GARDEN STUDIES AND THE PROBLEM
Of all nature-society interactions, none is more important than or has received such far-ranging study as agriculture. The diversity of motivations for and approaches to these studies within geography alone is large and includes emphases on food production and hunger, environmental change and land degradation, class and gender relationships, and international political economy and development (e.g., Turner and Brush 1987; Turner, Hyden and Kates 1993; Peet and Watts 1995; Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter and Wangari 1996.). These research foci and others are enriched through the recognition of the roles that women and children serve within the larger system of household and community production (e.g., Brierly 1991; Carney 1993; Katz 1993; Netting 1993; Pulsipher 1994). These roles are highlighted in the ubiquitous kitchen or house garden, credited by some as loci for early plant domestication (e.g., Anderson 1967; Sauer 1947). Such gardens are well documented in Mesoamerican antiquity (Killion 1992; Turner & Miksicek 1984), and contemporary kitchen gardens in Latin America continue to elicit considerable attention in terms of their production and spatial arrangements (e.g., Kimber 1966, 1973, 1987; McCarry 1990; Brierly 1991; Thomasson 1994; Pulsipher 1989,1990). The significance of these works notwithstanding, they provide an incomplete understanding of role that gardens play in agricultural systems.

This article discusses how gardens contribute to material production in agricultural systems. Furthermore, kitchen gardens are centers of women-led education of children about cultivation and the environment more broadly. Fieldwork in the Kaqchikel Maya area of highland Guatemala reveals that women educate children through the chores of the garden. They teach how to use farm tools, what plants need to thrive, and how to manage crops, especially through weeding and harvesting. From these experiences, early childhood understanding of human-environment relationships is learned within the garden.

THE KAQCHIKEL, STUDY SITES, AND STUDY APPROACH
The Kaqchikel language is a K'ichean Maya language and dominates much of the Guatemalan departments of Chimaltenango and Sacatepequez. Kaqchikel Maya speakers have occupied this part of [end p. 89] the Maya Highlands since breaking politically with the K' iche nearly 1,000 years ago, reaching substantial numbers and density of settlement (Adams 1991; Lovell and Lutz 1994). Today the Kaqchikel live both in small cities and the countryside. Although environmental conditions are suitable for the cultivation of a large array of crops, many with high market value, historical legacies and political-economic conditions keep many residents at the subsistence level or slightly above, regardless of residence in towns or villages. Indeed, 76% of the population of Guatemala live in poverty according to government surveys (Incer and Cano 1993:8. The average landholding is 2.1 manzanas (2.1 ha), a figure skewed due to larger holdings among farmers in the Peten lowlands and oflowland plantations in general. For example, 54% of the population has access to less than 1.4 ha, and fully 78% relies on landholdings smaller than 3.5 ha (Sandoval Villeda 1992:254). The relatively small size of landholdings increase the economic importance of gardens for individual households.

Iximche (Tecpán), Chiq'al (Comalapa) and Meq'en Ya (San Antonio Aguascalientes) are three small-sized cities in the heart of the Kaqchikel Maya region. From a high vantage point, the three cities look like dense collections of one or two story houses, topped either with clay tejas or corrugated aluminum roofs but always containing an interior or rear garden (Figure 1). White bricks cobble the main streets, although during the rainy season the bricks turn caramel-colored with mud. The main streets lead into the k'ux tinamit (central square), where Kaqchikel women in p 'ot (Maya tunic) and uq (wrap-around skirt) and young men in Western work clothes play basketball. ¹ The males in these "city" households manage remote fields in addition to maintaining salaried jobs. Women and children focus their activities around the home, not the remote field. During specific times in the growing cycle (e.g., sowing, harvest), however, they often visited the remote fields.

Figure 1

The study reported here took place in Iximche, Chiq'al, and Meq'en Ya during the summers of 1995 and 1997. ² These cities were selected for their relative cultural homogeneity --Kaqchikel populations predominate--and for reasons of convenience. Notably the cities' proximity to my participation in the Oxlajuj Aj Summer Language Institute gave me an opportunity to work intensively with Kaqchikel teachers and linguists.³⁾Qualitative methods were employed, including participant observation, open-ended surveys and participatory mapping. Three households were engaged through 16 intensive interviews among them, supplemented by interviews with seventeen other Kaqchikel Maya household [end p. 90] members (total number of interviews = 33). Interviews involved men and women across generations as well as lengthy observations and discussions in the kitchen gardens. Data collection occurred in the following phases: (1) multiple household visits, (2) open-ended resident interviews, (3) observation of daily activities over a two month period, (4) garden mapping with different genders and generations offamilies, and (5) surveys of other Kaqchikel. Surveys were designed to elicit information regarding who the respondents credited for their early childhood lessons about agricultural mentor and where the learning took place. Interviews, consisting of open-ended questions and included self-drawn sketch maps. This participatory mapping provided insight into how perception and knowledge of gardens varied by age and sex.

THE ROLE OF KAQCHIKEL URBAN GARDENS AND ITS LINKS TO FEMINIST POLITICAL ECOLOGY
When asked, many women and men in Guatemala, Maya or not, claim that women do not work; they only garden, weed, weave, nurture, cook, and clean. Such claims are replicated in much of the literature on household labor, as identified by Garrett and Espinosa (1988:209) "[Researchers] often say that women do only light work. .. women also declared that they did not engage in field work. . .it is a tribute to human imagination to persist in declarations and interpretations that are patently false." This distinction exists in academic and practitioner communities as well, perhaps owing to the emphasis placed on understanding the constraints and opportunities for increasing staple food and commodity production. In Latin America, men dominate the field work and decision-making for this production. Poats and colleagues (1988:6) maintain that this emphasis overlooks "other essential activities carried out by farm families, including home-based production for use or exchange, and the work required to maintain the home and its inhabitants." Neglecting these contributions to the household not only casts women as less important, it misses essential material and non-material elements of household production (Carney 1993; Ellis 1988; Rocheleau, Ross, and Morobel 1996a; Rocheleau, Thomas, Wangari 1996b).

Smallholder agriculture in Guatemala and elsewhere in Latin America depends on family or household production and decision-making (Deere and DeLeon 1987). As such "the conduct of everyday life in arbitrarily gendered (time-) spaces, within (time-) spaces that constrain subsequent activity participation else where within gendered realms of more or less restricted mobility, is fundamental to the ordering of social experience" (Pred 1990:41). Because these spaces and times are gendered, men and women develop divergent understandings of the physical environment. Women work in spaces situated among and between those traditionally dominated by men (Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter and Edmunds 1995; Rocheleau, Ross, and Morobel 1996a; Rocheleau, Thomas, Wangari 1996b). "Women and men ... have very different daily experiences, they frequently possess very different resource management skills and environmental knowledge" (Rocheleau, ThomassSlayter, and Edmunds 1995:63).

Within geography, feminist political ecology (FPE) leads much of the current initiative to investigate the nuanced and substantive ways that women contribute to agricultural and resource management systems. Focusing on "the convergence of gender, science and environment in academic and political discourse as well as in everyday life and in the social movements" (Rocheleau, Thomas-Slayter and Wangari 1996:9), FPE examines the gendered sciences of survival, gendered environmental rights and responsibilities, and gendered environmental politics and grassroots activism. FPE recognizes that women frequently hold different interests in the environment and its use that stem from their subjugation (both physical and social) and their common needs to protect and provide for their families in the physical environment. In this, FPE crosses traditional structure and agency boundaries and incorporates the importance of both.

Garden studies yield themselves to discussions of gendered sciences of survival and gendered environmental rights and responsibilities. The woman horticulturalist applies her knowledge in the garden, constrained by her responsibilities but empowered by her rights to manage the household plot. The knowledge that woman gardeners hold also informs Kaqchikel agriculture outside the garden's walls. Because women's responsibilities involve[end p. 91] biological and social reproduction of the household, their roles as producers, educators, and innovators overlap and can remain unnoticed or unmentioned.

My original, seemingly straightforward research question asked how women, through their gardens, complement Kaqchikel field agriculture. Initial observations and interviews, however, revealed that both Kaqchikel women and men recognized both the material and non-material products and roles linked to the garden. Material effects of gardens revolve around the provision of extra or supplemental food crops, religious/medicinal plants, and other types of crops. Non-material effects of gardens center on educating and training children within the garden. The garden, therefore, is the locus of early childhood education about cropping and nature, and women are the primary mentors. The study themes were enlarged accordingly.

KAQCHIKEL URBAN GARDENS
"Garden refers to a polycultural mix of cultigens and useful ... species grown on small plots where the cultivator focuses on individual plants and their micro-habitats by small inputs of labor on a continuous basis" (Killion 1992: 13). Santley (1992: 167) distinguished four primary areas of pre-Hispanic gardens that apply, with variation, into the present among the Kaqchikel:

"The structural core consists of the lot's principal buildings such as the house, kitchen, and occasionally storage facilities ... Around the core is the clear area: a zone that is meticulously kept free of debris because accumulations of household refuse in it interfere with routine domestic chores ... and outfitting activities for tasks ... outside the lot. ... Refuse that accumulates in this zone is swept or dumped in the intermediate area. Refuse is also dumped in the garden orchard, which often accounts for more than 80 percent of the total amount of space [used] within in the lot."

Figure 2

The most densely vegetated and heavily used gardens grow multiple species on multiple elevational levels with the use of trellises, walls, and trees for climbing vines. The variation in garden design is large, but the basic attributes are illustrated by one example, drawn with the help of the household members (Figure 2). Gardens include spaces for multiple, complementary activities. Doolittle (1992:76) notes that "[h]ouse lot gardens are under constant and close attention of the people who own and use them, mainly because they spend a large part of every day in them." And more, these activities are spatially and temporally coincident. Netting (1993:55-6) described gardening aptly:

"Diversified gardening on small land areas with heavy sustained production is a microcosm of the practices and virtuosity of intensive cultivation. The intimate association of gardens with residences, compounds, or kitchens reinforces the role of the household as a labor, management, and consumption unit that derives substantial benefits from what may be a very limited set of resources. Continuous individualized husbandry of plants and animals involving practices such as intensive tilling; carefully timed planting; transplanting; multiple weeding; elaborate systems of fertilization, with the recycling of plant and animal wastes; fodder production; and selective harvesting agriculture is horticulture- that is, gardening."

Kaqchikel women, linked to home because of domestic duties and culturally-based domestic expectations, undertake complex garden management intertwined with many other activities. Weeding occurs while waiting for masa (com meal dough) to soak; maize is mounded after washing breakfast dishes. Although the women reported spending [end p. 92] between one and two hours per day gardening, they claimed that the work provided enjoyment and did not constitute labor per se. Furthermore, they coordinated harvest times for plants and care schedules so that at no one time did labor demand in the garden grow so high that it interfered with other domestic activities.

Gardening, of course, manifests itself in directly observable, material outcomes. For example, economic plant species are given to specific sections of garden plots (Figure 2). In addition, socio-cultural activities, such as the children's education, take place in garden but leave no directly observable material marker. Activities that occur in Kaqchijel gardens--sreligious rites, the preservation of species, weaving traditional clothing, and storytelling---represent links to the past. Rather than solely relics, however, gardens inculcate children in Kaqchikel lore and culture and teach them to farm.

MATERIAL ROLES
First impressions of Kaqchikel gardens evoke a sense of disorder, with weeds and large shrubs dominating the space. Woman gardeners identify tended plants by name and use. They also explain the horizontal and vertical management of space [end p. 93]

involved in their care. The garden itself serves multiple functions simultaneously. Table 1 identifies these functions and categorizes them by class and type, followed by specific examples. Gardens maintain material and non-material functions. At least six types of material functions are recognized, each affecting the structure of the garden. These six are consumption, commodity, medicinal/religious, architectural and ornamental plants, and pioneer species. The specific functions (examples) frequently correlate to different levels of care. Pioneer and medicinal species, for instance, generally require less care than ornamentals and food plants. Different levels of care are also given to different species, regardless of activity. Maize, flowers, and beans, for example, are weeded, mulched, and watered, while most of the medicinal plants grow with minimal attention given to them.

Production
Consumption plants:
Gardeners grow a variety of food plants, primarily for household consumption. Fruits, spices, vegetables, and grains supplement maize taken from the family awan (milpa) or foods bought in local markets. Without additional food crops from the garden, increased food purchases would be required. In addition, garden produced foods reflect personal preferences for attributes as food flavor alternatives. For example, white maize fetches a higher market price, stimulating the awan farmer to focus on it. Women, however, may grow black maize in the garden for its preferred taste in tortillas (maize bread) and red maize for porridge. The variety of foods (e. g., greens, squash, flowers) in the garden provide important nutrient supplements for diets.

With notable exceptions (maize, güsquil, and beans), most food crops in the garden require little more than watering and occasional care, such as weeding. Maize, however, requires preparation involving the clearing of vegetation, soil rotation, and ridge building. Gardeners ridge, water, and protect maize and beans from weeds and pests. Fruit trees are transplanted and produce fruit for consumption or the market in addition to providing shade for other crops. Güisquiles (chayote or squash; [end p. 94] Sechium edule) scale trellises built from scrap lumber or climb trees and serve as a filler for the children when boiled and lightly sprinkled with sugar. K 'eqkinaq (beans; Phaesolus spp.), a daily protein source, compete for trellis space with the güisquil.

Figure 3. Intercropping maize

Commodity plants:
These crops are those sold in the market or used to create other products (e.g., mats and baskets). The amount of money generated from them is small, given the small, but varied sizes of gardens (500-l,800m2). Some households sell crops generally reserved for home consumption, during acute cash shortages, but these are not commodity crops by original intent of production. Young children of some households sell small amounts of individual produce, such as pomegranate. F or the most part, however, gardens are not dedicated to sufficient food products to earn a year round cash Income.

Medicinal plants:
Medicinal plants (ingested, topically applied, smoked, or inhaled) are administered for the treatment of physical or spiritual ailments. Many Kaqchikel view these illnesses as inseparable, and spiritually potent plants are resurfacing as important symbols for Kaqchikel cultural revival (cf. Fischer and Brown 1997). An impressive array of home grown medicinal plants are present, both annuals and perennials, and gardeners expressed happiness at being able to grow medicines in their homes. They claimed that medicinal plants provided the convenience of cures at hand. One gardener claimed that homegrown medicines not only cured common ailments effectively but saved the cost of factory produced remedies. Furthermore, garden grown medicinal plants provide cultural meaning. Claims regarding the importance of medicinal are supported by the healthy trade of medicinal plants among households and in the city markets. Neighbors borrow or trade herbs with one another and purchase them in the market. The medium of this trade is not cash, but reciprocity for a plant in the future or the donation of charcoal or firewood to the donor household. Men and women in all surveys pointed to their mothers as the manager of medicinal plants who hand down their knowledge to the children.

Architectural plants:
Architectural plants are those that anchor, shield, shade, or suspend objects or areas in the house garden. By way of illustration, the western border of the garden in Figure 2 consists of tzi 'te (coral bean tree) which shields the households from neighbors while also providing leaf mulch. Shading for other plant growth and human activities is an important role of these plants, but their height offers a venue for climbing plants and clotheslines.

Ornamental plants:
Ornamental plants are grown primarily for their perceived beauty and attractive aromas. Ornamental plants attract insects or birds, especially hummingbirds, a sign of good luck and fertility. Ornamental plants may also provide a psychological benefit to women gardeners as indicated by the claims of the children of one: our mother would "die for her flowers (Por las flores daría su vida)." Later, in a different conversation, the woman in question claimed that, given the opportunity, she would spend all her time cultivating flowers. Women trade plants or other items for new flower plants or bulbs. One respondent reported that [end p. 95] a primary reason for not keeping small stock, such as goats or sheep in the household, as seen in other houses, stems from these animal's affinity for eating flowering plants. Another respondent dedicates 30 m2 to the cultivation of ornamental plants. A weaver, she claims that the flowers and bright leaves of the plants growing in the ground and in ceramic flowerpots inspire color choices while weaving.

Pioneer plants:
"Pioneer" refers to plants (noxious or not) that flourish in disturbed or open areas, usually in waste areas, beneath trees, in multi-cropped growing areas, and along garden boundaries and building walls. Most gardeners could not provide the names of the pioneer plants in their gardens, and indicated that such invasives were "just weeds" (Kaqchikel: q 'ayis). Pioneer plants are tolerated for reasons of curiosity and experimentation and for the minimal time women have to control them. One gardener reported that a plant was new to her, and she wanted to see how it would grow. As with chamomile or dandelions (plants often used for food and medicine), a plant that at one time was invasive may come to be valued and encouraged in gardens.

In contrast, a few gardeners treated pioneer species as they are on the awful-eradicated. One respondent indicated that she considered pioneer species unacceptable weeds and did not tolerate them in her garden. The respondent, a teacher and a weaver, expressed distaste for what she termed "q'ayis". By allowing weeds to grow, she opined, the gardener demonstrated a lack of garden care. In contrast, another gardener worked outside the home most of the day, and her household responsibilities (cooking, child care, and husband's foot loom work) left her little time, energy, or inclination to undertake non-essential weeding.

Biodiversity
Steinberg (1998: 1150) suggests that kitchen gardens "provide important habitat for biotic diversity, including Neotropical avifauna." McCarry's (1990) exhaustive study reports a wide range of diverse crops (near 200) within the house gardens of Ciudad Vieja, a mixed Maya and Ladino community adjacent to Meq'en Va. Despite these important observations, the gardens in my study do not support them (the maximum number of species in the Figure 2 garden was approximately 50 plants).⁴ However, the willingness of some gardeners to tolerate pioneer plants and to plant non-commercial crops (e.g., non-white maize) suggest that gardens may be impotant sites for the protection of biotic diversity as field cropping moves toward purchased seed and chemical inputs, including herbecides.

Preservation, protection, and trading promote experimentation and can provide a planting stock for innovation. As, noted, some pioneer species are tolerated simple to observe their impacts on gardens. In some cases, these observations lead to changes in the management of gardens, and by extension, remote fields.

Non-material Roles
Gardens in highland Guatemala frequently include areas for ritual cleansing (in the tuj, or Maya sauna), seed blessing, spirit calling, and other religious activities. Thanksgiving prayers in Kaqchikel pay homage to ri k 'ux ulew (the heart of the earth), ri k'ux j'ob (the heart of the wind), ri k'ux q 'ij (the heart of the sun), and ri k'ux ajaw (the heart of God), evoking lessons pertinent to the physical environment. Women and elderly relatives of both genders lead these prayers and continue to indoctrinate children about human-environment relationships with further stories told within the garden. For example, one story claims that baskets for holding maize kernels need to be made from tightly woven aj (river cane: Gynerium saccharoides ) to ensure that the next season's awan grows well rather than in patches. This same aj is used in a fable claiming that when the cane flowers in the seven primary colors, the end of the current ka iun, or time cycle is about to arrive. Because the seven primary colors are associated with cardinal directions, Maya children learn young about their cultural beliefs and how they are reflected in nature.⁵ Children learn environmental and agricultural information by watching what gardeners do, imitating their chores, and learning plant needs. These activities are not scheduled parts of daily life in a Kaqchikel household, but take place sporadically and spontaneously. It is here that generational and gender relationships- sister/brother, and agedlyoung- take on their primary importance. Kaqchike1 women carry very young children with them when they work in the garden. As children age, they continue to accompany their mother while she performs garden tasks, learning how to complete tasks through observation and trial and error practice. A boy of seven, for example, ably named and described the [end p. 96] cultivation and care needs of the most important plants in his mother's garden. Likewise, girls in another garden recited the names of most plants in their mother's garden. Table 2 illustrates a typical activity/educational Timeline for Kaqchikel children.

Figure 4. Grandmother and grandchildren.

Women provide direct instruction in a number of ways. A gentle scolding or a slap on the backside, signaling the importance of the act involved, awaits a child who damages a garden plant. They also indoctrinate children through environmentally angled stories, as illustrated in the following:

The yellow maize was angry because no one ever took it to a party. The white maize, however, went to weddings and farewells along with flowers, pine needles, and incense. Then the black maize came and told the yellow maize: "but at least people like you and they look for you, and they give you to their children to eat. But not me, they don't even look for me." Then the quilete [cratalaria longirostrata] came and told the black maize: "That's not true. They do look for you, they love you, and at times they even look for me even though I may be far off in the forest. So, they actually love all of us" (Keys 1996).

The story teaches children that all plants in the garden and in the agriculture system have uses, although some may seem more important than others. Digging deeper, the story implies that diversity is a useful and needed characteristic of production.

During the early years children's tasks do not differ much by gender, although girls tend to care for small animals and elderly relatives more frequently than boys, and boys worked more on a garden's maize plot. Both girls and boys spend time weeding around garden plants, spreading organic fertilizer, and gathering garden produce. In addition, [end p. 97] when mothers travel to nearby forests to gather firewood, forest plants and herbs, children help gather and carry items, leading to wild plant recognition. Older children ultimately learn weeding, hoeing, seeding, ridging, mounding, trellis building, fertilizing, watering, and harvesting in the garden.

Not surprisingly, the depth of garden education varies by household. For example, one household's five children attended school from 7:30 a.m. and returned shortly after noon when their mother fed them and gave them directions for the day's chores. If needed, the girls fed chickens, cared for pigeons near the pila, or helped their mother prepare masa for cooking tortillas. The oldest boy, who also spent time working in his father's field, examined the maize plants in the garden to see if they had fallen in the night and repaired earthen mounds (in which maize is planted) that needed it. Special tasks, such as weeding, arose from time to time that demanded extra work by the children. In another household both parents worked in non-agricultural jobs outside of the home. Two girls cared for the household during the day, weeding the maize plot and cleaning the yard. In addition to domestic duties, the girls frequently ran errands for their parents. When asked about plant names, the girls provided them for the crops they tended but were unable to answer questions about the numerous small herbs and flowers that also grew in the garden and were tended after their mother returned from work. The boys in the same household did not know the names of many plants and seemed to do only light garden work. Ixey, a teacher and expert weaver who tended a small garden lamented this loss of knowledge. She saw this loss connected to the arrival of factories to the highlands and the continued urbanization of Maya lifeways. She claimed that young women and men no longer had time to teach their children or to work in gardens because their time was spent in transit to work or working in textile factories. At the same time she saw outside money and technology being invested into truck farming operations where maize once grew.

"[The higWand] Maya socialize their children almost from birth in the tradition of working the land to raise com" (Early 1982:74). Even this statement may be shortsighted. A Kaqchikel child's early years, even in urban settings, involves household and gardening tasks at the directions of mothers, aunts, sisters, and grandmothers and evolves by age. This learning experience evolves by age as captured in Table 2. Education within the garden takes place regardless of the father's input and, I suspect, is important for subsequent agricultural activities by boys when they accompany their fathers to the awän. Fathers whose children have experience in urban gardens receive a well-trained agricultural worker. Fathers may impart farming knowledge and technique to their sons after they enter awän labor, but their sons (and daughters) already understand basic concepts of cultivation and husbandry related to agriculture, including plant nutrient needs, weather appraisal, animal husbandry, and water and soil management schemes.

CONCLUSION
The garden remains an essential element of Kaqchikel life, even within an urban context. It provides important material production and serves as the location for important non-material elements of Maya lifeways. Dominated by women and children, the urban garden constitutes the medium through which women educate children about cultivation and the environment, be it approached by apocryphal stories about the symbolism of river cane, or scolding for damaging a plant. This educational role, in a broader sense, surpasses that of material production, gender empowerment, and horticultural architecture of the garden, those elements that have received the most attention from cultural and political ecology geographers. With few exceptions (e.g. Katz 1993; Katz and Monk 1993), this role is understudied.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author acknowledges the support of the Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, the FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies) grant, and the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University for helping fund this research. William E. Doolittle and Gregory W. Knapp of the University of Texas at Austin provided invaluable intellectual inspiration for this research and subsequent presentations and writing. At Clark University B.L. Turner II and Dianne Rocheleau provided a critical and useful sounding board for these ideas. Finally, the author wishes to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers of this paper who cast new light on approaches to article writing and logical argument. Any errors or omissions are the responsibility of the author. [end p. 98]

Notes
¹ In general older adults, women, and children preserve traditional dress, while young men dress in Western style clothing.
² Throughout this paper Kaqchikel place and plant names are used to support Kaqchikel language revitalization and autonomy movements. Where appropriate, the Kaqchikel name is followed by the more well-known Guatemalan toponym.
³ The Oxlajuj Aj Summer Language Institute is co-sponsored by Tulane University and the University of Texas.
⁴ This figure is based on the knowledge of the informants.
⁵ Kaqchikel women lead forays into the forest to collect pine needles to spread on the ground for ritual events, such as homecomings, farewells, and religious functions, some of which take place in the garden. In these forays and others, the women teach children about the spiritual meaning of the Kaqchikel landscapes. For example, the countryside, or juyu, is seen as anti-cultural and imbued with reachable spirits. Mixing juyu with tinamit (town) disrupts natural cycles and can cause natural imbalances. Because it is imbued with natural power, religious ceremonies begin at ruchi tin am it (mouth of the town), where culture and nature meet (Maxwell, pers. comm.).

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Resumen
La abundancia de investigaciones sobre la agricultura de pequeña propiedad en latinoamérica se enfoca en los aspectos materiales de la producción de cultivos básicos y ignoran la producción material de las mujeres y los niños dentro de la huerta y las funciones no materiales que mantienen esta producción. Basado en trabajo de campo en tres ciudades pequeñas en la región Kaqchikel de Guatemala, este escaséz se enfrenta con un estudio exploratorio de huertas urbanas como sitios donde las mujeres Maya suplen los requisitos del hogar, hacen pruebas, y educan a los niños sobre las bases de la cría de animales y sobre perspectivas de la naturaleza. [end p. 100]