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What do wild mushrooms, the marimba instrument, the Indigenous Zoque and Chapanecan people, and a fairy-tale forest deep in Southwestern Mexico have in common?
Everything. And we want to tell you all about it as we prepare for Moni Fest 2025 coming up in September.
About Fungaria
We are Fungaria, a team of fungi lovers. By trade, we are biologists, musicians, chefs, traditional foragers, and more and we’re producing an independent documentary about Los Moní: a group of wild edible mushrooms. Some of them appear with the first rains of the year (Lactifluus spp.), while others emerge after the midsummer drought (Cantharellus coccolobae and Tremelloscypha gelatinosa).
We have been working together for the last five years to preserve the traditional wild fungi and knowledge of them in the region in which we were born.
Biodiversity of Chiapas Mushrooms
The southwesternmost state of Chiapas, Mexico, is home to one of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems and an estimated 50,000 different species of wild mushrooms. According to regional experts, only roughly 2% of these mushrooms have been identified and described by science. Among these are multiple species of psychoactive Psilocybe and Amanita mushrooms, some of which remain to be discovered.
“I’ve traveled all over the world to study wild mushrooms and connect with mushroom entrepreneurs, and this story is one of the most compelling projects I’ve ever come across in this field,” says Dennis Walker, Founder of the mushroom media platform Mycopreneur.
“What Ezequiel and the Fungaria team are doing is something that needs to be supported immediately and replicated globally. They are bridging the gap between ancient indigenous mushroom knowledge and modern scientific analysis with a focus on their home region. Their combination of expertise, passion, commitment, and logistical execution is unparalleled, and without them, there is no doubt that this precious knowledge is at risk of being lost completely within a few generations.”
The Moní Mushrooms
The Moní mushrooms that we are focusing our documentary and festival on grow only in very specific forests in southeastern Mexico, where a tree locally known as Nangaño in Chiapa, Aguaná in Zoque, and Pomos in Tseltal (Gymnopodium floribundum) dominates the landscape. These fungi are incredibly important to the people of Chiapas. They have nourished not only generations of families but also their identities, rituals, and memories. Los Moní are more than just food: they are symbols of connection to the forest, to ancestors, and a worldview rooted in the land.
Threats to Habitat and Knowledge
But their habitat is under threat, and so is the knowledge surrounding them. The acceleration of globalization and large-scale development projects in the region has urbanized and acculturated the region and its native peoples, making Coca-Cola and Netflix more accessible to the five million inhabitants of Chiapas than the traditional mushroom knowledge and a relationship with the ancient forests in the region.
Whereas a decade ago one could find dozens of vendors selling wild foraged mushrooms out of ‘canasta’ baskets in the open air markets across the state capital of Tuxtla Gutierrez, today one is lucky to find one or two vendors offering the iconic indigenous Moní mushrooms—or any of the other dozens of wild edible mushrooms that grow endemically and have a history of use in the state.
The 3rd Moní Fest & Documentary Film
To combat this accelerating loss of heritage, we are producing a documentary film titled Los Moní del Nangaño and organizing the 3rd Moni Fest, a four-day community festival in the Chiapanecan capital city of Tuxtla Gutierrez scheduled to take place September 11-14, 2025.
At this event, we’ll screen the documentary and offer a space for educational, cultural, and culinary activities focused on Los Moní and the other mushrooms that thrive in Nangañal forests. The festival will include workshops on wild mushroom identification with a focus on the Moní, live performances of traditional Zoque and Chiapanecan music performed on the regionally important Marimba instrument, gastronomy experiences, and talks from regional fungi experts.
Honoring Los Moní and their guardians, the Nangañal forests allow people from the capital city of Tuxtla, Suchiapa, Chiapa de Corzo, Coita, and other neighboring towns to reconnect with a natural resource that is deeply woven into their biocultural identity. Recovering and sharing this knowledge strengthens local pride and empowers the community to understand what they have and what it’s for, not only as food but also as a key element of their ecosystem and why it must be protected.
You can’t love what you don’t know. That’s why we want more Chiapanecans to discover these natural and cultural treasures so they can value them and defend them. Starting from the story of Moní, we also want to spark curiosity about the many other fungi growing in these forests, and about all the life Nangañales sustain: trees, birds, insects, soil, and the ancestral knowledge that binds it all together.
How to Get Involved
As we roll out the 3rd Moní Fest and the Los Moní del Nangaño documentary film, we humbly ask for your consideration in making a financial contribution in any amount to support our work through our recently launched GoFundMe campaign.
We want to not only preserve and spread awareness of traditional mushroom knowledge here in our home state of Chiapas, Mexico, but also to inspire people and groups all over the world to take action in doing the same for their home regions. Though this project is limited in scope to our homeland, it is a blueprint for people all over the world to follow and implement anywhere that wild ecosystems, native cultures, and the mushrooms that bind them together exist, so that each may flourish for generations to come.
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