SchoolsEstela RomeroMarch 01, 2021

Trees also mean security for our lives!

SchoolsEstela RomeroMarch 01, 2021

THE VISIT

Dear friends,

The Symbolic Migration has once again visited a group of grandchildren and great-grandchildren to Ejidatario families in “El Rosario” Sanctuary, while their parents and grandparents work in different tasks as guides, guards, cooks, souvenir sellers, greeting national visitors mostly, but a few groups of international visitors too.

Well, time would be not enough during our meetings to go from one aspect to the other on how TREES are important in our daily living. At every single visit during this season, the program highlights to children living around Sanctuaries, on purpose of the “Benefits of Trees,” our topic this year, how “TREES MEAN SECURITY FOR OUR LIVING.”

As you can appreciate in some of the images attached to this post, families living around Sanctuaries have ancestrally built their homes scattered around hillsides all over our high mountains, the tops of which Monarch butterflies have been overwintering for centuries, while the town of Angangueo has settled right at the bottom of such mountains. Formal living should have started in this areas by the mid- to end 1800’s due to the mining activity in the region then. Some agricultural activities necessarily developed and there being no flat land around, the small community settlements simply cleared out hillside areas to plant corn, potatoes, wheat and broad beans to support the family living. It has been somewhat a historical question why our local communities did not develop an agricultural terraced system, just as the Inca Civilization in Perú, in order to guarantee security to the fact of living in such very steep areas around our own mountains. Nowhere around in close or far regions do we see evidence that the terraced agricultural system could have been known and practiced by our ancestral indigenous groups historically. A topic to go reflect with our community families indeed.

Over the decades, our region has been severely affected by deforestation in different epochs before Monarchs phenomenon’s importance were known locally and later worldwide. Forest activity for timber use is ancestral and inherent to Ejidatario’s family living in local communities around Monarchs’ Sanctuaries even though serious official agreements have been approved and applied by Ejidatario families themselves owning all rights on their own forest benefits, and supported by the Mexican State unconditionally, in order to support and protect their own living and that of future generations.

While bringing our lesson around Sanctuaries, the Symbolic Migration tries, through clear images and simple explanations by instructor Estela, to explain to children the important security trees provide to our living and our homes. If we are surrounded by trees, with their impressively strong roots underneath the land, our mountains are kept humid and upright so that homes and agricultural activities around are never in risk of dangerous land slides caused by deforestation, erosion and severe storms during the summer. Land slides have in the past caused significant accidents threatening secure living in the region. Our forest trees with their robust structure in trunk, enormous branches and leaves form the perfect curtain to protect ourselves and our crops from winds and frost ruining family’s sustainability.

Children, teachers, and moms working around, attentive to their children’s learning, remain amazed at realizing what a treasure our millenary forests are in our daily living!

Receiving their Ambassador Monarchs from all of you Northern friends in their hands, conveys a whole mutual promise of learning, of changing and of a real future that our land shall promise as long as we work to conserve and restore it all the time, every day.