When the cricket sings & the nopal bleeds

Oaxaca boasts the greatest cultural, linguistic, and biological diversity in Mexico, so insect and human relationships take many forms there. Various insect species are found in iconic specialty foods and the cochineal bug, exported from colonial Oaxaca to dye the world's textiles and other products, is among the most celebrated. Mexican literature, folklore, art and music celebrate insects, creating various imaginaries surrounding insect-human relationships. For example, Mixtec cosmogonies conceive of insects as spirits of creation and depict them as connections to the land. Today, tourists flock to Oaxaca to sample chapulines and gusanos de maguey or purchase textiles and fibers dyed with natural pigments, including those extracted from cochineal bugs. This paper pairs current ethnographic investigation and comparative literary analysis of contemporary children's stories, Mixtec cosmogonies, and other media, to examine human-insect imaginaries in Oaxaca, past and present. We use ecocritical frameworks to explore how insects and humans create dialogues that establish a unity of spirits and diversity of bodies, reversing the asymmetrical and exploitative nature of the commodification of insects. We ask how current political economies surrounding the commodification of insects mirror and contradict the political economies of colonial New Spain, and how Indigenous imaginaries dialogue with modern patterns of commodification and exploitation

Art · Biology · Commodification · Cricket · Economics · Economy · Ethnology · Geography · Humanities · Sociology · Animal and Plant Science Education · Anthropology · History · Insect Utilization and Effects · Ecology