26 January 2008: The Maya and American denim...

26 January 2008: The Maya and American denim...

Michael Coe, an anthropologist who studies the Maya, put the precarious future of the modern day Maya into perspective when he questioned, “Will the Maya survive?” He then went on to describe how the Maya “have been under attack from every side: from the army and death squads in Guatemala, from mass tourism and the destruction of the tropical forest in Mexico, and from ladino encroachments on their lands everywhere.”

As if that wasn’t enough, last summer, I stood witness to the ruthless destruction of the indigenous way of life through American industry. In a small town situated in the Mexican state of Puebla, a sprawling denim manufacturing complex stands where there used once laid the fields of indigenous people. The areas around the complex still belong to indigenous people, who primarily use them for farming corn.

While exploring the immediate vicinity around the factory, our group came across a stream adjacent to the manufacturing complex. It is difficult to describe the water in the stream but if you can picture liquefied denim, then you’ve more or less got the visual. And that description is by no means an exaggeration. The water literally appeared as a stream of vibrant Maya blue dye. From my understanding, this was ultimately the effect of the release of chemical by-products associated with the denim manufacturing and styling processes (i.e. sandblasting) into the water supply.

After leaving the stream in disgust, I got back into the car ready to head back and let the initial shock pass. But before even getting more than 15 minutes away from the factory, I saw a sight even more disconcerting. A sight that compelled me to pull over and touch it with my own hands so that I could determine if what my eyes were seeing was true. It was. And after that realization sunk in, I looked up and saw the expanse of dead cornfield that lay in front of me covered, acre after acre, in a two-inch thick layer of blue dirt.

It turns out that the stream polluted by the denim manufacturing complex fed into the same water supply that irrigated the surrounding cornfields. As a result, a layer of contaminated blue dirt had accumulated in the cornfields, which had first produced diminishing returns but by this point had ceased agricultural productivity all together. Sadly, this has forced many of the indigenous peoples whose livelihoods were deeply tied to their land and corn farming to find an alternative source of employment. Unfortunately, in a miserable twist of irony, the only other source of employment in the nearby vicinity is the denim manufacturing company and so, many indigenous people have been condemned to working in the exact place, performing the same exact processes, that had robbed them of their original way of life.