Suppressing Fire and Memory: Environmental Degradation and Political Restoration in the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca, 1887–2001

Andrew Salvador Mathews

FIRE IS a powerful symbol of chaos, often marking the destruction of order in both the social and the natural worlds. Fire fascinates the eye and appeals to the imagination, yet forest fires in the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca—in southern Mexico— have all but disappeared from popular memory. Why should something so apparently memorable be unknown to so many people? This article reconstructs the history of the forests of the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca, and describes how local memories of forest history have been partially suppressed as a result of the struggle between forest communities and logging companies, to claim control of the forest, starting in 1956 and continuing until 1982. In the 1950s, government officials blamed forest destruction upon the local indigenous communities. Fire, as a symbol of disorder, became the target of state control and the subject of a state-sponsored discourse of environmental degradation. Over the following fifty years, the forest communities gradually mastered and modified this discourse, and reallocated blame to outsiders in order to claim control of their forests. As a result, past forest fires are little remembered today. This story can help us understand how local and extra-local people can struggle over environmental discourse in order to claim control of the natural environment. These conflicts over discourse are carried out not only in the realm of narratives and language, but through political organization and popular mobilization as well as the more mundane practices of logging and fighting forest fires.

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In recent years, a number of scholars have pointed out how state narratives of environmental degradation often have formed part of a systematic discourse that states used to claim political control over natural resources.1 These degradation narratives may be partially or completely incorrect; James Fairhead and Melissa Leach in particular have presented solid evidence that, far from declining, forest area in Guinea has increased over the past one hundred years despite the ongoing state narrative of deforestation. Fire is a powerful metaphor for social and environmental destruction, and fire suppression frequently has been part of state policies of social control. As Stephen Pyne has pointed out, "as often as not fire suppression was one of the most powerful means of controlling indigenes"; this was certainly part of the agenda of state-sponsored forestry programs in the Sierra Juárez over the past fifty years.2 In the Sierra Juárez however, the forest communities have taken control of the forests and of fire suppression, appropriating a state discourse of natural resource management in order to gain control of their own forests. In the process, they have internalized many of the elements of the state degradation discourse, including the vision of fire as destructive. By adopting part of the state language of natural resource control, and by organizing politically, the forest communities have gained control of their forests, although in the process they lost sight of the history of their forests and of their own long and constructive relationship with fire. Far from having been uniformly degraded over the past sixty years, the forests of the Sierra Juárez have in many ways recovered from the fires of the revolutionary period from 1911 to 1923. Forest area increased, and forest fire frequencies dramatically changed around 1940, going from a regime of frequent light fires to one of almost total fire suppression punctuated by rare, intense fires.

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