What is Nepantla?

It is a space, a dream, where through research, sharing , and collaborative learning, we create strategies and practices to regenerate the fertility of the earth and reconnect with it.

 

We begin from the understanding that the land is a complex and living assembly of human and more-than-human forces, and is the spiritual, cultural, political, economic, and social foundation of our territories. We affirm the principle that we not only continue to need Land for People , but we also need People for the Land .

 

We position ourselves beyond the sustainability discourse that has become an indispensable part of Green Capitalism. That's why we're returning to our roots, to the paths historically followed by resistance and liberation for over 500 years.

 

This project is a quest to reestablish the principle of abundance and other ways of co-creating the territory. A way of bridging, of being a bridge between ancestral knowledge and practices for the generation of fertility and abundance in Abya Yala, and contemporary ways of weaving ourselves back into the web of life of the earth , of what conventional agronomy has called soil. We know that the way we name is also a way we relate: that is why we return to the earth . Because the earth is alive, alive in the billions of microorganisms, of beings that inhabit it, aerate it, generate it. It is in a permanent state of recomposition-decomposition-rebirth, of biological, physical, and chemical mutation, in relation to the cycles of nitrogen, oxygen, rainfall, temperature, etc.

 

It is also permeated by human relationships, by the ways we organize life. Currently, it is irremediably influenced by the multiple violences of capitalism, patriarchy, and colonialism that threaten the life of the planet. These are the roots of the so-called "Soil Crisis."

 

However, we recognize that, in many different civilizing projects, human beings can also be and have been planters of gardens of abundance, caretakers of the life of the earth. That is why we recognize that the earth's microbiome, this web of relationships, is a source of hope.
We begin with the call to connect the emotional with the scientific, understanding that in these territories, speaking of land implies recognizing both its sacredness and the causes of its destruction.

 

Our inspiration is the Selva Maya Garden , researched and documented by Ron Nigh and Anabel Ford. We also learned and walked with the Soil Food Web School , founded by Dr. Elaine Ingham. And above all, it is the organized communities who, despite everything, continue to defend the land, the territory, and the terroir.