represented on maps. They then gave the community members a large, blank sheet of paper and some pencils and pens. For the next three hours the young and old men of Tlitepec drew, erased, and redrew the features of their lands.

The local investigators did all of the drawing. They chose to include numerous streams, paths, historic sites, communal forests, and the springs that supply water to the village. The ancianos' contributions demonstrated that during their many years in the area they had acquired a more thorough knowledge of Tiltepec than the local investigators. They knew the names of the farthest flung places in the community. They also educated the local investigators as to the many Zapotec names for features found throughout Tiltepec's lands. In this way the ancianos contributed to the preservation of Tiltepec's heritage. The map that Tiltepec's local investigators and ancianos drew is remarkably detailed and cartographically accurate and reflects the vivid mental maps that community members possess of their everyday surroundings.

After creating the sketch map, the Mexico Indigena team and the local investigators planned the field mapping. Mexico Indigena maps only those features that communities choose to include, and it only does the mapping when accompanied by a local investigator. Field raapping involves teaching local investigators how to use global positioning systems (GPS) units so that mapped data can be entered into a geographical information system (GIS). GPS and GIS allow Mexico Indigena to convert field data into highly accurate maps for the community. Mexico Indigena donates GPS units to participating communities so that they may continue to revise and add features to their maps.

The people of Tiltepec chose to create two maps initially: one of their settlement and another of their entire territory. The group decided to divide into two teams, each one led by a local investigator. The local investigators bore multiple responsibilities. They led the teams on hikes to every point that would be included on the maps. They often manned the GPS units used to identify and record the geographical coordinates of those points. They also told the Mexico Indigena team members the names and significance of each feature mapped. Their task was much like directing an aereal inventory of their lands.

The team that mapped the settlement learned much of the history of Tiltepec as they recorded sites of historical interest, such as the place where the previous town was located. They also mapped sites of mythical significance including an enchanted cave, the rock where witches met to transform themselves into animal forms, and the dwelling places of the male and female founders of Tiltepec. The local investigator also took them to archaeological sites where the students mapped significant pre-Columbian constructions that had never been studied.

The other team completed several marathon hikes during which they recorded many of the streams that drain the lands of Tiltepec. These streams are represented on the current government maps, however, their names are not. Once the mappers were able to attach names to the streams on the maps, the streams became effective reference points for understanding the locations of other features. The Mexico Indigena team learned that the Tiltepecanos have a complex collection of water feature names.

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The Mexico Indigena team created computer generated maps with data gathered from the initial field mapping and presented it to the community for revision and for planning future mapping work. The final result will be a series of nigh quality maps that the community may use and continue to refine. How will they use them? The chairman of Tiltepec's natural resources committee plans to place copies of the maps in the local schools so that students can learn the Zapotec names of physical and cultural features. He sees the maps as a means of preserving the local knowledge of the community's elderly residents and of using that knowledge to teach their children the history of their place.

Mexico Indigena's participatory mapping project benefited all parties involved in the endeavor. Researchers gained a thorough understanding of communal resource management in an indigenous community. Students learned practical applications of field geography and field archaeology by working in difficult environments with expert local investigators and scholars. The community of Tiltepec gained the power to map their own lands. The presence of the Mexico Indigena team and the mapping skills acquired by the Tiltepecanos have enhanced their appreciation of their land as a resource to be protected. The maps they made, and will continue to make, heighten their sense of ownership. Their maps are declarations of possession, possession of the land and the history that their people have lived there.

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Scott Brady, a geographer at California State University-Chico, is collaborating on a project to re-photograph Eadweard Muybridge's collection of Central American images.