The territory that feels
Rebeca Altamirano, who is from the San Andrés Tlayehualancingo community in the northern mountains of Puebla, Mexico, and is part of the Totonac people, clearly remembers the year 2011: “We learned of the plan to build 14 hydroelectric dams on the Ajajalpa River. Private investors, including companies such as Walmart, wanted to generate their own energy”.
The young biotechnologist disagrees with this imposed development model, which was implemented without consulting the people who live in the region and has serious consequences for nature. Fascinated by traditional medicine and ancestral knowledge, she decided to join the Totonaco Regional Council, an organization supported by the Mexican Institute for Community Development (IMDEC), which strengthens territorial defense processes and emancipatory political projects in different regions of the country.
“There was no shortage of threats, intimidation, or criminalization of the protest”, Rebeca recalls, “but in 2018, with legal support from IMDEC, we managed to get the hydroelectric plan canceled”.
Today, Rebeca is part of the institution’s young team, supported by aid organizations such as Misereor. “If we don’t take care of our territory, no one else will – least of all the government”, she says with conviction. The communities have learned to monitor logging and clay extraction themselves, ensuring that they comply with sustainable management plans. However, they also face new threats: the loss of young people to migration or drug addiction. “Communication technologies help, but they also bring risks. Many young people dream of moving to the cities”.
In the Totonac worldview, nature is not a resource, but a living being with whom a bond of reciprocity and respect is maintained. Through herbal medicine workshops and women’s gatherings, Rebeca accompanies processes of healing and strengthening the female voice within the Totonac Regional Council. Historical memory also drives her commitment. “In 1970, there was a massacre in Monte de Chila, in the municipality of Jopala”, she says. “Totonac women, men, and children were killed for claiming their right to the land. It was one of the greatest injustices in our history. The community’s crime was to defend its territory. And that is not forgotten”.
Territory that resists, memory that flourishes
In the northern mountains of Puebla, the risk remains latent. The state and corporations stalk the territories of communities that still resist, defending the land as if caring for a living body. “Our resistance,” says Rebeca, “is also a way of not forgetting the massacre.” At the University of Puebla, a book entitled: Y por la tierra, la vida: Monte de Chila y el inmutable silencio (And for the land, life: Monte de Chila and the unchanging silence), collects that wounded memory and brings it back to the present as a testimony and a warning.
For Rebeca, hope lies in young people, in the possibility that their life projects will be born out of autonomy. “Vocational education,” she says, “often drives them away; they seek their future elsewhere, when their roots are here. Agroecology could be the thread that brings them back.”
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Based on your cultural background: to what extent have culture and constructive identity, and linked to this, defined gender and intergenerational roles have undergone a reconfiguration? If so, how could such a reconfiguration be encouraged?
From the Center for Encounter and Dialogue of Knowledge (CEDES), IMDEC promotes the Rural Schools of Construction and Knowledge (ECAS): workshops where the earth teaches, hands create, and knowledge flourishes collectively. There, women play an essential role: they translate the content into Totonaco, returning knowledge to their mother tongue. In this way, learning travels further, multiplies, and reaches other women, other communities, and other hopes.
The outlook in the state of Puebla is not encouraging. Thirty-five municipalities in the northern mountains are under threat from fracking projects, while the state-owned company Pemex continues to exert pressure on these areas. So far, community resistance has managed to halt several of these plans. In Ixtacamaxtitlán, an open-pit gold and silver mine poses a serious environmental risk, though communities in other areas have succeeded in cancelling mining concessions through legal appeals. Added to this are President Claudia Sheinbaum’s recent election promises to create 100 industrial corridors, which could open new frontiers for dispossession. While alleviating some needs, the social support programs promoted by former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador could also demobilize people from actively defending their territories.
When the community is built by women's hands
IMDEC and the MesoAmeri-Kaab Network (kaab, “earth” in Mayan), bring together organizations that defend the right to build with raw earth through Popular Education and Territorial Defense. With the support of Misereor, they promote the Schools of Peasant Construction and Knowledge (ECAS), spaces where words, earth, and bodies learn at the same pace. Some schools are mixed; while others, designed exclusively for women, are created as safe havens. Sandy Minier, who coordinates ECAS, recalls: “Only women attended the last school. Many of us shared what we experience in our communities: the lack of privacy, unsafe spaces, and invasive stares. And we understood that building a house is also building a place where the body can dwell without fear.” Thus, was born the decision to create modules exclusively for women, where learning to build earthen walls is also learning to establish boundaries of dignity. Based on Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of learning-by-doing, ECAS sows knowledge of eco-technologies: wattle and daub, adobe, water collection, filters, dry toilets, ecological gardens… Knowledge that springs from the earth and returns to it.
Rosa Méndez has walked all the ECAS. She and her husband built their earthen house together; then, after his death in an accident, she continued building as if healing a wound with warm mud. “Working the land helped me through my grief”, she says. “Sharing what I’ve learned is like giving my feelings to him, wherever he may be”. Rosa radiates a contagious strength. In her community of Cuacuila, she has passed on what she has learned with young people in secondary school, thanks to the school principal´s openness: rainwater harvesting, school gardens, small projects that are seeds of autonomy. A mother of two daughters, fluent in Nahuatl, she is a catechist, workshop leader, treasurer, councilor… and, above all, a woman who believes in the power of hands working together.
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However, getting to school isn’t always easy for women. That’s why IMDEC and the MAK Network have adapted ECAS to suit their schedules and needs, offering two-day sessions and spaces where participants can bring their children. The activities are designed to accommodate all ages. Then something beautiful happens: the children don’t just watch from the sidelines — they get stuck in the mud, molding adobe bricks and plastering walls. They watch their mothers, sisters and grandmothers build, and something in them changes. Sandy puts it this way: “It’s powerful to see how their world opens up when they understand that building isn’t just for men, and that earth, mud and fiber are living materials that are still ours”. In these spaces of trust, the earth teaches. And, together with it, women rebuild their territory.
Learning path
The first ECAS emerged in 2011, taking root like small clay seeds in the hands of the community. The first workshop was with a housing cooperative, and, at the time, the agenda was simple: building with earth. Over time, however, the focus broadened from houses to territories, from clay to life, and from techniques to resistance. The critical path became clear, although it often remains hidden from view: it is not possible to build with earth if the earth is being depleted, nor to build a living house if the forest, water or clay are at risk. In rural areas, any attempt to improve life awakens the appetite of invasive capital and the circle of dispossession is completed by extractive logic. Therefore, without caring for the land – without regenerating ecosystems and curbing exploitation – the possibility of building authentically and lovingly is also jeopardized. Another profound challenge remains: the invisibility of women in building cultures. ECAS is seeking to heal this wound step by step.
ECAS transmits and recovers knowledge about habitats and natural construction. It encourages application, replication and sharing of techniques and opens avenues for addressing community processes. Currently, there are six active replication processes underway, four of which are in the northern mountains of Puebla, and these are supported by Red MAK and IMDEC. Together, they have implemented ten eco-techniques (dry toilets, rainwater harvesting, grease traps, biofilters, wattle and daub walls, lime and earth plastering, among others), as well as five eco-gardens which are already thriving.
One such process is underway in the indigenous community of Santiago Tepeixco in Zacatlán municipality, an hour’s drive up the mountain. As a result of the ECAS, the Tenoxtitepe group was formed there. Consisting of around twenty people, mostly women, the group has built an adobe and wattle-and-daub hut with a dry toilet and water collection system. They dream of developing it into a small ecotourism site where visitors can enjoy the silence, the springs and the land’s history. María Luisa Garrido, a group member, says, “We are protecting the springs and planting trees; we have experienced droughts. People from the city love this place”. However, in a community of more than a thousand families, there is no shortage of suspicious glances and envious neighbors. Initially, there was institutional support, but now the new authorities are creating obstacles. Nevertheless, the group is now flying solo: they make blueberry marmalade and promote the installation of dry toilets in private homes, paving the way where before there was only silence. Women, men, older people and young people have all participated in building the cabin. Doña María González shares: “The children, our children and grandchildren, enjoy coming here. They love the cabin and helping us work with our hands and the earth”. María Luisa adds with a smile: “People who come here are sure to enjoy learning about and working with earth”.
Tell us what you think and felt, and how these stories relate to your own life. Share your opinions and insights about this motivating experience on our social media, and let’s join voices to build a meaningful tomorrow.
Messages to the Future
1
The processes supported by IMDEC and the MAK Network achieve reciprocal convergence: defending and resisting the territory while simultaneously rescuing and rebirthing constructive cultures. This is achieved through reconfiguring roles in terms of both gender and intergenerational relations.
2
Rather than viewing and managing knowledge and expertise from a culture of competitiveness as elements of power and domination, they can awaken a sense of community, shared responsibility and mutual nurturing if viewed with a sense of belonging and mutual care.
3
It is believed that collective knowledge can break the siege of invasive capital. When a community organizes itself, the territory ceases to be a ‘resource’ and becomes a home again. The power of ECAS as a seedbed of autonomy is evident, with each replica being an act of multiplying dignity. There also remains the certainty that the most profound lessons are those shared without haste or fear. The idea that defending the territory is defending the very possibility of inhabiting it remains. Building with earth is a political gesture, a way of saying, “here we are”.
This article was written by Jorge Krekeler, coordinator of the Almanac of the Future and facilitator for Misereor on behalf of Agiamondo, visiting the House for Encounter and Dialogue of Knowledge – CEDES in Zacatlán, as well as the communities of Cuacuila and Santiago Tepeixco in the northern mountains of Pueblo in Mexico, sharing conversations and dialogues over three days in September 2025.
The Almanac of the Future thanks Humberto Castorena, Rebeca Altamirano, Isidro Herrera, and Silvia Villaseñor from the Mexican Institute for Community Development (IMDEC) and Sandy Minier, IMDEC member and collaborator for the MesoAmeri-Kaab Network (MAK Network) for their support, and the entire IMDEC team for their hospitality and trust. Special thanks to Rosita Méndez, director Margarita Castelan, and the students of Cuacuila Secondary School: María Teodora González, María Luisa Garrido, Salvador Cruz, María Sofía Cruz, Fernando Cruz, María Martina Sosa, María Eugenia Velasco, Antonio Nochebuena, and Martha Marín from the community of Santiago Tepeixco for their time and for sharing their readings and opinions with the Almanac of the Future.
Authors:
- Jorge Krekeler | jorge.krekeler@posteo.de
Design:
- Gabriela Avendaño
Photos:
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- IMDEC
- RedMAK
- Jorge Krekeler
Contact information regarding the documented experience:
- Mexican Institute for Community Development – IMDEC
- www.imdec.net
- Facebook: IMDEC A.C.
- Instagram: imdecac
- Red MesoAmeri-Kaab – Red MAK
- Facebook: RedMAK
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- www.imdec.net
- Facebook: IMDEC A.C.
- Instagram: imdecac
- X: imdecac
Edition:
JUNI 2026
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