México Indígena

Mexico Indigena is the prototype project of the Bowman Expeditions, an initiative of the American Geographical Society to organize international teams of geographers to research potentially important place-based issues and restore the role of geographers as advisors to U.S. government foreign policy.

The Mexico Indigena project began in 2005, and the bulk of its work will end in 2008. Led by a multinational team of Latin Americanist geographers, including Peter Herlihy and Miguel Aguilar Robledo, it focuses on the geography of Mexico's indigenous populations and the changes in the cultural landscape and conservation of natural resources resulting from the gargantuan land certification and privatization program called PROCEDE.

Mexico Indigena's primary method for obtaining and understanding data is participatory research mapping (PRM). In PRM, local investigators, chosen by the communities, are trained by the researcher in geographic data gathering techniques. Cognitive mental (individual) maps are converted to consensual (community) maps, including only features whose nature, name, and coordinates have been verified. These are then converted to standardized maps, which the communities may choose to use educational, political, legal, or other, unexpected purposes. Participatory maps of resource-use areas, for example, have been used successfully for indigenous territorial claims in Panama (Herlihy 2003) and elsewhere. Mexico Indigena's primary tool for joining data from different sources to produce maps and to analyze trends is Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

Sponsoring and collaborating institutions of the Mexico Indigena research project have included the University of Kansas (US), the Autonomous University of San Luis Potosi (Mexico), the Foreign Military Studies Office (US), and the Mexican federal environmental agency SEMARNAT.

SOURCES: Dobson, J. 2006. AGS Conducts Fieldwork in Mexico. Ubique. Vol 26, No. 1.
Herlihy, P. 2003. Participatory research mapping of indigenous lands in Darien, Panama. Human Organization. 62: 315-331
Herlihy, P. and G. Knapp. 2003. Maps of, by, and for the Peoples of Latin America. Human Organization 62.

EXTERNAL LINKS: Mexico Indigena research project website