From Gatherers to Certified Growers: Tensions and Articulations about Territorial Knowledge at the Biological Reserve of the Tuxtlas Biosphere, Veracruz (México)

Abstract

This paper discusses how, in the context of creating a protected natural area, new territorializations are generated that overlap existing territories and territorializations. Each of these territorializations is embedded in particular territorial knowledge, which responds to sometimes conflicting interests and valuations of nature. We analyzed how the creation of a protected natural area, based on expert territorial knowledge, impacted the modalities and possibilities of access to forest resources that were essential for the family economy of several populations. We show that around the harvest of a non-timber forest resource existing in the mountain, the peasants created their territorial knowledge. The change from the resource’s extraction to its cultivation disrupted this territorial knowledge. The results presented here are the product of a long-field work that combined action-research and ethnographic work.