These farmers are working to cultivate native corn despite the economic pressures
As a child growing up in Oaxaca’s Valles Centrales, Carina Santiago had to finish stripping the day’s corn from its cob before she could go out and play. Red, blue, yellow, and white varieties of native corn formed the basis of her family’s cuisine, and prepping it was an everyday chore: shucking the dusty husks from a heap of cobs, carving the kernels off their ears, gathering them to cook into tortillas or atole or tamales.
Mexico runs on maize: No meal here is complete without a basket of fresh tortillas. And corn’s ubiquity in Mexican cuisine is a constant reminder of the country’s Indigenous roots. Though it’s unknown who first domesticated what we today know as corn — crossbreeding it from a grass-like grain called teosinte — most studies trace it to Indigenous people in southern Mexico, and some of the oldest known specimens of corn have been found in caves in Oaxaca, dating from between 4500 and 4200 BCE.
Today, Oaxaca remains one of Mexico’s last strongholds of native corn. Santiago numbers among a cadre of Oaxacans who consider their ancestors’ practices of cultivating maize to be not just central to their diet and way of life, but also a matter of supreme cultural, and even spiritual, significance. As GMO corn has overtaken the Mexican market, they’re proud to conserve not only their ancestors’ practices, but also their seeds.
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