heirloom Cotton Rescue Project in la Costa Chica de Oaxaca
Written by Margaret Mac Sems
On the coast of Oaxaca you can find wild cotton plants, which have been growing freely for more than 10,000 years and native cotton plants which have been continuously cultivated in the region for more than 4,000 years.
By 2011 native cotton had nearly disappeared from the fields in San Juan Colorado, (a small town near the Oaxaca/Guerrero border.) As little as one generation ago it was standard practice for farmers to plant a bit of cotton in the milpa along with other traditional crops such as corn, beans, squash, chili and up to 70 other plants for domestic use, thus providing for a small but steady supply of fiber for their wives and other local artisans. The gradual decline of cotton production was the result of diminishing demand by spinners. Whereas San Juan is well known for its traditional backstrap loom weaving, which is still widely practiced, the art of spinning has been almost entirely replaced by the use of industrially produced thread.
Notwithstanding, 14 years-ago, the local community development organization Consejo de Desarrollo Sustentable San Juan Colorado (CDS) was approached by traditional textile artisans in San Juan Colorado with a request to rescue the native brown cotton for use in their iconic, couychi textiles. The Escuela de Campo de San Juan Colorado, a project of CDS, responded. After locating a bit of seed from one of the few remaining growers, an initial group of fifteen farmers who were organized around learning agroecological farming practices, started to grow it in their milpas. As they progressed in this endeavor, they expanded the rescue to include native white, green and eventually rusty red cotton.
Understanding that a significant demand would be required to maintain the viable production of native colored cotton, CDS also fostered the establishment of Katyi Ya’a, an artisan’s collective whose purpose was, and is, to spin, weave and market textiles made exclusively with native cotton, thus conserving the traditional skills as well as the bio-cultural patrimony of the native seeds. Soon thereafter, the cotton project became the sole provider of native cotton to hand spinners who work with Khadi Oaxaca (another artisanal textile collective in the Sierra Sur de Miahuatlan, Oaxaca).
Over the course of several years the project expanded to other municipios on the coast, incorporated more farmers, developed a participatory guarantee system and formed its own identity. As of this writing, the group is on its way to becoming a legal cooperative; Ñu’u Ndito Tierra Viva. Much of the cotton planted by Ñu’u Ndito famers is done in the traditional manner amongst companion plants in the rain-fed milpa. Others cultivate it alone in one section of the field and work it into a field rotation with corn and or mucuna (a nitrogen-fixing cover crop). The farmers are encouraged to plant small quantities in order to reduce attacks by the boll weevil and to maintain a balance with food crops. In addition to increasing the availability of native colored cotton in the region, the cotton project has served as a fulcrum in the transition to agroecological practices, where the health of the environment takes precedence over production yields and the focus is on building fertile soil, increasing biodiversity, and eliminating the use of agro-chemicals.
Along the way, we came into the knowledge that our seeds might be contaminated with genetically modified organisms (GMOs); something that had not even remotely occurred to us since the Mixtec de la costa de Oaxaca is some 1,500 miles from the industrial cotton producing region, which includes the states of Sonora, Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Coahuila. After our seeds were tested and the results were positive, we had to make a choice: continue planting our seeds as if nothing had changed since the cultivation of cotton began some 4,000 years ago, (yet knowing that we would likely be concentrating the presence of GMOs in the cotton as time went on), or engage in a deliberate, expensive and complicated effort to reduce the level of transgene contamination in the environment.
The resulting native, colored cotton seed purification program is a work in progress. Ñu'u Ndito works with the Centro de Aprendizaje Rural en Tecnologia Apropriada (CATA) which is an extension of Chapingo University and with the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) with financial and administrative support from the One Foundation Oaxaca (2017- 2024). The program started with the farmers taking seed samples which were then sent to the UNAM for testing. The seeds were planted in the greenhouse at UNAM and then their leaves were tested. Negative plants were identified and sent back to Oaxaca to be grown-out in a specially constructed greenhouse at CATA. The greenhouse protects the negative-tested plants from possible re-contamination by local pollinators, who might carry pollen from contaminated wild plants or cotton cultivated by farmers who do not participate in Nu’u Ndito. Inside, the greenhouse is divided into sections in order to separate and conserve the four distinct color varieties.
As of last summer we also started growing clean-seed plants outside the greenhouse at CATA in order to be able to monitor the recontamination rate and also to compare production quality between perennial and annual plots. Next steps include inviting more farmers to grow native cotton using agroecological methods, developing a system for the reproduction of clean seeds via community-based, living seed banks and developing other cooperative initiatives.
Nu’u Ndito has been short-listed for a prize given by Lush Cosmetics in acknowledgement of their diligent effort and accomplishments in the area of regenerative agriculture.
The 2025 Lush Spring Prize competition received over 600 applications which were whittled down to a shortlist of 58 individual applications. Over 30 countries are represented in the shortlist with applications from every continent (except Antarctica). All shortlisted projects and the final results can be explored on the Spring Prize website.
You can support our clean-seed program via Gofundme:
English/USD: https://gofund.me/f390f0ea
Español/pesos: https://gofund.me/3ac0ef27
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Receive more information about our work: mdmacsems@gmail.com