Martha Paola Vega 1, Marie Joseé Vaillant 2, Ezra Béjar 3,4,5 1Department of Biology,
University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093. 2 Cemanahuac
Educational Community, San Antonio #7 Centro, Buenavista de Cuellar, Guerrero, C.P. 40332,
México3 College of Sciences, San Diego State University 5500 Campanile Drive, San Diego,
Ca 92182. 4 Plant Bioassay™, 5702 Baltimore Dr # 265, La Mesa, CA 91942-1667. 5 To
whom correspondence should be addressed.

Buenavista de Cuellar is a town located in the South-Central region of México, at the
North-Eastern limits of the state of Guerrero positioned at 18° 27' N longitude and 99° 25'W
latitude. The town is formed by a mestizo (Spanish-Indian) community with strong cultural
traditions but with a youth's gearing interest on modernization and a few practicing traditional
healers. This project was sparked by the interest of local anthropologist (M.J.V.) with a strong
interest in rescuing the herbal knowledge of elder traditional healers in the context of national
programs to document medicinal floras by the Mexican Institute of Social Security (IMSSM),
National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH-Morelos), and the National Autonomous
University of Mexico (UNAM) Botanical Garden.

We conducted a rapid assessment program obtained through a process of cultural integration by
a Peruvian-American student into the medical and social practices of the community for a period
of seven weeks. The program fructified in the generation of a computerized database (in pc
format) consisting of taxonomic, ethnomedical, ethnobotanical, ecological, phytochemical and
pharmacological information of plants as well as digitized pictures of the plants in their natural
habitat.

One hundred and ten plants were collected in collaboration with three informants. The field
collection included three copies of herbarium vouchers deposited in the herbaria of IMSSM,
INAH-Morelos, and UNAM Botanical Garden. The bilingual (English-Spanish) database in
Filemaker Pro v. 4.0 includes vernacular names, scientific name, family, botanical description,
use, preparation, administration route, ethnomedical information (nosological terms of ailments
and ethnic classification of plant properties), and landscape and close-up digital pictures of
flowers, leaves and fruits.

This inventory represents the only report to date describing the local indigenous medicinal flora
from Buenavista de Cuellar. It is suggested it can serve as a framework to identify future
transformation of oral traditions in the use of herbs and the integration of new plants. Through an
intercultural exchange of information: ethnobotanical, phytochemical, and biomedical, all captured
in a common database, ethnomedical/biomedical researchers can have an opportunity to focus
their investigations on already successful herbal therapies guiding their drug discovery efforts into
a direction that is most likely to give promising results. Through rich Mexican ancestral herbal
knowledge, modern biological information, and western biomedical research techniques,
scientists have the opportunity to discover and/or innovate natural remedies and therapies.
 
 

Supported by the SDSU/UCSD Minority International Research Training (MIRT) Program of
the Fogarty International, NIH.