Tequio y Tierra

This project, completed as part of my master’s thesis, addresses pressing and current environmental, economic, and societal concerns surrounding the mezcal industry in Oaxaca, Mexico, striving to reveal how the city might autonomously source sustainable material for earthen construction in the future. The mezcal industry—which has exploded in recent years due to celebrity-fueled popularity in the US and Europe—is causing serious ecological damage due to industrial-scale monocultural practices and the improper disposal of its plant-based byproducts, bagasse and viñaza. Used in combination with earth, however, these alternative building materials can activate circular systems of construction and economies. By coordinating this labor through tequios, this production system could facilitate agency to vulnerable sectors of the local population while responding to an immediate ecological crisis.

Oaxaca is in southern Mexico, surrounded to the north by the Sierra Madre mountains and to the south by the Pacific Ocean, isolating it from the rest of the country. As a result, it is the most ethnic and culturally diverse province in Mexico. However, Oaxaca has historically suffered from a lack of federal government investment and is the country’s poorest region. 61.9% of the population lives under the national poverty line and 23.3% lives in extreme poverty. Under such conditions, Oaxacans have had to maintain a level of self-sufficiency—not only in terms of housing construction, but also in infrastructure, education, and other necessities. One of the most important traditions of this practice of self-sufficiency is tequio, a community-organized call to collective work. Communities sustain this tradition not only because they consider the material results of these works to be important, but they also see social value in strengthening and fostering coexistence and integration among community members.

Most of the important works today across Oaxaca that the community prides themselves in were carried out thanks to the cooperative work of its citizens. Tequios enable the building and upkeep of public infrastructure, including roads, water and sewage utilities, schools, sports and cultural facilities, clinics, landscaping, and other basic public works, in the absence of sufficient funding from the state or federal government. Jacobo, a local craftsperson from San Martin Tilcajete (population of 1,975) says, “The most important thing is that we offer our services, even to create our infrastructure, or if some day there is an emergency like an earthquake or a fire, to help and support each other. The government may provide the resources, but we provide the manpower. This is very nice when you live in such villages where you can still preserve these traditions.” This is how they were able to rebuild in 2022 a school in Jacobo’s community that collapsed during the 2017 earthquake, so that in-person classes could resume right after the pandemic. Tequios also extend to other communal work beyond construction, like reforestation and preservation initiatives to secure native trees and wild agave plants that are being threatened by climate change and mezcal monoculture.

Earthen construction in Oaxaca is an existing—although nearly extinct—vernacular architecture that is disappearing due to stigmatization and the popularization of industrialized materials. Building with this ubiquitous material is not simply a positive step towards environmental and sustainable healing, but it also preserves ways of life. Reworking one’s own soil is a means of agency, especially meaningful and true for Indigenous people who seek to preserve and embody their cultural identity and traditions in the way they live and inhabit spaces. The exclusion of earth-based materials in governmental public sector construction policies due to stigmatization forces native people to change their ways of life, leading to the loss of tangible and intangible cultural heritage. The design proposition presented in “Tequio y Tierra” proposes the design of a center for research, education, fabrication, and innovation. With the implementation of tequios, the design proposition includes a network strategy solution for the handling, processing, and redistributing of mezcal’s byproducts to use in combination with earth for regenerative building materials. The proposition aims to promote local environmental and socio-economic development in Oaxaca, Mexico. The wider goal for this centre is not only to prove that earthen materials can and should be used in contemporary urban as well as rural architecture, but also to spread knowledge and teachings on the use of the materials with a view to encouraging communities in Oaxaca to self-build regeneratively.