TWO Sacred Maize, Stalwart Maize

World historians once dated the birth of agriculture to the domestication of einkorn wheat in the Fertile Crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in approximately 7500 BCE. Around the same time, early horticulturalists in the Americas were already domesticating squashes and gourds in present-day Mexico. If we were to overlay that history of agriculture onto a twenty-four-hour clock (with wheat’s domestication starting at 12:00 midnight), soon thereafter Mesoamerican peoples began experimenting with the wild grass teosinte; by 9:00 a.m. they had coaxed teosinte’s seeds into tiny husked cobs of maize. Maize cobs grew in size between 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. That bounty nourished the first Mesoamerica cities into a long period of prosperity starting around 3:50 p.m.; Europeans invaded at 10:44 p.m.; and US breeders hybridized corn at 11:48. Genetic modification of corn DNA occurred at 11:56 p.m.; and evidence that these new genetic sequences contaminated native maize varieties in Oaxaca, the birthplace of maize, surprised the world at three minutes to midnight. In the global race against a climate clock, Mesoamericans have since organized to defend their ancient legacy and the world’s third most important grain against the relatively recent and reckless introduction of GM corn into maize’s center of origin.

Biotechnologists make short-term decisions based on quarterly returns, but Mesoamericans rely on ancestral memories from thousands of years of cultural coexistence with maize. As people famous for forgetting history, Westerners might be skeptical that traditional maize knowledge was coherently passed down over millennia, imagining it to be eroded like a children’s game of “telephone.” Yet, when divided by the average reproductive span of twenty-eight years, ten millennia represent just 321 generations, who could easily pass down coherent and consistent maize knowledge. This is because they are also people with strong cultural traditions for sharing transgenerational stories. Having spent many years living among Maya maize farming families who continuously impressed me with their investigatory skills, recollection, hard work, kitchen craft, and intergenerational pedagogy, I take seriously the wisdom embedded in their oral history, which is only recently being vetted by genetics.

Maize is humble, versatile, and malleable into endlessly mesmerizing varieties. It sustained Indigenous peoples of the Americas through hard centuries of colonialism. Tall and long-armed with tasseled hair, maize seems almost human.¹ More than just a staple, maize has been a stalwart companion of Mesoamerica’s peoples and cultures. Small farmers who recognized maize’s potential and acclimated its seeds to new ecological niches turned it into the most productive crop on the planet. Building from my own ethnographic research among lowland Q’eqchi’ Maya communities who are now Guatemala’s most productive maize cultivators, this chapter blends narrative, archaeology, biology, and economy to trace the story of maize, its travels, and associated cooking techniques to highlight the special role that women play in conserving agroecological cultivars for their culinary traditions.

TENACIOUS TEOSINTE

Teosintes (also written as teocintle, from the Nahuatl) are tall, wild grasses from the genus Zea and the family Poaceae. Zea luxurians and Zea nicaraguensis, as well as the abundant parviglumis and mexicana subspecies of Zea mays, are all annuals; the relatively narrowly distributed Zea diploperennis and Zea perennis are perennials. The grasses are endemic to Mexico, two regions of Guatemala, as well as western Honduras and northwestern Nicaragua. Scientists continue to discover new teosinte populations throughout the region.² Before domestication, hunting-gathering peoples may have consumed teosintes’ sugary stalks directly or fermented them. But the hard coating on the plant’s triangular seeds made them inedible until someone realized they burst when heated, leading to the first ancient popcorn party. In an influential 1983 article in Science, ethnobotanist Hugh Iltis argues that Amerindian people were not just passively harvesting teosinte, but also purposefully planting it outside its natural range.³ In other words, teosinte likely traveled through ancient trade and community networks before it was turned into maize.⁴

Without human intervention, teosinte would never have spontaneously mutated into maize. Through observations recorded through strong social systems for conserving intergenerational knowledge, the original peoples of Middle America gradually stewarded small molecular changes into significant morphological changes. In the Nahuatl language teocintli means “[mother] deity of maize.” Although Mesoamericans inscribed this history of domestication within their own language, Western geneticists pedantically debated for decades whether or how maize evolved from teosinte. Invisibilizing Indigenous agency, some thought maize had another wild ancestor that went extinct; others contended that South American maize had separate origins.⁵ Eventually archaeologists and geneticists concurred that maize was domesticated in the Balsas River region of southwest Mexico from one teosinte species.⁶ The most recent genetic research suggests that hybridization with a second teosinte in the highlands of the Mexican Central Plateau likely played a crucial role in the evolution of modern maize as well.⁷

How might this have happened? Wild teosinte is a grass that looks almost identical to maize when young, but matures into a plant with multiple sweet stalks. Each stalk produces small ears or “spikelets” with five to twelve hard-coated seeds that shatter and replant themselves. Ancient horticulturalists might have first noticed a mutated teosinte with softer seeds and replanted them. Then they likely selected teosinte varieties whose lowered tassels and clustered ears made them easier to harvest. The next step (about 6,250 years ago) was probably to reduce the multistalked grass into a stronger single stalk that could support a one-inch cob. In the 1960s an archaeological team found a trove of one-inch cobs in the Guilá Naquitz Cave in Oaxaca, dating this stage of maize’s evolution to 4,200 years ago.⁸ Those tiny cobs of proto-maize developed a leafy husk to protect the kernels. Evolutionarily this progression would have been useless in the wild, because even if those husks had fallen directly to the ground, the seeds inside would have been too crowded to sprout. However, that husk gave humans a chance to harvest the kernels before they spontaneously scattered.⁹

Although prior theories imagined that those early maize cobs had slowly diffused via trade and cultural exchange, new genetic evidence from Belizean caves indicates that people also moved alongside maize. This suggests that a proto-maize may have traveled from Oaxaca southward through the Andes into Peru and Bolivia seven thousand years ago. These improved cobs may have returned to Mesoamerica via Chibchan speakers from present-day Costa Rica or Panama into Belize.¹⁰ These archaeological findings correspond to Guna stories of the isthmian land bridge being the origin center of “Abya Yala,” a term many Indigenous have adopted to replace “the Americas” to avoid honoring a colonizer.¹¹

Native or “open-pollinated” varieties of Mesoamerican maize also continue to cross-pollinate with teosinte whenever the two come into contact.¹² The famed botanist George Beadle bred some fifty thousand hybrid plants of crosses between teosinte and maize, and from morphological observation Beadle concluded that they differed by only five genes.¹³ Cross-pollination continues, because teosinte and rainfed maize share a growing season with both flowering in September.¹⁴ Next to milpas, wild teosinte populations continue to enhance the vigor of domesticated maize in its cradle of origin, such that Garrison Wilkes called these patches “evolutionary gardens.”¹⁵ Although “domestication” suggests a closed event, maize evolution was an extended, people-assisted process that continues today through the hard work of small farmers who enrich their landraces with teosinte.¹⁶ Gene flow from teosinte can confer pest resistance, flood tolerance, nutritional value, and other adaptive traits for climate change.¹⁷

Remaining patches of teosinte are small, sometimes just two square kilometers.¹⁸ Just 11 percent of extant teosinte grows in protected areas of Mesoamerica.¹⁹ Elsewhere, cattle and urbanization threaten teosinte populations.²⁰ For example, after NAFTA decimated maize prices (see chapter 4), cattle replaced half a million acres of maize in Oaxaca’s Balsas watershed, threatening those ancient stands of teosinte.²¹ To maintain teosinte reservoirs for resistance to pest, pathogen, and abiotic stressors, teosinte expert Garrison Wilkes published an impassioned “Urgent Notice to All Maize Researchers” about the endangerment of teosinte, especially in Guatemala, along with low-cost recommendations for participatory research with small farmers.²² Wilkes’s admirers raised crowdsource funding to open a teosinte greenhouse in Mexico.²³ Elsewhere teosinte remains endangered. In Guatemala, mining projects threaten the Huista habitat.²⁴ An investigative journalist, Jeff Abbott, traveled through Huehuetenango in 2019 in search of one of Guatemala’s two endemic teosinte species. He never found the wild relative, but farmers showed him what appear to be teosinte-maize hybrids formed at the milpa’s edge, so teosinte must have been growing nearby.

This long-continued labor of domestication is honored by origin stories retold throughout Mesoamerica, which describe hardworking ants as having discovered maize through a cleft in Paxil, the mountain of sustenance. As told in different Mayan languages, animal deities discovered the ants’ secret and began to steal the maize, but wanted more. They enlisted the thunder gods to pierce the mountain to reveal the maize inside. Both K’iche’ and Jakaltek Maya versions of this story explain that the mountain deity, Paxil, pinched the ants (or tied them with twine) as punishment for having revealed the maize source; and, to this day, these ants announce planting time by swarming.²⁵ (See the conclusion for a Q’eqchi’ version of this story.) In the Aztec iteration of the story, the god Quetzalcoatl transformed himself into an ant to fetch corn from Tonacatepetl, another mountain of sustenance.²⁶

Through teosinte’s loss of the ability to reproduce itself, Mesoamericans began a long reciprocal relationship with maize.²⁷ Maize became kin, but also a responsibility.²⁸ Perhaps this is why Mesoamerican people still regard the spilling of maize seeds as taboo or the burning of tortillas as bad luck. As Rigoberta Menchú notes in her 1983 autobiography, “The child … is told that he will eat maize and that, naturally, he is already made of maize because his mother ate it while he was forming in her stomach. He must respect the maize; even the grain of maize which has been thrown away, he must pick up.”²⁹ After learning that it is a sin (xmaak) to waste even a single kernel, I began to notice in Q’eqchi’ villages that whenever a kernel accidentally fell to the ground, someone would always pick it up. Should maize accidentally sprout somewhere from a fallen seed, it must be left to mature even if it is in the middle of a path.³⁰ Q’eqchi’ leader Sebastián Cux recently copied me on an email in which he admonished a project director to be more careful in not wasting tortillas to feed trainees. “Not only is the sacred corn so expensive and in short supply, I say this for the good of ourselves because if we do not respect our corn, it could bring a punishment to us.”³¹ These and other examples show domestication is not merely the adaptation of a “wild” species to human will, but a continuing process of mutual respect and biosocial entanglement.³²

ADAPTABLE MAIZE

Maize remained thumb-sized, with about fifty small kernels, for another two millennia.³³ Then around four thousand years ago, the archaeological record shows increased pollen, charcoal, and other evidence of more extensive burning and maize cultivation.³⁴ Rather than following patterns of concentric diffusion, maize appears to have traveled quickly into North America and the South American lowlands. According to recent genetic research, another variation traveled through southern Mexico into Guatemala and the Caribbean—precisely when glottochronology would date the appearance of the proto-Mayan word for maize.³⁵

As maize adapted to new homelands, it flourished, and this agricultural surplus ushered in an age of great urban cities and empires. From the Anasazi of the desert Southwest to the great Olmec, to the ancient Mayas, to the Aztecs, as well as the majestic Inca city of Machu Picchu in South America, maize nourished many peoples that built great civilizations.³⁶ In almost all instances, their pre-Columbian cities were larger than any of those of their ancient or medieval European counterparts.³⁷ The 230-foot Danta Pyramid near El Mirador, a city in northern Guatemala founded in the third century CE, is second to only to the Egyptian pyramids in terms of mass. After Tenochtitlan was founded as the center of the Aztec Empire in 1350, it became home to two hundred thousand people; only Paris, Venice, and Constantinople were larger at the time of the 1519 Spanish mainland invasion.

A phylogenetic tree of maize’s evolution now confirms oral histories that maize began spreading overland from the US Southwest to the eastern US seaboard and by 700 BCE was being sown in Canada.³⁸ Because Native tribes of the Mississippian region and eastern woodlands were already skilled horticulturalists, they easily integrated maize as a minor crop among other regional cultivars. Then, between 750 and 1000 CE, these local maizes evolved into the dietary staple that gave rise to the five large tribal confederations of the Southeast. Maize gave energy to Mississippian cultures, which were able to move 55 million cubic feet of earth to build the great Cahokia Mounds, the largest being ten stories tall.

Although a great many scientists were intrigued by the original domestication of teosinte, perhaps the more interesting story is how Indigenous peoples so quickly and effectively adapted it to so many diverse habitats. Manipulating its visible and flexible genetics, Indigenous farmers now grow maize in locations from the Tierra del Fuego tip of Chile to as far north as wintry Canada.³⁹ One flint variety adapted by Mi’kmaq peoples to the Gaspé Peninsula of Quebec grows to just two to three feet tall with four-inch cobs that mature in just sixty days—a truly extraordinary feat, considering that maize is so sensitive to day length.⁴⁰

Over millennia Indigenous peoples of the Americas adapted maize to the harshest of microclimates, from arid mountaintops to lowland rainforests. A blue Hopi maize can germinate through two feet of sandy, desert soils; some Hopi tribe members have obtained consistent yields from the same fields for sixty years without inputs or irrigation.⁴¹ A Nambé Pueblo white maize thrives at an altitude of six thousand feet in New Mexico. Rarámuri Gileno maize also does well at similar desert altitudes.⁴² Bolivia and Peru have adapted maize to the Andean slopes and can boast almost as many endemic landraces as Mexico has produced on either side of the Sierra Madre. As Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wrote in his “Ode to Maize,”

America, from a grain

of maize you grew

to crown

with spacious lands

the ocean

foam.

A grain of maize was your geography.⁴³

During the colonial period, when left with the worst lands that colonizers disdained (swamps, hillsides, arid regions), Indigenous, Native, and mestizo farmers readapted their maize and labor practices for survival. How did they rebuild agroecological systems after colonial holocausts had forced relocation to different ecosystems? They parsed risk with communal social supports, relational thinking, polycultural systems, agroforestry, and organic mulching crops (“green manure”) to ensure food year-round and to optimize production when fallowing was not possible.⁴⁴ Above all, contemporary maize seed diversity “is a testament to the resiliency of campesinos” and Indigenous peoples through hard times.⁴⁵ The gorgeous “glass gem” maize bred by Cherokee farmer Carl Barnes is a tribute to Native American strength and “survivance.”⁴⁶

Maize can be planted with pointed “dibble” sticks close to sea level in the tropics, it can be buried in the desert Southwest, and it can be hoed into hillsides of the Andes. One variety called Puno is cultivated at twelve thousand feet, near Lake Titicaca.⁴⁷ As a rain-fed crop, farmers adapted it to places having as little as ten inches of precipitation to rainforests deluged by two hundred or more inches annually. Hopi and Navajo maize varieties have morphologically adapted to being planted eight to twelve inches under sand dunes, producing strong shoots that can break to the surface.⁴⁸ Maize’s growing season typically lasts 120 frost-free days, but in the Maya lowlands farmers plant two, and sometimes three crops a year using hybrid seeds that can mature in 50 days. Others are slowly interbreeding “seven-week” hybrids into open pollinators.⁴⁹ At high altitudes the growing season will be much longer.⁵⁰

In each of these regions, farming families selected for starchiness and kernel type best suited to the local climate and their culinary preferences. The starches and kernels in the five broad types of maize—popcorn, flint, dent, flour, and sweet—react to heat and kitchen processing in different ways.⁵¹ Popcorn maize is probably the oldest varietal: a small-kerneled corn with a hard endosperm and little starch. Flint corn produces an elongated kernel with a high fiber and protein content that makes for a low glycemic index. The field or dent corn grown in the US Midwest evolved from crosses between traditional flour varietals and New England flints. With an extra high starch content, these kernels compress and form a dimple as they dry. Dent corn is not particularly palatable but can be fed to livestock or used for industrial processes. Flour corn has denser, fatter kernels that make for a malleable staple. Sweet corn comes from a recessive mutation that arose in at least two places in pre-Columbian times: Andean peoples developed a sugary maize called Chullpi and northeastern tribes of the United States stewarded a sweet version called “Papoon Corn,” which George Washington’s soldiers stole when they came across a field of it during a scorched earth campaign against the Haudenosaunee.⁵² What people consume today as “corn on the cob” is a variety further sweetened through Cold War military experiments that irradiated seeds. Corn breeder John Laughnan happened to taste a radiated sample in his lab in 1959, which he crossed with other hybrids to make a marketable seed.⁵³

To conserve the robustness of a field’s diversity, farmers must take continual care not to allow certain varieties to cross-pollinate. For instance, if flint corn is pollinated with sweet corn, the resulting ear will have shriveled kernels.⁵⁴ Itza’ Maya farmers say that black and yellow maize has a “violent” nature—meaning those seeds germinate quickly—and therefore must be planted away from their white maize.⁵⁵ Guaraní farmers plant different fields of ceremonial maize, staple maize, and popcorn.⁵⁶ Bestselling Potawatomi author Robin Wall Kimmerer interprets the four colors as a reminder that humans have four ways of perceiving and understanding the world: using the mind, the body, the emotions, and the spirit.⁵⁷ The examples could go on.

Alongside maize’s gorgeous diversity is a parallel medley of complementary crops adapted to its germination, height, width, seasonality, and water requirements. Beans that trellis up a maize stalk must not overtake the maize’s own growth cycle. Companion squashes depend on local pollinators.⁵⁸ The many other species central to Mesoamerican diets in addition to these two sister crops include cacao, amaranth, chia, chilies, nopales, mushrooms, tomatillos, tomatoes, and root vegetables.⁵⁹ The fallow maize milpa hosts other species such as fruit trees, medicines, and greens. In oral histories among Q’eqchi’ Mayan speakers in southern Belize, I documented around eighty wild and cultivated foods in or around their milpas.⁶⁰ However, although some other crops require special prayers when being harvested or used, in these polycropped mixtures only maize is sanctified—such that in Nahuatl it has become a fused word: centeotzintli or “sacred maize.”⁶¹

The Mesoamerican diet of maize, beans, and milpa vegetables constitutes one of the healthiest subsistence diets in the world. Although Mesoamerica had few animals that could be domesticated other than chihuahuas, turkeys, dogs, and ducks, its people were nevertheless extraordinarily well-nourished. Long before Michael Pollan celebrated an omnivore diet that is mostly plant-based with only occasional meat consumption, Mesoamericans were the quintessential omnivores bar none. They get two-thirds to three-quarters of their dietary carbohydrates and protein from maize, with other foods serving as condiments.⁶² Despite the many jokes about tacos making people fat, one would be hard-pressed to gain serious weight on a traditional low-meat Mesoamerican diet. In fact, European invaders often remarked in their journals and sketches their admiration for the relative height, muscularity, and regality of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, as compared to their own stunted growth from centuries of feudal poverty.⁶³

Wherever Europeans invaded, they brought domesticated animals and, with them, associated zoonotic diseases. Nine-tenths of America’s original peoples perished within a century of contact—mostly from epidemic diseases, but slavery, labor conscription, forced relocation, and military violence also took a terrible toll.⁶⁴ Spanish priests systematically burned Mayan hieroglyphic books, erasing thousands of years of accumulated agronomic knowledge; only four books (codices) survived their Inquisitorial fires. Even after independence from Spain, colonizers continued to enslave Indigenous people onto haciendas and plantations through debt peonage. Q’eqchi’ Maya elders related to me in vivid terms how their overseers restricted the time and acreage they could devote to subsistence crops. Civil wars of the twentieth century further disrupted seed saving and maize diversity.⁶⁵

Despite all this trauma, Guatemala has conserved thirteen maize varieties (“races” in botanical terminology) and Mexico an astounding sixty-four, all with different agronomic and nutritional properties. Some maizes contain higher amounts of essential aminos acids, while others have special phytonutrients.⁶⁶ As a general rule, the first places where maize was domesticated and improved continue to host the most diversity today: Jalisco, Michoacán, Guerrero, Oaxaca, Mexico, Morelos, and Puebla.⁶⁷ Mexico has stored at least ten thousand accessions in its National Institute of Forestry, Agriculture and Livestock Research seed bank.⁶⁸ Hidden in the countryside are likely others that have stood the test of time but as yet undocumented by Western science.

ORIGIN STORIES OF THE PEOPLE OF MAIZE

The three great ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica—Olmec, Maya, then Aztec—as well as peoples that remained independent of the Aztecs, like the P’urhépecha—all revered maize deities. Maize first appeared in Olmec art by 3000 BCE, and it continued as the central symbol in Maya and then Aztecan sculpture, architecture, and pottery. Not just in Mexico but throughout the Mesoamerican region, people maintain a rich oral tradition as to why they refer to themselves in daily and idiomatic expression as “people of maize.” These stories are simultaneously scientific, ceremonial, and metaphorical.⁶⁹

The Maya version comes from the mythohistorical tale called the Popol Vuh. The original document, in hieroglyphic script, was lost to Spanish bonfires, but K’iche’ Mayan–speaking intellectuals rewrote a bilingual version in Romanic script with the help of a Spanish priest in the sixteenth century.⁷⁰ That text moved around the world in a veritable cloak-and-dagger story. The eighteenth-century Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez made a Spanish copy of the original text. A French abbot stole that, and it was passed through many European collections until it made its way back to North America, eventually landing at Chicago’s Newberry Library. Since then, multiple transcriptions and translations have appeared in contemporary Spanish and English, as well as children’s books and “New Age” websites.⁷¹ Murals discovered in 2001 at San Bartolo, a site north of Tikal in the Petén region of Guatemala where I lived, depict scenes from the Popol Vuh. Many believe the Candelaria Caves in Alta Verapaz are the entrance to the ancient Maya underworld, where Ixmucane’s grandsons defeated the lords of death. Elements of this nonlinear narrative also remain very much alive in the countryside, in the tales passed down by elders and from whom I heard remarkably consistent versions across Q’eqchi’ communities in both Guatemala and southern Belize.⁷²

The Maya creation story goes like this: Long ago, the gods found themselves lonely and therefore decided to experiment with other materials to fashion new creatures who would keep them company.⁷³ Heart of the Sky and other deities joined together. First they created animals, but the animals wandered about, squeaking and howling and unable to speak. The deities again tried to create people out of mud, but those clay creatures crumbled and were too weak to think. The gods tried again using wood, but those creatures lacked respect for their creator and abused smaller animals, so the gods exiled them to the forest as monkeys. The fourth creation was the charm: the female deity Xmucane used the white and yellow maize kernels she discovered inside a sacred mountain, grinding them nine times into dough. With that dough she created four articulate men of maize. However, they were perhaps too intelligent, because they spoke disrespectfully to the gods. The gods decided to dull the vision of the maize people. Like the haze of breath on a mirror, humans now can see only what is close to them and only the gods remain omniscient. To cheer the four men, they created four women. These couples are the ancestors of the Maya people. (To this day, the Q’eqchi’ political governance system is anchored by councils of four men and four women.)

In the Aztec version of the story, the gods created people five times over, using teosinte as the base material for the third and fourth people, but the gods remained dissatisfied with their creations until they tried using maize.⁷⁴ For this fifth step the serpent lady Cihuacóatl ground sacred maize with a bit of sacrificial blood from Quetzalcóatl. In four days a man emerged from the dough; he was followed four days later by a woman.⁷⁵ Puebloan cultures that adopted maize as early as the Maya also spoke of being made of maize, whose colors are symbolic of the four cardinal points: red represents the birth of the rising sun, black with night and death, white the northern wind, and yellow the material world.⁷⁶

In contrast, traditional stories about maize among tribes that adopted maize at a later time—such as in the northern and eastern regions of North America—tend to describe the crop arriving as a gift from a deity or visitor or as an act of female sacrifice. The Oneidas describe maize coming from “the woman who falls from the sky”; from Little Giver in Seminole (Muskogee); from the Unknown Woman (“Ohoyo Osh Chisba” in Choctaw); and from Onatah for the Haudenosaunee.⁷⁷ Maize was gifted to the Dakota people by a woman who rose from Spirit Lake (where the Wapetunwan and Sisisituwan bands still remain) and “from then on we treated it like a delicacy.”⁷⁸ Cherokees venerate Selu, the goddess who could rub maize from her belly and whose blood fertilized the crop after her twin sons killed her. The Potawatomi story similarly speaks of a corn mother who sacrificed herself for her children. Just as Native stories preserve the memory of traumatic catastrophes, they also record triumphant achievements.⁷⁹ Although maize rituals in the eastern United States have less symbolism than those of the US Southwest and Mesoamerica, almost all northern Native American nations celebrate some type of Green Corn Ceremony for the first harvest.⁸⁰

Settlers also told exculpatory stories of being “gifted” maize by the Wampanoag—a gift they perceived as a possessive entitlement. The Wampanoag brought popped maize to the so-called Thanksgiving feast and shared their maize knowledge with the starving Pilgrims.⁸¹ Then governor Bradford of Plymouth falsely claimed white agency for this “discovery,” writing, “And sure it was God’s good providence that we found this corn for we know not how else we should have done.”⁸² These early colonists raided granaries of villages that had been wiped out by European diseases.⁸³ Later they turned corn into whisky, which fueled the North American fur trade and frontier expansion.

Spaniards also depended on maize to sustain their marauding armies in the early conquest, but complained in their journals about the “misery of maize cakes.”⁸⁴ Had Cortés not also received in present-day Tabasco, Mexico, a gift of fifteen to twenty enslaved women to grind maize (including the woman who would become his mistress and translator, Marina–Malitzin–La Malinche), he might not have been able to keep his mercenaries alive to seize Tenochtitlan.⁸⁵ Whether mestizo (mixed race) or Indigenous, Mesoamerican women have sustained their culinary traditions through frugality, ingenuity and hard work.

GENDERED GASTRONOMY

Perhaps because of maize’s monoecious nature—feminine and masculine flowers live on the same plant but are separated from one another—maize created many cultures that valued both masculine and feminine deities with balanced gender relations in everyday life.⁸⁶ However, with the notable exceptions of Betty Fussell and Sophie Coe, male scholars mostly dominated the modern recorded history of maize and paid little attention to the culinary challenges of making a grain palatable and pleasing as a staple.⁸⁷ In colonial times as well, women’s voices are clearly absent from gastronomic descriptions by priests like Diego de Landa and Bernardino de Sahagún.⁸⁸

Yet, one cannot fully understand the cultural centrality of maize in Mesoamerica without considering how women’s daily lives are enmeshed with the “daily grind” of its flesh.⁸⁹ They spend three to eight “grueling” hours each day, cooking, shelling, washing, grinding, kneading, stirring, patting, and toasting this adaptable substance.⁹⁰ Before the mid-twentieth century advent of motors or hand-cranked metal grinders, women spent many hours breaking kernels by hand on a metate (grinding stone). Today in most Guatemalan villages someone operates a diesel mill as a small business, and women carefully guard their cents for the service.⁹¹ Because this maize dough (“masa”) is still somewhat coarse even after passing through a mill grinding, many women regrind it by hand on the metate stone. In Q’eqchi’ there are two different verbs for grinding: the first breaking of maize (ke’ek) and the second refinement (litz’ok).⁹²

Day in and day out, with little more than firewood, a mortar and pestle, a metate, a few pots, and a clay griddle, women tirelessly prepare and cook maize and foods from the milpa and the forest in dozens of creative ways. Key to this transformation is nixtamalization—which comes from the Nahuatl term nextamalli, a combination of the words for ashes (nixti) and dough (tamalli)⁹³—from which the Spanish “tamale” derives. Every two days or so, household members collaborate to shell fifteen to twenty pounds of maize kernels, depending on their needs. Women then boil the dry kernels in alkalinized water (created by adding slaked lime or calcium hydroxide) then let them soak overnight to soften the pericarp. In this state, cooked maize stays preserved for several days without refrigeration. However, once the kernels are washed, the outer hull slips off and the maize begins to spoil (or purposefully ferment into special recipes), so women must wake very early to make the morning tortillas.

Traditionally (and still in the western highlands), women slap tortillas with the palms of their hands. In the lowlands and urban places, tortillas are more commonly pressed by hand on plastic. Then it takes skilled wrists to transfer an ultrathin tortilla onto a hot metal or clay comal (a griddle) above a wood fire. With intuitive rhythm and toughened fingers, women multitask the pressing of tortillas with flipping them twice on the griddle. On the third toast, a well-made maize tortilla will inflate with hot air inside. By arranging the finished tortillas in a cloth-lined basket or as a vertical stack, the tortillas remain warm until all the masa is processed. Critical to a good tortilla is the proper starchiness and stretchiness of the dough.

Crop choices fundamentally depend on what people want to eat and what makes cooking easiest. For this reason women are the de facto curators of seed diversity. I was struck when reading that Q’eqchi’ women once told a botanist they preferred softer maize varieties (with more flour quality) for grinding, while the researcher’s male informants preferred to grow harder flint varieties that would be less subject to post-harvest loss in storage. By reducing the labor of grinding, diesel mills made these differences in seed selection less important.⁹⁴ Nevertheless, women complain that dough from modern varieties turn rancid more quickly even if hybrids may yield more at harvest. They also insist that native maize takes less time to cook, makes a stickier dough to make thinner tortillas and tostadas, and yields more tortillas per pound of kernels.⁹⁵

Almost all Maya people eat maize tortillas three times a day and claim that without them they cannot feel full. While urban consumption is less, Guatemalans consume on average one pound of maize per person per day. Rice, yucca, spaghetti, and any other starchy carbohydrate get served in Maya households along with tortillas, the latter of which function simultaneously as plate, tableware, and napkin. Even dogs eat leftover tortillas. No part is wasted. The husks can be used as wrappers or for making tamales. The cobs (baqlaq) are saved for various household uses. Bug-bitten maize serves as animal feed or for making fermented maize drinks.

When combined with beans or amaranth, maize makes a perfect carbohydrate and provides the full spectrum of vegetarian protein—but only through nixtamalization. Cooking maize in alkali water loosens the husks, but also adds more calcium, makes the B-vitamins more bioavailable, and increases its lysine and tryptophan content.⁹⁶ Maize is otherwise deficient in tryptophan, which the body needs to synthesize niacin and which naturally reduces mycotoxins.⁹⁷ Without nixtamalization, a maize-staple diet could never have nourished the ancient civilizations as it did. In other words, plant domestication required some domestic ingenuity.

There are two main methods for nixtamalization: boiling the kernels in an alkali substance or grinding the kernels dry and then reconstituting them with alkalized water. Almost all Indigenous groups of the Americas that integrated maize into their diets also developed some form of nixtamalization.⁹⁸ In New England, tribes of the Iroquois Confederacy make hominy from wood ashes. To make the traditional flatbread (piki) found in the US Southwest, the Hopis boil blue maize with burnt willow branches.⁹⁹ An alkaline solution deepens the blue color of the maize into black, whereas acidic solutions turn it red.

These days Mesoamericans tend to purchase store-bought “cal” (calcium carbonate), but some elders still remember the olden times when they used wood ash or snail shells or burned special limestone rocks in kilns. Under high heat, limestone becomes “quicklime,” or calcium oxide, which when added to water becomes calcium hydroxide.¹⁰⁰ Mesoamerica is a land of karstic caves and sunken wells where limestone abounds and where excellent roadbuilding techniques linked the region’s great cities with bright white royal roads (b’e). Although archaeologists link the advent of this quicklime technology with an increase in pottery and colanders (about three thousand years ago), women may have also cooked slaked maize using hot stones in woven baskets or in vats in the ground.¹⁰¹ María Caal, the matriarch of a Q’eqchi’ family with whom I lived over many years, described having cooked her nixtamal this way in the new hamlets she and her husband founded in the dense Petén forest in the mid-twentieth century.¹⁰²

How did women originally learn to do this? One male author hypothesizes that perhaps a male farmer noticed that maize stored and smoked in the rafters of a hut were more impervious to insects, inspiring him to instruct his wife to add wood ashes to the family pot.¹⁰³ More probably a woman accidentally spilled ashes into her maize pot and noticed the kernels cooked faster and softer, saving labor from the daily grind.¹⁰⁴ The latter idea is woven into a syncretic Mexican story told about the Virgin Mary, who

was sitting on a stone suckling her baby, Jesus Christ. She was thoughtful, worrying about how she would sustain herself and her son. All of a sudden, she noticed a movement under her stone. She saw that there were ants carrying something that neither she, nor any human, had seen before. She asked herself what it could be, and soon discovered it was [maize] …

When the Virgin ate the [maize] she felt queasy, it didn’t do her any good. She sat on her stone once more and a thought occurred: “What if I use this stone to make lime to cook the [maize] with? Then it will be better for me.”¹⁰⁵

From nixtamalized maize, steamed tamales likely came first. The date that pottery records show the advent of tortillas remains a spirited subject of debate. Some say that in the Central Mexican highlands tortillas date back to only 700 CE and then spread regionally under the Aztec Empire.¹⁰⁶ Although clay griddles were absent from the archaeological record before then, women may also have been cooking on stone slabs that would not necessarily be distinguishable from grinding stones.¹⁰⁷ Early Spanish colonial texts describe lowland Maya communities as consuming most of their maize in liquid form (as soups or a gruel-infused drink called an atole, or dissolved in hot chocolate).

In the thousands of hours that I spent cooking and visiting with Q’eqchi’ women in their homes I documented almost thirty different Q’eqchi’ names for methods of cooking maize, plus dozens more names in recipes of maize combined with other foods.¹⁰⁸ My list is undoubtedly incomplete because even after years of working in different villages, women were still surprising me with new maize-based delights. White maize is generally preferred for daily tortillas, but Maya women prefer blue (“black”), yellow, and red varieties for ritual tamales and for making special maize drinks. Among Q’eqchi’ communities where I worked, fermented tamales (poch) are favored for ritual community meals, the preparation of which can involve bawdy jokes for women’s nether parts (also called poch). Because making tortillas is so time consuming, women often mentioned to me their gratitude if they had husbands willing to eat reheated lunch tortillas for a quick dinner.

In colonial texts, Maya women appeared considerably freer than women in the Aztec Empire of highland Mexico, who were expected to produce labor-intensive tortillas at every meal.¹⁰⁹ The frequency and type of tortilla preparation in Mesoamerica, therefore, could be a reverse indicator of women’s status. In highland Guatemala, where women have a strong public or market position, they substitute entire meals with savory maize drinks that are faster to prepare. In the matriarchal societies of Oaxaca, Indigenous women (Zapotec, Mixtec, Chinantec) shape remarkably oversized tortillas—one of which is sufficient for a meal. For wage-working women in the modern era, industrial tortillas—though not particularly tasty—do represent a gendered break from the backbreaking labor of milpa cuisine.

In 1982, Mexico’s Museum of Popular Culture published perhaps the most comprehensive maize recipe book, including more than six hundred culinary uses of maize.¹¹⁰ The sophistication of “Mexican” cuisine is indubitably a legacy of the ancient “foodie” traditions of Aztec nobility. Great Aztec banquets involved dozens of courses cooked with particular types of firewood and served with complementary flowers. Montezuma is reported to have sampled more than thirty dishes every day.¹¹¹ Based on this, the work of anthropologist Sophie Coe challenges food historians to consider menus, presentation, and manners holistically. As the faculty wife of another anthropologist but also credentialed in the same field, Coe undoubtedly used these skills in fulfilling gendered expectations to host faculty dinners over her lifetime (1933–94).

Rather than reducing the stunning diversity of regional and subregional cuisines and cooking styles to the label “Mexican food,” it would be more accurate and inclusive of Central America to say “milpa-based cuisines.”¹¹² Scholars and social change agents are reinvigorating these recipes for “decolonized diets,” using modern cooking techniques for Mesoamerican communities in diaspora.¹¹³ TikTok and YouTube channels now celebrate the skills of mothers and grandmothers. My favorite is one young Poqomchi’ Maya man, Miguel Babo, who travels the country with his mother, Yolanda, documenting recipes; his videos have attracted half a million followers and earned him Guatemala’s first TikToker of the Year award.

When I assign students to interview an elder about heritage recipes, it often opens up conversations about rural life and production of maize that young people had never had. As one student emailed to me, “It gave me ideas of what to speak to my parents about their past, since I never really knew how to approach that topic. It was just something that was never brought up between my parents and me. I definitely feel closer and more connected to them, and I cannot put into words how much that means to me.” As my colleague Inés Hernández-Ávila notes, “Many Native American people who have been cut off from their traditions are hungry to recapture their ways or, at the very least, have a sense of what they have lost. Grandpa Raymond always said, ‘The ceremonies, the language, the songs, the dances are not lost. We are lost; they are where they have always been, just waiting to be [re]called.’”¹¹⁴

LANGUAGE AND RITUAL LIFE OF MAIZE

As with most Maya groups, words for the cultivation and preparation of maize remain central to the Q’eqchi’ language. The word for tortilla, wa, is embedded in multiple ways into Q’eqchi’ morphology. To eat is waak (a passive construction that roughly means “to become one with tortillas”). Ordinal words refer to the stack of steaming hot tortillas prepared for every meal, so “first” literally means “the tortilla on top” (x’ben wa), second means “the second tortilla” (xka wa), and so forth. Wa uk’a (tortilla, drink) means “sustenance.” Little wonder that Q’eqchi’ speakers describe the wheat bread brought by the Spanish as kaxlan wa, translated as “foreign tortilla.” Most Q’eqchi’ ceremonies—whether organized as a community or as a family—involve an offering known as a wa’tesink (the “giving to eat of tortillas”). Paying respect for the planting of maize with a wa’tesink is an essential feature of Q’eqchi’ ritual life and community organization.

Events surrounding the maize season confirm and reaffirm religious holidays, kinship, friendships, and, indeed, the whole social network. Even among mixed race (mestizo or ladino) people, to say someone is a “man of maize” (hombre de maíz) is to compliment that person for courage or strength. Parents customarily cut an umbilical cord over a corncob and bury a baby girl’s placenta under the household grinding stone to wish her skill in maize preparation. Most Catholic Q’eqchi’s, and even some evangelical Protestants, practice elaborate community ceremonies (mayejak) for the blessing of maize seeds. For example, when shelling the seed, a farmer should loosen his belt so that his future maize harvest will also be easy to shell.¹¹⁵ And to complete the blessing, the couple may sprinkle the seeds with water soaked with cacao seeds. The Tsotsil Maya of Chiapas do something similar: desiring to transfer some human soul (ch’ulel) to the seeds, they blow water over a basket of seeds until they are humid.¹¹⁶ In Q’eqchi’ cosmology, maize seed kernels have a soul or a kind of shadow spirit (xmuhel). To keep maize from being “lonely,” Q’eqchi’ families prepare a vigil for their seeds the night before planting.¹¹⁷

Women do also help the men with certain stages of maize cultivation, and female-headed households tend their milpas by themselves. Overall, however, in Q’eqchi’ society maize cultivation remains primarily a male-led task and maize-processing a female-led task. Through maize the Maya household is forged. Much of the symbolism around maize planting is deeply gendered—with the earth regarded as “mother” into whose surface a seed is planted. Traditional Q’eqchi’ couples will practice sexual abstinence (k’ajb’ak) three days before and three days after planting. In villages with a strong elder authority, four chosen Q’eqchi’ men make pilgrimages accompanied by virgin children to offer incense and food offerings inside caves, which are symbolic of the womb of the earth.

While a comprehensive description of maize ritual life and taboos would be worthy of a book itself, the important thing these examples illustrate is the remarkable resilience of Mesoamerican traditions through centuries of genocide. Local maize traditions were so vital to cultural life that the colonizing Spaniards had to acquiesce and adapt Catholic holidays and other religious festivities to the maize agricultural calendar. For Indigenous people of the time, the Christian cross looked like the foliated maize gods depicted in Mesoamerican art.¹¹⁸ As bread was limited to the cities, colonial frontier friars and priests substituted maize tortillas for the Eucharist. The Otomí people of Mexico developed elaborate festival tortillas stamped with Christian religious symbols using natural dyes derived from cochineal and plants.¹¹⁹ As a symbol of Mexico, the Virgin Mary herself was legitimated by the miracle of her apparition at the shrine of Tonantzin, the Aztec goddess of earth and maize.¹²⁰

PEOPLE OF PELLAGRA

Although the Spanish disdained maize, it was the real treasure of the New World. The annual value of maize and other American crops that traveled the world was probably $200 billion in 1980—a higher value than all the precious metals exported from the Spanish colonies over the course of the entire colonial period.¹²¹ Mexico is the center of origin to 15 percent of the world food system.¹²² Although his journal is not clear, Christopher Columbus and his men were introduced to maize on their third day, or at least by their third week in the Antilles. Columbus may or may not have taken seeds home on the first return journey, but the chronicles of Pedro Mártir de Anglería definitely note that they took white and blue maize seeds back to Europe in 1494.¹²³ Maize was grown in Spain by 1498.¹²⁴ Ferdinand Magellan carried maize seeds to the Philippines in 1519.¹²⁵ Through medieval trade routes, maize found its way to China by 1555, confusing European historians into thinking the Chinese had domesticated it.¹²⁶ When maize returned to Europe via the Ottoman Empire, the English called it Turkish wheat. John Locke reported seeing maize fields in southern France in the 1670s, where it was called Spanish wheat.¹²⁷

Describing it as a “botanical bastard,” the late Mexican anthropologist Arturo Warman depicted maize as “an adventurer, a settler of new lands, one of those that helped fashion the modern world from the distant sidelines.”¹²⁸ Maize became a food of underdogs. Today, more than fifty countries grow maize on a quarter million acres and it directly feeds one-third of the world’s population.¹²⁹ The United States, China, Brazil, Argentina, Ukraine, and India are now the top six producers of commercial corn.¹³⁰ Roughly one-fourth of the world’s population consumes maize directly, while others use commercial corn as animal feed or industrial food ingredient.¹³¹ In Africa, maize integrated well into local multicropping systems. With a double annual harvest and less spoilage, maize began to replace the annual sorghum crop, and some argue that these calories helped feed the slave trade.¹³²

In Europe, maize was mostly used as biomass for animal silage, making it the world’s first “flex” crop.¹³³ In some places, though, it was cultivated in the fallow fields of other cereals, and it replaced the less predictable millet. Maize provided more than twice the calories on the same amount of land as wheat and barley. Eastern European countries enthusiastically integrated it as a staple, and by the 1920s Romania was the second largest maize exporter in the world.¹³⁴ Maize was the salvation and curse of the Italian peasantry: the direct grinding of maize for porridge or as polenta created a filling food for the poor.¹³⁵ In the early United States, corn was half the cost half of wheat, so it also became a frugal part of settlers’ diets.¹³⁶

Although maize traveled far and wide, Mesoamerican women’s knowledge of nixtamalization did not. Without this technique, maize eaters can develop pellagra, a disease caused by a nutritional deficiency of niacin. By 1784 an estimated 5–20 percent of the Italian polenta-eating population suffered from pellagra, which causes diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia, and even death.¹³⁷ In the American South, enslaved people ate as much maize as Italians did (as grits or cornbread), but pellagra was initially uncommon because plantations provided rations of pork lard that contained the missing amino acids. However, after Emancipation, pellagra became a serious problem for African American sharecroppers, annually causing an estimated one hundred thousand excruciating deaths in the early twentieth century.¹³⁸

To the detriment of human health, the United States continued industrializing corn without nixtamalization. Colgate and Company began producing cornstarch from corn in 1844.¹³⁹ By the time of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, hundreds of industrial by-products of yellow dent corn—alcohol, starch, guar gum, maltodextrin, MSG, malt, and, especially, high-fructose corn syrup—are again making the North American public ill. The US corn crop is so deeply mechanized that “from field to soda can or gas tank, a human will likely never touch the grain.”¹⁴⁰

COMMODITY MAIZE

In contrast, on the eve of planting, a Q’eqchi’ farmer traditionally invites his kin and neighbors for a late-night household vigil to accompany the living soul of his maize seeds. They pass the night by drinking b’oj (a fermented drink), telling stories, enjoying harp or marimba music, and perhaps playing a game called b’uluk that is similar to the modern board games of Parcheesi and Trouble.¹⁴¹ How children behave during these and other ritual activities at home is as important for the milpa’s success as the men’s planting work. Everyone’s shared responsibility for the success of the maize harvest is reflected in the duality and balance appreciated in a good marriage. As the men play and night fades into dawn, the planting group stays awake, making jokes and friendly bets about how the maize crop will grow that year.¹⁴² Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, commodities brokers make financialized bets on corn harvests that can irrevocably undermine Q’eqchi’ lifeways and livelihoods.

As anthropologist Michael Taussig points out in his study of commodity fetishism in South America, a society can produce for small market exchange even while preventing those market principles to dominate and sicken the whole society.¹⁴³ Throughout Guatemala, even when it makes no economic sense to do so, Maya people plant maize on “parcels that would hardly be large enough to bury the owner.”¹⁴⁴ Likewise, in tiny backyards, urban Maya families might plant stalks of maize para el gasto (“for the spending,” a phrase used to describe household subsistence or the usufruct value of maize) (see fig. 6). Ethnohistorian David Cary Jr. notes that even powerful Kaqchikel professionals living in Guatemala City or other urban areas may plant maize in their home communities to maintain a connection to their spiritual roots.¹⁴⁵ In the western highlands, where many Maya farmers produce winter vegetable crops for export, they buy market corn for daily use but still plant heirloom maize varieties for special holiday events. Despite years of state pressure to abandon the milpa, many Mexican farmers continue to plant maize for subsistence, even using off-farm or migrant wages to subsidize its continuation.¹⁴⁶

Although the Q’eqchi’ have become Guatemala’s primary maize producers for urban markets, they continue to envelop the commercial production of maize with community ritual and kinship through labor groups with their neighbors. Where Q’eqchi’ people have strayed from this collective path, the gods sometimes send corrective messages. Q’eqchi’ elders in Belize told of a man from a village near Agoutiville, Guatemala, who was kidnapped by a mountain god called a Tzuultaq’a. The displeased god taught the man three lessons through song and instructed him to travel and teach these lessons to others. Hearing about his experience, the villagers of Jaguarville invited the traveler to come to Belize. They held an all-night vigil to memorize his songs, including a maize song that went like this:

There were once people

Before in the olden days.

Very important was their work

To plant the sacred maize.

Tomorrow, they are off to plant their milpa.

They scold the children to behave.

Three times, they will burn incense.

Morning, noon, and evening.

Thirteen great mountains

Whose names we recite,

And one to which the elders go

To give our thanks.

Those of us alive today

Forget what is sacred.

Oh, young people!

Do not forget these sacred gifts.

If you learn to speak Spanish and how to write,

Don’t forget your mother and father.

Don’t be like the animals,

Who eat what they haven’t planted.

Maize domestication is what separates people from animals. And, despite the Green Revolution and US-imposed trade agreements, the Maize People have not forgotten their mothers and fathers. They continue to tend their evolving milpas as their ancestors did before them. Mesoamerican campesinos (peasants) and Indigenous people are “heirs to, and trustees of, the largest genetic diversity of maize in the world.”¹⁴⁷ As Zapotec-Oaxacan activist Aldo González Rojas states so eloquently, “I plant and will continue to plant the seeds that our grandparents bequeathed to us, and I will assure that my children, their children and the children of their children continue to grow them. I will not allow them to kill the maize, because our maize will only die the day the sun dies.”¹⁴⁸ González has also become a key Indigenous voice in denouncing the neocolonial theft of Oaxacan olotón maize by Mars Inc. and affiliated researchers from my own university, a travesty to which I turn next and last in this chapter.

MARS INC.

In 1979 Thomas Boone Hallberg (an expatriate botanist who lived fifty years in Mexico and became a research professor for a Oaxacan university) stumbled across a maize variety in the mountains of Oaxaca that grew to twenty feet on extremely poor soils and produced a mucilaginous gel on its aerial roots.¹⁴⁹ Hallberg reported this and returned in 1992 with Mexican scientists, who hypothesized that this maize could indeed receive nitrogen from the air. Mexican biologist Ronald Ferrara-Cerrato published a 1993 report confirming this. In short, this olotón maize produces its own fertilizer¹⁵⁰—potentially a “holy grail” for industrial corn farming.¹⁵¹ In the official investigation of GMO contamination of Oaxacan maize, Mexican scientists highlighted olotón maize as a uniquely endangered species.¹⁵²

Despite these prior publications, a public-private partnership between Mars Inc. and scientists at UC Davis and the University of Wisconsin has claimed “discovery” of this maize variety. A key figure in this drama is Howard-Yana Shapiro, Mars’s “chief agricultural officer,” who holds a cross-adjunct appointment at UC Davis. During his hippie days, Shapiro originally collected the maize without prior informed consent while living in a Oaxacan town called Totontepec.¹⁵³ In 1990 he became vice president of an organic company called Seeds of Change. His then boss, Stephen Badger, is great-grandson (and heir) to the founder of Mars Inc. They sold their company to Mars in 1997.¹⁵⁴

Shortly after I arrived to UC Davis, the university hosted visioning sessions for a World Food Center. I attended a few sessions, hopeful that I might bring some dissident perspectives to the center’s planning about the value of Indigenous agriculture. I consciously ended my participation once Mars Inc. became the center’s outsized benefactor in 2015 (with a $40 million “gift” matched by the university’s $20 million). Mars Inc. and its subsidiary BioN2 directed two unrestricted University of California grants (totaling $4.3 million) to a research team led by UC Davis professor Alan Bennett with thirteen other UC Davis scientists and six University of Wisconsin scientists to explore the genetics of olotón.¹⁵⁵ One Wisconsin faculty member withdrew from the team and just published a riveting 2024 exposé with two other Wisconsin colleagues, a Guatemalan biologist and a famous plant patent historian.¹⁵⁶

Although many details remain murky, UC Davis negotiated a “material transfer agreement” with the town of Totontepec, decades after Shapiro collected his original samples in the 1980s.¹⁵⁷ While serving as an associate vice chancellor of UC Davis, Alan Bennett signed that 2005 agreement with Totontepec. It permitted the transfer of maize samples to the university for research but not for commercialization. In return Totontepec received a donation to renovate municipal buildings and to publish a children’s book about biodiversity. Before that agreement expired in 2010, it was extended to 2019. Shortly thereafter (in 2012), Mexico ratified the international Nagoya Protocol, designed to prevent neocolonial biopiracy by requiring “fair and equitable” benefit-sharing and compliance paperwork with national governments. (See chapter 6 for more details on this procedural addendum to the 2000 Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity.)

In the 2005 material transfer agreement, these “men from Mars” had originally promised 50 percent of any patent income to the town of Totontepec. In 2015, however, lawyers for the UC Davis–Mars team renegotiated another benefit sharing agreement that reduced the community share to 1 percent.¹⁵⁸ Other forms of genuine benefit-sharing might have included scholarships for Mixe youth or, more relevant, a promise for improved maize cultivars that would grow at Oaxaca’s latitude and altitude. When interviewed by an investigative journalist, Bennett claimed he had not seen the contract.¹⁵⁹ However, someone anonymously leaked it to the above group of critical University of Wisconsin professors, from which they stitched together a rough chronology.¹⁶⁰

The appropriate Mexican governmental agencies were neither included in these negotiations nor did they receive copies of the contracts. Bennett excused that “oversight,” arguing to a journalist that since Indigenous communities were autonomous under the Mexican constitution, his team did not need the state’s permission.¹⁶¹ Through the campus grapevine I heard that many UC Davis colleagues attending a campus seminar about olotón had asked about community compensation, but Bennett repeatedly dodged their questions. However, he was quoted in the campus newspaper that UC Davis had negotiated an agreement to commercialize the corn, “but if we do commercialize it then any economic benefits that come back to the university will be shared with the community.”¹⁶²

Without any proof that the maize originated in Totontepec, the Mars-supported team conveniently ignored that many other communities in the Mixe mountains, the Sierra Juarez, and beyond have stewarded this same maize.¹⁶³ The same Major Goodman who crusaded to integrate more farmer knowledge into seed bank storage systems indicated that the presence of olotón maize also extends into Guatemala.¹⁶⁴ Outraged Mexican scientists are documenting olotón’s broader geographical range to register it as a collective breed in Mexico’s National Catalogue of Vegetable Varieties.¹⁶⁵ And a Oaxacan grassroots organization called “Espacio” continues to denounce this theft of collective Indigenous patrimony. At a 2019 conference, members symbolically gifted olotón seeds to a representative of Via Campesina “so that through this organization small farmers in their respective countries may plant them without having to buy them from transnational corporations.”¹⁶⁶

Mesoamerican farmers speaking different languages have stewarded this agrodiversity over millennia, but Mars Inc. leadership thinks the corporation can make a patent claim to the “corn of the future” [singular] by applying additional “cutting edge technology” to understand its genomics.¹⁶⁷ Yet, even after ten years of research, the Mars team can still only estimate that “29%–82% of the plant nitrogen is derived from atmospheric nitrogen.”¹⁶⁸ They have yet to pin down any genes at work or determine which of the thousands of microbes in the root gel are responsible for the nitrogen fixation.¹⁶⁹ Nonetheless, they have apparently applied (and been denied) twice for a patent on olotón discoveries.¹⁷⁰ Meanwhile, they have continued to shop for more corporate sponsors. Commented Shapiro to a reporter for The Atlantic: “It probably won’t be Mars Inc., ’cause we’re not a maize company, but I’m trying to find the right partner.”¹⁷¹

Although seed buccaneers like these Mars men have not paid a cent, much less a buck, for the right to tinker with the collective heritage of maize, they think if they tweak a gene or two, they deserve to file patents on them. This example reminds us how slow and clunky of a process it is to make “technical fixes” in real life. It takes corporations a decade or longer to bring a new seed to market. Meanwhile, small farmers use observational science to select and improve seeds for survival every planting season. They do so according to the cultural values and culinary preferences described in this chapter.

As Potawatomi philosopher Kyle Powys Whyte argues, culturally central foods like maize for Mesoamericans or manoomin (wild rice) for the Anishinaabe or salmon for California and Pacific Northwest tribes are “irreplaceable elements of a community’s range of collective capacities to adapt to change.”¹⁷² These affective staples fuel bodies but also motivate collectivities to organize against structural injustices. The right to grow particular foods is connected to the right to grow as peoples towards self-determination. Defending or rebuilding these “collective food relations” contributes to cultural continuance.¹⁷³ Decolonization happens not in discourse but in “everyday practices of resurgence” from fields to kitchens to university campuses that can connect past, present, and future.¹⁷⁴