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MAPS AS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS OF KNOWLEDGE
After long sessions of analysis of all the materials, we were able to identify some tangible indicators as result of the mapping activity within the three communities at different scales:
Generation of thematic maps for the platform and validation.
The exercise let us identify which natural resources were more important to the community, San Pablo Chimalpa and San Mateo Tlaltenago showed a particular interest in their springs and trees, while in Santa Fe’s town they were worried about natural landscape and trees as supports if their home’s infrastructures since they are settled in the hillside near Rio Tacubaya. In the first two communities we noticed interest of recovering old pre-hispanic practices and language, they even refer to some places by referring to pre-hispanic names, they are also proud of speaking native languages and some individuals are keen on excavating their lands looking for archaeological object. With this information we developed thematic maps that will be part of the catalogue digital platform and had a preliminary session of feedback with the communities. As a result of the sessions we need to adjust some boundaries depicted on the collage maps and validate it with other neighbouring communities we are also thinking on generating a map with ancestral boundaries and pre-hispanic names.
The mapping activity trigger local action from the individual scale to collective actions. Some examples referred to the individual level: In one session some men from Chimalpa said they were willing to start their own pulque production after they socialized to their team members. There was a group that recovered traditional knowledge from an elderly woman that used to be a “leñera” women that carried in their backs (in absence of animal ownership), logs and wood chips from the sawmill in the forest to their towns to make a living. That woman couldn’t read or write, but orally accounted for the way she and her co-workers managed to transport the logs, she even remembered some prehispanic names the trees and places in the forest that were called “parajes” and corresponded to natural boundaries, she even remembered the names of the tools they use for carrying that they made with their own hands. Stories like these are evidence of how knowledge could be transferred from the elders to the youth within the community through the mapping process. The information generated at the workshop enabled participants to assume different roles while they communicate their ideas to others and supported equality in the decision-making processes,
The use of tactile and picture-based materials for map making was especially helpful for women of two communities in particular. These communities have a more cohesive social organization based on a ‘communal commissioner’ of the land, who holds a more traditional hierarchical and patriarchal division of labor within it. The objects used for the activity were made familiar to them through their materiality and encouraged them to speak their voice, especially for the elders in their group. In these situations, dominant men are the ones who usually tend to speak while others remain quiet, respecting their leader position for their group.
From individual to a collective activity
The processes of communication and coordination between individuals engaged in the collective activity of mapping has evolved between the participants and created some relationships binding them one to another, while we were doing follow up interviews with some of the participants we learned that some actions and initiatives have started from some of the groups, like women from the community of San Pablo, started a plant and herb recipe book which now is being worked with collaboration from students from our university.
From an interview to a community leader from Chimalpa, we learned that the community is meeting during the weekends to clean their rivers and also have initiated some consensus-based management that asks for the owners of private lands to tell the community leaders first, if he or she is planning to sell their land, so the land could stay within the community first.
In San Mateo, there has been some changes in the role of the community leaders and the politics of representing land tenure, that might have influence within their broader regions, some participants of the workshop are thinking about producing conservational areas maps to influence government land decision making in the construction of the inter-urban train coming from Toluca-Mexico.
Conclusions
The approach of mapping as a practice helped our academic team to overcome the high level of complexity that can marginalize poor communities from sharing their knowledge and beliefs of their territory. Our method provided the three groups with tangible information artefacts that let each person be aware of the spatial knowledge they possessed and how he or she can make immediate use of it. But more importantly it led beyond a common knowledge situation, where one or more people not only know something, but also all the others know, that they know. In other words, led to evidence their local knowledge among them.
By offering different ways to communicate their ideas, we also mobilized the information flow from one person to another and touch the community to a certain level, where the data endowed provided them with relevance and purpose regarding their natural resources. Specially by giving voice to women, an let them express their organizational routines, processes and practices in regard to their natural resources led men to recognize their primordial role in local knowledge.
All the memories evoked through the process of map making and embedded in the maps, made them reconnect with their personal and family history and understand their heritage regarded their natural resources. It empowered them by making them aware of their main risks and threats in their territory and established a hierarchy of resources that they needed to respond through collaborative and coordinated activities towards a positive change, instead of waiting for the government to do something.
Each community started actions according to their situation; in Chimalpa they are organizing weekend activities to clean the rivers, and a catalogue of traditional medicine and mushrooms in collaboration with students, In Tlaltenango they are looking for new alternatives to communicate their boundaries to the government, and in the Town of Santa Fe they are starting to communicate among neighbours.
The emergent voice of the community was pronounced and ascribed to different forms of acknowledgement regarding natural resources management.
There are still strong barriers to overcome when applying GIS technologies to participatory mapping with rural or indigenous communities in developing countries, mainly to limited financial resources and lack of technical skills that automatically sets an unbalanced situation, from the community to the few experts, that automatically positions local inhabitants at a disadvantage within a power position.
There are major problems to attend to regarding the map authorship of these initiatives and the unintended negative consequences of exposing the information generated by the community. Either purposefully or inadvertently we will end up with private or otherwise valuable community knowledge. In our case it took the form of the location of informal settlements. Depending on how we showed it, or to whom, and how it will be managed could mean further harm and/or marginalization of exploitation of the land to the disadvantage of these people.
Perhaps these kinds of initiatives can help apply more pressure and inform official decision-making processes, and location-based technologies will one day be more accessible to everyone, or maybe we might settle down into something more widely useful, but for now it is still essentially a well-intentioned technological mess and remains unclear how this technology will actually help address these issues.
The absence of best practices and standard methodologies it becomes crucial to assess the validity and credibility of mapping processes within the context of the purpose and its use. If we believe that the ultimate purpose of maps is to support the general prioritization of actions or to increase the adaptive capacity within a community, we need to come up with new methods that help communicate or narrow the gap between local people and government.
We might not have one unique answer for achieving a successful participatory mapping project, but we believe we have revealed a methodology to balance the intended purpose of a map, the available resources, capacity within the community, the duration of the commitment to the project, and finally a way to trigger action and reflection through the process of map making. We might not yet be able to free the power of maps to just a few groups, but we might be pushing to keep all the voices of the stakeholders in a territorial project within the same level. Perhaps even these are merely the preliminary stepping stones to help us rethink new technologies from a different perspective and a step forward to achieve a successful participatory mapping initiative.
We can agree with Kitchin’s statement that maps are never fully formed, and their work is never complete: they are transitory and fleeting, relational and context-dependent. My question to you would be how we would to establish a monitoring mechanism, and strategies to adapt to these constantly changing activities? The experience of this project is evidence of the truly fragile status of a place and these inhabitants. They face enormous pressures. At the moment I am narrating this story, these lands and natural resources of the three communities are being threatened and transformed by a giant infrastructural issue the construction of the Inter-urban train Toluca-Mexico which has caused the felling of many trees and species, as well as destruction of natural habitats near water springs land. It is doubtful to us that these projects used anything like a participatory map-making process as depicted in this paper. With this transformation the human activities and practices of people in this territory is being transformed too.
NOTES
1. This communities have pre-hispanic origins, some of the regions are even mentioned in pre-hispanic codex as part of the villages in the outskirts of the mountains, there are still residents that remember their parents speaking indigenous tongues like: Nahuatl and Otomi.
2.A Mexican alcoholic beverage made by fermenting sap from the “maguey” a variety of fleshy-leaved agave plant known as “Century plant”.
2018 Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference Proceedings, pp. 125–143, ISSN 1559-8918