El tiempo del maguey: baroque spaces disappearing

Mexico is home to the world’s richest agave biodiversity, shaped by more than ten thousand years of human-agave interactions. In recent decades, the rising global demand for mezcal—an agave-based spirit—has exerted pressure on Mexican territories and their human and more-than-human inhabitants, moving at a pace that disrupts rural dynamics and the agave’s intrinsic temporalities. Yet the dominant narrative surrounding mezcal continues to rely on its mythification, promoting its own version of an architecture of the mezcal that culminates in the figure of the so-called pueblo mezcalero, a reductive terminology that compresses complex spatial realities into monofunctional sites of production. Through a methodology based on grounded, long-term fieldwork and the creation of situated visual material, this thesis offers counter-narratives that open space for alternative futures for the mezcal communities, particularly in the Central Valleys of Oaxaca. The work critiques the commercial narrative of mezcal as shaped by economic and foreign interests that reproduce colonial dynamics embedded in the mechanisms of capitalist modernity. Drawing from Bolívar Echeverría’s theory of the Baroque ethos and Cien años de soledad by Gabriel García Márquez, it contextualizes how power continues to operate coloniality through the reproduction of schemes of domination and inequality across Latin America, threatening life by suppressing its diversity. As these critiques unfold through narration structures—respectively, a societal ethos and a prophecy—they open pathways to other possibilities of life grounded in collective resistance. Mezcal, entangled within complex relationships, embodies within its narrative a series of dualist tensions. Following Alejo Carpentier’s assertion that mestizaje inherently generates baroquism, the thesis proposes a distinction between two baroques of the mezcal: a lived one, expressed through everyday spatial practices in the pueblo; and one appropriated by the dominant narrative, operating as “baroque capitalism.” Both produce their own imaginaries, shaping the spaces, aesthetic and architectures of mezcal. The research mobilizes multiple forms of narration—including counter-mapping, drawings, photography and video—to underline the distinction between these two baroques among the pueblo. These materials are strongly inspired by theoretical and practical approaches that move toward anticolonial futures, positioning visual narration as a space of resistance towards extractive representational regimes. In this attempt, the image functions simultaneously as a design tool and a political device, emerging from the sensibility of architectural thinking towards space, territory and culture. Applying this strategy, the history of agave plantations comes out from fictionalized dialogues in the form of screenplays. The baroque character of mezcal’s architecture is embodied by the palenque—the artisanal distillery—and fragmented into significative elements that point to a wider constellation of mezcal’s entanglements within the territory. This narrative process culminates in the creation of a photobook and a short film, visual archives that trace the resistance of the pueblo through a speculative account of the threatened disappearance of Candelaria Yegolé. Rather than documenting loss, the project shifts from the market-driven architecture of mezcal to one rooted in the pueblo’s imaginary, revealing a visual testimony of baroque resistance, of multiplicity, adaptation, and expansion.