An American scholar. A Mexican village. The U.S. military. What could go wrong?

On most maps, Tiltepec doesn’t look like much. A Zapotec village of several hundred indigenous people, Tiltepec clings to the steep slopes of the Sierra Juárez, a formidable range in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Its people have lived there for generations in relative isolation under the shadow of Cerro Negro, where once their ancestors forced conquistadors off a cliff to the Rio Vera below. The valley teems with ancient earthen terraces, platforms, and sacred caves. Yet find Tiltepec on government maps and all you’ll see is bare topography and a name. Viewed on Google Earth, it’s even less — a few patches of white rectangles drowned in forest. For most of the world, Tiltepec might as well not exist.

Peter H. Herlihy was going to change that. A geographer at the University of Kansas, he has been a pioneer in what he calls participatory research mapping, a method that allows indigenous communities to reflect their knowledge on official, standardized maps, empowering them when the state comes to redraw borders. Herlihy was no stranger to Latin America — he had used the method in the early 1990s, in Central America. But he was a stranger to Tiltepec.

In 2006, Herlihy and his team of American and Mexican researchers arrived in Oaxaca under the aegis of the American Geographical Society, an organization, now much reduced, that once rivaled the National Geographic Society in influence. The AGS had pinned its revival, which it saw going hand in hand with the revival of geography as an academic discipline, in large part on the success of Herlihy’s expedition.

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