Today, the traditional three-sisters system of cultivation in Mexico is being replaced by agro-businesses making extensive use of monocultures and biotechnology, patented GM seeds, industrial agrochemicals and pesticides. This transition is conspicuously taking place in the communal agricultural lands of the town of San Isidro, Jalisco, situated in the mythic Llano Grande region, where writer Juan Rulfo found his inspiration for El llano en llamas (The Burning Plain & Other Stories). San Isidro’s inhabitants are waging a legal battle against the illegal occupation of their lands by the transnational Nutrilite corporation as well as by other companies encroaching upon the area—like Monsanto, Desert Glory and Nature Sweet.

The photographs here reveal the tensions between two types of agriculture. In one we see a smallholder farmer, Don José, fighting for his lands, holding a sheep’s jawbone as a “weapon.” There are images of monoculture greenhouses, restricted areas, high-tech automation, work yards covered in agrochemicals: highly toxic pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers that workers must avoid coming into contact with but that are used to grow foods—all this next to a traditional plot of land covered in nylon netting. There are also images of what has traditionally existed in these lands—fires, ditches, animals, even pre-Hispanic potsherds found during sowing.

The title of the series comes from the first story in El llano en llamas, which deals with the irony of land distribution—barren land given to farmers, with no available source of water. In this site, different forces confront each other at a time of change between a traditional practice and biotechnological production techniques whose consequences now seem irreversible.