Under a blazing sun and accompanied by the calls of hundreds of herons, plovers and other migratory birds that stop at the lakes, Hernández gathers dozens of egg-coated sticks and lays them on a raft of styrofoam. The branches serve as an anchor for the bird-fly bugs to deposit their eggs. Ocampo called the dish's survival an example of “community resistance,” similar to the way in which inhabitants around Lake Texcoco - a shallow, saline lake that once covered most of the eastern half of the Mexico City valley - have managed to preserve other traditions, festivals and ceremonies.įor Hernández, it's hard, dirty work that few are willing to do anymore.ĭressed in a hat, long-sleeved shirt, shorts and rubber boots, Hernández wades through the calf-high waters of Nabor Carrillo - a smallish lake formed from the remnants of Texcoco - to collect pine branches he had poked into the muddy lakebed the week before. The painstaking collection of “Mexican caviar,” known for its intense but delicate flavor, is threatened by the drying out of Lake Texcoco, development around the lakeshore and waning interest in the ingredient among younger generations, said Jorge Ocampo, agrarian history coordinator at the Center for Economic, Social and Technological Research on Agribusiness and World Agriculture in Mexico State. He is one of only six people known to still harvest ahuautle, at least in the Texcoco area, they fear they may be the last. “For me, more than anything, it means tradition,” said the 59-year-old Hernández. The bug, which only occasionally surfaces before diving again in a trail of bubbles, would not look like food to most, but it was once important to the people of the Valley of Mexico.įor Juan Hernández, a farmer from San Cristóbal Nezquipayac, cultivating and collecting the tiny insect eggs known as “ahuautle” - meaning water amaranth in Nahua - is a way of life.
Similar bugs are often known as “water boatmen” in English, because of the way they seem to row in ponds and streams. CHIMALHUACAN, Mexico (AP) - In a shallow lake on the outskirts of Mexico City, a handful of farmers still harvest the eggs of an evasive, fingertip-size water bug in a bid to keep alive a culinary tradition dating at least to the Aztec empire.Ĭaviar is typically associated sturgeons swimming the Caspian Sea, but the Mexican version is made from the tiny eggs of the an aquatic insect of the corixidae family, also know as the “bird fly,” because birds like to eat it.
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