When he died, his house was abandoned, it fell apart little by little from the rain and the sun, the plants climbed through the windows and the earth with which it was built was reintegrated to its source.
In the rural territories of Mexico, the act of building homes with earth is so ancestral that one can’t find a specific date for when this practice began; some written chronicles date it back to the 15th century. What is certain is that in the past, Mesoamerican civilizations founded their territories with earth and stone construction systems.
However, this practice was displaced as a result of colonization processes, technological development, and new forms of exploitation to obtain construction materials in Abya Yala (an ancient name for this continent meaning “living, mature or flourishing land ” in the Kuna language). In other words, adobe construction was transformed by other systems and architectures based on nonrenewable materials.
Eventually, the construction of Earth houses went from being the norm to being called “poor people’s houses,” which discriminates against indigenous peoples and rural populations who have largely continued to use these construction systems. Thus, the hands that built these houses are a testament to the resistance and resilience of entire communities.
It is important to understand also that houses tell stories, are part of the living memory of each territory, are a dignified and valid way of inhabiting that can be redefined, especially when it has become a way of living rapidly eroded by urban tarnish, forced migration, and real estate speculation.
This is the story of the resistance of the houses of Tierra in Xiquipilli and of those who inhabit them.
A Dignified Way of Living
For locals, these houses represent deep roots to their history and identity:
It represents my life itself, because many generations lived and died in it, who passed on important lessons, values, experiences, and customs. Because in them we remember part of our childhood and adolescence, and where the family bond was very strong. Responsibility, solidarity, the culture of effort was instilled in us at an early age. And that allowed you to imagine that you could achieve many things. (Elías Delgado, master adobero)
Adobe houses are surprisingly resistant and represent a whole ecosystem in themselves, because they seem to be alive even when they are not inhabited. When they are no longer lived in, they quickly deteriorate and are reintegrated into the earth with which they were built, reminding us again of the impermanence cycle of life and things.
Adobe houses are mainly made of earth, effort, tile, knowledge, wood, water, patience, ocoxal, and straw. Earth houses are highly thermal: they retain heat during the cold season and are cool during the hot season, which helps us to cope with the ravages of climate change. Like this year, when maximum temperatures reached 29 degrees Celsius, 0.6 more than the annual summer average.
The testimonies of the people interviewed show that the construction of adobe houses has radically decreased, because they opt for other types of materials, partly because the predominant perception is that concrete houses mean progress.
Fortunately, some efforts have been made to share knowledge about other construction systems. People have published manuals and have built designs to make bioconstruction processes more efficient, which are also available on the Internet, with innovative designs that can be adapted based on people’s needs.
Adobe houses still shelter children’s sleep, they protect hundreds of grandparents from the heat and the cold, they protect young people from the street, and represent home to hundreds of people in this community. They are inherited millenary construction systems that go beyond their materiality, because they represent resilience, resistance, and intelligence, because they do not generate serious socioenvironmental devastation, unlike those built with nonrenewable materials.
It is a way of inhabiting that is constantly attacked by colonial classist and racist stereotypes, and represents, in itself, a dignified and humble way of inhabiting the Earth.
Architecture and Engineering as Extractive Powerhouses
By questioning current paradigms about housing, we also break the extractive and colonial chains that determine our ways of inhabiting.
The high demand for materials used to build cities, mega-projects, housing areas, etc., promotes the exploitation and ecocide of natural, rural, and indigenous areas. This situation is common in the field of architecture and industrial engineering.
In Xiquipilli, quarry and gravel mines have wreaked ecocide on nearby forests and hills, where a large number of trees have been cut down, animals have been dispossessed of their land, and water bodies have been depleted.
These ecocides have been denounced by the community of Endexto in Xiqupilli, and although they managed to close one of the main mines in 2017, special interests remain in place, while governmental mechanisms to protect both natural areas and those who defend the territory are nonexistent.
Locals have denounced the corruption that takes place between those who buy large plots of land and local governments. They also point out that fires have strategically taken place in highly speculative areas, with the aim of pushing for changes to land regulations and thus, the exploitation of mines can proceed.
The appropriation of knowledge about traditional construction systems is also a constant. Such is the case of Mayan houses and the use of chukum, a tree native to Mexico, an endemic-plant for bioconstruction, which represents knowledge that is in high demand by the international real estate industry.
This is being done under the premise of avant-garde sustainable architecture, but it is a sustainability that lacks an economic or decolonial analysis. It merely represents an international agenda and branding scheme to seemingly offer changes in consumption practices, in the face of the global environmental crisis, when in reality it is just voracious capitalism. Its adaptability, however, propitiates a growing appropriation of peoples’ biocultural knowledge and resources. It is a discursive revamping of the same extractive logic in indigenous and rural territories, under a new assumed morality with respect to environmental care.
Extractivism is a constant in these territories. It is a chain of multiple intellectual, economic, political and cultural exploitation in communities that, through ancestry and intelligence, have learned to coexist without generating great environmental destruction.
Inhabited Houses Tell Stories of Separated Families
Adobe houses also bear witness to issues of migration, family separation, and the constant struggles of women, who are the caretakers of children (the future) and grandparents (ancestors).
A family and their two daughters lived in this house, where this photo was taken, in the early 1990s. The lack of access to services and guaranteed rights, such as education and employment, did not allow them to remain in the territory, so when they came of age, they migrated to the United States.
Life went on, their mother and father died, and the sisters never returned because they lacked the necessary documentation. The house was therefore abandoned and some of its walls fell down, exposing tender murals that the sisters had painted as children.
Currently, the abandoned house has become a refuge for a young man from the same community, who lost cognitive abilities in an accident and, due to the lack of social and medical assistance, fell into a deep depression and addiction.
In cases like this one, it is possible to observe the vulnerability experienced by rural youth due to the lack of guaranteed rights, which is the main reason for the massive migration that has been occurring for decades in search of opportunities to support their families.
Two elderly people live in this other house, not so far away from the first one, who have dedicated their whole lives to farming. Their children migrated to the city and they only see them twice a year. Their nephew and a neighbor are the ones who assist them and take care of them daily, make tortillas for them and bring them firewood for cooking. In spite of their advanced age, both men are still devoted to taking care of animals, planting corn, and cultivating medicinal plants that they sell from time to time.
This house, we were told, is almost 120 years old and was built by the owner’s great-grandfather and great-grandmother. It is in need of restoration, but it is still very stable. It is inhabited by two young women who take care of two elderly people and their three children, who are still learning to walk and talk. They say that their husbands also migrated for work and that they return only from time to time.
In these cases, where most of the men migrate, it is the women who are left in charge of all the work of caring for and raising their families, as well as planting corn, beans, squash, oats, and vegetables to feed the family and some animals.
Finally, in this other house lives an elderly lady with a very friendly personality. She told us that she has almost lost her eyesight and is accompanied by an adult son with Down syndrome. She also said that when as a child she worked in the city and that life was quite difficult for her because as a domestic worker she suffered mistreatment, racism, and humiliation, so she decided to return to the countryside and some time later, she got married. A few years ago her husband died and she and her son continue to work in the fields.
“I would only go to work to bring money for my family, but sooner or later one comes back because life in the city is more difficult when you are poor and don’t know anyone.” (personal communication, anonymous).
Conclusion
By doing a decolonial and historical contextual analysis of how the knowledge of ancestral construction with Earth and the people who embody these practices are situated, we can begin to apply epistemic justice. It is also a summon for new generations of rural people to value and recognize the legacies that today can represent great strengths in the face of ongoing crises: the climate crisis, forced migration, the lack of access to housing as a human right, a physical-spatial need inherent to our socialized humanity.
At present, aspiring to housing means going into debt with public and private companies, which is distributed based on an economic order that is often racist and classist.
Therefore, traditional construction systems and, in this case, adobe houses represent people’s self-determination to guarantee the right to housing, the right to self-construction, and the right to sustainable and sustainable self-design, and all this thanks to an ancestral legacy that can be taken, safeguarded, and re-signified by today’s rural youth.
Each house tells a story that makes the systematic neglect of the most vulnerable bodies and life in the countryside visible, reminding us of latent wounds caused by inequality and, at the same time, showing the strength and resilience of rural life.
Population growth is exponential and rural areas are rapidly absorbed by the urban stain. Unplanned real estate speculation is overwhelming, as well as migration, extractivism, and returning home, which places us in a scenario where it is necessary to ask ourselves: how could we live in the future, knowing today’s social and environmental context?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
De Grammont, Hubert C. (March-April 2016). “Hacia una ruralidad fragmentada: La desagrarización del campo mexicano.” Nueva sociedad 262, p. 1. https://nuso.org/articulo/hacia-una-ruralidad-fragmentada-la-desagrarizacion-del-campo-mexicano/.
Matiúwàa, Hubert. (2022). “El cómo del filosofar de la gente piel.” In Xó Nùnè Jùmà Xàbò Mè’Phàà: El cómo del filosofar de la gente piel, cap. 4. Iztapalapa, México: Ediciones del Lirio.
Robert, Jean. (1999). “Libertad habitar.” In Libertad habitar, cap. 3. Barcelona: Habitat International Coalition.
Robert, Jean. (2021). “El arte de habitar no se deja alfabetizar.” International Journal of Illich Studies 8 (2), pp. 201-210. https://journals.psu.edu/illichstudies/article/view/62595/61740.
