The air in Oaxaca’s Huatulco National Park is thick as soup, and the abundance of living things is so rich my senses feel saturated. Zapotec guide Perfecto Careno Ramirez brings the bounty into focus through memories of his childhood spent on this land. There’s the grado tree used to connect with ancestors in ceremonies; the cat nail vines’ roots that saved his friend by delaying a scorpion’s fatal sting; and the ‘ear tree’ with its tough seed cases his mother used to exfoliate when she bathed.
Numerous hotels in the area offer guided tours of the jungle, opalescent beaches and coral reefs, but I’ve booked through Huatulco Salvaje. Most members of this 12-strong Zapotec co-operative lived here before they were relocated in 1998 when the government declared Huatulco a national park. On the brightly painted porch of the co-operative’s office, founding member Sigifredo Castro tells me that, despite their unique relationship with the land, they struggle to compete with tours offered by large hotels. “The all-inclusive model is broken,” he says, shaking his head. “Tourists don’t come out to meet the people, and the money they bring is mostly taken out of Mexico.”
I began dreaming up this trip in Tulum while eating a £20 aguachile and doing my best to dodge the various Instagram shoots happening around me. I knew I wanted to connect with Mexicans interested in preserving their land and culture, but between the shiny beach bars and clubs blasting EDM, opportunities seemed few and far between. A Google search of community tourism projects led nowhere. Facebook pages with antique images suggested the owners were more interested in running their projects than promoting them, and with my poor Spanish, phone calls were awkward rather than illuminating.
Back in Oaxaca, I roll down the car window and watch hills covered in verdant jungle slide by. My friend Eytan Elterman, founder of Lokal Travel – a booking platform that champions small, community-run projects throughout Latin America – has stepped in. We’re on a scouting mission from Oaxaca’s epic coastline to its mountain-top capital looking for new additions to add to the platform.
“In Mexico, remote communities with limited access to business opportunities often resort to logging or mining to survive. Or they emigrate to the States, of course,” says Eytan, pausing to let a cow lumber across the road. “Community tourism empowers people to become stewards of their own land – not to mention offering travellers the opportunity to have cross-cultural exchanges that mean something.”
A few hours later, we’re in a smoke-blackened kitchen in the hamlet of San José Manialtepec. Angela Carmona and Jacinto Garcia, who have lived in this house for 50 years, are about to reveal the recipe for their signature cheese. It’s swelteringly hot and decidedly awkward. Although the cheesemaking workshop is available to book through Ecoturismo Manialtepec, the way Angela is silently twisting her skirt suggests that few travellers take them up on this offer. Eytan shudders as his forearms disappear into a bucket of whey, and everyone laughs. Angela rushes over and shows him how to pack it into the press that once belonged to her grandmother, her hands patting with the deftness of a master potter.
Later, Señora Gonzalez, who owns Ecoturismo Manialtepec alongside her husband, Ismael, feeds us mole to a soundtrack of bolero music floating over from the neighbouring yard. Although our faces are puce from our foray into fire cooking, we set about scooping up the deep, dark sauce with gusto. She tells us it has taken years of trial and error to perfect a recipe that includes cacao, five types of chilli roasted overnight, bread and a host of wild herbs.
As Eytan and I steam in the air-conditioned car, he reflects: “There’s a beautiful humility in what they offer here. She’s just spent two days cooking the best mole I’ve ever tasted but doesn’t make a big deal of it. That level of care is just part of her culture.”
At this point, I’m set to swear my allegiance to community tourism forever. However, my romanticised bubble ruptures at Ventanilla, where two co-operatives from the same community fight to offer crocodile-spotting tours in the lagoon where the Pacific swallows the Tonameca River. Before we’ve even left our car, two men – one from Lagarto Real Ventanilla, the other team from La Ventanilla – charge and begin to explain their tours' superiority.
I’m set to swear my allegiance to community tourism when my romanticised bubble ruptures as two co-operatives fight to offer crocodile-spotting tours in the lagoon where the Pacific swallows the Tonameca River.
Both groups emerged in the aftermath of hurricanes with a vision of restoring the mangrove forest – vital work since it provides flood protection and acts as a carbon sink – and both offer locals an alternative form of income to crocodile hunting. However, with more than 600 visitors a day between them, it’s an altogether less intimate experience.
“I’ve seen this in communities all over Latin America,” Eytan says as we walk across a beach littered with wood bleached like dinosaur bones, a calling card from Hurricane Agatha. “If the income from tourism isn’t divided fairly, factions begin fighting over the resources.”
It’s a very different story in Teotitlán del Valle, a petite pueblo of adobe buildings with tiled roofs located 20 miles from the city of Oaxaca. Like many Zapotec towns, Teotitlán specialises in a particular craft: rug weaving. We’re visiting the workshop of Vida Nueva, the first all-female weaving co-operative in Mexico, which fluctuates between 12 and 20 members. Economic pressures leading to alcoholism and domestic violence mean that many of these women are divorced and would otherwise struggle to find work due to the resulting stigma.
In the shaded workshop, founder Pastora Asunción Gutierrez Reyes’s 20-something daughter, Silvia, shows us the plants and minerals the women use to create dyes following formulas inherited from her great-great-grandmother. There’s cochineal, the insect that bleeds dragon’s blood red; marigold blooms for mustard yellow and Brazil wood pink. As she holds up each bowl, I notice the outline of an aeroplane tattooed on her wrist. “Most women my age in the village are married with several children,” she says. “I’m saving to go travelling.” With Silvia growing up with a keen understanding of the power of co-operatives, let's hope she can share the benefits of connecting with local communities on our travels, for everyone involved.
