Preface

I was into the third month of what would become many village sojourns as an anthropologist in northern Guatemala—a country described in many Mayan languages as Iximulew, meaning “place of maize.” I had spent my first two months as a guest of newlyweds Violeta and Paco Gomez, in a tiny ten-by-ten-foot thatched hut on the edge of the rainforest. In the company of my generous and talkative hosts, I took my first trip to a swidden milpa (see fig. 1). Although they were mestizo Salvadoran refugees, Violeta and Paco took as much pride in maize cropping as their Maya neighbors. I enjoyed my time with them, but village leaders suggested that I rotate every two months to a different family. For my next homestay I readily accepted an invitation to live with Consuela and Lorenzo and their Q’eqchi’ family of six, in their thirty-by-fifteen-foot thatched home. It afforded me the opportunity to learn Guatemala’s second-most-spoken Mayan language, plus the Caals (pronounced kah-AHLs) were one of the few village families with the luxury of a pit latrine and a personal well.

On my second or third night with the Caals (perhaps it was September 4, 1993), I heard the family arise, light candles, and speak in hushed Q’eqchi’ tones. They were gathered on the far side of the hut and energetically stomping. Unsure if I might be witnessing a secret Maya rite, I pretended to remain asleep. In the morning I summoned the courage to ask what had happened in the night. “Ants.” In my stammering high school–level Spanish I asked if had I understood them correctly. Ants? Yes. Consuela, the lady of the house who became like a sister to me, explained that fire ants had invaded the kitchen hearth area. She asked if I would buy them some volatón (phoxim) insecticide powder on my next trip to town.

Pleased to have an opportunity to be helpful to my hosts, I embraced the errand. The market vendor measured the phoxim into a cheap plastic sandwich bag that I naively brought home in the shopping bag holding the week’s groceries. To my horror, after using it to kill the ants, Lorenzo sprinkled the leftover powder over the dried cobs in their maize storage bin. This episode burst my romantic teenage notions of organic living in a rainforest frontier. The morning tortillas never tasted quite the same.

Over seven years of fieldwork I routinely observed the application of phoxim as common practice to prevent postharvest storage losses.¹ Although hybrid corn brings higher yields, it is more susceptible to weevils than native maize. By contrast, traditional maize varieties naturally withstand bugs, especially when stacked into traditional bins and sprinkled with wood ash (or the same store-bought calcium carbonate powder used to prepare tortillas) or layered with the leaves of allspice or other medicinal plant leaves. I later learned that the World Health Organization classifies phoxim as a “moderately toxic” insecticide-rodenticide, and the US Environmental Protection Agency deems it hazardous to the brain because it disrupts the critical neurotransmitter acetylcholinesterase.

I never explicitly set out to study pesticides or corn/maize. Other topics—women’s health, agrarian politics, Indigenous rights, and biodiversity issues—were my primary focus. Even so, conversations about maize permeated my fieldnotes since maize farming (milpa in Spanish) structures everyday life in the rural communities of northern Guatemala and southern Belize. (N.B.: Both corn and maize are the same species, Zea mays. Spanish speakers would say maíz for both, but I take advantage of the English synonyms in this book to differentiate between open-pollinating native maize and modern hybrid or commodity corn.)

Small talk around the maize cycle was a reliable way to break any ice. Farmers always took pride in showing me their milpas and their wives often accompanied us on these merry excursions—perhaps to keep a watchful eye on the gringa, since the invitation, “Let’s go to the milpa,” apparently has a double sexual innuendo. “No, no,” I reassured them, “I’m not luring your husband into an affair. I’m genuinely interested in intercropping” (or whatever aspect of rural life I was trying to understand). For a deeper and longitudinal understanding of maize agriculture, I was fortunate to be mentored by one of Ruben Reina’s students, Norman Schwartz, who studied Petenero milpas for fifty-eight years and bequeathed those fieldnotes to me upon his death.

SEPTEMBER SONGS

Two events during graduate school at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, further kindled my interest in maize. On September 4, 2001—an important date in my story—Dr. Ignacio Chapela, a microbial ecologist working in a building across campus, announced the shocking discovery of genetic contamination of native maize in Oaxaca, Mexico, even after the Mexican government had placed a moratorium on growing genetically modified (GM) corn. The discovery was particularly disturbing because Oaxaca is the center of agrobiodiversity of the world’s most productive grain crop. Unfortunately for Chapela, his department had previously accepted a $25 million donation from the biotech corporation Novartis, and in exchange Novartis received a right of refusal for five years on any research patents filed by the department’s faculty. When UC Berkeley denied tenure to Chapela in 2003, I followed the debates surrounding his case more from the angle of academic freedom than from an interest in GMOs or herbicides per se.

Ignorance is not bliss. After graduate school, during my first year as an assistant professor, I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer more commonly found among retired farmers than young academics. During the slow drip of chemotherapy infusions, I thought a lot about phoxim and the many other pesticides to which I had been exposed during my fieldwork.² Through my networks I realized that I knew an unusually high number of foreigners who had worked in this region and then faced cancers of the immune system. So I combed through my old fieldnotes and survey data and discovered that the three most-used herbicides on maize crops in Guatemala at the time were paraquat, 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D), and glyphosate (better known as Roundup)—all three of which are strongly correlated with lymphomas and leukemias. After a grueling regimen of chemotherapy, I limped through my last day of radiation on September 4, 2008. This is my official cancer remission date.

Unfolding over the next few September 4ths came a serendipitous series of connected incidents related to corn, corruption, and civil disobedience that compelled me to write this book. Although I am the granddaughter of Dutch immigrant corn farmers from Iowa, I grew up in the Deep South and knew little about the shocking quantities of oil that the US corn crop guzzles, until I read Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. While I appreciated Pollan’s pithy presentation of the petrochemical perversities of US corn cultivation, his privileged food politics overlooked the meaning of maize to Mesoamerica. After completing my first two books on the relationship between corporate trade and land grabs, I therefore began comparing how US trade agreements with Mexico in 1994 and the Central American region in 2005 impacted maize markets.³ I also started a side investigation into gossip that illegal GM corn seeds were entering northern Guatemala.

Then, in April 2009, while traveling home from a routine monitoring PET/CT scan at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, I happened to hear a National Public Radio (NPR) story that filled me with icy rage: Dow Chemical had just filed a lawsuit against Canada through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to challenge Quebec laws that banned certain herbicides like 2,4-D for cosmetic lawn use. 2,4-D was one of the two active ingredients in the infamous Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange (sold to the military by both Dow and Monsanto). I recognized the mention of the herbicide both because it was thought to cause lymphoma and because I had been exposed frequently to it in Guatemalan villages, where it is sold under the brand name Hedonal.

Due to the rising number of medical studies that suggested 2,4-D causes a variety of cancers, several Nordic countries plus Belize, South Korea, and Kuwait had also banned it. Following Sweden’s ban, associated cancer rates in that country apparently went down.⁴ Although Dow had convinced the North American public that 2,4-D was safe for homeowners to apply, a small-town physician from Quebec, Dr. June Irwin, wondered if its use was related to the strange ailments and rashes she was seeing in her patients. In 1985 Irwin began monitoring her patients’ blood and sending the results to her town’s council. In 1991 her town of Hudson was the first in North America to ban the use of “cosmetic” pesticides on public and residential property. By the late 1990s almost two-thirds of Canadian towns and municipalities had followed suit.⁵

Predictably, the turf industry challenged the 2,4-D ban. Nonetheless, the Canadian Supreme Court in 2001 upheld these public health regulations for “our common future.” That case was the first to introduce the “precautionary principle” into Canadian jurisprudence. Canadians were understandably outraged that a US-based corporation had leveraged the fine print of NAFTA to challenge their country’s sovereign, democratic laws. Unlike other corporations that had used NAFTA to sue Mexico, Canada, or the United States to strike down regulations or receive compensation in the hundreds of millions, Dow demanded only $2 million from Canada—a puzzling sum that was surely less than its own legal fees. Two years later Dow agreed to withdraw its NAFTA lawsuit once the Quebec government publicly stated that 2,4-D was not a risk to human health if label instructions were followed.⁶ It was such a peculiar outcome that I applied for and won a Fulbright scholarship in 2012 to conduct ethnographic research about Canadians’ reactions to the case. I wanted to understand why Canadians were more risk-averse than my fellow US citizens, who applied 16 million pounds of 2,4-D to their lawns in 2005 and even more thereafter.⁷

Unfortunately, I had to forfeit my Fulbright scholarship when I accepted a job at UC Davis that same year. Although housing prices near campus were shocking, I happily found an old house in the more affordable town of Woodland, the county agricultural seat located just ten miles north of campus. A few months after settling in, my parents came to visit. I vividly remember when we took an excursion west out of town—possibly it was a September 4th—and how startled I was to see a Monsanto sign in front of a large mysterious gated complex about a quarter mile down Highway 16. An internet search revealed that Monsanto’s largest vegetable seed research facility in the United States was located but two miles from my new home. I soon realized that it was not just Monsanto. On my drives between Woodland and Davis I noticed that Dow, Syngenta, and many other biotech and chemical corporations had facilities nearby, likely to partner with (or poach) university research.

That fall I was anxious to learn the mundane logistics of teaching (like how to reserve books at the library), but all the new faculty orientations I attended focused more on how lab scientists could negotiate patent agreements with the surrounding corporate labs. Although Big Ag clearly dominated campus research, I soon realized that many earnest “Aggie” students at UC Davis dream of ditching corporate jobs to work in sustainable agriculture. For them I began teaching a new upper-level course, “Native Foods and Farming of the Americas,” in 2014, right before the events recounted in this book unfolded in Guatemala.

Until 2014 Monsanto held a virtual monopoly on the major GM food and fiber crops, all strategically engineered to be sprayed with its proprietary Roundup herbicide, whose active ingredient is glyphosate. Yet weeds evolve. Bugs evolve. Since the COVID pandemic, we all have learned how quickly viruses evolve. Any plant botanist, ecologist, or entomologist with a rudimentary understanding of the Green Revolution could have predicted that the productivity of GM crops would be transitory and ever-new herbicides would be needed. In 1996, the same year Monsanto launched its GM soybean seed, scientists documented the first case of weed resistance to Roundup in an Australian apple orchard. By 2000 the first Roundup-resistant weeds associated with a GM crop system appeared in Delaware, and many more cases would follow.⁸

By 2014 Dow Chemical saw an opportunity to compete with Monsanto by commercializing GM corn, soy, and cotton seeds paired with Dow’s own signature herbicide, 2,4-D, once used in Agent Orange. Insulting the three hundred thousand veterans who died from diseases associated with Agent Orange exposure during the Vietnam War, Dow had the audacity to brand its new GM technology with the trademarked name Enlist.⁹ Both the Veterans Administration and a coalition of fifty scientists filed vociferous complaints with the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).¹⁰ In an unusual move, the USDA punted Dow’s application to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), asking for an environmental impact study. More scientists filed concerns about 2,4-D’s volatility and capacity to travel by wind a hundred miles from application. With a potential fourfold increase in the use of 2,4-D were Enlist to be approved, an additional 3,247 elementary schools downwind would be exposed—inevitably adding more cases to the eight hundred children and young adults already diagnosed each year with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.¹¹ Unfolding research also implicates 2,4-D with a spectrum of neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and perhaps autism.¹²

My UC Davis undergrads were aghast to learn that “Agent Orange corn” might soon become legal. We organized an extracurricular club to follow the USDA regulatory process. After class one afternoon our little group phoned into a public comment session and were shocked to realize how few other people were on the call. Afterward, our group began contacting all the major food nonprofit organizations to learn whether they might be joining the advocacy movement against the approval of Enlist crops. Other than a campaign led by the Center for Food Safety, all the other food organizations we contacted seemed to have been focused on lobbying for the nation’s first buyer-beware GMO labeling law, passed by the tiny (and very white) state of Vermont in May 2014.

If ever there was an opportunity to ban a GM crop, this was it! During that summer of 2014, the media rehashed news items about two different neurodegenerative illnesses possibly linked to herbicide exposure. Robin Williams had just committed suicide after developing symptoms from Lewy body dementia.¹³ In those dog days of August, after its ice-bucket challenge went viral, the ALS Association raised $115 million for research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Had more “foodie” citizens, disease research groups, or anti-GM organizations connected these dots, the USDA/EPA review of Dow’s Enlist crop system might have ended differently. Although born into a neoliberal age that had relegated political agency to consumer spending alone, my millennial students realized our government could have preemptively banned Dow’s dangerous new GM seed and herbicide package for everyone.

Tiny Guatemala attempted to do just that. Until the summer of 2014, Guatemala was among the few countries in the world that had banned all GM crops. However, the US government pressured the Guatemalan Congress into legalizing GM crops through a secretive vote just before the June start of the 2014 Soccer World Cup. When social movements learned of this “Monsanto Law,” street protests broke out in the capital. Maya elders and mayors held consultations at numerous locations throughout the highlands over the month of August. They carefully timed their civil disobedience actions for September 2, or 13 Ahau (Lord/God) in the Maya calendar. Until then, it was the largest civic uprising in Guatemala’s history. More than one hundred thousand people blocked the Pan-American Highway for ten hours, while Anonymous hacktivists took down government websites and urban foodies and agronomists blockaded the congressional building.

In a stunning reversal, the Guatemalan Congress voted to repeal the law. The vote fell on September 4, 2014, which in the Maya calendar is 2 Wind (written •• Iq), a day for healing rituals to purge illness from the body—in this instance, the social body. After decades of war, narco violence, and unabated corruption, it was Guatemala’s first major citizen victory in living memory. By contrast, just a fortnight later (on September 17) hardly any US citizens seemed to notice when the USDA quietly approved Dow Chemical’s 2,4-D–resistant Enlist corn seed for use in the United States.

In Guatemala the unusual rural-urban alliance that had spontaneously erupted against the Monsanto Law continued clamoring for the restoration of democracy after sixty years of repression. The next spring, a United Nations (UN) anticorruption commission revealed that Guatemala’s authoritarian president (and former general) was involved in an elaborate scheme to steal the country’s customs revenues. Tens of thousands of Guatemalans converged in the plaza outside the presidential palace for seventeen consecutive weekends in 2015, calling for his resignation. Exactly one year after the Monsanto uprising, the president’s own right-wing Patriot Party voted to rescind his immunity from prosecution. The next morning, September 4, 2015, a judge ordered the arrest of the fallen president.¹⁴ Never before had such a high-level politician been held accountable for stealing from the country’s public coffers. The president eventually spent eight years in military prison for his corruption crimes and may one day also be tried for his complicity in the Guatemalan genocide as field commander and then head of military intelligence during the worst years of state-sponsored violence. With support from a UN anticorruption commission, Guatemala began jailing more high-level officials, including several other ex-presidents.

Skipping ahead to the Sunday morning news “roundup” on September 4, 2016: it was agribusiness as usual for the gringos. The US Department of Justice had just approved the megamerger of Syngenta with China’s largest chemical corporation, ChemChina.¹⁵ Two months later, several cornbelt states gave Donald Trump his electoral college victory. Among many other corporate nominees, Trump appointed a former Dow Chemical lawyer, Scott Pruitt, as EPA administrator. Twenty days after holding a meeting with Dow Chemical’s CEO, Andrew Liveris, Pruitt controversially overturned the EPA ban on chlorpyrifos, a neurotoxic pesticide manufactured by Dow. In 2000 the Clinton administration had restricted chlorpyrifos from home use but permitted the agricultural industry to continue spraying it on many crops (including Christmas trees) despite documented evidence that it damaged the brains of children. It had taken farmworker advocacy organizations fifteen years to win the total ban that Pruitt refused to enforce.¹⁶

While following these fluky but somehow connected September 4ths, I was struck by the contrast between how Guatemalans voted with their feet to maintain a ban on GM crops while the US food movement asked only for warning labels. Beyond the spiritual blasphemy of genetically modifying a sacred crop (maize), the Guatemalan public articulated environmental, geopolitical, legal, agronomic, and economic concerns about GM technology not often heard in US food activist circles. US citizens expressed worry about personal health and the safety of corn for consumers, while the Guatemalan public emphasized the threat of GM corn to the livelihood, dignity, and cultural survival of maize producers. Although foodies see themselves as vanguard agents of change who “vote with their forks,” this book will show how and why the older “pitchfork” moral economy of farmers represents a more formidable resistance to the use of GM crops.

LOVE-HATE LABELS

Having lost much generational wisdom and community cohesion, modern consumers must rely on government-mandated food labels or their own research to make healthy purchasing decisions. Unlike organic certification that comes with government-enforced standards, the quest for GMO- labeling assumes that corporations will be honest with the public. Labels devolve regulatory responsibility onto consumers, most of whom are ill-equipped to assess the deception lurking behind many corporate claims.¹⁷ It is not just food labels. From carpets to clothes to cars to construction to tourism to recycling, corporations have invented their own labels to greenwash their business practices. Labeling is a marketing solution to avoid resolving deeper environmental problems.¹⁸ The US public is now so obsessed with logos, labels, and social media endorsements that young people now speak about building a “personal brand.”

From “natural” to “farm fresh” to “free range” to “low-fat” to “low sugar,” consumers are especially awash in misleading food labels. All these labels have created “more work for mother[s],” who assume a disproportionate time burden on family well-being.¹⁹ In outsourcing responsibility for health onto individuals, the focus and reliance on food labeling (and other forms of eco-labeling) has also deflected citizens’ attention and energy away from demanding government-enforced regulations to protect everyone.²⁰ As a cancer survivor, I have a love-hate relationship with labels. While they are a necessary means for protecting myself, I would far prefer to have a functioning Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or EPA protecting everyone, not just overeducated label-readers. As a single mother working long hours, the time I spend reading labels directly encroaches on the time I could spend making calls or writing letters to my legislative representatives, asking for systemic solutions.

The food movement has now invested ten years into the fight for caveat emptor labels, and for what? GMOs have become so ubiquitous in the US food chain (integrated into some 70–80 percent of foods) that labels are essentially meaningless. Corporate lobbyists narrowly defeated the first ballot initiatives in California (2012), Colorado (2014), Oregon (2002, 2014), and Washington (2013) to require that foods containing GMOs be labeled as such.²¹ When Vermont finally succeeded in passing its GMO disclosure law in 2014, the US Congress soon overrode it to save the food industry the complexity of labeling only part of the commodity chain. This is how the United States became the sixty-fifth country to require GMO labeling of food at a national level. But even this laggard decision was a pyrrhic victory.

The legal loopholes were more like craters. Trump’s secretary of agriculture, Sonny Perdue, easily undermined the intent of the law by changing the language required on the label from the popularly known term “GMOs” to “bioengineered.” Worse yet, Perdue allowed the food industry to substitute a QR code or a text number for information that should appear on the label. Exempted from labeling are foods that contain refined GM crops or whose first ingredients are meat, eggs, broth, or water.²² Furthermore, the food industry is not required to disclose herbicide residues on GM foods, which are disturbingly pervasive, according to recent Mexican studies (see chapter 5). The Center for Food Safety did us all a service by suing the USDA to revise the QR code rule.²³ Civic pressure can indeed protect everyone, not just privileged consumers who tend to read labels.

CHEMISTRY MATTERS

September 4, 2017: Looking back on my sent emails, I enrolled that morning in an undergraduate organic chemistry course. This opportunity was made possible by a generous New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation. Over sixteen months I sweated through twenty-four toxicology and environmental epidemiology courses to infuse more scientific rigor into my passion for environmental justice. I wanted to understand how and why C₃H₈NO₅P almost took my life. Or was the culprit C₈H₆Cl₂O₃? Or perhaps something else entirely, like C₁₂H₁₄?

The next month, while slogging through problem sets on chirality, I discovered my daughter’s school district was violating state laws by spraying indoors during school hours a pesticide banned by the European Union. Through public records requests and some cross-sleuthing at the county agricultural commission, I uncovered evidence that for years the school district had failed to report to the state or notify parents about their other monthly habit of blitzing school fields with Monsanto’s Roundup. Hell hath no fury like a cancer survivor whose daughter was being exposed to herbicides and insecticides during lunch and recess. Through grassroots organizing on this and other issues, we mothers compelled a school district in a town where Monsanto is a major employer to become one of the first in the United States to ban the use of Roundup on school property.²⁴

Although the school board trustees initially ignored the mothers’ concerns, the board quickly changed its policy after Dewayne “Lee” Johnson’s pathbreaking lawsuit against Monsanto.²⁵ Johnson’s lawyers saw the potential for filing lawsuits on the West Coast after California’s EPA filed a public notice of intent on September 4, 2015, to add glyphosate (Roundup’s active ingredient) to the Proposition 65 list of carcinogens. A groundskeeper for the Benicia School District, located about an hour from my home, Johnson proved himself to be an ideal plaintiff.²⁶ He had developed a terminal and particularly painful cutaneous lymphoma after accidentally soaking himself while on the job with Ranger Pro, which is a slightly more diluted form of glyphosate than Roundup. When he called Monsanto’s consumer hotline, a corporate employee took detailed notes, promised to collect information for him, then never called him back. So, he continued spraying the herbicide even as his health deteriorated.²⁷ During the trial Johnson’s lawyers showed that Monsanto had ghostwritten numerous “scientific” articles presenting false safety data about Roundup. In a stunning victory in August 2018, a California jury ruled that Monsanto had willfully hidden evidence from regulators about the hazards of its signature herbicide. The jury ordered Monsanto to pay $289 million in penalties and compensation to Mr. Johnson.²⁸

Yet almost 99 percent of the US public has Roundup circulating, involuntarily, in our bloodstreams. Children often have higher levels of this herbicide per unit of body weight.²⁹ Curious about where on the spectrum my daughter and I might sit, I submitted our urine samples for testing in 2020. Although she had almost always eaten organic food in my home, and the school district is no longer spraying Roundup, my child still had more than twice the amount of glyphosate (per billion blood parts) as me. How could this be? And what are the implications for her lifelong health? Beyond cancer, the more we learn about Roundup, the more disturbing the research is. Roundup is now linked with obesity, inflammation, diabetes, liver and kidney damage, endocrine disruption, neurotoxicity, infertility, and birth defects.³⁰

After Bayer bought Monsanto in 2018, it inherited almost 150,000 lawsuits from other Roundup victims. Ironically, Bayer’s home country, Germany, had banned GM crops in 2015. Then in 2019 (once again, on a September 4th), Germany announced that it would phase out the use of Roundup by 2024. Although the EU controversially relicensed glyphosate for another ten years in November 2023, German ministers indicated they would continue restricting its use.³¹ Seeing the writing on the wall, Bayer announced in 2021 that it would voluntarily remove glyphosate from US lawn products. Even so, US officials continue to insist that Mexico and the sovereign nations of Central America are not themselves free to regulate Roundup, according to terms of the “free” trade agreements they signed with the United States.

CALENDAR-KEEPING

This sequence of September 4ths in my life may be coincidental, but perhaps not. The longer I collaborate with Maya movements, the more I realize how carefully they align their strategies with the Maya calendar. Maya scribes began using zero around 350 CE, at the start of the ancient Maya renaissance known as the Classic period.³² Without calculators or any magnifying instruments, Maya astronomers designed a calendar so accurate that one long cycle of time (5,129 years) ended precisely on a winter solstice: December 21, 2012. These brilliant ancient astronomers backdated their zero year to 3114 BCE, which was just about the time ancient Mesoamerican farmers had domesticated teosinte into more productive maize cobs. Quite literally, Maya time coevolved with maize.

The Maya calendar weaves together two interlocking wheels. The first is a winal, or 20 days, representing the number of fingers and toes on the human body. It interfaces with a second wheel of 13 sacred days. Multiplied together they make a tzolk’in, a 260-day cycle, which is also the period of human gestation. Maya leaders known as calendar-keepers (Aj Q’ijab) make offerings of maize gruel to the gods every 260 days to welcome each new cycle of time. The sacred calendar-keepers also lead celebrations that commemorate the solar calendar, the tun (equaling 18 winals, or 360 days plus 5 dangerous transitional days, the latter of which are known as the wayeb’). Subtracting the tzolk’in from the solar calendar leaves 105 days, which is roughly the lowland growing season for rain-fed maize. At Guatemalan latitudes, 105 days is also the period between the solar zeniths (when the sun passes directly overhead) in the spring and fall.

Twenty tuns make a k’atun and twenty k’atuns make a baktun. Thirteen baktuns ended in the Gregorian calendar on December 21, 2012. On that day in the Maya Long Count calendar the base-20 system rolled over from 12.19.19.17.19 to 13.0.0.0.0. Contrary to apocalyptic media hype, Maya elders explained that this passage, from one cycle of thirteen baktuns to the next, was not expected to be a doomsday. Maya prophecy did, however, foretell a period of intense social struggle and transformation around this temporal transition. For certain this new baktun has opened with epic battles by Indigenous peoples in Mexico and Guatemala in defense of their seed sovereignty and maize-based cultures.

For some reason my life has been enmeshed with these temporal transitions. I was born under the Maya sign Aj K’at, which makes me a “net,” or connector. From the foot stomping “ritual” I witnessed in my host family’s hut to my 2008 cancer survivor anniversary to Guatemala’s 2014 victory over Monsanto, this remarkable chain of September 4ths is a story I felt compelled to write. In Maya belief, a good life is one in which a person discovers and fulfills his or her destiny. In sharing the kernels of Mesoamerican resistance to Monsanto—and what that means not only for human health, but also for the health of democracy—I hope to fulfill part of mine.

This preface was finalized on the Corn Moon, September 4, 2022, in Woodland, California. (September’s full moon is usually the time of the “harvest moon,” but about every five years October’s full moon is closer to the equinox than September’s. When that happens, October’s becomes the Harvest Moon and September’s the Corn Moon.)