Flora And Its Uses, And Some Causes Of Change In Fifteen Homegardens In The Municipality Jose Maria Morelos, Quintana Roo, Mexico

Abstract

In the Mayan Zone, in the Yucatan Peninsula, changes have emerged in the daily priorities, including the management of the Mayan traditional homegarden referred to in Spanish as a solar. Using personalized interviews of owners or “keepers” and walking through the homegardens, we enlisted species and documented the reasons to modify priorities in the solar. We selected 15 homegardens with an evident plant diversity in three towns in the municipality Jose Maria Morelos in the Mayan Zone of the state of Quintana Roo. We registered 72 species of 40 botanical families and 10 categories of uses. We found two main reasons to modify priorities in the management of the solar: the age of owners and the new alternatives for supporting the family financially. The homegardens studied are changing: they are surviving as a Family Productive Unit (fpu) but also as a Social Adaptative Unit (sau), maintaining their main function as food provider