Rancheros & Campesinos
Farmers in Mexico and Guatemala are using the soil to develop more sustainable methods of construction and agriculture.
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Miguel and Aurora, below, photographed at Semillas de Agua. Here they’re digging up earth from the farm for construction materials - hay, sand, water, manure and clay are moulded into adobe bricks that become solid when dried in the sun.
When the ingredients have been combined, they jump around barefoot on the mixture to blend everything together before moulding each brick individually.
They say that they work with a lot of love for the earth, and this is evident in the time and effort that’s taken to construct their building in this way.
Odilon, pictured below, is aurora’s father. He’s standing on the land his family has farmed for generations. In pictures hung on the wall he can be seen in these same fields as a young boy.
Pictured below is Baltazar, director of Sol y Verde, a restoration project in Peten, Guatemala. Born in Honduras, he spent his early twenties as part of a military group combatting smuggling and narcotraffic in his home country. His involvement in an anti-government protest group preceded decades of forced migration, which included a year long prison stretch in Belize after he was assaulted in the street for his refugee status. He has since settled in Peten, where he has lived a peaceful life with his son, Emanuel, for many years. He spends most of his time teaching biocunstruction and maintaining the project.
Baltazar and others cutting large leaves from nearby trees to construct a roof. It took several days of climbing trees with machetes to get these leaves down, and several more to drag them all to the farm. Each will be split into two, before being hoisted onto a large wooden structure and woven together to create the roof.
