Jaime E Rivera-Hernandez

Towards a strategy of environmental education and communitarian ecotourism in San Juan Teponaxtla, Oaxaca, Mexico.

Indigenous people working with birds

LocationCountryCategoriesDate
San Juan Teponaxtla, Oaxaca State,MexicoBirds, Central and Latin America, Education25 Apr 2008

In this project, we are looking for building a Communitarian Ecotourism strategy together with the community of San Juan Teponaxtla, Oaxaca, Mexico as a valuable way to support the indigenous people in finding an economic alternative.

We will be working with community in workshops to build the Ecotourism strategy hand by hand. At the same time, we are doing several biologic studies such as inventories of birds and mammals (and maybe we will be working with amphibians, reptiles and a special group of plants such as orchids) and also we are trying to systemise traditional knowledge of the cuicatec community such as customs, relationship between people and nature, native language, medicinal plants, and other issues. All this information will be shared in the Ecotourism programme.

Another branch of our project is about of training of indigenous people in environmental education, ecotourism, and biologic topics. We will be organising a course about this topics for a special team of indigenous people training to be tour guides in Ecotourism. In this way, they will be able to manage the ecotourism programmes by themselves. Finally, another result of our project will be a set of identification guides about birds, mammals and special plants. This guide will be illustrated with photos or drawings and will include both scientific and traditional information, such as cuicatec language names of animals and plants.

For more information contact rivalcan@gmail.com

Project Update: June 2008

Environmental education activities with children

We have been working in Teponaxtla to compile information regarding biodiversity. At this time we have recorded the following number of species: 190 birds, 23 mammals, 10 amphibians, 15 reptiles, 2 cycads, 10 orchids and other several species such as mushrooms, insects and more interesting plants. Most of them considered as endemic species or threatened or at any risk status according Mexican laws.

Additionally, we have been doing interviews to obtain as much information as possible concerning, Cuicatec names, Spanish local names, uses, perception, classification and oral tradition of those species.

On the other hand, we have started the construction of ecotourism guide which include the most important animals and plants in both aspects cultural and biological. Other information included in this guide is archaeological sites, cultural background, language, etc. We are applying for a National support in order to publish this guide.

Also we have carried out environmental education activities in the local primary school with all the entire classes. Manual activities, discussions, images projections, games and catching birds with nets were done. The main topic of all the activities was the importance to maintain the biodiversity and how we can help to conserve the entire natural world.

Besides, we had our first communitarian workshop about ecotourism, and after hours of a constructive brain storm and many feedback ideas, they decided to create a special committee called Communitarian Ecotourism Committee composed by six members and five individuals for being ecotourism guides. No women were included in this workshop because they cultural costumes, but they decided to create an alternative women committee composed just by women who can establish activities such as embroider, cooking tasks and as an ecotourism guides.


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