El monocultivo y el ecuaro: aspectos y genealogías de la modernización agrícola en San Miguel Zapotitlán, México

This article explores the arrangements between humans, non-humans, and the more-than-human that have resulted from the modernization of agriculture in the ejido of San Miguel Zapotitlán in the town of Poncitlán, Mexico, since the 1950s. The photographs capture a kind of farming with a lineage that combines the green revolution with the practices and knowhow of rural dwellers. Besides pointing to the affinities and tensions between traditional and modern, local and global, and autonomy and dependency, the article shows how monocropping (corn and wheat) coexists with intercropping (ecuaro) and spirituality in agriculture. Additionally, they capture how commercial and subsistence farming require a certain “way of looking”: a close observation of the environment by traditional rural dwellers that new farmers are eager to incorporate.