January-looking forward/back II: Toledo+Seeds

When we were in Oaxaca a couple years ago, we saw several of Maestro Toledo’s art spaces and libraries, including a couple visits to the IAGO, where we were also fortunate to be able to see this children’s play, “Caracol y Colibrí” (“Snail and Hummingbird”).

Here Caracol and Colibrí improvise a startled reaction to the roar of police helicopters circling low over the trellised courtyard, surveilling the massive teachers’ strike in the streets just outside.

The play ended with a praise and invocation to maize in several indigenous languages (Mixteco, Nahuatl, Zapoteco, and Mixe; noni, zintli, xhuba, and mook, respectively), and then all the kids sitting on the floor in the front row were given handfuls of enormous, colorful (red, yellow, blue, purple) dried kernels of various traditional landrace maize to take home with them.

We’ve grown different kinds of corn successfully in our garden most years, but in the two seasons since we brought these back, we’ve still been unable to get them to produce viable ears within our comparatively short growing season. But the plants themselves have reached well over 10 feet high by the end of the season, leaving us with some great, long-ass stalks for fall decorating. We’ll see if we can get our remaining seeds to finally yield this year.

That same summer in Oaxaca, we passed a couple times through the Tehuacán Valley of Puebla, where maize was first domesticated and cultivated nearly ten thousand years ago, as well as the surrounding region, where a lot of it was being farmed in big milpa plots worked by mules and oxen. Given the damage NAFTA has done to traditional Mexican agriculture and rural communities (flooding local markets and diets with cheap, subsidized US commodity surplus GMO corn, etc.), one can understand why Maestro Toledo and others have recognized the need to educate people (locals, visitors, etc.) about how to resist crooked forms of “progress & development.” Protecting local and traditional strains of maize, and local and traditional methods of cultivation and preparation, is not just a matter of ecological and cultural patrimony, but also one of food sovereignty and security.

Just one ugly example: Following the 16^th century European adoption of maize cultivation, pellagra swept across many regions of Europe, Africa, and North America, mainly because those who brought maize back, and subsequently others who went to farming it, failed to recognize the need to nixtamalize corn in their cooking and preparation methods (boiling it with ash or lime) to release the niacin, the way Indigenous practice has been doing it for millennia. It would be nearly three centuries before western science (re)discovered this lost detail. Also, I cannot recommend asking the Google about images of pellagra.

But here are some images of Maestro Toledo’s and others’ work to keep us honest and grounded here.

Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca (IAGO)

Maíz: Exhibition partnership between El Museo Latino of Omaha, Nebraska & El Museo de Filatelia (Stamp Museum) de Oaxaca.

Limestone (cal) for nixtamal at the Saturday a market in Tlacolula, Oaxaca.

And here's a quick video of Toledo with Rubén Albarrán at IAGO, demonstrating against Mexico's adoption of maíz transgénico (GMO corn) back in May 2014.

“We do not accept that a company, a corporation, attempts to patent life, attempts to patent our food. We cannot surrender our food independence for this supposed ‘progress.’ Progress does not exist when the earth is being contaminated, when water is being contaminated, when air is being contaminated, and when we are ourselves being contaminated. That is not progress.”

also:

Nixtamal

No País sin Maíz