Souls of the Dead?

In Mexico, many schoolchildren have been taught a story in which the indigenous Purépecha of the State of Michoacan believed that monarch butterflies were the souls of the departed.¹ This story made sense given that the arrival of monarchs in the region occurred every year in early November when local communities celebrated Día de los Muertos. In pre-Hispanic times, when the Aztec king Nezahualcóyotl (1402–1472) ordered the Palace of Quetzalpapalotla to be built, he dedicated the royal residence to “the divine butterflies who bore the souls of dead warriors to other, mythical worlds.”² However, there is little to no historical evidence supporting the popular claim about this particular indigenous belief; in fact, this story about monarchs carrying the souls of the dead was probably invented during the 1980s to support butterfly tourism.³

People of different nationalities watched monarchs long before the creation of the myth, often pondering from where they came or where they went. In 1917, Canadian entomologist H. V. Andrews saw orange swarms gliding over Lake Ontario from Toronto, noting that “their flight was rapid, as if they intended reaching the U.S.A. or wherever they were going in as short a time as possible.”⁴ US naturalist Jennie Brooks witnessed the return of butterflies to her hometown of Lawrence, Kansas, surmising in 1911 that “all along the Canada line east and west the mighty winged host of monarchs advances, when instinct stirs, straight down across the states, to Mexico.”⁵ Mexican poet and environmentalist Homero Aridjis, then an eight-year-old boy returning home to Contepec, Michoacán, from his first Holy Communion in 1948, fondly recalled that “thousands of monarch butterflies were crossing the village. The air, like a river, carried currents of butterflies. Through the streets, above the houses, between the trees and people, they passed by going south.”⁶ The winged wanderers were certainly known, but their transnational migration was not (see figure 1).⁷

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Figure 1. The monarch butterfly migration and overwintering sites.

Source: Map by Kailey Adams. Reprinted with permission.

Before the 1975 “discovery,” la Monarca was called many names in Mexico, reflecting localized systems of knowledge. Mazhua peoples referred to these butterflies as the “reapers” (cosechadoras) because their presence overlapped with the maize harvest. Their swarming in flight prompted Otomí peoples to call them “pigeons” (palomas) since their behavior resembled that of the flocking creatures.⁸ According to Leonel Moreno Espinoza, the people of Ejido El Capulín believed the origins of monarchs to be earthly and local. Moreno recalled, “Some older folks said that butterflies were born from the oyamel [fir] seeds; others said that there was a cave in Cerro Pelón and that butterflies came from there.”⁹ His elders were correct to associate butterflies with Cerro Pelón, one in a series of forested mountaintops along Mexico’s Transverse Neovolcanic Belt. His community came to possess a portion of those lands in 1937, a year before Leonel was born, when his father, uncles, and many other campesinos became land-reform beneficiaries known as ejidatarios. Starting under the Lázaro Cárdenas administration (1934–1940), ejido and indigenous communities obtained communal land rights where monarchs regularly overwintered.¹⁰

With land redistribution, ejidatarios started extracting timber on shared plots after establishing “producers’ cooperatives” under the Forestry Code of 1926. The law articulated a vision of forest management combining rational science and social justice. Natural resources, although subject to oversight by professional foresters, were managed by local communities.¹¹ Leonel’s cousin Elidió Moreno de Jesús remembered working for a local forestry cooperative on Cerro Pelón that made charcoal, firewood, and axe handles from the trees they felled. They sold most of their products in the nearest city, which was Zitácuaro, Michoacán. “We got a whole bunch there,” Elidió explained, referring to the time when he and others dealt wooden goods like “corn vendors” in the streets. During his 1940s childhood, Moreno saw monarch butterflies in the mixed pine-fir forest on Ejido El Capulín. “The branches were loaded with them,” Elidió recalled, but as an adult who inherited rights to the forest he never witnessed nor recorded where any large clusters of butterflies were.¹² On the other side of the mountain, the federal government issued a forest closure (veda) in 1950 for the State of Michoacán that drove many ejidatarios to work as tree-tappers in the resin industry. This decision was consistent with national goals which viewed the conservation of natural resources and their development by small producers as compatible.¹³

Unlike the Romantic tradition of unpeopled “wilderness” that undergirded US national parks, revolutionary desires for social justice shaped Mexico’s nature protection. Between 1935 and 1940, the Cárdenas administration created forty national parks across the country, more than ever established before or since. Protected areas outlawed commercial production, but subsistence uses within those places remained. At Popocatépetl-Iztaccíhuatl National Park, two extinct volcanoes located on the eastern side of the State of Mexico, local communities still gathered firewood, tapped pine trees for resin, and processed timber into paper products. People and parks cohabitated through the social politics of the age.¹⁴ When asked who owned the forests where monarchs could be found, Elidió’s brother Melquiades Moreno de Jesús responded without hesitation, “We are the owners.”¹⁵ During the environmentalist push to establish a protected area for the monarch butterfly in the 1980s (see figure 2), federal officials politicized these forests by reformulating community timber as overwintering habitat.¹⁶ In this sense, monarchs became fragile messengers for the living as much as the dead.

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Figure 2. A flying frenzy of monarch butterflies at the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, ca. 1980s.

Source: Photo by Carlos F. Gottfried. Reprinted with permission.

Citizen-Science and the Politics of Discovery

Confirming the monarch migration was made possible through the participation in data collection and analysis of ordinary people, or—“citizen-science” as it is better known. Citizen-science was based on the inclusive premise of democratizing knowledge production, but it was also exclusive in that only professional scientists received the recognition for new findings. The history of tracking monarchs’ flight southward reveals this tension: Anyone could tag butterflies, report tag recoveries, or go searching for roosting sites. However, only trained lepidopterists made the public headlines. Making science more participatory confirmed the trinational journey, even if it was not so welcoming to everyone along the migratory path.¹⁷

Two stories illustrate the politics of scientific discovery. The first begins in the 1940s when a husband-wife team of Canadian researchers, Fred and Norah Urquhart, created a tagging system to solve a longstanding puzzle: where did the monarchs they saw every summer go during the winter? To find out, the Urquharts developed postage stamp–sized tags which adhered to butterfly wings and read “Return to Museum of Toronto, Ont.” Each of them held a unique serial number to record who did the tagging, when it was done, and where a tag recovery was made. A returned tag generated evidence that Monarch A had traveled from Point B to Point C on a map. Their first recoveries showed that butterflies had flown from Toronto to other parts of Ontario, and even to New York State. But the Urquharts soon realized that monitoring would only produce meaningful answers if they could recruit large numbers of people to do the tagging. To build a bigger team, Norah published calls for volunteers in US and Canadian magazines and newspapers. By 1955, the Urquharts had enlisted nearly two hundred monarch taggers, whom they dubbed “research associates,” spread across five Canadian provinces and thirty-nine US states. Their transnational network of lay participants was named the Insect Migration Association.

Tagging monarchs turned apparently arbitrary movements into a coherent migration. Between 1953 and 1964, volunteers with the Insect Migration Association marked 70,800 butterflies, from which 600 tags were returned. While most recoveries documented short journeys, every year the Urquharts reported a few long-distance flights spanning thousands of kilometers. Audrey Wilson of Grafton, Ontario, tagged one monarch that was recaptured a month later in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. David Bridge of Kent Point, Maryland, marked another butterfly that was recovered near Marietta, Georgia. Ted MacDonald of Port Hope, Ontario, tagged another specimen that was recovered near Beaumont, Texas. Norah Urquhart maintained a large map of the United States and southern Canada in her home, which was dubbed “butterfly ground zero,” charting the beginning and end points of returned tags to visualize what the Urquharts called “release-recovery lines.” These lines revealed that the winged creatures traveled in a south-to-southwest direction every autumn, and by the early 1960s the Urquharts’ best guess was that the eastern population of monarchs overwintered along the US Gulf Coast.¹⁸

The gaze of citizen-science turned farther south a decade later when the Urquharts recovered two tagged butterflies from Mexico: one from Huichapan, Hidalgo, and another from San Miguel Tenochtitlán, State of Mexico. On February 25, 1973, Norah wrote a piece in an English-language Mexico City newspaper asking for assistance in locating monarchs.¹⁹ The piece ended by saying that anyone curious about joining their search should write to the University of Toronto, where Fred was a zoologist and Norah was a lab technician. US expatriate and garment engineer Kenneth Brugger, who was working for textile giant Jockey International in Mexico City, responded to the request.²⁰ In fact, the Urquharts were receiving some help from two people, not one, though at first they were unaware of this fact. Inclusion was a defining feature of the Insect Migration Association, but someone historically left out its story is Brugger’s wife, Catalina Aguado.²¹

Aguado was one of the most important, and yet most overlooked, citizen-scientists. Born in 1949, Catalina grew up outside of Morelia, the state capital of Michoacán. As a child, Aguado snuck off to the library at Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, where her father worked, to read books about natural history. “I was the girl that played with insects,” Catalina later recalled, lying on her stomach in the mud for hours to watch Mexican bluewings, swallowtails, and other butterflies. Free-spirited, Aguado was convinced she would not marry young like her four sisters. At age seventeen, she was living in Mexico City, working in household sales for the Philips Company. Aguado spent her free time and extra savings on foreign travel, roaming from Guatemala and El Salvador to the United States and Canada. In 1971, a Canadian friend introduced Aguado, who was taking English immersion classes at the Mexican resort town of Acapulco, to a charming gringo named Ken Brugger. Although more than thirty years apart in age, Brugger asked Aguado to be his girlfriend and to look for butterflies with him.²²

Aguado’s familiarity with the local culture and countryside, as well as her fluency in Spanish, proved decisive in locating the monarchs’ whereabouts. Seeing a pulse of monarchs flying over their Winnebago camper had prompted Catalina and Ken to search ejido-owned lands along the Michoacán–State of Mexico border. Ejidatarios viewed the couple with suspicion during their expeditions. It was perhaps because Brugger was a white foreigner; or maybe it stemmed from middle-class Aguado’s approaches to working-class campesinos; or it could have been that locals wanted to keep the biological wonder a secret from outsiders. It is also plausible that they were worried about what might happen to their land rights. Whatever the source of uneasiness, Catalina was able to calm their apprehensions. “Some said that we were looking for Zapata’s treasure or that we wanted to take their minerals,” Aguado remembered. “But I’d tell them, oh, no, we’re looking for monarchs.” Since they were unfamiliar with formal or scientific names for the butterflies, Catalina showed them pictures. “‘Why?’ they’d ask, and I would say because we wanted to educate people about how they live and travel. They were okay with that.”²³

On January 2, 1975, the couple left their Winnebago at four in the morning to meet a local guide nicknamed Agapito, who had brought his uncle’s horse to carry their backpacks of water, food, maps, notebooks, and cameras, at a trail near Ejido Nicolás Romero. They could hardly see a few hundred feet in front of them due to the low-hanging clouds. They finally pierced through the fog at a dramatic summit called Cerro Pelón which funneled into an arroyo, a seasonal streambed just trickling from the recent showers. “That’s when we saw them,” recalled Aguado. Monarchs upon monarchs, most of them clinging to tree branches and trunks, made the evergreen forest look many shades of orange.²⁴

Two days later, Catalina and Ken encountered another butterfly colony at Sierra Chincua, thirty miles away from the first cluster, and made another important discovery. Among the menagerie of monarchs, they found two white-colored tags from the Insect Migration Association: one butterfly had the serial number “S2-294” glued to its wing; it had been labeled four months prior by Mrs. C. Emery of Nevada, Missouri. The other tag, with the number “84,” was homemade and had been affixed three months prior by John McClusky of Fredericksburg, Texas. Aguado later recalled that she couldn’t fathom how butterflies from all over North America had come to gather less than two hundred kilometers from her birthplace. Catalina and Ken raced down the mountains to find a telephone. On January 9, Brugger called the Urquharts. “We have located the colony!” he informed Fred and Norah, voice trembling with excitement. “We have found them—millions of monarchs—in evergreens beside a mountain clearing.”²⁵

In August 1976, Fred announced the discovery to an international audience through a piece in National Geographic magazine. The lepidopterist was purposely vague in not offering an exact location of the overwintering area, even wrongly stating that the butterfly colonies were found in the Sierra Madre. Fred recounted how over thirty years of organizing three thousand lay volunteers to place 300,000 tags on monarchs had led him and Norah to a biological spectacle far beyond their wildest dreams. Democratizing who could participate in science was responsible for authenticating the migration, but citizen-science was not so welcoming to those at the southern destination. Despite adorning the National Geographic cover photo, research associate Catalina Aguado was reduced to a footnote, so to speak, mentioned only once in the fourteen-page spread: “Ken Brugger doubled his field capacity by marrying a bright and delightful Mexican, Cathy.”²⁶ Aguado was a crucial member of the Insect Migration Association who had helped locate the roosting sites in Mexico, but she was hardly recognized at the time (or thereafter) for her contributions.

A second discovery story rarely gets told in official accounts; it represents a bottom-up perspective that has been more important to Mexicans who live near overwintering monarchs. Jesús Ávila Montes de Oca recalled first seeing a tagged butterfly sometime before 1975—before Aguado and Brugger did—but he declined to inform the Urquharts. People described Ávila, who was descended from a family of powerful estate owners called hacendados, as big, light-skinned, used to commanding the labor of others, and given to wearing a pith helmet while doing so (see figure 3). Ávila lived in Donato Guerra, State of Mexico, and he organized deer hunting parties for friends, bringing them up to Cerro Pelón through Macheros, where he stopped to hire local men as guides. It was on one of these outings that Ávila first saw a marked monarch. Whether or not he recovered a tag, Ávila was fondly remembered in Macheros for another reason.²⁷

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Figure 3. Hacendado descendent and CEPANAF supervisor Jesús Ávila Montes de Oca with monarchs on his pith helmet, ca. 1980s.

Source. Photo by Carlos F. Gottfried. Reprinted with permission.

Ávila attended an audience with the governor in Toluca when “two Canadians,” probably Fred and Norah Urquhart, asked municipal presidents for help in locating monarchs. Governor Jorge Jiménez Cantú (who addressed Ávila by the nickname Bear, since he was fat) asked him: “Hey Bear, you know where the butterflies are?”²⁸ Ávila responded that he would find out, leaving for Macheros to summon his hunting guides Valentín Velázquez, Leonel Moreno Espinoza, and Elidió Moreno de Jesús. Valentín and Leonel went looking around Llano de Tres Gobernadores on behalf of Ávila, but torrential rain interrupted their search. The next day, Valentín and Elidió returned and found a massive cluster of monarchs, bringing live butterflies in bags back to Ávila as proof of the colony’s existence. A Mexican broadcasting station named Televisa interviewed Ávila and the Urquharts about the discovery. The documentary program drew national attention to the spectacle of monarchs, as evidenced by Televisa’s president receiving hundreds of letters on the topic from across Mexico.²⁹

Once the program aired, Ávila worried about what the rush of sightseers would do to the overwintering site and took matters into his own hands. Around 1977, perhaps earlier, Ávila used his political connections in the State of Mexico to secure work for the local men from Macheros as guardabosques, or forest rangers, through an agency that became the State Commission of Natural Parks and Wildlife (Comisión Estatal de Parques Naturales y de la Fauna, CEPANAF). Ávila approached Leonel, who was serving as ejido commissioner at the time, and told him: “I’m here because I need three people. You are one, and who else do you want us to take?”³⁰ Leonel chose Elidió and Valentín to travel with Ávila to Mexico City and register all their names with officials in the Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources. The three men of Macheros now watched over Cerro Pelón to conserve the butterflies, even fulfilling their duties without pay for the first few years since “Don Jesús” had commanded them to do so.³¹

After the CEPANAF positions were formalized, Leonel, Elidió, and Valentín became some of the few people in the community of Ejido El Capulín with economic security through forest protection. They enjoyed stable employment with health care and government pensions. The rangers spent most of their time trying to prevent logging wherever the butterflies roosted, but also performed other tasks like maintaining trails, building firebreaks, and regulating tourist use. They managed to protect the monarch habitat at Cerro Pelón despite facing several constraints. Working for a State of Mexico–based agency, the CEPANAF crew basically saw their jurisdiction as ending where the state line did, along the crest of the mountain, even though the butterfly colony was on a different side of this border each year. No matter where they patrolled, they also did not have authority to fine or arrest locals for tree cutting. All that Leonel, Elidió, and Valentín could do was talk to loggers they encountered and make reports to their superiors. A conservation job took care of them, so they in turn conserved the monarch forest.³²

Scholars of science and technology studies have used the concept of “boundary-work” to discuss how scientists uphold their elite status in society by creating hierarchies of knowledge production that are divided between “professional” and “amateur.” Participatory monarch research challenged distinctions of expert and layperson while upholding boundaries of race and nationality. Fred and Norah Urquhart were remembered internationally; Valentín Velázquez and Elidió Moreno were not. Citizen-science was therefore Janus-faced: inclusion and exclusion became dueling sides in the discovery of the trinational migration.³³

Campesinos Meet “Conservation Imperialism”

In 1978, US lepidopterist Robert Michael Pyle wrote an essay for the Xerces Society titled “International Problems in Insect Conservation,” reflecting on the lessons he had learned about environmental justice from working abroad in Papua New Guinea and then applying them to monarchs in Mexico. Pyle worried about reinforcing what he termed “conservation imperialism” when First World scientists like himself pressured Third World nations for wildlife protections. He commented that “a major problem confronting international conservation efforts is that of external desires versus internal needs. When expatriate biologists perceive preservation needs which differ from national development goals, severe conflicts may arise between sovereignty and interference.” Pyle believed that decisions about natural resources should be determined by national governments and supported by their citizens, not decided by foreign experts. “Such an approach,” Pyle added, “will be essential to the Mexican monarch situation since certain ancient human uses are too well established on the land in question to simply displace them for a total preserve.”³⁴ That is to say, Pyle felt the three North American countries could work together in protecting the overwintering grounds as the foundation of a transnational migration, but Canadian or US models should not be forced onto Mexico.

Monarch conservation teetered back and forth between imperialism and internationalism as external desires met internal needs. Domestically, a Mexico City–based lawyer named Rodolfo Ogarrio decided, after reading the National Geographic story, to take a trip to the hibernation areas because of their proximity to his home. In January 1977, Ogarrio traveled to the Sierra Chincua colony where, much to his surprise and delight, he met Fred Urquhart and rival lepidopterist Lincoln Brower, who had been studying the chemical relationships between monarchs and milkweeds since the 1950s. Ogarrio was inspired by the experience of gazing upon the butterfly-laden trees, so much so that he wanted to help in preserving the place before the inevitable tide of tourists came to see the spectacle. Ogarrio and industrial engineer Fernando Ortíz Monasterio, also of Mexico City, founded the organization Pro-Mariposa Monarca, A. C. (Asociación Civil, or nonprofit) for this purpose. Pro-Monarca wanted, in the words of Ogarrio, “to bring together members of various institutions that share a common interest . . . whether they belong to the government, scientific, or private sector, and whether they be Mexicans or foreigners.”³⁵ With the help of scientists at National Autonomous University in Mexico City, Pro-Monarca lobbied federal officials in the Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources to establish a protected area around Angangueo, Michoacán.

While Pro-Monarca worked nationally, Pyle worked globally in his position as chair of the Lepidopterist Specialist Group at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). In March 1979, he attended a meeting of the IUCN’s Survival Service Commission in Costa Rica. Pyle convinced the committee to pass a resolution asking Mexican President José López Portillo to take concrete steps to ensure the perpetuation of the monarchs’ overwintering areas. Sir Peter Scott, who founded the IUCN’s fundraising arm, the World Wildlife Fund, conveyed a special message to Portillo about the Costa Rica resolution, which was followed up by similar declarations from other organizations such as the National Geographic Society, Smithsonian Institution, British Butterfly Society, and Society of European Lepidopterists. Foreign conservationists, at Pyle’s request, were walking a fine line between international concern and foreign intrusion.³⁶

A year later, in March 1980, the Portillo administration issued a decree providing vague conservation measures for “areas in which the butterfly known as the Monarch hibernates and reproduces,” despite ejido communities’ communal ownership of these lands since the post-Revolution reforms of the 1930s. It is difficult to judge what had the most influence on Portillo’s decision to protect the monarch migration, but Pyle felt the decree was “probably the result of Sir Peter’s letter to the President.”³⁷ If true, the US lepidopterist had violated his own rule: external desires outweighed internal needs.

But Pyle could also do better in living his ideals, reaching out to his Mexican counterparts concerning apparent inadequacies with the 1980 edict. The Mexican federal government gave protections to monarchs in situ, instead of in the forest where they overwintered, which meant that logging still threatened their habitat when the butterflies were not present. Brower, a University of Florida professor, called Pyle about Portillo’s decree, sharing over the phone his concern that “roosts may be gone when the Monarchs return or attempt to shift in response to local conditions.”³⁸ Pyle replied that a joint conference between the Lepidopterists’ Society and the Sociedad Mexicana de Lepidopterología might offer an opportunity to advance a proposal for a new national park or preserve dedicated to the monarch butterfly.

A visit to one of the butterfly colonies during the winter of 1980–1981 was pivotal on numerous fronts. Brower arranged for Pyle to join him at Sierra Chincua, where they toured the overwintering site with Ogarrio and Monasterio of Pro-Monarca (Pyle called Monasterio “Zorro” for his dashing looks) as well as Mexican entomologists Leonila Vázquez García and Héctor Pérez of National Autonomous University. Vázquez, a prolific insect researcher who would describe thirty-nine species new to science, also served on the IUCN’s Lepidoptera Specialist Group. During the trip, Brower and Vázquez developed a conservation strategy, modeled after UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere program, dubbed the “string of pearls.” Like prized gems, the roosting areas were defined as “core zones” where extractive activities would be strictly forbidden, and these nodes would be strung together by a chain of “buffer zones” where natural resource use could still happen with government oversight. Brower and Vázquez thought a biosphere reserve, especially one taking into consideration the preexisting claims of ejidos to the forest, could reconcile the tension between biological conservation and sustainable use.³⁹

An extraordinary storm also intensified the desire for new wildlife protections. Starting on January 10, 1981, three consecutive days of rain and snow pelted the Transverse Neovolcanic Belt, followed by a full week of sub-zero nightly temperatures. A mass die-off resulted, with 2.5 million butterflies, or 20 percent of the colony, killed then and there. Brower’s research team, led by his colleague, biologist Bill Calvert, detailed the striking difference between intact and thinned forest in terms of monarch survival. A heavy logging operation around Sierra Chincua during 1978–1979 had altered forest composition, reducing the density from 400 trees per hectare to 150 per hectare, causing recorded temperatures to be 3.5 degrees Celsius lower in lumbered areas. Butterflies, wet from the downpour, froze to death. Thinning the forest was like removing a protective blanket over the monarchs, exposing them to greater extremes of weather and thus heightened mortality rates. As Brower recognized, conserving a “closed canopy” of intact forest was crucial to the persistence of overwintering monarchs.⁴⁰

With a conservation proposal in mind, Brower and Pyle received help from the state government of Michoacán to identify core zones. In January 1981, the pair of US lepidopterists traveled to Morelia, the state capital, for a meeting with Governor Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of renowned former president Lázaro Cárdenas. Although the exact words of the exchange were not recorded, Cárdenas expressed his support for the endeavor if tourism and other industries could replace local logging income. Pyle agreed, citing the success of butterfly farming in Papua New Guinea as an example of what alternatives could be developed. “Through protection,” Cárdenas later stated, “we are going to have economic development in these regions so that the inhabitants can receive the same yields and productivities that they could get from the rational and intensive use of their forest resources.”⁴¹ Cárdenas also authorized Brower to use state helicopters to conduct surveys along the Michoacán and State of México border to locate any previously unidentified butterfly colonies. Brower then forwarded the aerial reconnaissance to Vázquez so that the latter could design the protected nodes and outer parameters of a biosphere reserve.⁴²

Trinational collaboration culminated with the first-ever Symposium on the Biology and Conservation of the Monarch Butterfly, which began on July 31, 1981, and later became known as “Moncon-1.” Lepidopterists, mostly Canadians, Mexicans, and US Americans, gathered, along with special government attendees, just south of Mexico City in Cocoyoc, Morelos, to deliberate future monarch protections.⁴³ With geographer Carlos Melo Gallegos, Vázquez and Pérez presented “A Preliminary Proposal to Create a National Park in the Chincua, Rancho Grande, and Campanario Mountain Ranges of the States of Mexico and Michoacán” based on Brower’s string-of-pearls design. Juan José Reyes Rodriguez, Wildlife Department director in the Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources, agreed to circulate the “Monarca Manifesto” among federal bureaucrats. Funded by World Wildlife Fund grants for Pro-Monarca, Ogarrio took responsibility for devising tourism-based job opportunities for ejido communities. “Each of these countries shares in the legacy of the migratory Monarch, the zenith of North American insect evolution,” Pyle concluded at the conference’s end. “Yet each nation also shares the responsibility for preserving that legacy; no one of them can do it alone.”⁴⁴ Moncon-1 organized major players of different nationalities behind conservation ideas for political action.

Amid the activism, Sir Peter Scott charged Pyle with compiling a detailed list of the world’s imperiled invertebrates for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. With over a million organisms known to science at the time, Pyle recruited two British entomologists to divide the intellectual labor, Susan Wells for mollusks and Mark Collins for spiders, while he focused on butterflies and moths. Pyle felt that monarchs should definitely be included, but how? The species was not in danger of going extinct, even though Pyle and Brower had independently declared that their unique migratory behavior was seriously threatened by logging, wildfires, and tourism at the overwintering sites. Conventional distinctions such as “endangered species” or “threatened species” didn’t work to explain the circumstances. “Since invertebrates often fail to fit into systems developed for vertebrates,” Pyle noted, “we are innovating with new categories.” In 1983, the Invertebrate Red Data Book was finally published, the first inventory of its kind for judging extinction risk in this taxon. Pyle listed the monarch butterfly migration, a 4,500-kilometer-long journey across North America, as an “endangered phenomenon.”⁴⁵

During the process of listing the biological phenomenon as endangered, Pyle came to believe that the Xerces Society should establish a separate entity called The Monarch Project. He thought that only a species-focused conservation campaign on a trinational scale would get a biosphere reserve in Mexico across the finish line. That was when he started running into resistance, however. From Pyle’s point of view, Ogarrio, Vázquez, and his other Mexican colleagues were sending “implicit signals” that the US lepidopterist was hindering their work. “I was afraid it was starting to look like the roots of conservation imperialism,” Pyle remembered. The Xerces Society officially launched The Monarch Project in 1984, but its focus would be limited to the western population of monarchs that overwintered along the Californian coast because they largely migrated within the United States and therefore were more of a national issue. Pyle withdrew from Mexican conservation, signaling how uneven power among nation-states confounded transnational solidarity.⁴⁶

NAFTA and Neoliberal Conservation

Critics of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) argued that the international treaty would do a great deal to enhance the movement of capital and goods throughout Canada, Mexico, and the United States but would do little to address transborder issues relating to the environment. To placate such critics, US President Bill Clinton proposed two side accords be ratified in conjunction with the trade deal. Clinton called his centrist stance “NAFTA plus.”⁴⁷ On January 1, 1994, the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation went into force alongside NAFTA, with a primary objective being to “increase cooperation between the Parties to better conserve, protect, and enhance the environment, including wild flora and fauna.”⁴⁸ The treaty established the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), headquartered in Montreal, Canada, to facilitate state-to-state collaboration on transboundary problems. Since the monarch butterfly migrated across the three signatory countries, environmentalist Homero Aridjis suggested that the insect be chosen as the official symbol of NAFTA’s environmental accord.⁴⁹

Monarchs became both symbol and victim of interconnected economies. During late-20th century neoliberalization, when right-wing politicians sought to encourage foreign investments by slashing state regulations and privatizing public services, monarch conservation was neoliberal too. Mexico had entered the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade back in 1986, the same year its national government created a biosphere reserve for overwintering monarchs. Due to a debt crisis, federal officials outsourced administering the protected area to non-state actors through Pro-Monarca, which sought funds from outside of Mexico. Pro-Monarca then pursued market-based approaches to monarch conservation.⁵⁰

The main challenge that had to be met in order to protect overwintering monarchs was minimizing deforestation. Two types of timber harvesting poked holes in the blanket-like forest: “heavy logging” (tala inmoderada), which was well-organized and well-equipped cutting of timber destined for regional sawmills, and “ant logging” (tala horminga), small-scale felling of trees used for domestic purposes like cooking or heating homes. During 1982, the Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources permitted 16,000 cubic meters of pine trees and 2,000 cubic meters of fir to be subject to heavy logging. Ejidatarios usually received forest-use payments on their land titles and distributed jobs chopping down trees to community members. Ant logging took a toll as rural communities expanded their village footprints. For example, Ejido Cerro Prieto grew from seven families, who had first settled near the Sierra Chincua colony in 1928, to over five hundred people by 1980. The introduction of agrochemicals during the 1960s allowed villages to replace oyamel forests with maize fields on steep slopes with shallow soils. Both ant logging and heavy logging degraded the forest where monarchs roosted.⁵¹

Poverty compounded the problem. The José López Portillo administration (1976–1982), which had issued the 1980 decree to conserve monarchs, tied government spending to petroleum development through Mexico’s state-owned company Pemex (Petróleos Mexicanos). When world oil prices fell in mid-1981 because of a global recession and a glut in crude oil from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), President Portillo responded by devaluing the peso to encourage foreign lending. In August, the federal government announced that Mexico would not pay its $80 billion in debts—40 percent of which belonged to US banks. Paul Volcker, chair of the US Federal Reserve under the Reagan administration, offered Mexico a rescue package in exchange for promises to privatize and deregulate its economy. In 1982, Miguel de la Madrid, the newly elected president, inherited the debt crisis and decided to adopt the neoliberal policies outlined in the US bailout proposal. Between 1982 and 1988, per-capita government spending on social programs declined by 38 percent just as poverty rates rose by nearly the same percentage. Three-quarters of the Mexican population, especially those living in rural areas, faced severe economic deprivation.⁵²

Ejido communities were no exception. On a 1982 visit to the El Rosario sanctuary for the television program 60 Minutos, Mexico City reporter Jaime Maussan confronted an ejidatario named Macario with axe in hand. “Aren’t these butterflies in danger?” Maussan asked, gesturing at the monarch-laden fir tree. “Why are you chopping this tree down?” Macario shrugged and then pointed to the village at the edge of the forest. “For my children,” he responded.⁵³ Artemio Martínez, who also resided near the El Rosario colony with his wife and children in a one-room wood plank house, suggested that poverty was contributing to population growth. “A family should have eight children,” Martínez stated, “because children die so easily [from malnutrition], you need at least eight.” Fernando Ortíz Monasterio of Pro-Monarca observed that “ejidatarios know they are extracting more wood than is growing back. But they must eat.”⁵⁴ The federal government, now committed to lean austerity budgets under de la Madrid, was not going to commit funds to alleviating poverty or administering a federal reserve.

Pro-Monarca secured foreign capital for the purposes of developing ecotourism jobs at the overwintering sites. Carlos Federico Gottfried Joy, an industrial engineer from Mexico City who became president of the environmental nonprofit, received grants from the World Wildlife Fund, the MacArthur Foundation, and The Nature Conservancy—all charitable organizations based in the United States. Pro-Monarca members reasoned that because the migration was a transnational phenomenon, it was appropriate for monetary support to come from outside of Mexico. Rodolfo Ogarrio argued that “the monarchs constitute a global resource and a global conservation issue.”⁵⁵ In 1984, at Pro-Monarca’s urging, the Ministry of Urban Development and Ecology launched the Monarch Butterfly Protection Trust, an endowment made up of private donations, plus financial commitments from the state governments of Michoacán and Mexico, to bankroll development programs for ejido communities.⁵⁶

Another environmental organization, Grupo de los Cien (Group of 100), turned up the political heat on the de la Madrid administration with respect to monarch protection. Grupo de los Cien came together in 1985 when famed Mexican poet Homero Aridjis wrote a declaration, signed by a hundred prominent artists, writers, and intellectuals, denouncing air pollution in Mexico City. They demanded the government reduce automobile smog by directing Pemex to remove lead from gasoline, by requiring the installation of catalytic converters on buses and trucks, and by mandating cars be taken off the streets for one day every week according to their license plate numbers. After pushing for better air quality in the federal district, Aridjis turned Grupo de los Cien’s attention to other environmental issues like campaigning for butterflies near his childhood home. In April 1986, Aridjis convinced Manuel Camacho Solís, minister of urban development and ecology, that the federal government should create a biosphere reserve that included Cerro Altamirano, where he had grown up. Cultural elites secured a commitment to conservation.⁵⁷

A strategy was laid out at the Second International Conference on the Monarch Butterfly, or Moncon-II, which began on September 2, 1986, in Los Angeles, California. Bringing together scientists and conservationists from every corner of the continent for discussion, Pro-Monarca outlined its programs to, in the words of Carlos Gottfried, “recognize and respect the basic needs of the local inhabitants that share forest resources with the monarch butterfly.” With respect to this goal, Rodolfo Ogarrio believed that “the most effective means to preserve nature was through the socioeconomic improvement of those communities.” María Elena Camas de Castro and Susana Rojas González de Castilla shared that Pro-Monarca had organized ejidatarios to charge visitors entrance fees, constructed facilities to sell local handicrafts, and contacted urban travel agencies to bring more people to the overwintering sites. With 50,000 visitors to the sites during the 1985–1986 season, the assumption was that developing an ecotourism industry run by locals could make up for economic costs imposed by reduced logging (see figure 4). This market-based approach was about to be put to the test.⁵⁸

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Figure 4. Tourists walk along the roped path, gazing at the butterfly-speckled forest the El Rosario Monarch Sanctuary, ca. 1980s.

Source. Photo by Carlos F. Gottfried. Reprinted with permission.

In October 1986, President de la Madrid issued a decree establishing a 150-square-kilometer federal protected area named Reserva Especial de la Biosfera Mariposa Monarca (Monarch Butterfly Special Biosphere Reserve). The presidential edict outlined formal boundaries and regulations for five of the thirteen overwintering areas along the Michoacán and State of Mexico border: Cerro Pelón, Cerro Chivatí-Huacal, Sierra del Campanario (also known as El Rosario), Sierra Chincua, and Cerro Altamirano. These sites made up the “core zones,” where timber extraction was outlawed; they were surrounded by “buffer zones” where natural resource use required a government permit. Communal land titles remained in the hands of ejidatarios, but a new ecological reserve for monarchs meant their rights to the land were restricted.⁵⁹

After the 1986 decree, managing the biosphere reserve became the responsibility of Pro-Monarca. The thirty-six-year-old Gottfried, who remembered singing “both national anthems” in his Mexican-American family, traveled to the World Wildlife Fund headquarters in Washington, DC, to ask for continued monetary support. “They could not believe the number of employees we had, the number of projects, and the number of successes that derived from $20,000 a year,” Gottfried stated. “For us in pesos, devalued at 300 percent, it was a huge amount.”⁶⁰ Because World Wildlife Fund’s sponsorship financed most of Pro-Monarca’s programs, the environmental nonprofit hosted Prince Philip, who was the WWF’s honorary president, at the butterfly sanctuary in 1987 (see figure 5). Gottfried and other environmentalists wanted to show monarchs to the monarchy to secure more capital for conservation.

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Figure 5. Mexico City professionals and Pro-Monarca founders Rodolfo Ogarrio (far left) and Fernando Ortíz Monasterio (far right) show honorary World Wildlife Fund president Prince Philip (with binoculars) a tree nursery for reforesting the biosphere reserve, 1987.

Source. Photo by Carlos F. Gottfried. Reprinted with permission.

Near Sierra Chincua, the Mondragón sawmill closed its doors permanently after the federal government suspended its timber leases around the butterfly colony. With financial assistance from the Canadian International Development Agency, Pro-Monarca purchased the facility in 1987 to convert it into a tree nursery for oyamel seedlings, employing former loggers with temporary reforestation projects as well as establishing a Christmas tree farm for longer-term work. “People told us we were making a mistake,” Carlos Gottfried recalled hearing when he explained Pro-Monarca’s plan, “because at least General Mondragón was protecting [trees] with his machine guns.” Employed by Pro-Monarca, local women raised 350,000 saplings over the next two years and local men planted 150,000 of them inside the federal reserve. Although these opportunities were limited, the results demonstrated that jobs and justice could be conservation tools just as effective as guns and guards. “Fortress conservation” might give way to community conservation.⁶¹

Some ejido communities received tangible benefits from the new federal reserve. During the 1990–1991 season, about 90,000 tourists visited El Rosario, paying entrance fees, local guides, eateries, and souvenir shops what amounted to $1.4 million MXN ($350,000 USD) in total revenue. When television reporter Jaime Maussan returned to the butterfly sanctuary, he met Macario again. The ejidatario was not cutting down trees anymore but was escorting people to the overwintering site. “Why are you working here as a guide?” Maussan asked. As in their first exchange, Macario simply replied: “For my children.”⁶² The tourism income was distributed among about 280 families who lived around the roosting site. Pro-Monarca also developed educational materials about the migration for teaching in primary schools, which generated interest in improving local classrooms.⁶³

Other ejido communities, however, resented the federal reserve because they had neither consented to its creation nor obtained job opportunities through ecotourism. Silverio Tapia Torres of Ejido Jesús Nazareno near Sierra Chincua explained: “In 1986, when the government created the five monarch butterfly reserves, we thought we’d get some benefits. But that never happened. Finally, in 1990, because our families were starving, some of us decided to log in the area without a permit.”⁶⁴ The Ministry of Urban Development and Ecology had limited public visitation to El Rosario until the mid-1990s, so only those surrounding villages profited from sightseers. In July 1995, fourteen ejidos formed the Alianza de Ejidos y Comunidades de la Reserva Mariposa Monarca (Alliance of Ejidos and Communities of the Monarch Butterfly Reserve) to organize a political defense of their rights to the forest. Logging intensified inside the federal reserve due to anxiety that lands might be expropriated from ejidatarios.⁶⁵

Lincoln Brower teamed up with scientists at National Autonomous University of Mexico to calculate forest degradation on the Michoacán side of the reserve. Using aerial photographs of Sierra Chincua, El Rosario, and Cerro Chivatí-Huacal taken in the years 1971, 1984, and 1999, they determined that 44 percent of mixed oyamel-pine forest had been thinned out by logging over a quarter-century. Most shockingly, the rate of deforestation was 1.7 percent annually from 1971 to 1984 and 2.4 percent from 1984 to 1999, suggesting that timber harvesting had increased after the biosphere reserve was established.⁶⁶ Brower rang the alarm bells, but Mexican environmentalists had to tread lightly in their treatment of ejidos. “We had to be careful not to be too associated with Brower, who was like a bull in a china shop,” Gottfried observed. “He would say things like ‘Why don’t you just put these people in prison if they’re cutting illegally?’”⁶⁷ As a toned-down response, Brower and Homero Aridjis proposed in 1996 to “lease the forests from the peasant communities,” making annual remittances to ejidatarios for conserved habitat by using the interest on a $5 million fund from the US-based Packard Foundation. This solution, payments for ecosystem services, was deemed more sensible to halt deforestation where monarchs overwintered.⁶⁸

In contrast to what Brower had documented on the Michoacán side, the forest remained more intact on the State of Mexico side because of the presence of CEPANAF rangers. In 1982, Melquiades Moreno de Jesús joined the crew to make a total of five ejidatarios who patrolled the Cerro Pelón colony under the oversight of hacendado descendant “Don Jesús” Ávila. Pro-Monarca had minimal presence at this overwintering area because Ávila did not want to give up authority as CEPANAF supervisor. Moreno recollected “walking in the mountains and we ran into loggers occasionally. It was difficult because we had to get them to understand that it was not right and, well, sometimes they paid attention to us and left.”⁶⁹ While local people still cut down trees on Cerro Pelón, especially those from the neighboring Ejido Nicolás Romero in Michoacán, the state border became a defining line in deforestation. In 1993, Aridjis noted the spatial variance in the newspaper La Jornada: “It’s absurd to subject the same ecosystem to two different sets of forest regulations, which forbid logging in the State of Mexico but allow it on the Michoacán side.”⁷⁰ CEPANAF rangers, who charted a middle ground between stable jobs and state surveillance, made a difference in monarch conservation.

While CEPANAF managed Cerro Pelón, Pro-Monarca lost its grip on the four other overwintering sites. A power struggle was set in motion during the 1988 presidential elections when Carlos Salinas de Gortari, handpicked to uphold de la Madrid’s neoliberal agenda for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, was challenged by leftist candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, former governor of Michoacán. Once the ballot tabulating system crashed, Salinas preemptively declared victory before all votes were counted. Mexican citizens, including Cárdenas, assumed fraud but did not formally contest the results. Government officials later admitted to rigging the election. President Salinas responded to weakness in the electoral process by consolidating his authority over federal agencies, including the management of protected areas.⁷¹

The Federal Environmental Protection Agency (PROFEPA), created under the Salinas administration in 1992, became known as the “forest police” since the bureau enforced the laws governing the biosphere reserve. The forest police fined local people for cutting down trees within the core zones. CEPANAF ranger Elidió Moreno remembered arguing with PROFEPA officials as his crew was getting ready to build a firebreak around the butterfly colony. Elidió recalled carrying tools when:

Those aggressive PROFEPA guys came with their notebooks, and I got scared. I thought those bastards were going to denounce us. They were writing things down and asking, “Why are you doing that?” [I told them] because we don’t want the forest to burn down, and if the fire reaches here, this part will burn. What are we going to put it out with? With a hat? With a branch?⁷²

CEPANAF maintained some autonomy at the Reserve, but Pro-Monarca did not. According to Carlos Gottfried, President Salinas met with Kathryn Fuller, CEO of the World Wildlife Fund, telling her that Pro-Monarca had played a minor role in monarch conservation and federal officials were taking over the biosphere reserve. In 1994, the World Wildlife Fund terminated its patronage of Pro-Monarca. “That was the end of our active participation,” Gottfried remarked. “The new government wanted to coerce us into their programs.”⁷³ Policing, not poverty alleviation, was the Salinas administration’s strategy of choice.

Illegal Logging and Environmental Justice

If the root cause of illegal logging at the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve has been poverty, then addressing economic inequality on ejidos can be the only transformative solution. Scholars of environmental justice have considered how environmental policies like those related to the management of toxic pollution sites have discriminated against people of color and the poor.⁷⁴ Monarch conservation promised rural economic development, especially after the 2000 expansion of the biosphere reserve, but stable jobs for ejido communities proved largely elusive. The enlarged protected area created more environmental risks than rewards. Reversing legacies of inequity will likely be the most profound conservation work of the 21st century.

On November 10, 1997, the North American Conference on the Monarch Butterfly (or Moncon-III) began in Morelia, Michoacán. Sponsored by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, the four days of meetings featured the usual participants, from academic scientists and government officials to journalists and NGOs. However, conference organizers like Karen Oberhauser of the University of Minnesota made certain to involve a previously neglected group of stakeholders: the ejidatarios of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. Even though the Mexican ambassador to Canada, Jürgen Hoth, stated that the purpose of the conference was to build “bridges between often adversarial groups,” US writer Sue Halpern of Audubon Magazine observed that attendees listened to presentations as at a wedding ceremony: conservationists all sat together on the groom’s side; campesinos all sat on the bride’s. Keynote speaker Lincoln Brower told the 300-person audience that the two biggest threats to the monarch migration were the extensive use of agricultural herbicides in the breeding areas of Canada and the United States and illegal logging in the overwintering areas of Mexico.⁷⁵

During roundtable discussions, one issue was amending policies governing the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve to satisfy human needs without depleting natural resources. Local representatives from Alianza de Ejidos y Comunidades de la Reserva Mariposa Monarca laid out collective demands that all butterfly sanctuaries be opened to tourism, rural infrastructure be improved, and the 1986 decree be scrapped and “replaced with the goal of maintaining and improving the forest through sustainable resource management programs.” Rosendo Caro Gómez, a forester with the Ministry of the Environment, Natural Resources, and Fisheries, remarked that “the problem is that legislation and regulations are the formal expressions of a set of political interests where the campesino organizations have little political power.” Alianza director Pascual Sigala Páez responded that, at a bare minimum, any revisions to the biosphere reserve “should include the active participation of the area’s agrarian groups” and “consider compensation for the campesinos” who had suffered diminishing income. Diverse interests debated the most effective strategies—policing, payments, or poverty alleviation through ecotourism—to conserve monarchs alongside their human neighbors in Mexico.⁷⁶

Another issue was building transnational solidarity in monarch conservation, broadening its scope beyond the overwintering phase in Mexico. Jesús Manuel de Jesús of the San Felipe los Alzati indigenous community expressed appreciation for the interest of US Americans and Canadians in the biosphere reserve, but he asked that “northern friends take real steps for the conservation of monarchs in their own countries, too.” Manuel suggested launching an “adopt-a-sanctuary” program in which ejidos of the biosphere reserve were paired up with communities in Canada and the United States to hold each other accountable. US Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt, who attended at the urging of Brower, commented that the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s “Wildlife without Borders” program should award grants for monarch-related projects. Ejidatarios believed any money should go directly to them, not be filtered through middlemen like government bureaucrats or NGOs. Mexican campesinos wanted international commitments, not empty promises.⁷⁷

The conference’s outcome was the solidifying of a proposal to modify the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. On November 10, 2000, President Ernesto Zedillo issued a decree expanding the protected area from 16,000 to 56,300 hectares. This threefold enlargement, according to Mexican scientist Leticia Merino Pérez, “covers possible fluctuations in the areas where colonies are located.”⁷⁸ In other words, extending the core and buffer zones into one contiguous park allowed the butterflies to move and roost where the mixed oyamel-pine tree canopy was most intact, adapting to a thinned forest. To discourage logging, the Fondo Monarca (Monarch Fund) would compensate all ejidatarios who lost access to forest resources from an endowment created by the Packard Foundation and other international NGOs. Every year, they received $360 MXN ($18 USD) per cubic meter of timber forfeited because of the new core zones, plus another $250 MXN ($12 USD) per hectare of conserved forest. The 2000 edict was a compromise between conservationists and campesinos. The former wanted the expansion of the biosphere reserve; in exchange, the latter demanded annual payments for preserved ecosystem services.⁷⁹

Thirty-one communities impacted by the new Reserve boundaries (80 percent of the total) chose to participate in the Fondo Monarca. Government bureaucrats with the Ministry of the Environment, Natural Resources, and Fisheries conducted field visits to assess deforestation rates; World Wildlife Fund officials administered the trust. If less than 2 percent of the forest was degraded, ejidatarios got the payment. If less than 3 percent, they got a warning but still received money. If greater than 3 percent (above what Brower and his colleagues estimated was the deforestation rate between 1984 and 1999), they were denied any money. In 2003, Fondo Monarca disbursed almost $500,000 USD across thirty communities—all but one ejido received compensation. Scientists have estimated that the financial incentives slowed down logging by 700 hectares in the core zones.⁸⁰

But Fondo Monarca’s effectiveness at conserving forest through economic stabilization was limited by the patriarchal and undemocratic structure of land ownership. Although the ejido system improved the lives of landless campesinos who once toiled on haciendas, the 1930s land reforms were still based on an unequal distribution of resources. The title of ejidatario became an inherited position handed down from father to youngest son, which allowed these men to participate in local governance and to receive trust payments. 70 to 85 percent of local people have no formal rights in their ejido. Some ejidatarios distributed funds to the wider community; others kept money to themselves. Economic instability meant an outmigration of young men and women: half of those who grew up around the biosphere reserve left in search of jobs in Mexico City or the United States. Cutting trees was always an option for those who stayed.⁸¹

And those who did were criminalized. At Moncon-III, the Ministry of the Environment, Natural Resources, and Fisheries promoted the formation of vigilance committees to help the federal government patrol the biosphere reserve. In 2003, for example, Vicente Guzmán Reyes of Donaciano Ojeda petitioned the Vicente Fox administration (2000–2006) for money to pay small salaries for his forty-member crew.⁸² Federal officials responded by purchasing radios through the World Wildlife Fund to coordinate the watch and turn their neighbors over to PROFEPA more easily. The forest police responded to forty-two complaints of illegal logging in the year 2003 alone, assessing fines when people were caught in the act.⁸³

Consider the story of Emilio Velázquez, an ejidatario who lives at the base of the Cerro Pelón Monarch Sanctuary in Ejido El Capulín. In an oral interview, Velázquez remembered taking a seasonal job as an apple picker in Washington State because there were no opportunities near home. Velázquez migrated with his family for one season, but they all were arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement for lacking work visas. His young daughter spent six months in foster care following his arrest. When the family was finally reunited, Velázquez was traumatized because his child no longer spoke Spanish. Deported home, Velázquez then turned to logging. He recalled an unhappy day a decade ago when the PROFEPA forest police caught one of his crew members with a downed tree and fined him $80,000 MXN ($3,500 USD) for the park infraction. The financial catastrophe was devastating, Velázquez remarked, “We took out loans against our land titles, we sold what we had.”⁸⁴ Velázquez was treated like a criminal no matter where he went; his plight representing the economic insecurity of many Mexicans in a post-NAFTA world.

The Mexican federal government expanded the protected area, and yet its administrative response was haphazardly implemented or excessively punitive. The Vicente Fox administration enacted a “zero tolerance” policy, increasing law enforcement through the Ministry of National Defense to crack down on illegal logging at the sanctuaries. Some ejido communities wanted state intervention but believed government officials turned a blind eye, colluding with sawmill owners; others believed their birthrights as ejidatarios were being unfairly disregarded and that they were being persecuted with arrests and massive fines for tree felling; still others felt the money should go to financial assistance for rural development projects rather than the paramilitary. Instead of addressing rural poverty, federal officials criminalized poor people who possess historic rights inside the park. Avocado-growing provides opportunities for generating local income, but the cartel-led aguacate industry in Michoacán has a vested interest in illegal logging around the biosphere reserve because deforestation opens land for new orchards.⁸⁵

By the first decade of the new millennium, monarch conservation needed a metamorphosis, but it was unclear what type of response was going to emerge from the cocoon. Monarch numbers in Mexico dipped to their lowest ever recorded. Reserve administrators calculated population sizes since the mid-1990s by tallying forest coverage. Between 1994 and 2003, the butterflies covered 9 hectares on average; between 2003 and 2012, they overwintered on only 5 hectares. During the 2013–2014 season, they dwindled to a mere 0.67 hectares. On the basis of a general rule of 50 million butterflies per hectare, monarchs had plummeted from their highest recorded number of 1 billion in 1996–1997 to an all-time low of 33 million in 2013–2014, which translated to an 87 percent decline over twenty years. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature considers any species whose population size has dropped by 90 percent to be “critically endangered.” The monarch butterfly, a “sentinel” species, serves as warning sign about the dire circumstances of many insects.⁸⁶

To counteract a population collapse, one promising approach to monarch conservation employs local communities. In 2019, Emilio Velázquez finally found economic security through an arborist position with a grassroots conservation nonprofit called Butterflies and Their People. “Now I have a secure job and I will not cut down trees again because it’s very dangerous,” Velázquez stated.⁸⁷ A stable job, more than a yearly payment, was the difference between protecting or pilfering the butterfly forest. He performs a myriad of tasks like trail maintenance and forest patrolling, and he enjoys returning home to his family every night. Velázquez offers a glimpse of a metamorphosis, of what a more equitable future might look like, but too few people in too few communities have long-term employment. And instead of payments for ecosystem services going solely to ejidatarios like Velázquez, they might be distributed to everyone in the ejidos as a form of universal basic income.⁸⁸ Environmental justice for the monarchs’ Mexican neighbors means broadening conservation approaches beyond market-based strategies such as ecotourism, which come and go like the butterflies.

Discussion of the Literature

The scholarly literature about monarch butterflies has been dominated by scientists, particularly Lincoln Brower and Fred Urquhart, and by those at academic institutions outside of Mexico. An exception was Carlos F. Gottfried’s Monarcas (1984), one of the few early works in Spanish to synthesize monarch biology and conservation for a general audience and to catalyze national support for a biosphere reserve.⁸⁹ Proceedings from each major conference on the monarch butterfly—in 1981, 1985, and 1997—were published to assess the current state of scientific knowledge and conservation priorities.⁹⁰ They reveal a shift in concern over time from preserving overwintering forests in Mexico to restoring milkweed and nectar sources in Canada and the United States. The final conference was significant for its inclusion of ejidatarios and their perspectives on the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. Sociologists Leticia Merino Pérez and Ludger Brenner have brought a critical edge to scholarship by discussing how local communities viewed the Reserve’s expansion in 2000 and the acceptance of ecotourism as an economic alternative to logging.⁹¹ Placing all these changes in their historical context of conservation in Mexico, Emily Wakild’s Revolutionary Parks (2011), Christopher Boyer’s Political Landscapes (2015), and Matthew Vitz’s A City on a Lake (2018) offer launching points into the secondary literature.⁹²

A knowledge gap that my own work tries to fill was the crucial decade (1976–1986) beginning when Urquhart announced the monarch migration to the world and ending when President de la Madrid formally established the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve.⁹³ Future scholarship could address the pre-Hispanic and colonial experiences with monarchs. Carlos Beutelspacher’s Las Mariposas entre los Antiguos Mexicanos (1999) provides an important base of archaeological knowledge on butterflies, but it does not address monarchs specifically.⁹⁴ Evolutionary biologists suggest that the origins of the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) lie in Central America because most butterflies in the subfamily of Danainae reside in the equatorial tropics. According to Richard Vane-Wright’s “Columbian hypothesis,” the monarch butterfly took advantage of cutover forests, which led to the expansion of host plant Asclepias, and of transoceanic steamship travel to achieve a dramatic range expansion across the Pacific and Atlantic during the 19th century.⁹⁵ Outside of North America, migrating monarchs can be found in Australia, where they first colonized in 1870. There are also resident populations of butterflies in Spain. More historical work could trace the monarch’s global diffusion from the Americas.

The bureaucratic changes in administering the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve are difficult to assess because World Wildlife Fund-Mexico does not have publicly available records other than official reports. There are many environmental nonprofits that work inside and outside the biosphere reserve, such as Alternare (established in 1999) and the Correo Real (established in 1992) of Protección de la Fauna Mexicana (PROFAUNA). Future studies could assess the origins and influence of Mexico’s nonprofit sector in monarch conservation. Sjoerd Van der Meer’s “The Butterfly Effect” (2007) offers a launching point, with interviews, which were conducted in 2004–2005, of key stakeholders who work and live near the protected area.⁹⁶ The jurisdictional complexities of the relationship between the Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas (CONANP), which oversees all federal protected areas, and ejido and indigenous communities, which retain communal land rights, could be analyzed historically and spatially to better understand who has exercised authority within the biosphere reserve. The works of geographer M. Isabel Ramírez-Ramírez and ecologist Pablo Jaramillo-López can help to define the problem’s context.⁹⁷

Primary Sources

Because the monarch migration is a trinational phenomenon, sources can be found in repositories in Canada, Mexico, and United States. Below is a list of the most pertinent collections related to monarch butterfly conservation: