flower

MEXICO CITY — Amid the constant blare of car horns in southern Mexico City, it’s hard to imagine that Cuicuilco was once the heart of a thriving ancient civilization. Yet atop its circular pyramid, now surrounded by buildings and a shopping center, a pre-Hispanic fire god was revered.

“This is incredible,” said Evangelina Báez, who spent a recent morning at Cuicuilco with her daughters. “In the midst of so much urbanization, there’s still this haven of peace.”

Her visit was part of a monthly tour program crafted by the National Institute of Anthropology and History, known by its Spanish initials as INAH.

Aside from overseeing Mexico’s archaeological sites and museums, the institute safeguards the country’s cultural heritage, including restoring damaged monuments and artworks as well as reviewing construction projects to ensure they don’t harm archaeological remains.

Its historians and archaeologists also lead excursions like the one in Cuicuilco. Each academic expert picks a location, proposes a walking itinerary to the INAH and, once approved, it’s offered to the public for about 260 pesos ($15).

“I joined these tours with the intention of sharing our living heritage,” said archaeologist Denisse Gómez after greeting guests in Cuicuilco. “Our content is always up to date.”

According to Mónica de Alba, who oversees the tours, the INAH excursions date to 1957, when an archaeologist decided to share the institute’s research with colleagues and students.

“People are beginning to realize how much the city has to offer,” said De Alba, explaining that the INAH offers around 130 tours per year in downtown Mexico City alone. “There are even travel agents who pretend to be participants to copy our routes.”

María Luisa Maya, 77, often joins these tours as a solo visitor. Her favorite so far was one to an archaeological site in Guerrero, a southern Mexican state along the Pacific coast.

“I’ve been doing this for about eight years,” she said. “But that’s nothing. I’ve met people who have come for 20 or 25.”

Traces of a lost city

Cuicuilco means “the place where songs and dances are made” in the Nahua language.

Still, the precise name of its people is unknown, given that the city’s splendor dates back to the pre-Classic era from 400 to 200 B.C. and few clues are left to dig deeper into its history.

“The Nahuas gave them that name, which reveals that this area was never forgotten,” said archaeologist Pablo Martínez, who co-led the visit with Gómez. “It was always remembered, and even after its decline, the Teotihuacan people came here to make offerings.”

The archaeological site is a quiet corner nestled between two of Mexico City’s busiest avenues. Yet according to Martínez, the settlements went far beyond the vicinity and Cuicuilco’s population reached 40,000.

“What we see today is just a small part of the city,” he said. “Merely its pyramidal base.”

Now covered in grass and resembling a truncated cone, the pyramid was used for ritual purposes. The details of the ceremonies are unknown, but female figurines preserved at the site’s museum suggest that offerings were related to fertility.

“We think they offered perishable objects such as corn, flowers and seeds,” Gómez said. “They were feeding the gods.”

Echoes of living heritage

According to official records, Mexico’s most visited archaeological sites are Teotihuacán and Chichén Itzá. The first is a pre-Aztec city northeast of the capital known for its monumental Sun and Moon pyramids. The latter is a major Mayan site in the Southeast famed for its 12th-century Temple of Kukulkán.

The INAH oversees both. But its tours focus on shedding light on Mexico’s hidden gems.

During an excursion preceding Cuicuilco’s, visitors walked through a neighborhood in Ecatepec, on the outskirts of Mexico City, where open-air markets, street food and religious festivals keep local traditions alive. A few days prior, another tour focused on La Merced market, where flowers, prayers and music filled the aisles during the feast of Our Lady of Mercy.

October’s schedule takes into account Day of the Dead traditions. But tours will feature a variety of places like Xochimilco, where visitors can take a moonlit boat tour through its canals and chinampas, and Templo Mayor, the Aztec empire’s main religious and social center in ancient Tenochtitlán.

“These tours allow the general public to get closer to societies that are distant in time and space,” said historian Jesús López del Río, who will lead an upcoming tour on human sacrifices to deities in Mesoamérica.

“Approaching the pre-Hispanic past is not only about how the Maya used zero in their calculations or how the Mexica built a city on a lake,” he added. “It’s about understanding how those societies worked — their way of seeing and relating to the world.”

Hernández writes for the Associated Press.

Two scenes. Two storytellers. Two visions for a climate-altered American West.

On an overcast spring morning, I hopped a low metal fence off a lonely dirt road in the Nevada desert, following botanist Naomi Fraga. She assured me she’d done this before — these were public lands, after all. We were 100 miles east of Yosemite, out in the middle of nowhere, except I’d long since learned there’s no such thing as nowhere. The desert may look barren, but its mountains and valleys teem with life. And precious metals.

Fraga led me up a small hill, the soil chalky-white and rich with lithium, a key ingredient in lithium-ion batteries for electric cars. We moved slowly, not wanting to trample any endangered wildflowers.

Wait, were those the flowers? The Tiehm’s buckwheat I’d come hundreds of miles to see?

“Very tiny,” Fraga confirmed. “When it flowers, its flower stalks might come about 4 or 5 inches high.”

“It snows here in this elevation zone,” she added, roughly 6,000 feet above sea level. “It’s a very cold desert, and when it’s cold, Tiehm’s buckwheat is just lying in wait, waiting for spring.”

For a flower that’s spurred high-stakes litigation, detailed scientific study and global news coverage, it was pretty ugly, at least in its dormant winter state. The clumps of gray-green buckwheat looked almost like mold.

Clumps of Tiehm’s buckwheat near the planned Rhyolite Ridge lithium mine.

(Sammy Roth / Los Angeles Times)

For Fraga, the flower’s current appearance is beside the point. Tiehm’s buckwheat doesn’t grow anywhere else in the world — just here, across three square miles of Esmeralda County. She’s enthralled by its role in an ecosystem of pollinators and bighorn sheep. She’s awestruck by its ability to survive winter snow and 120-degree heat.

“I just have an enormous amount of respect for the organisms that make this their home,” she said. “I feel like it brings for a reverence for harsh living, and ways in which life will find a way.”

The question now: Can Tiehm’s buckwheat survive a lithium mine?

Fraga doesn’t think so. Bernard Rowe disagrees.

The day after I met Fraga, Rowe took me to the same area. We drove down the dirt road past the metal fence, to a spectacular basin where his employer, Australia-based Ioneer, is preparing to dig for lithium.

“The good thing is, this is a natural amphitheater, and it is hidden from really everywhere,” Rowe said. “You’ve got the ring of volcanic rocks that completely surrounds this basin.”

Sight lines don’t matter to an endangered flower. But contrary to claims made by conservationists, Rowe said the Rhyolite Ridge mine won’t drive Tiehm’s buckwheat to extinction. He noted that mining activities won’t touch any subpopulations of Tiehm’s buckwheat — although the quarry could come as close as a dozen feet.

“We had to make sure we put buffer zones. We had to map all the plants,” he said.

So who’s right?

Bernard Rowe, managing director at Ioneer, discusses the company’s planned lithium mine in Esmeralda County, Nevada.

(Jonathan Shifflett)

It would be easy to make the company look like the bad guy. After all, here’s a profit-seeking foreign corporation seeking to exploit America’s public lands in the name of environmental progress. Potentially at the expense of an endangered species. With only a band of hardy activists standing in the way.

It’s a good story. Arguably an accurate story. And yet…

And yet the climate crisis makes everything complicated. To phase out oil and natural gas — whose combustion fills the air with deadly pollution and fuels devastating storms, wildfires and heat waves — we’ll need enormous amounts of lithium, for electric vehicle batteries and solar energy storage to keep the lights on after dark. Most of the world’s lithium is currently produced in Australia and China, and at destructive evaporation ponds in Chile.

Those geopolitical dynamics help explain why lithium mining has garnered bipartisan support even as President Trump kills other clean energy projects. The Biden administration approved Rhyolite Ridge last year, then backed the developer with a $996-million loan. The Trump administration has let both decisions stand.

Already, Rowe estimated, the U.S. consumes 100,000 tons of lithium carbonate per year for electric car batteries.

“By the time you add in grid batteries, hand tools, recreational vehicles, cellphones … it will soon be hundreds of thousands of tons,” he said. “And into the future, it’ll be 1 million tons of domestic demand.”

Let’s say the Rhyolite Ridge’s critics are right, and the mine would, in fact, annihilate Tiehm’s buckwheat. Is that a reasonable price to pay for ditching oil-burning cars and shutting down gas-fired power plants?

The answer might depend on your vantage point.

Botanist Naomi Fraga examines Tiem’s buckwheat on a hill near the planned site of the Rhyolite Ridge lithium mine.

(Jonathan Shifflett)

Take Fraga. She was born and raised in Southern California’s San Gabriel Valley and is now a botany professor at Claremont Graduate University. She started doing research in Nevada a few years before the COVID-19 pandemic. She sees Rhyolite Ridge as part of a landscape so unique it might be a national monument were it in California.

Rowe, meanwhile, grew up in an Australian farm town. He was inspired to study geology by a university lecturer’s tales of travel and adventure, which led him to the mining industry. He’s spent 20 years splitting his time between Sydney and Nevada, where he helped identify the value in Rhyolite Ridge’s mineral deposits.

Part of the value is lithium. The rest is boron, a durable, heat-resistant metalloid. Rowe could riff for hours about the vast array of products that require boron, including steel alloys, carpet fibers, car parts, wind turbine magnets and many types of glass, including cookware, windshields, TV screens and thermal insulation.

Right now, Turkey is the world’s top boron producer by far. Rhyolite Ridge was a rare find.

“Most other metal deposits — copper, gold — they can be quite young, in terms of a few million years old. Or they can be hundreds of millions, even a billion years old,” Rowe said. “You don’t find old boron deposits.”

For Rowe, Rhyolite Ridge is treasure buried in plain sight. For Fraga, it’s just the latest example of callous outsiders attempting to exploit Nevada’s public lands — a history that began with silver mining and continues with housing development, solar farms and nuclear waste storage. Nevada is already home to America’s only active lithium mine, not far from Rhyolite Ridge. The Thacker Pass mine is also under construction near the Oregon border.

Angelenos driving electric vehicles ought to think about how their choices affect Nevada, Fraga suggested.

“There’s a real tension there, where we need to avert the worst of the climate crisis. But in doing so, we can cause real harm to ecosystems,” she said.

So how do we resolve that tension?

Tiehm’s buckwheat in bloom.

(Naomi Fraga)

I put off writing this column for three months because I didn’t have a good answer. How could I defend the mine when it might doom an endangered species? Yet how could I condemn it when we need lithium, and when so few large-scale clean energy projects don’t face environmental conflicts?

As far as the sparring parties are concerned, the facts speak for themselves. Ioneer points to a biological opinion from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concluding that its mine is “not likely to jeopardize the continued existence” of Tiehm’s buckwheat or “result in the destruction or adverse modification of its critical habitat.”

Conservationists counter that when the Fish and Wildlife Service declared the flower an endangered species in 2022, the agency described “mineral exploration and development” as one of the “greatest threats” to the flower. The Center for Biological Diversity, the Western Shoshone Defense Project and Great Basin Resource Watch sued federal officials over their approval of the mine last year, contending they rushed the environmental review.

It’s possible we’ll never know who’s right. Ioneer is scrambling to secure new funding after the South African firm Sibanye-Stillwater — which was supposed to invest $490 million — backed out this year amid falling global lithium prices. Ioneer said this month it wouldn’t start construction until at least March. If and when the company is ready to start digging, the groups in the lawsuit could ask the judge to block construction.

But whatever happens at Rhyolite Ridge, these types of questions aren’t going away — especially in the American West, where public lands have traditionally supplied big cities with energy, water and food. We’ll need to be more thoughtful than ever about how we use land. We’ll need to get comfortable evaluating trade-offs.

In an ideal world, we’d never have to choose between lithium mines and lovely flowers. Or at least, we’d find ways to resolve these types of conflicts amicably — and quickly, because climate chaos is coming fast.

Sometimes it’s possible. Alas, sometimes we’ll have to choose.

This is the latest edition of Boiling Point, a newsletter about climate change and the environment in the American West. Sign up here to get it in your inbox. And listen to our Boiling Point podcast here.

For more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on X and @sammyroth.bsky.social on Bluesky.

More than a dozen religious leaders from an array of faiths marched to the steps of the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday night, flowers in hand, calling for an end to the federal immigration raids they say have torn families apart and resulted in racial profiling.

At the start of the procession in Plaza Olvera, the Rev. Tanya Lopez, senior pastor at Downey Memorial Christian Church, recounted how last week she watched as plainclothes federal agents swarmed a constituent in the parking lot of her church. Despite her attempts to intervene, she said, the man was detained, and she doesn’t know where he is now.

“All of our faith traditions teach us to love our neighbor, to leave the world with less suffering than when we find it, and this is creating trauma that will be unable to be undone for generations,” Lopez said.

Religious leaders from multiple faiths left flowers on the steps of the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles in honor of people detained in recent immigration raids.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

Federal enforcement actions have played out across Southern California this week as the Trump administration carries out its vows to do mass deportations of immigrants in the country without documentation. Initially, President Trump focused his rhetoric on those who had committed violent crimes. But shortly after he took office, his administration made clear that it considers anyone in the country without authorization to be a criminal.

The raids — which have spanned bus stops, Home Depot parking lots, swap meets, farms and factories — have prompted many immigrants to go into hiding, and in some cases, to self-deport.

The religious leaders marching Wednesday called for a halt to the raids, saying immigrants are integral to the Los Angeles community and deserve to be treated with respect and dignity, regardless of documentation status.

They carried their message through downtown, marching from Plaza Olvera to the Federal Building, dressed in colorful garb reflecting Jewish, Sikh, Muslim and Catholic traditions, and uniting in song and prayer, in Spanish and English.

They called out to God, Creator, the Holy One, and prayed for healing and justice. They prayed for the hundreds of people who have been detained and deported and the families they’ve left behind.

Father Brendan Busse of Dolores Mission Church looks out over the crowd participating in an interfaith protest Wednesday in downtown Los Angeles.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

In the crowd, Talia Guppy held purple flowers to her chest as she sang along. Guppy said she learned that members of her Episcopalian church, St. Stephen’s Hollywood, had been detained during the raid of the Ambiance Apparel factory in downtown L.A. Her church has since moved its services online to accommodate people afraid to venture from their homes.

“We’re out here for them,” she said. “We’re going to keep the hope and keep the faith until we get justice for them.”

At the end of the procession, the marchers approached the steps of the Federal Building. Officers from the Department of Homeland Security poured out of the building and guarded the entrance as clergy leaders lined the steps. Inside, behind semireflective doors, rows of U.S. Marines stood at the ready.

The leaders called for peace and laid flowers on the steps in tribute to those who have been detained.

“We come with flowers, and we will keep coming with flowers as long as our loved ones are held in cages,” said Valarie Kaur, a Sikh leader. She turned her attention to the officers at the doors, who stood stoic, and questioned how they wanted to be remembered by history. Then she placed flowers by their feet.

Sikh leader Valarie Kaur leaves a flower at the feet of federal officers standing guard at the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles.

(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)

In the crowd, protesters held signs with images of the Virgin Mary and Mexican flags. The clergy asked them to be ready to defend their neighbors in the coming days.

Father Brendan Busse, a Jesuit priest at the Dolores Mission Church in Boyle Heights, said he has felt the impact of the raids within his church. Devoted members are no longer in the pews. Others call asking whether it is safe to come to church. The fear is palpable.

“We need to be a safe space for people, not just in our church, but in the whole neighborhood,” he said. “I can’t guarantee to anybody that we are a totally safe space, but to at least give them a sense that in the difficult moment we’re at, that we stand together.”

This article is part of The Times’ equity reporting initiative, funded by the James Irvine Foundation, exploring the challenges facing low-income workers and the efforts being made to address California’s economic divide.

For Miley Cyrus, an “extremely excruciating” pain preceded “Something Beautiful.”

The pop star and Disney channel alumna this week spoke candidly about her mental, emotional and physical health, unveiling that she powered through a “medical emergency” during her live “New Year’s Eve Party” TV special three years ago. The Grammy-winning “Flowers” musician said she suffered an ovarian cyst rupture.

“We didn’t know exactly what was going on, but it was pretty traumatic, ’cause it was extremely excruciating,” she told DJ and Apple Music interviewer Zane Lowe in a far-ranging conversation published Wednesday. “I did the show anyways.”

The “Wrecking Ball” and “Party in the U.S.A” singer, 32, rang in 2023 for NBC, co-hosting her “Miley’s New Year’s Eve Party” with godmother and music icon Dolly Parton. During the special, produced by “Saturday Night Live” boss Lorne Michaels, Cyrus performed live, taking the stage alongside Parton, Paris Hilton, Sia and Fletcher. Latto, Rae Sremmurd and Liily were also among the musical acts who joined the New Year’s celebration.

Cyrus, who said she couldn’t pass up an opportunity to work with both Michaels and Parton, told Lowe the holiday gig “was really hard on me” and did not go into further detail about the health scare. Ovarian cysts are fluid-filled sacs found in an ovary or on its surface. Cysts are common and can often be harmless and cause little to no discomfort, but larger cysts can bring about symptoms including pelvic pain, abdominal pressure and bloating, according to the Mayo Clinic. Cysts can “become twisted or burst open,” causing “pain and bleeding inside the pelvis.”

The “Hannah Montana” star also opened up about a polyp on her vocal cords, which makes live performances feel like “running a marathon with the weights on,” and her sobriety journey. Cyrus has been in the public eye since childhood and in recent years has spoken about her struggles with addiction. In December 2020, she told Rolling Stone about her drug and alcohol use and how the young, drug-related deaths of artists including Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix prompted her to “pull my[self] together before I’m 27.”

For Cyrus, sobriety hasn’t always been a straightforward path, but this week she said “sobriety is … like my God.”

“I need it. I live for [it]. It’s changed my entire life,” she said before acknowledging there was a moment she “fell apart” in recent years. “I was so close to who’s sitting here right now but … [life] had more lessons for me.”

Cyrus, who won her first career Grammy for “Flowers” in 2024, is on the verge of a new, theatrical and fashionable era. Her ninth studio album, “Something Beautiful” is due May 30 and will be accompanied by a film in June.

“This era marks another bold artistic evolution for Miley, blending music and film into an immersive experience,” according to an announcement shared to her Instagram page.

“Something Beautiful,” Cyrus said in the Apple Music chat, “ couldn’t [be] any more personal to me.”

She added: “Every single string, sound… sequin, strand of hair, eye lash has been considered and created not only something that I love but something that I’m excited to share with [fans.]”