Cross-Pollination: It's All About Timing

Another trip to the field, with two weeks left here in Mexico. This was another return visit to a community I went to a few weeks ago to interview the community leader. This time the goal was to do the focus groups with people who use agaves, as well as do a night of bat/agave camera monitoring. Unfortunately, as has been characteristic of this whole summer, things didn’t go quite according to plan. Temo, Ana, and I arrived in the evening and went back to the leader’s house to meet with him and get the focus groups going. However, I had not been able to contact him ahead of time, despite numerous texts and phone calls. There is no phone reception in the community, and while he had told us on our last visit that he is in Monterrey Thursdays and Fridays, I was still not able to get in touch with him during those days. So I was just hoping that he would remember that we had a visit scheduled for these days and that I wanted to do the focus groups. That didn’t work out so well...We couldn’t find him. So we went to the house of one of Temo’s friends who lives in the community, and she took us to meet with the leader’s dad, who is one of the few people in the community who harvests agaves and makes “mezcal”. Ana and I had a great almost two-hour conversation with him while Temo and his friend drove around the area looking for flowering agaves to monitor that night. We learned all about the history of mezcal making in the community, the process to make it, a medicinal use of mezcal (when mixed with sewing machine oil it’s apparently a great thing to put on cuts, burns, etc. to promote faster healing), and the best part: we got to try some! We got to try some of his very own mezcal, as well as some of his apple wine. Mmm, both so tasty! The mezcal was definitely a lot smokier than the “destilado” one of the other communities makes. That’s because the process he uses is a bit different: he collects agua miel from the agaves and ferments it in vats (like the other community does), but instead of distilling the fermented liquid (the pulque) to make the destilado, he cooks the agave pinas in earthen ovens, chops them up, and adds them to the vat of fermenting agua miel, and lets the mixture sit like that for a few days, and THEN distills the liquid. It’s amazing how everyone has their own process, and the results are definitely different!

After a great conversation and some tasty perks, Temo reported back that they had found some agaves with flowers, but the flowers weren’t open yet. Which meant we couldn’t monitor them (not open = no nectar for the bats). We decided to come back to Monterrey, and hopefully on our visit next week the flowers will be open. Cross your fingers (or as they say here, “Haz changos” (literally meaning “make monkeys”))!

While the missed timings and the ever changing plans are getting frustrating, at least for next year I will know better when to go to each community and how to coordinate visits with the community leaders.