Floating Garden Geopoetics: More-than-human Collaborations in Xochimilca Foodways

A labyrinthine network of canals stretches across Lake Xochimilco in southern Mexico City; this landscape is made up of chinampas – small islands used as cultivation plots, constructed on the lake using organic matter, mud, and bonpland willows. Their uniqueness and beauty have earned them the romantic epithet of ‘floating gardens’, though chinampas are not floating, but anchored in place by willow roots. This foodscape, inhabited by diverse species, developed over centuries of constant cultivation and survived hydric policies that desiccated the rest of the Basin of Mexico. Today, Xochimilco still supplies Mexico City with large amounts of food and water.

In this context, I explore the geopoetics of the practice of chapín, where mud from the lake’s bottom is used to make seedbeds. This exploration will show how traditional food production techniques can lead to relations and collaborations with our environment, including non-humans, and how this affects the ways we see and value nature and its inhabitants. I approach chapin through two vignettes: mud collecting in the canals of Xochimilco and cutting mud and sowing seeds in the chinampas. Both vignettes come from tequios, a form of collective work that has relational and political implications that extend beyond the human. The materials I present here were gathered through ethnographic fieldwork in Xochimilco, undertaken as part of a wider transdisciplinary research project – Cocina Colaboratorio – which uses a participatory action research approach.

In this paper I bring together questions of geopoetics and cosmopolitics with the blue humanities and the recent relational turn of sustainability science, which posits the need for diverse ontologies and epistemologies of nature to be considered. Thus, my work surveys what traditional Xochimilca foodways can teach us for building a more just and sustainable future.