Issue link: http://cp.revolio.com/i/30780
were said to support “liberalized trade,” and soon their “neoliberal agenda” was being criticized in what I’d call “liberal” publications. So which was it: Liberal equals good or liberal equals bad? And besides, you couldn’t hug an ideal of economic justice like you could a tree. In November 1993, when NAFTA was ratified by the U.S. Congress, my reflections on the matter could be summed up by the dismissive phrase that is the hallmark of political apathy: What! Ever! A decade and a half later, I’m still dismissive of many things I probably can’t afford to ignore, but thanks to ecofeminism and, oddly enough, corn, talk of “free trade” in the Americas is finally firmly in my view. The most beautiful corn I’ve ever seen grows behind the home of Adelina Santiago, a shopkeeper in the Sierra de Juárez of Oaxaca, Mexico. In a rectangular plot about 1 hectare in size, her corn thrives, greener than the bright- est suburban lawn, taller than any man, with bone-colored tassels that splay out from the tops like sparklers. I traveled to Oaxaca in June 2004 to learn more about the relation- ships between women and corn. I’d recently lived across the street from an industrially farmed cornfield that was off-limits, No Trespassing, untouchable. Because I have always loved touching plants—as a girl, I trolled the aisles of Navlet’s Nursery for hours, stroking pansy petals, running my hands through the feathery needles of Norfolk pines— this field filled me with a tactile sense for the loneliness of industrial corn. In Oaxaca, I stepped into the rows between Señora tells about the origins of maize are varied and contested, the most credible theory, at present, posits that 7,000 to 12,000 years ago, maize developed (through selection by Mesoamerican people) from a wild teosinte grass. Recent genetic evidence suggests this domestication process took place in the highlands of what are today Mexico’s southwest- ern states, including Oaxaca, and archaeologists have found the oldest-known remains of early maize ears in a cave in the Oaxaca Valley. Today, the mountains and valleys of the state of Oaxaca bear the world’s greatest maize diversity. In 2001, the world’s first instance of transgenic contam- “i’m here to learn more about the relationship between women and corn.” he said, “oh, you mean tortillas, in which this relationship lives!” Santiago’s corn plants, felt the fine maroon hairs on the stalks, rubbed the shiny leaves bigger than a boot print. Drunk on the mountain sunlight, beside the alive and breathing cornstalks, I felt like I was greeting a long-lost sister. (Such instances of personal fulfillment occurred re- peatedly during my travels in Oaxaca. It’s embarrassing to note that through my sense of fulfillment, I enacted a fa- miliar neocolonial tourist gesture, in which the wounds of sensory deprivation suffered by inhabitants of an industri- alized country are balmed and soothed by contact with the perceived sensuality and sensory stimulation located in a “less-developed” country. The fact that the goal of this es- say extends beyond an account of personal eco-fulfillment to an effort at understanding larger global processes may or may not compensate for my problematic position, de- pending on what response it elicits to the matters at hand.) Both the state of Oaxaca and the species Zea mays (corn or maize) are hot-button issues for conservation biology in the Americas these days. Although the stories science www.msmagazine.com ination of a native race of corn was discovered by University of California, Berkeley, researchers Ignacio Chapela and David Quist…in Oaxaca. They found “transgenes,” meaning genes from another species (a cauliflower bacte- ria, in this case), introgressed into the DNA of native corn. Though a smear campaign brought their methodology into question, the researchers’ data indicating the presence of transgenes in native varieties of corn was not disputed. Further studies by American and Mexican researchers have verified additional instances of transgenic contamination in native Mexican maize. In a sense, NAFTA can be seen as the cause for this con- tamination, because corn is wind- pollinated and the native species in question “caught” pollen from transgenic U.S. corn imported un- der the agreement. Because the Oaxaca region could be considered the evolutionary birthplace of corn, and because the state itself has been “ground zero” for transgenic contam- ination issues, I wanted to do some poetic research on the implications, for women’s lives, of transgenic contamina- tion of maize. As a Chicana poet, I’d been reading con- temporary Chicana poetry with an eye toward shared themes, and had noticed the recurrence of powerful im- ages of corn in poetry by Chicanas from all over the United States. It seemed logical to me that rural Mexican women’s connection to corn might represent the histori- cal and psychological roots of contemporary urban and suburban Chicana poets’ connections to corn. When I sat down with the head of an organic market in the capital city of Oaxaca and said, “I’m here to learn more about the relationships between women and corn,” he said, “Oh, you mean tortillas, in which this relationship lives!” Yes! In my abstract, academic fixation on the con- cept of “relationships,” I had been sorely in need of some- one to point me in just this direction: toward the “things” that embody ideas—in this case, tortillas. In rural Mexico, the tortilla is a communicative body, a treatise, a testimonio proclaiming a woman’s expertise and skill, care for her family and community, and, yes, her re- SPRING 2011 | 51