“The indigenous world does not conceive of history linearly, the past and the future are contained in the present.” Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
In 2022, the Brazilian indigenous philosopher Ailton Krenak wrote a book titled Futuro Ancestral — the future is ancestral. The phrase has since traveled far beyond the Amazon basin where it was born. It is a statement that has been enthusiastically adopted by regenerative agriculture circles, by slow food advocates, by the kind of people who write long captions about returning to the earth. I have used it myself, in the work I do connecting consumers with campesino families who farm agroecologically in Mexico.
But the phrase has been sitting uneasy with me. Not because it is wrong, but because of what happens to it in transit — how it gets lifted from the intellectual and political tradition that produced it and is instead reproduced as a feeling of ancientness that makes contemporary products more compelling. As nostalgia dressed as philosophy. Because here is what nostalgia does: it places the past behind us, at a safe and admirable distance, available for selective retrieval. It lets us invoke ancestral knowledge as inspiration while remaining entirely within the logic of the market, the individual, the extractive relationship with territory. Nostalgia is, in this sense, the most elegant way to honor something while ensuring it cannot challenge you.
I use Krenak’s reference to write about one of those systems: usos y costumbres, indigenous customary law, as practiced in Totontepec Villa de Morelos, a Mixe community in the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca. The following article is based on the testimony gathered in Usos y Costumbres: Vivencias de un Alcalde Mixe, written by Honorio Alcántara Núñez, and on visits I have made to communities across Oaxaca and beyond. Those encounters left me with an understanding that is difficult to reduce to a tagline: that traditional mezcal is not a product that happens to come from indigenous territory. It exists because the milpa exists. Because the rituals that mark the agricultural calendar require it. Because the maguey is not a raw material but a sacred presence in a landscape that the community has agreed, collectively and across generations, to tend.
We are living in a moment when the institutions of Western liberal modernity are visibly unraveling. Democracy is being contested from within by the very parties it was designed to moderate. Capitalism, in its current form, has made the management of natural resources a question of profit margins rather than inter-generational responsibility. The representatives of the two pillars of the world order we inherited — electoral representation and free market economy — are struggling to justify themselves to the populations they claim to serve.
In this context, it is worth asking: are there other systems? Not utopian ones, not hypothetical ones, but actual, functioning, tested systems that organize collective life in ways that are coherent, legitimate, and ecologically grounded?
In Oaxaca, the answer is: 418 of them.
Oaxaca is the state in Mexico with the largest number of municipalities governed by usos y costumbres, a legal framework formally known as sistemas normativos internos or internal normative systems. According to this system, political authority is not delegated to a party or a candidate through competitive elections. It is built from within the community, through consensus, through service, through the slow accumulation of demonstrated responsibility. Oaxaca is followed by Michoacán, Guerrero, and Chiapas as states where these systems persist. In Oaxaca alone, 19.4% of the population identifies as indigenous, and their relationship to the land they inhabit has, in many cases, never been fully interrupted.
Zapata, NAFTA, and a system shaped by resistance
Usos y costumbres did not arrive fully formed from a pre-Hispanic past, nor was it granted by a benevolent state. It was forged across five centuries of negotiation, imposition, and resistance.
Before colonization, indigenous peoples across this territory — Olmec, Maya, Chichimec, Toltec, Mexica — each governed themselves through their own internal normative systems. The Spanish Crown recognized elements of this customary law not out of respect, but out of utility: through institutions like the Juzgado General de Indios, indigenous law was preserved precisely where it served colonial administration and economic extraction.
After Independence in 1821, Mexico declared all citizens equal and in doing so, flattened the distinction between communities with centuries of collective governance and a newly invented liberal individual. Land restitution became the persistent demand during the Mexican Revolution that began in 1910: echoing through Zapata’s Plan de Ayala proclaimed in 1911 and into the 1917 Constitution, which folded indigenous peoples into a homogenizing national project rather than recognizing their right to govern themselves. The principles of equality and fraternity were applied without addressing the indigenous question at its root.
The most aggressive assault came much later. In 1992, as Mexico prepared to enter NAFTA, President Salinas reformed Article 27 of the Constitution to allow the sale, rental, and corporate association of ejidal and communal lands. As Mexican anthropologist and ETC Group member María Verónica Villa Arias argues, free trade represented a systematic legal dismantling of every framework that had protected collective rights and common territories — in particular, the lands of indigenous and campesino communities. Public policy began directly attacking the reproduction systems of those communities, subordinating everything to the logic of the market.
The Zapatista uprising of 1994 was a direct response to that dismantling; it was a refusal, armed and public, to accept a future in which territory, seeds, water, and forest were reduced to commodities. The San Andrés Accords on Indigenous Rights and Culture, signed in 1996 in the aftermath of the uprising, recognized Mexico’s pluricultural constitution and the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination and autonomy — acknowledging, for the first time with legal weight, not just their customs but their capacity to govern. It was a recognition the state granted under pressure, and has since been honored inconsistently.
What this history reveals is a consistent pattern: indigenous governance has been recognized when useful, ignored when inconvenient, and never fully dismantled only because the communities themselves refused to let it be. As legal scholars Eduardo de la Cruz and José Luis Caballero argue, sistemas normativos internos are not a pre-modern remnant that the state failed to erase. They are the result of the active, ongoing capacity of indigenous peoples to read the pressures of modernity and reshape their institutions in response — without surrendering the communal logic at their core.
The meaning of usos y costumbres and how the cargo system works
In Totontepec, a Mixe community at over 2,000 meters in the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca, Honorio Alcántara Núñez was elected presidente municipal in 1986 and was elected Alcalde único in 2002. He did not run for power. He ran because the community asked him to. This distinction is the entire architecture of the system.
Usos y costumbres operates through a hierarchical structure of cargos — offices — through which community members rotate over the course of their lives. Nobody earns a salary. The service is unpaid. To hold a cargo is a responsibility, not a privilege; a form of reciprocity toward the community that made you.
At the top sits the Presidente Municipal — not a governor in the Western sense, Tuk Amaaba in Mixe language means the one who takes care of the home. The municipality is the home. The president does not command it; he tends it.
The next position is the Síndico Municipal — the one who opens and clears roads and paths. He organizes tequios, the collective unpaid labor that maintains communal infrastructure: roads, water systems, communal buildings, the cleaning of ceremonial spaces. He coordinates the festivities that mark the ritual calendar. The tequio is the visible expression of what the system assumes: that the community’s infrastructure belongs to everyone, and everyone is therefore responsible for it.
Then comes the Alcalde Único, also called el Bastón Mayor — the one who carries the staff of authority. He is the figure who makes justice. To reach this position, a man must have held all the other cargos before it. He is not appointed because he studied law. He is elevated because he has served, and served, and served again, and the community has witnessed the character of his service across decades. Justice, in this framework, is not administered by the credentialed; it is exercised by the experienced.
The structure continues downward through the Suplente de Alcalde, Tesorero, Secretario, Regidores, and finally the Topiles — the helpers of the cabildo, often the entry point for young men beginning their life of service. It is a system of apprenticeship in civic responsibility, designed so that no one arrives at authority without having first understood, from the ground up, what authority serves.
This is the precise inversion of modernity’s political logic. Modernity is built on the preeminence of the individual over society and the state: rights belong to persons, and institutions are designed to arbitrate between competing individual claims. Usos y costumbres places the community above the individual, not as a suppression of personhood but as its condition of possibility. You exist because the community sustained the land that sustained you. Your responsibility is commensurate with that debt.
Not secular: Ritual, mezcal, and the sacred ground of governance
There is one more dimension of this system that cannot be omitted: it is not secular. God precedes every action. Before a cargo is assumed, there are rituals. Before collective work begins, there is a ceremony.
For those of us who live in cities, this requires a genuine act of imagination. I was raised Catholic but I don’t attend church nor do I follow the liturgical calendar anymore. Like most urban Mexicans, my relationship to the fiestas patronales is largely acoustic: the sound of cuetes — fireworks — breaking through the noise of the city at odd hours, often interpreted as an intrusion on urban peace. An explosion without context. But the cuetes are not noise. They are an announcement. They are the way a community tells itself that something sacred is about to happen. They are, in the most literal sense, a call.
Honorio Alcántara describes how, immediately after being elected presidente municipal in Totontepec, his first obligation was not administrative. It was ceremonial. The feast day of January 20th was approaching, and the preparation had already begun: at least three days prior, the procession would take place, food prepared by the mayordomía, the philharmonic band playing through the streets, the community gathering in a way that was simultaneously religious, political, and social. The fiesta is part of his governance, the moment when the community reaffirms, collectively and publicly, its relationship to the sacred forces that sustain the territory.
This is what the ritual dimension of usos y costumbres actually means. It is not ornamental religiosity layered onto an otherwise rational system. The ritual is what binds the cargo to the territory rather than to ideology or party loyalty. And it is continuous: in Xochimilco, within the limits of Mexico City, there are between 400 community celebrations per year. That number is not an anomaly — it is the direct result of a territory made up of 14 original pueblos and 17 original neighborhoods or barrios, each maintaining its own patron saint feast day, alongside commercial fairs, cultural festivals, and Lenten observances. The calendar is the architecture of community life itself. They may be seen as interruptions to ordinary life. But it is what creates the sense of community.
Learning to read these celebrations is not a romantic exercise. It is the difference between seeing a governance system from the outside — as folklore, as heritage, as picturesque — and beginning to understand it from within, as a living logic that organizes time, territory, and responsibility in ways that our urban institutions have largely forgotten how to do.
It is in this context that we can begin to understand traditional mezcal as a cultural expression inseparable from this entire system. The agave that becomes mezcal grows in communal territory governed by customary law. Its harvest is not simply an agricultural decision; it is a decision made within a framework of intergenerational responsibility where the familia mezcalera is also a cargo-holder, a member of an assembly, a participant in tequios. They are expressions of a governance system in which the maguey is a communal resource before it is a raw material.
Without usos y costumbres, there is no institutional reason to harvest sustainably. There is only the logic of the market, which, as we have seen in every other extractive industry, does not protect territory. The agave crisis in many producing regions is, at its root, a governance crisis: what happens when mezcal production is decoupled from the communal systems that historically managed the “resource.”?
Contradictions within the system
The best way to understand how sistemas normativos internos function is through the people who live inside them.
In San Pedro Totomachapan, Oaxaca, at the end of Valles Centrales, the Celis family offers one of the clearest portraits of the system in practice. Valentín Celis from Celis Mezcal Ancestral, has served as both agente municipal and tesorero — treasurer — two of the most demanding cargos in the structure. The treasury position, he explains, is particularly complex: the community operates on a monthly budget of approximately 30,000 pesos, and financial discipline is not guaranteed. If an administration overspends, it is not the government that absorbs the deficit. It is the community itself — each member contributing to cover the losses at the end of the term. Accountability is collective, immediate, and personal.
His son Adiel completed his service as topil in January of this year. That is where it begins: the lowest rung of the cargo ladder, carrying out the practical tasks that keep the cabildo functioning. From there, if the community recognizes your commitment, you move upward — slowly, across years and decades, toward greater responsibility. Valentín watches neighboring communities where political parties have begun to penetrate the assembly structure. People may lose interest because the commitment is fierce. He admits that when the collective sense erodes, the system follows.
This tension is something Mariana García knows well. García is a member of the Oaxacan collective Hacer Tequio (and also art director at Mezcalistas). She works directly with communities navigating the contradictions of their own normative systems. The assembly, she explains, is genuinely sovereign: it decides the community’s norms, who participates, and how the system evolves according to its own needs. Everything is tied to spirituality and to the specific history of that community — there is no generic version of usos y costumbres, only particular ones, rooted in particular places. The unpaid collective labor generates real benefits: roads are maintained, fires are extinguished, infrastructure is built, and those who fulfill their obligations earn the right to access communal land.
But the system also carries its contradictions openly. In many communities, women are not granted land rights — even when they contribute labor equally. When a husband dies, his widow’s standing in the community is not protected. When you fail to fulfill a cargo, the assembly decides the consequence, and there is no external appeal. And when a man takes on years of unpaid service, it is his entire family that absorbs the cost. It is his wife, above all, who holds the household together while the community holds him to his obligations.
Mariana does not present these contradictions as reasons to dismiss the system. She presents them as reasons to engage with it honestly. After all, it is a living structure that communities themselves are debating and transforming, not a fixed inheritance to be either celebrated or condemned.
Further along the mezcal trail, the picture grows more complex. In Amatenango, Ejutla, Sergio Juárez — known as Tío Sergio, the producer behind Gozona Mezcal — speaks about what has been lost in his community. Political parties have largely displaced the traditional assembly structure. The tequio, he says, used to carry a different weight: more respect for the land, more communal awareness, a genuine ethic of mutual aid. Now, with significant migration fragmenting the community’s fabric, that cohesion has thinned. Researchers who study these systems consistently identify migration as one of the primary forces behind their erosion — not because people leave, but because the cargo system requires presence, continuity, and the slow accumulation of collective trust that distance makes impossible.
Not every community organizes through the full cargo hierarchy, but the underlying logic of territory as collective responsibility, access regulated by commitment. In San Mateo Yetla, in the Chinantla region, Don Floriano García Delfín has dedicated his life to conserving the forest and maintaining traditional systems of corn and wheat production. He leads a group of 72 campesinos who continue to work the land collectively, and the community maintains its normative system intact. In the Estado de México, the Tlahuica community — also known as Pjiekakjo — governs itself through traditional social, political, and religious organization. Its mujeres hongueras, the mushroom-gathering women who are the guardians of the forest, protect more than 160 species of wild fungi. You cannot enter their territory without an invitation. The boundary is communal, and it is enforced.
Something similar operates in San Gregorio Atlapulco, in the lacustrine zone of Xochimilco. For generations, this community has supplied water to large parts of Mexico City — while watching the city manage that shared resource with a carelessness that has produced local scarcity. In response, the community has organized to strictly regulate economic activity in the zone, limiting tourism and access to those outside the ejido. It is, in essence, the same principle as Totontepec and the Tlahuica forest: the community as the sovereign body that determines who may use the territory and under what conditions.
What connects these places is not a shared political ideology or a romantic attachment to tradition. It is a structural premise: that the territory belongs to the community, that the community is responsible for the territory, and that this relationship generates obligations which no individual can opt out of without consequence.
The future is ancestral but also perfectible
It would be easy, at the end of a piece like this, to arrive at a clean inversion: that everything modernity built was a mistake, and that the answer lies in returning to what existed before. But that conclusion would be as dishonest as the nostalgia we started by questioning.
We did not live in ancestral times. What we know of those worlds comes filtered through archaeology, oral tradition, colonial records written by people with their own agendas, and the partial, imperfect transmission of knowledge across generations of disruption. To romanticize that past is to turn complex, contradictory, evolving human societies into a backdrop for our own disillusionment with the present.
And the present, for all its failures, carries real advances. In medicine, in communication, in the slow and incomplete expansion of rights to people who were excluded from them for centuries. To reject modernity wholesale is a luxury that the people who most suffered under it cannot afford, and would not choose.
What the communities in this piece offer is not a rejection of the present. It is a demonstration that another logic is possible alongside it. These are not people frozen in the past. They are people managing the present with tools the present forgot it had.
Ailton Krenak’s phrase–the future is ancestral–is not an instruction to go back. Read alongside Rivera Cusicanqui’s spiral, it is something more demanding: an invitation to stop assuming that the linear path we are on is the only one available. That the institutions we inherited are the final form of human organization. That the market is the only mechanism capable of managing shared resources. That governance must always mean the competition of individuals for power rather than the rotation of community members through service.
The future is ancestral. It is also perfectible. Which means it is unfinished and that is maybe the most uncomfortable thing this piece left me with. It is not clear that these two systems can simply coexist, or that we can take the best of each without confronting what makes them fundamentally incompatible. What does seem possible is something more modest and more demanding: participation. Not the participation of voting every few years and returning to private life, but the kind the cargo system has always required — showing up, taking responsibility, being accountable to something larger than yourself.
Mezcal, at its best, already knows this. It is a drink that carries the maguey’s decades of growth, the ritual that preceded the harvest, the knowledge of the families who learned from watching and doing, and the governance system that decided, collectively, that this plant and this land were worth protecting. It did not arrive at that knowledge through a certification or a marketing brief. It arrived through a system of obligations, relationships, and sacred commitments that is, as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui — Bolivian sociologist and Aymara activist — argued, not behind us.
It is here. It is contemporary. And it is, in the most precise sense of the word, our present.
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