Maiz — corn — rules much of rural Mexico. (At one time it ruled almost completely.) Guadalajara’s neighboring muncipio, Zapopan, was until recently called villa maicera, because it grew so much corn. And there are hundreds of small villages throughout the Republic called pueblos maiceros by their inhabitants because they exist on maize.
This time of year, fishermen, gardeners, masons, carpenters, waiters, plumbers and many others, all of whom are relatively reliable during much of the year, frequently disappear to tend their fields of corn. People grow corn in patios and corrales behind their houses, in vacant city lots, patches of ground owned by their employers, along Lake Chapala beaches, in their front yards, down the edges of orchards — anywhere there’s a bit of fertile earth.
Quetzalcoatl’s kernel
Mexico’s mythical cultural hero, Quetzalcoatl, is said to have turned himself into an ant so he could steal a single grain of teocintli (corn) from deep within a secret mountain where the insects had hidden the precious grain. Returning, he gave that one kernel of maize to humankind so it could nourish itself forever.
To the Mexica (Aztecs), corn was a divine gift, a true miracle. To historians, it is the exceptional plant that allowed mankind in the Americas to cease existing in scattered groups of hunters and gatherers and settle down to create the ancient rich, fascinating and often mysterious civilizations of what is today Latin America. It was the bridge between culture in the Americas and the beginning of the region’s civilizations.
Worship of maiz
The oldest civilizations of Mexico, the Olmec and the Toltec, worshiped corn and had corn deities. The Mexica were most elaborate in their worship of corn and used it in almost all of their religious ceremonies. Human, and other sacrifices were made to corn deities. The images of these deities, and others, were fashioned from corn dough and corn husks. This tradition continued after the Spanish conquest, when the indigenous peoples of Mexico were converted to Christianity, and they created images of Christ and the new religion’s many saints.
Despite the modernization of Mexico and despite government policies that have wrecked much of the Republic’s agriculture — to the point where this nation which once exported grain now imports millions of tons of it each year — corn is still worshiped here, although often in seemingly quite secular ways. (Some old-time farmers in remote ares still sing the alabado — a hymn sung in the fields at dawn and sunset.)
Mexican birth place
Corn was apparently born in Mexico, and it is only here — in Jalisco — that the most ancient species of the grain still grows. Research indicated that corn was domesticated between 10,000 and 5,000 years ago and that it originated here some 80,000 years ago. While early man in the Americas may have first domesticated other plants — gourds, squash — it wasn’t until the domestication of corn that hunter-gatherers could settle down and begin to create what modern man has defined as civilizations. The domestication of corn, once it was accomplished, spread swiftly throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Europeans slow on corn
By the time Christopher Columbus showed up, corn had created vast, powerful, complex, creative societies in Latin America. But as researcher Paul Weatherwax has said, “Columbus and his party weren’t much impressed by the plant. In general, they were dull observers of plants.” Nonetheless, by the beginning of the 16th century, as more Europeans arrived in the New World, corn entered Europe — first from the West Indies, then from Mexico, Peru and Brazil — to be scattered along lengthening trade routes. The Portuguese carried to to West Africa and India. Magellan introduced it to the Philippines and the East Indies. From there it traveled to the East Asian mainland. Deceased Harvard scientist, Paul C. Mangelsdorf, pointed out, “Only two other New World products spread with equal rapidity — tobacco and syphilis.” (Today, scientists agree that syphilis originated in the New World as a non--sexually transmitted disease and then mutated into a venereal version after it arrived in Europe in the 1490s.) Yet Europeans were slow to take to the new grain. “It is hard of digestion, and yieldeth to the body little or no nourishment,” according to one 1597 commentator. “It slowly descendeth and bindeth the belly.”
Indigenous crop mgt.
But when European settlers in the New World discovered corn, they knew a good thing when they saw it. Of course, by then it had been the dietary mainstay of the Americas, from Canada to Chile, for many centuries. Intricate methods of crop management already had been created by native Americans. They had learned long before the use of fertilizer, the necessity of controlling insects, weeds and diseases. They taught European newcomers how to plant corn with other crops to make the most efficient use of their land and its fertility. In addition, they had discovered the importance of eating corn in combination with other foods — beans, for example — to compensate for corn’s less-than-adequate protein count.
Changing corn
Long before Columbus appeared on the horizon, the original primitive corn plant had been put through both accidental and careful selection by indigenous farmers, taking it a great way from its origins and changing it vastly.
Europeans, once they caught onto liking the new grain, began tinkering with it too. Using rapidly advancing scientific knowledge, they sped up the process of improvement. Today, the hybrid strains that have resulted from this experimentation possess once-unimagined high yields, considerable resistance to disease and uniform quality. but hybrid corn retains its vigor only for a single generation, meaning farmers must buy new seed each year. That’s fine for agriculture in developed nations, which have effective methods of mass seed production and distribution. But for the poor farmers in the home of corn — Latin America — hybrids are too expensive and too vulnerable. A mountainside farmer here saves next year’s seed from this year’s harvest. He doesn’t have the money to invest in new seed each year. And his corn plants aren’t as productive — and certainly not as uniform — as hybrids. He averages nearly 20-percent less in per-acre yield than does his fellow-farmer in eastern Nebraska.
Research now must be encouraged to turn away from hybrid refinement to the improvement of open-pollinated corn varieties better suited for the rugged circumstances of agriculture in the Third World.
The discovery of corn’s teocintli ancestor in Jalisco may go a long way in this direction. Not only is this grain perennial (meaning farmers don’t have to plant it every year), it is immune to many of the diseases that have recently decimated hybrid crops in developed nations. It is also not patented, keeping the price of seed down from transgenic corn varieties. If the heartiness of this ancient grain can be retained while its quality and uniformity is boosted it will change the lives of millions of poor farmers in Latin America and throughout the world. Researchers hold out hope that it could accomplish that long-awaited miracle: banishing famine forever.