Cross-Pollination: The Summer of Dead Cars

Wow, this sure has been the summer of dying batteries and car problems! We (Isra, Ana, and I) got back yesterday from a 2-day trip back to the community we visited earlier this week, and boy was it a production trying to arrange the trip! It all started when I found out two days before leaving that the truck isn’t working (the battery had died last week, but I thought it had been fixed…). So then I had to find another mode of transportation. Isra’s car isn’t an option (since he was in an accident a few weeks ago and his car is still out of commission) so I asked Ana if we could go in her car. Luckily she said yes. However, around 8:00pm the night before our trip, she texted me saying that her husband’s car had stopped working and he needed to use her car the next day. That left me to scramble that night to figure out what to do. I settled on renting a car. Not ideal given my budget, but I really had to make this trip (I had already arranged it with the comisariado of the community), so I sucked it up and decided to rent a car for the two days. Luckily the community we were going to is located right off the major highway and no four-wheel drive is needed, so I could get the cheapest car available.

Luckily the car troubles stopped there, and we were able to make the trip. We arrived in the community at 5:30 (about an hour later than we had planned given the emergency car rental situation) and were greeted with glasses of pulque from the comisariado. This was my first time trying pulque, and it was DELICIOUS! Pulque is an alcoholic beverage with the alcohol content of beer. It is fermented agua miel, with a milky/cloudy appearance. This batch was mixed with pineapple juice so it wasn’t pure pulque, but man was it good!

My first pulque! Mixed with pineapple
juice, it was a sweet treat!

After finishing our glasses, the comisariado and the engineer in charge of their new agave program took us to see their massive numbers (thousands) of planted agaves on the ejido’s land. It looked like a jungle of flowering agaves. I asked the comisariado why so many of the agaves were flowering (since he had said before that each flowering agave is a loss of about 2000 pesos (about $107) in profit) and he said that before they hadn’t had the resources available to harvest them and that the people weren’t very aware of all the products you can make from agaves (and therefore the money you can make), but now with their new government program they are going to be harvesting most of them. If there are bats in the area that feed from these agaves, this will definitely have conservation implications!

A goat road block

Look at all those flowering agaves!

We then drove to a nearby ejido where they also harvest agaves for various products, including agua miel and miel espesa/jarabe (thick honey/syrup). Along the way we stopped at a small “hut” made of dried agave quiotes (stalks) where an old man and his wife sell several agave products, including the cooked quiote (which is sweet and which you chew and swallow the juice, but spit out the fibers), agua miel, miel espesa, and pulque. Their pulque was A LOT different from the comisariados’ pulque. This one wasn’t mixed with any fruit juice, and it was REALLY acidic, kind of like apple cider vinegar. The taste isn’t great, but the man said it’s great for diabetes and health in general!

The owner showing us the cooked quiote

(agave stalk) pieces that he sells.

The walls and roof of the stand are made

out of dried quiotes.

Once in the ejido, we met with the former comisariado and got to see his cooking station for agua miel and miel espesa, and we got to try his miel espesa. It was a lot different than the one we tried in Tepozanes in the mountains a few weeks ago. The Tepozanes one was sweet but very smoky, while this one was just really sweet (and yummy!). Apparently this is because in Tepozanes they use wood stoves to cook it, while here they use gas stoves.

Hot miel espesa (boiled from the agua miel)

After our treat session, he took us around his property to show us where he grows and harvests agaves, as well as the process to harvest them. It was fascinating! You first have to find an agave that is “ready” to be “broken”. You can tell it’s ready to be broken by the curved center/top leaves. Once you’ve found a plant to break, you have to use a machete to slice the leaves length-wise and fold them back so you can enter the center of the plant. Then you use a bar to chop away at the base of the newly emerging stalk. The verb for this process is “capar”, which literally translated means “to castrate”. They call it this because when they chop the stalk off, they are preventing it from growing and producing flowers, thereby “castrating” it. When this process is done, they cut a little piece from the chopped stalk and hang it on a leaf tip so they can later quickly assess which plants in the field have already been castrated. Once an agave has been castrated, it can be left in the field for up to a year before “working” it for agua miel (by carving out a hole in the base). In this way, a person can castrate agaves whenever they become “ready”, and then throughout the year can collect agua miel as they need/want it from these plants.

Step 1: Find an agave that is "ready", as shown by the curved leaf tips in the center.

Step 2: Slice the leaves lengthwise to reach the center/base of the plant.

Step 3: Chop away at the emerging stalk, thereby "castrating" it.

Step 4: You're done! The agave can be left for up to 1 year before "working" it.

Step 5: Stick a piece of the chopped quiote on a leaf tip to show that the plant has been "castrated".

Look at the size of this agave!!!

The seeds (black) within the fruit.

The agaves planted in rows on the former comisariado's parcel.

After a couple hours, we headed back to the first community to discuss our game plan for the bat/agave camera monitoring that night. Unfortunately, the hundreds of agaves that we had seen flowering in the community’s land had flowers that were too old to produce nectar (they were already producing fruits) and therefore were not suitable for monitoring. I should have come about two weeks earlier…But Isra had seen a couple younger agave flowers back in the other community, so after driving around a bit to scout out another lead from a community member, we headed back to this site and set up. However, before heading out, the comisariado gave us some more pulque, this time with a bit of the agave destilado added. It was yummy! This destilado, although made from agaves just like mezcal and tequila are, did not taste or smell like mezcal or tequila. It smelled and tasted much more like a plant, and wasn’t smoky. The comisariado said this is because the destilado is distilled from the pulque (which is obtained by fermenting the agua miel, which was collected directly from the agave plant), while mezcal and tequila are made by cooking the agave piñas (bases) and distilling the resulting juice. I must admit that on my empty stomach and after seven weeks of pretty much no alcohol, I was slightly buzzed when we headed out. But luckily not too much! Unfortunately, we didn’t see any bats during our three hours of monitoring (from 1:00am to 4:00am), but it was a peaceful, starry night (although cold!) and I always enjoy being out in the field.

The next morning after Ana and I did the agave survey around the focal agaves, we drove back to the community and I was able to do my first household survey. Household surveys contain a set/standardized list of questions, and I will be doing the surveys with people who use agaves in the communities. Because of the more structured nature of household surveys versus key informant interviews (with the same questions asked in the same order each time) they allow better comparison between communities and allow for statistical analysis of the data. This first household survey served as sort of a “pre-test” to allow me to see which questions work/are understood, which questions need to be revised, and which need to be tossed out in future surveys. This “practice” one was a bit long, so I’ll need to go back and revise it later. But it was good to give it a go!

Tomorrow we’ll be heading to another community for focus groups and hopefully a night of monitoring, if the weather and the cars cooperate. Tune in later for more updates!