Seeking Life Among the Fallow Fields of a Forgotten Agriculture: Illegal Logging and Maya Subsistence in the Managed Forests of Southeastern Mexico
Josemaría Becerril Aceves, Mexican PhD Student at the Social Anthropology Laboratory (EHESS, France) and Lecturer in Environmental Anthropology at the Côte d’Azur University
Cover photo: A Maya man cuts a thin trunk in an abandoned agricultural plot within the forest of Quintana Roo. Photo by the author, February 2022.
In mid-October 2021, I accompanied a group of Maya men to cut several trunks of chakte’ (Caesalpinia platyloba)—a tropical hardwood with an intense reddish hue highly demanded as beams by the construction sector for hotels, restaurants, and amusement parks in the Yucatán Peninsula of the Mexican Caribbean. Mexico’s primary international tourism destinations, the mass beach resorts of Cancún, Tulum, and Playa del Carmen, not only rely on cheap Indigenous labor (Córdoba-Azcárate, 2020), but also on the extraction of hardwood to sustain the material infrastructures of “boho-chic” bungalows, restaurants, and wellness centers. Maya men were well aware that they could not cut trees in their villages’ common forests, as logging has been strictly regulated there since the 1980s according to the principles of scientific forestry, and valuable species are also becoming unexpectedly scarce due to selective extraction hindering natural regeneration. Thus, the men decided to approach Don B., a prolific Maya farmer in his sixties. They asked whether they could enter one of his jubche’, a Maya term for forest patches that have regenerated naturally over many years in old clearings initially opened through traditional slash-and-burn agriculture.
Upon arriving at Don B.’s land, one of the team members enthusiastically expressed his satisfaction, pointing out that they would not need much time to locate and fell the trees. He remarked that, unlike in the officially designated forest management areas, where individual trees are often spread across vast distances of up to 50 hectares, in the jubche’, “the wood is all together and abundant.” The young workers took turns using the chainsaw to cut the chakte’ trunks. They were in good spirits and told me that, in Maya villages, contrary to what many Mexicans believe, there was a lot of money to be made through the trading of trees. Those could be most easily accessed by stepping outside of the legal forest management zones, venturing instead into the feral spaces of previous cultivation cycles. We hoisted a dozen trunks onto our shoulders and loaded them onto the pickup truck we had parked just a few steps from the jubche’. The next day, the Mestizo boss (patrón) who had purchased the logs would smuggle them to the coast. Although scientific forestry laws restrict legal logging to specific management zones, this article shows how contemporary Maya life projects challenge sustainability regulations by appropriating the unruly vegetal proliferation of the jubche’.
Figure 1: A pile of chakte’ logs waits to be loaded onto a truck. In the jubche’, hardwoods and other plants used in tourist infrastructure, such as lianas, proliferate due to past agricultural disturbance. Photo by the author, October 2021.
For this day of logging, the cutters would receive a fixed piece rate per tree shared among them, while the owner of the jubche’ would earn only a modest rent for granting access. Most of the revenue would therefore go to the Mestizo middleman, who transported the timber to the mass tourism zones on the eastern coast of the Yucatán Peninsula. Despite such economic disparity, K., the leader of the work crew, told me that he preferred spending the day cutting timber in a jubche’ rather than trying to fell and burn the trees to plant maize. The previous year, he had tried to cultivate one of the many jubche’ inherited from his late father, but all his time and effort were lost when heavy rains fell just a few days after sowing the maize seeds. The seeds rotted in the soil. K.’s misfortune is not rare, as erratic rains, droughts, and hungry wild animals displaced by logging have made harvests increasingly uncertain in Quintana Roo. K. concluded by saying something I often heard during my fieldwork here: losing his corn also meant losing his óol. During Spanish colonization, this Maya term was translated by missionaries as “heart” or “will” (Jiménez-Balam, 2024), but my interlocutors also used it to describe withered plants. Like the Maya disheartened by years of bad harvests, the maize also had lúubul óol (literally, its óol had gone down).
This more-than-human sorrow is hardly surprising when we consider the Maya’s millennia-old attachment to slash-and-burn, corn-based agriculture, known as kool (“to fell”) and more widely as milpa (Ford and Nigh, 2015). For the Maya, milpa is not merely a subsistence method but also a political technology, even a cosmic and ecological infrastructure. Cultivating their own maize allowed them to flee into the forested margins of the Yucatán Peninsula in order to escape exploitation on agave fiber plantations up until the 1900s (Farriss, 1984). Maize—known as the “grace” of God—provides dough for ritual tortillas and feeds the livestock offered to forest guardian spirits (the núukuch báalam or great jaguars)in exchange for their gifts. Older Maya men fear that breaking the “promise” to hold these annual rituals jeopardizes future harvests and even the cyclical temporality sustaining their world (Dapuez, 2011). Moreover, by following their parents into the milpa, children acquire the practical knowledge needed to care for crops, interact with forest animals, gather firewood, and maintain the more-than-human relations that bind Maya life to the tropical forest.
Figure 2: Beto, an experienced Maya farmer, shows how to fold corn stalks before harvest to protect them from birds. The milpa is a privileged site for transmitting ecological, symbolic, and technical knowledge. Photo by the author, September 2022.
However, during my fieldwork, I realized that most Maya men no longer frequented the forest to grow corn, but rather to work in the extraction of mahogany, cedar, and other tropical timber species. Trucks loaded with wood passed through Maya villages all day, while families eagerly awaited each week at the government store to receive maize sacks, as many had no milpas to grow their own food. Since the 1983 Pilot Forestry Plan (PFP) in Quintana Roo—a development project designed by German and Mexican engineers aimed at promoting “the rational use of forest resources as secure and attractive source of income for the local population” (Primack et al., 1998, p. 48)—the Maya have lost sovereignty over forest-related decision-making, as external experts imposed strict sustainability rules on their territories. PFP’s Forestry management relies on designating logging zones within the forest, where trees can be felled in 35-year cycles. Maya peasants are prohibited from practicing milpa agriculture within these areas, as fire is stigmatized as causing deforestation (Mathews, 2005). Traditional farming is limited to certain small areas of the forest where, in turn, commercial logging is not allowed. Forestry experts justify this mandatory division by framing nature as a resource to be “managed.” In a 2023 interview, a local representative of the internationally recognized Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) claimed that forestry made it possible to govern the forest like a household, with designated zones for each activity.
Figure 3: Forestry engineers post maps in local government buildings to show farmers which parts of the forest, often the majority, that are not allowed to use for their cornfields. They also show where logging must take place. Photo taken by the author in November 2024.
The strict rules and technical demands imposed by forestry engineers have turned many Maya communities into laborers for market-based conservation programs that combine timber extraction, reforestation, tree surveys, carbon accounting, and the delivery of so-called “ecosystem services.” Don Mariano, one of my interlocutors in the village where I cut the chakte’ trunks, is among the Maya whose lives have been altered by the PFP. He remarked that “Maize stopped growing altogether when engineers restricted access to the best agricultural areas in the 1980s.” In his village, 80% of the communal forest is off-limits to milpa agriculture, and forestry management plans extend well into the second half of the 21st century. Most notably, many young Maya men have neglected milpa agriculture and its cosmic implications, preferring forestry jobs instead. For Don Eusebio, the caretaker of the Maya church in the same village, timber brought money, and knowing they could buy their food, men forgot about the milpas and the rituals promised to the núukuch báalam for bringing abundant harvests. The future promised by forestry, in the name of national development and global environmental care, has thus colonized the everyday present of rural communities (Doganova, 2024).
Figure 4: A truck loaded with logs drives through a Maya village. Photo taken by the author in July 2023.
However, Maya subsistence practices do not always conform to the boundaries established by forestry regulations. Today, with milpa cultivation prohibited across large parts of the territory and most men employed in forestry, the tropical forest has become a mosaic of mature stands and old jubche’—fallow lands abandoned by the descendants of earlier peasant generations. For the few elderly Maya who still attempt to cultivate milpa, corn grows “sad,” or fails to grow at all, as they are forced to repeat the swidden cycle annually in the same depleted plots. In contrast, younger men like K. have realized that these jubche’ were not only useful for hunting game, as older generations had done, but also for harvesting precious and construction-grade timber beyond the limits imposed by forestry regulations. Indeed, due to high light levels, the fertilizing properties of ash, and low vegetal competition, tropical timber species tend to proliferate more rapidly, abundantly, and with greater diversity following anthropogenic disturbances such as felling and burning (Valdez-Hernández et al., 2014). In short, while scientific forestry regulations criminalize timber extraction outside designated logging zones, they have created the ecological conditions in which abandoned agricultural plots become crucial, but illegal, sites of an Indigenous “politics of survival” (Shiva, 1991) that defies official environmental rules.
It is not only capitalism that produces ruined environments (Tsing, 2015); sustainability does too. In Quintana Roo, fallow plots left behind by now-limited milpa rotations have become key sites in a paradoxical landscape: one where the most valuable timber grows precisely where cutting is prohibited, and where forestry experts predict it should not grow at all. Thus, many Maya men respond by working within the ambiguous margins left by sustainability and capitalism. The unruly ecology of the jubche’ not only challenges the predictions and prescriptions of scientific forestry, but the illicit—yet locally legitimate—practices it enables also offer a means of grappling with what Olivia Angé and David Berliner (2021) call “ecological nostalgia,” namely a longing for lifeways rendered impossible by environmental changes. Woodcutters like K. harness the ghostly traces of withering traditional agriculture not merely to supplement their incomes, but also to fund ritual celebrations in honor of the patron saints who are considered to be powerful intermediaries for dealing with the guardian spirits of the forest, such as John the Baptist and the Virgin of Guadalupe. In the weeks leading up to every December 12, the Virgin’s feast day, these families harvest more timber from the fallow jubche’ than at any other time of year to support their annual pilgrimage. While logging in these abandoned fields does not constitute an open refusal of forestry governance, it allows for the maintenance of Maya engagements to cosmic beings: at times, a sacred “promise” can sustain the longing for a better present beyond the empty assurances of a sustainable future.
Figure 5: A Maya family prepares for the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe. In the background we can see a spare wheel for a truck that a former timber buyer abandoned in the village. Photo taken by the author in December 2021.
Footnotes:
[1] Although Indigenous communities collectively own around 50% of Mexico’s rural land, their access to markets depends on local Mestizo elites who act as intermediaries. In Mexico, non-indigenous people with mixed European ancestry enjoy higher social status and economic power than Indigenous communities.
[2] In order to restore soil fertility in the region’s karstic limestone terrain, a landscape where water and nutrients are retained not in the soil but in the vegetation, Maya farmers traditionally left their old milpas fallow for years and traveled long distances in search of new mature forest to transform into charcoal (Fisher, 2020).