Nanacateras — Guardians of the Mexican Fungal Forest
Nanacateras
The woman who knows the mushrooms of the forest. Who tells them apart, names them, prepares them, and passes them on. The one who carries the knowledge of the land in her hands, in her sense of smell, in her memory.
Mexico’s mycological knowledge does not begin in a laboratory or in a book. It begins in the forest, with the communities who have inhabited and read that ecosystem for centuries. The nanacateras are custodians of a knowing that no scientific paper can reproduce in full: knowledge that is situated, embodied, and transmitted orally from one generation to the next.
01 — Francisca Quiroz Olvera
Francisca Quiroz Olvera
Francisca Quiroz Olvera is an artisan and nanacatera from Omitlán de Juárez, Hidalgo, in the Sierra de Pachuca. Her hands carve and embroider forest mushrooms — not as ornament, but as testimony. Every piece she makes carries the weight of a knowledge that is not learned from texts: the bodily recognition of species, the intuition of habitat, the memory of the forest passed from mother to daughter.
Francisca works in carved wood and embroidered textile, making unique pieces whose mycological motifs come from the species that grow in the fir and pine forests of the Sierra de Pachuca. Her sculpted mushrooms — Amanita, Boletus, Lactarius — are not imagined illustrations: they are mushrooms she has gathered, cooked and known for decades.
For Simbiosis, working with Francisca is a way of returning something to the fabric of knowledge that formed us. Her pieces are available in our Art and Craft collection as collector’s objects that carry with them the geography and the culture from which they were born.
Carved wood Embroidery Omitlán de Juárez, Hidalgo Traditional knowledgeHer pieces are material documents: records of species, names, forms and relationships that Western fungal knowledge is only beginning to systematise. In each of Francisca’s objects there is a taxonomy of its own — more embodied, and in certain respects more precise, than the one academic mycology provides.
02 — Maestra Horalia Díaz Barriga
Maestra Horalia Díaz Barriga
Some people do not teach you a subject: they teach you a way of seeing. Maestra Horalia Díaz Barriga was, for Arif and for Simbiosis, one of those people. A profound educator, deeply versed in the land of Guanajuato and in the fungi that inhabit it, Maestra Horalia embodied the line that joins the forest to the classroom, the harvest to the understanding, traditional knowing to pedagogical transmission.
Her influence lives on in the way Simbiosis understands fungal education: not as a transfer of data, but as an experience of relationship with the land. The rigorous curiosity she sowed, her insistence on naming with precision and respecting the cycles, are part of the DNA of what we do.
03 — The regions and communities we work with
We work directly with foragers, artisans and communities across six Mexican states, in a relationship that always seeks reciprocity and the explicit acknowledgement of where the knowledge comes from.
Sierra de los Bosques Altos
Our home. The pine-oak forests of San Miguel de Allende and the Peralillo reservoir are the setting for our foraging tours. The farming families know the season of “Hongosto” — the Sundays of August — with remarkable phenological precision.
Campesino communities OtomíSierra de Pachuca and Omitlán de Juárez
Territory of the Hñähñu (Otomí) peoples. Fir and pine forests with high mycological diversity. This is where Francisca Quiroz Olvera works. We have taken part in the Rocabosque fair and in activities with the UAEH.
Hñähñu (Otomí) Campesino communitiesOtomí and Pjiekak’joo (Tlahuica)
It was here that Arif first met local mycological knowledge, walking with Otomí neighbours from childhood. These communities distinguish with notable precision the mushrooms known as patas de pollo (Ramaria spp.).
Otomí Pjiekak’joo (Tlahuica)Pátzcuaro and the Purhépecha region
The Lake Pátzcuaro basin and its forests hold a rich Purhépecha mycological tradition. Mushrooms have belonged to the diet, the medicine and the cosmovision since pre-Hispanic times. We collaborate with foragers, exchanging species and knowledge of identification.
PurhépechaSierra Norte and Nahua communities
One of the richest mycological corridors in Mexico. Nahua communities distinguish dozens of species by local names with no equivalent in scientific Spanish, and maintain harvesting practices that respect the cycles of fungal reproduction.
NahuaSierra Mazateca, Zapoteca and Mixe
The state with the greatest documented mycological diversity in Mexico, and the deepest traditional knowledge in the country. César Kevin Pérez Pacheco — designer, artist, biologist and mycologist, collaborator of Simbiosis — was born of this cultural universe.
Mazatec Zapotec Mixe04 — Our relationship with the communities
Principles that govern the collaboration
- Explicit acknowledgement of origin: Mexico’s mycological knowledge was built by Indigenous peoples over centuries, long before academic mycology existed. We name that origin, always.
- Economic reciprocity: when a collaboration generates income for Simbiosis, we seek to return part of that value to the community — through direct purchase, commission, credit or exchange.
- No epistemological extractivism: we do not publish, systematise or commercialise traditional knowledge without the informed consent of those who hold it.
- Long-term relationships: we do not seek one-off collaborations for image. We build bonds sustained over time, with the same people, in the same communities.
- Debt and gratitude: we recognise that without Indigenous and campesino knowledge, Simbiosis would not exist. That debt is not settled — it is honoured with every action.
05 — Mexican ethnomycology: the knowledge that precedes science
Ethnomycology — the study of the relationships between human cultures and fungi — found in Mexico one of its richest territories. In the 1950s and 1960s, Roger Heim and R. Gordon Wasson documented for Western academia, for the first time, the traditions of sacred use of Psilocybe mushrooms in the Mazatec communities of Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca, guided by the healer María Sabina. That milestone marked the birth of the discipline — yet the knowledge Wasson “discovered” had been alive in those communities for millennia.
What science still cannot do entirely, the nanacateras do with their senses and their memory: distinguishing Amanita caesarea from Amanita muscaria at a distance, under shifting conditions of light, humidity and age of the specimen; knowing on which particular tree a given species grows in that particular forest; knowing which years “give mushrooms” and which do not, without formal climate data. That knowledge is as rigorous as any laboratory protocol — only its medium is not paper but the body, the land, and oral transmission.
Recommended books and resources
For anyone wishing to go deeper into Mexico’s mycological richness from a cultural and ethnobotanical perspective, we recommend:
Recommended reading
- Arqueología Mexicana, Special Edition no. 87 — “Hongos de México: saberes y tradiciones” (Editorial Raíces, 2019). The most complete reference available in Spanish on the cultural, gastronomic, medicinal and sacred use of mushrooms in pre-Hispanic and contemporary Mexico. Includes analysis of representations in codices, traditions of Mazatec, Zapotec, Nahua and Purhépecha peoples, and the archaeological context of the Mesoamerican “mushroom stones”.
- “Estado de hongos” — Nanae Watabe Llamas (Ámbar Diseño, 2025). Antonio García Cubas Prize (INAH), Popular Science category. A book documenting the present state of mycological knowledge in Mexico from the perspective of citizen science, communities and biodiversity. Indispensable for understanding why Mexico is one of the most mycologically rich countries on the planet.
- “Etnomicología en México” — J. Cifuentes, M. Villegas and L. Pérez-Ramírez (eds.), in Hongos de México: aspectos culturales y económicos (UNAM, 2004). The academic reference framework for the relationships between Mesoamerican cultures and the Fungal Kingdom.
06 — Knowledge in action
On our foraging tours, the knowledge of the nanacateras lives in the details that appear in no manual: in how the basket is carried (never a plastic bag, so the spores scatter as you walk), in how to cut without tearing out the base, in the choice of places where nothing is gathered because “this year it rests”.
That deep ecological knowledge — what the academic literature calls traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) — is what we try to pass on in every experience. It is not folklore. It is field science with centuries of empirical validation.
The nanacateras are not an anthropological curiosity: they are the primary source of what we now call applied mycology.
You belong to a community with mycological knowledge
If you are a forager, artisan, cook or keeper of traditional fungal knowledge and you would like to collaborate with Simbiosis, write to us. The relationship we build is long-term, reciprocal, and explicitly acknowledged.
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