This paper examines the influence of gender relations and gendered domains on maize and squash varietal selection in a village in Yucatán State, southeast Mexico. Results of the exploratory study indicate that the traditional production spaces of homegardens and agricultural fields are complementary gendered domains of varietal maintenance for both crops although with different cropping patterns, while a ‘new’ space, of land allocated to some families for future residential construction (terreno) is in the meantime a jointly worked agricultural domain. Women’s labour, knowledge and preferences predominate in post‐harvest processes. Fieldwork revealed that neither men nor women are independent decision‐makers, planning what to grow, where and in what amounts, but that in most aspects of farming the interests of both are accommodated within the household’s production spaces.

Disciplines and approaches concerned with peopleenvironment relations have contributed to legitimate traditional ecological knowledge, nowadays endorsed in the international scientific policy agenda as an important driver for management and conservation of biological resources. However, there is still a need to further understand how people internalize worldviews, knowledge, and practices regarding environmental management. In this sense, traditional homegardens are a suitable scenery to unravel such processes. Grounded on Bourdieu´ś theory of practice´, this paper unveils homegardens as fields of social practice. The homegarden field is embedded within the household field, further influenced by the community field. The three of them make up the 'array of fields' where homegardening develops by means of social interactions, informing and informed by the habitus (schemes of perception, appreciation, and action, produced by particular social environments that shape agent's own sense of the world and his/her place in it). Both, inputs (e.g. land, plants, labor, and knowledge) and outputs (e.g. increased knowledge, homegarden produce, homegarden functions and derived benefits) are here approached as homegarden´s capitals. According to the theory of practice, such capitals are unequally distributed across agents, and it is such inequality that impulses them to generate, maintain, increase and/or transform homegarden capitals.

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Allí, en el mercado tradicional de Chalcatongo, se esconde un titánico tesoro biocultural; su complejidad no puede comprenderse a simple vista, por lo que su interpretación requiere de un examen meticuloso. Allí, la gente originaria se desenvuelve de una forma impresionante que incita por un momento idílico a revivir las raíces"