The Valley of Tehuacan is not only the birthplace of domestic corn, it is also the mother lode of columnar cacti.

There are more species of these giant beauties in this one valley than in any other place in the world.

And more important, they are essential to the lives of the people who have lived here for centuries.

Major funding for The Desert       Speaks was provided by The Kemper and Ethel Marley Foundation.

Additional funding was provided by Desert Program Partners.

And by Arizona State Parks.

(music) Cacti from the miniscule Mammilaria to giants over 60 feet tall are native only to North and South America.

For cactus lovers, Mexico's Tehuacan Valley is just a little bit of heaven.

It has more species of cacti than any other place in the world, including some of the largest.

Alberto Búrquez, my Mexican ecologist friend, and I are going there to see all these strange and wonderful plants, and the people who have used them for thousands of years.

The Valley of Tehuacan, or Valle de Tehuacan as they say in Mexico, is about 150 miles south of Mexico City.

Its natural history is so unusual that the United Nations has declared it a biosphere reserve.

All trips to the Valley start in the bustling city of Tehuacán.

I'd recognize these as avocados but they're not like any avocados I've ever seen before.

Oh, they are very small, aren't they.

These are very, very close to the ones, look, after several thousands of years of careful selection we ended with these big avocados that are known worldwide.

So how old is the domestication of corn in Tehuacan.

Is it 5,000 years or something like that?

Five thousand and six hundred years is the closest date that the nation has got.

That's a long time.

And it came from here.

This is where the domestication point was, right?

Yes.

Tehuacán is the place where all this corn has been found.

And this is the, a huge variety of them here.

This is the white corn, the basic white corn.

Yes.

And what's it used for?

For lots of things, tortillas.

For tortillas.

Somewhere there is the pozolero that is really white.

The big grains type, you can eat them one by one.

Yes.

And then there's a yellow corn which I know is not favored for human consumption but it's fed to animals everywhere.

And that one is a popcorn that is also very primitive corn so they pop the corn and consume it.

That by the way was the old way of using corn.

So their most primitive corn is popcorn?

Popcorns is among the most primitive corns.

Then there's this huge variety of beans.

Beans were also domesticated in central Mexico.

Yes.

And some beans probably were domesticated in this very area.

We've got chiles over here.

Chiles were certainly here very, very early, thousands and thousands of years ago.

Yes.

People started eating the wild chiles and then selecting for different flavors, textures, sizes, etc.

So the basic Mexican diet originated in the Valle de Tehuacan.

We could say that.

There is plenty to eat and see in Tehuacan.

But to find the cacti we're interested in, we need to leave the city behind and head for the hills.

There we can visit the giant cacti in their own, oh, their own neighborhoods.

Each one seems to have its own.

You can see them from the road but getting up close can be hell.

They, like the columns of soldiers they resemble, show no sympathy.

From afar it looked easy to go through this path.

Yeah, but from afar you don't see all the spines and the milky sap and all the stinging, sticky, pully, grabby, grubby stuff.

Well, it's very difficult just to traverse this country.

That's the price we pay for getting to see the viejitos.

The scientific name of this cactus is Cephalocereus         columna-trajani .

The meaning of these Latin words is the old cactus, the old columnar cactus that resembles the column of Trajan the Roman Emperor that erected the column in Rome to commemorate his reign.

To us these cactus resemble the armies of Trajan just marching up the hill.

They always lean to the north.

They never branch, only as they are injured and they have a row of gray hairs pointing always along the line in the north side of the cactus where the fruits and flowers and produced.

That makes this cactus unique among the cactus of the Tehuacan Valley.

Not only do we have the soldiers, the Trajan columns as viejitos, but this big old cacti here, they look like barrels but they're different.

They are locally called silla de suegra.

Silla de suegra?

Yes.

That means mother-in-law's chair?

Look, it's like a bellows of an accordion all the way around.

When the rainy season comes, they expand and increase their girths.

So they actually swell out like an open accordion then?

Yes.

The cacti aren't just eccentric and exotic.

Down the road some different kinds are an important part of the local diet and economy.

This gentleman comes here all the time.

He takes the fruit to a woman in Oaxaca.

We harvest the fruits and they distribute them.

We take the fruits to the market in Huajuapan.

We're going to make a lot of money.

Yeah, right.

Not really.

Before we grew these plants in our backyard, you had to go on a four-hour burro ride to collect the fruits.

Now almost everybody in town has at least three or four cacti plants in their yards.

This is a wild plant.

If we were to irrigate it, each fruit might weight up to three pounds.

This will make a box of fruits weigh close to 80 pounds.

Each box now is about 40 pounds because the fruits are very small.

We started this grove with only three or four cacti.

From there we expanded to what we have now.

Once you realize the high demand for this fruit.

This gentleman approached us and now he comes twice a week to take our product to market.

There are different types of fruit: yellow, red, crimson.

Different colors and flavors.

The smallest one is hucotia.

That one is tastiest.

When it ripens, it smells fantastic.

Especially in the months of August, September, October and November.

It is so tasty and puts out a beautiful aroma.

Since I was 7 I've eaten this fruit.

Now I'm 77.

The specially designed pole that he used to harvest the fruit is called a chicole and it's very specially made from the shoot of an agave and the carrizo or wild cane that they make into a basket, it's a very special design, very old design, used for centuries and he still uses it.

Farther down the road is a forest of cactus.

It's so dense that it's drawn international attention.

The nearby native people, the Popolocas, have protected this forest for centuries.

Before this was a protected area, this was just an immense open field that was somewhat insignificant.

We lived in the field, harvested firewood and ate fruit for subsistence.

This place is important because of the great biodiversity you find here.

It is a part of the Biosphere Preserve of Tehuacan-- Cuicatlá.

Principally because of the vast number of columnar cacti found here in the botanical garden but also because of the concentration of species here.

There are around 2,750 species of plants with 17 families of cacti that have been identified.

One thing that strikes me as extraordinary here is the variety and the sizes of these tetechos from a few inches up to, oh, 40 or 50 feet tall.

And that probably reflects that there is an even recruitment from many different years.

That speaks well for the next generations then.

Yes.

I shouldn't walk into this.

This is about chin high on me and the local people here tell me that it takes 23 years to grow one meter or just under 40 inches, so that's probably about 23 years so we'd say 35 to 40 years for this one.

Yes, they said that they need to grow up to three meters tall, about 70 years, to reproduce.

Well, that means also that they're getting ready to hide their fruits and their flowers from people who want to harvest them.

Or predators that will climb the cactus and get it.

The tetecho is a very important plant in ecological terms.

It provides food for animals, it provides shelter for plants that grow behind them and to humans it also provides food as well as construction materials.

I guess you can't have the tetechos growing without a nurse plant of some kind and this is this uña de gato, vicious stuff, and this is about as good as they get.

These fierce thorns protect young tetechos after germination because see it don't allow the passage of many little critters that would eat the seedling.

Or big critters like goats and cows.

That's right.

That would step on them or eat the seedling.

So they nurse them along and hence the idea of a nurse plant.

Yes, uña de gato is the one that takes that role.

Yeah, I see why they call it catclaw.

This is just mean stuff.

It ought to be punished for being so mean.

If you get caught on this, literally, we call it stay-a-minute, I mean you can't leave.

Well, they did let me go.

Thanks a lot.

Now you're caught.

If they don't get you one way, they get you another.

You can walk for hours down on the flats and not see a single tetecho and get up on these hillsides and there's thousands of them.

Yes, they prefer certain orientations.

Well, the Valle de Tehuacan has more than just cacti.

It has other strange and wonderful plants like this huge thing.

This they call locally sotolín and some people call it pata de elefante or elephant's foot.

Well, this plant is a lily, amazingly, and has this very thick trunk that's a response to environmental needs of water.

So it's a waterous plant.

So it's mostly water in here.

Some people locally said that it's between eight and nine hundred years.

So Aztecs could very well have leaned against it, in the heat of day, after you've been working so very hard.

In the heat of the day we travel upwards into the mountains where it's cooler and where we find another native plant that has some most agreeable uses.

For dozens of years the agave plants, the magueyes have been used by people in Mexico.

They are central to the life of the community.

That agave over there is over 15 years old.

We trim it and work the ground around it so the water can seep down to its roots so it will grow.

It takes a lot of work but it is our livelihood.

Their leaves are transformed into ropes or fibers of different kinds.

The skin of the leaves is used to protect food.

They are used to make beverages so they are a multiple use plant that is essential to the life of town.

Ever since we were born this is what life is all about.

My father, my grandparents, they all drank pulque, we, as well as our kids, of course in moderation.

In the case of the maguey pulquero they go and cut the stalk, the flowering stalk, and make small cavity.

This sugar solution that collects in the cavity of the maguey pulquero is harvested twice a day.

It is called aguamiel because it's a sort of watery honey, miel.

And every day they scrape a little bit and enlarge that cavity so the supply will be constant up to six months.

We can extract up to three liters of liquid from each plant.

We regularly drink about four liters but we don't drink any water.

One liter in the morning, one liter in the afternoon and two while we work in the fields.

In these highlands, in these central highlands, virtually everybody drinks this right?

Yes, most people in the highlands.

And when the campesinos, when the peasants go to the fields, it's particularly, if they have a faba bean crop, it will just cut a stick of the faba bean that is hollow, go to the plant and sip straight from the cavity inside the agave and get a very refreshing drink to start the day.

Mmmmm.

Oh, my.

That is wonderful, rich, sweet juice.

It's like a very sweet pineapple juice with a much more delicate flavor.

It takes the agave 12 hours to produce the aguamiel, the honey water.

After that it starts to ferment, producing form.

If you add to it and continue to let it ferment, the drink will eventually become pulque.

By carefully mixing the old stock with the aguamiel, they add the liter of yeasts that will start the process of fermentation that will produce that pleasant, low alcoholic beverage called pulque.

This is our way of life.

If we sell ten liters of pulque, they'll allow us to buy two pounds of beans or two dozen eggs.

That's very cheap right now.

Without the maguey or the agave we wouldn't amount to anything.

There is a legend saying that there was a goddess, Xuachitl, that provided the local inhabitants with the pulque plants and the pulque plants are so plentiful and good that they give these people their daily food in the form of this extraordinary liquid.

However, you shouldn't abuse it because if you take too much, you'll fall asleep and be the scorn of the whole town.

The plants produce prodigiously all year round but in the cold times it doesn't ferment as well and the warm times like this they have to be very careful to add enough of the new aguamiel because if they don't, it'll go bad.

So it requires very careful attention and that's part of a very seasoned and skilled pulque producer.

And I'm sitting with several right here.

They toast to the goddess of pulque, the wonderful fermented product of the maguey.

Oh, that's good.

Rather than sit around all day and drink toasts to Mayahuel, the goddess of pulque, we head back down to the desert where there is a very uncommon and useful cactus, chende.

I've heard that it's grown in the town of Reyes Metzontle.

I don't know, but I've heard that the rarest of all columnars, the chende, Polaskia , is found here and they actually grow it.

So it's a shot in the dark.

We may find it.

They seem to, in this area, love to have a variety of cactus fruit growing in their yards and I can understand why.

But they do for some reason, it's the soil, it's the climate, they do extremely well.

So where we'd like to have one or two they can have ten.

Have you seen this wonderful living fence?

Yeah.

That's what they call a xoconochtle.

I think that one produces in late July through August.

It's not a real early producer.

This one is pitayo de mayo, May and June.

From around the first of May through the end of October they have a constant supply of cactus fruit, usually all those species.

Yeah, that's amazing, just to find this extraordinary sequence of flowering and fruiting of different species of cacti that will supply your table with an assortment of flavors and textures.

I think there's a nationalism in wanting to have their own cactus fruit that comes from their region.

Plants that grow wild everywhere else, they bring them and plant them in their yard.

There are a lot of chendes up in the mountains but way, way, way far away.

So far away that you can't go.

Ah, she's said because she scraped off all the spines and they come off easily because it's ready to eat.

And when it's ripe, the spines fall off.

Very convenient.

Very unusual on the cactus fruit that they suggest that you eat the husk and I'm doing it.

I have to take them at their word.

Each plant, and these bigger ones can produce between four and five hundred of these very nice little fruits, even more than the bigger plants up in the mountains that are too far for us to walk to.

In this village the people are called Popolocas, they have lived here for hundreds and hundreds of years.

They were taught here by the Aztecs but in this village and this village alone they retain much of their old traditions and the language.

Well, it's always worth planning to raise nesontla Well, it's always worth planning to raise nesontla but especially when you get to find the tender, the rarest.

It's a thrill to find it growing in somebody's backyard because they planted it and then to get to eat the fruit and you find that they still speak Popaloca.

What more could one ask.

Thousands of years ago, the residents of the Valley of Tehuacan domesticated corn, a great gift to our planet.

At the same time they discovered that using the great cacti and other plants in the valley, they could survive in the desert.

Today, many of their descendants continue planting the same corn, using the fruits of the great cacti, and we who come to visit can see it even today in the Valley of Tehuacan.

The journey from the ancient city of Oaxaca, Mexico, north to the Valley of Tehuacan is a lesson in desert lifestyle.

Join us next time on         The Desert Speaks as we search for native peoples using native material.

From the local weavers using local dyes to the harvest of native desert bounty.

A normal ear of corn, which we're all familiar with, is called an elote in Mexico, tasty.

An abnormal ear of corn which is caused by a fungus is called huitlacochi and is a delicacy, a very expensive delicacy.

Cooked carefully, it brings a great price on the market.

It probably has its origins in central Mexico, maybe even here in the Valle de Tehuacan.

Major funding for The Desert or Speaks was provided by, The Kemper and Ethel Marley Foundation.

Additional funding was provided by Desert Program Partners.