This paper explores how Indigenous languages of Mexico transmit biocultural knowledge through poetic and narrative forms. Focusing on three recent anthologies—"Flor de siete pétalos" (2022), "Verbo raíz" (2023), and "Antología bilingüe de cuento y poesía" (2020)—and on selected readings from "Places That the Map Can’t Contain" (co-edited by Julia Fiedorczuk and myself, 2023), the study investigates poetry written in Zapotec, Mixe, Mixtec, Mè’phàà, and Nahuatl as a medium where language, plants, and collective memory intertwine.
Across these works, vegetal imagery—maize, flowers, roots, herbs—functions not as mere decoration but as a grammar of relation. Poems by Alicia Guzmán Ortiz and Sótera Soledad Cruz Rodríguez link the female body to soil and seed, turning the act of cultivation into an ethics of care. In the Mè’phàà story Pulkincio chu Kiwikgolo’, medicinal knowledge is acquired by observing a snake’s choice of herbs—a parable of interspecies pedagogy and listening.
The analysis draws on Gabriela Jáuregui et al.’s “Defenders of Life,” which portrays women’s collectives from La Montaña de Guerrero as weaving baskets of shared knowledge, preserving ancestral uses of medicinal plants and the milpa system. Hubert Matiúwàa exemplifies how Mè’phàà poetics fuses mourning with germination, while Juana Adcock’s essay on translating Matiúwàa frames bilingualism itself as a site of epistemic negotiation.
Through close reading and literary-ethnobotanical interpretation, this paper contends that Indigenous poetry operates as a living archive of plant knowledge and relational ecology. By revitalizing endangered languages and reaffirming their ecological lexicons, these poetic works enact what I term biocultural literacy: a mode of knowing that entwines speech, soil, and spirit.
The presentation contributes to the ISE 2026 theme “Indigenous Languages and Knowledge Transmission,” offering a literary-ecological perspective on how Indigenous writers transform language itself into a technology of remembrance and survival.