The People of Clouds by Matt Black (Archive)

Matt's photography project is raising funds through Kickstarter through August 23rd. To help fund this project, see: www.kickstarter.com High in the Mixteca mountains of southern Mexico, an exodus is unfolding. In the birthplace of corn cultivation, where farmers first coaxed maize from the earth nearly 9000 years ago, an ancient way of life is crumbling as land degradation and erosion cripple the soil and as migration tears families apart. Named the "Place of the Cloud People" by the Aztecs, the Mixteca is home to one of the oldest and largest indigenous cultures in the Americas. Rugged and remote, the isolated region sheltered a pre-Colombian way of life that largely vanished from the rest of Mexico in the aftermath of the conquest. At its heart, it's a culture of the land, and corn. Along the region's hillsides, it is still possible to glimpse ancient terraces, canals, and runoff channels that protected the Mixteca's rich but fragile soil, and nourished its inhabitants, for thousands of years. But today, these ancient farming traditions have been lost, replaced by chemical fertilizers, hybrid seeds, and herbicides, the trifecta of modern agriculture heavily promoted in indigenous communities by the Mexican government and international charities as part of the "Green Revolution" of the 1960s. When combined with slash and burn farming, the Mixteca's steep terrain, and the loss of other indigenous soil-preserving traditions like multi-cropping, these imported industrial ...



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