The Recolonization of Corn

or how MASIENDA is capitalizing on a "timeless staple" and offending your abuela with a $95 "tortilla press"

There is not much I know about my maternal grandmother. I know her name— Margarita Madrigal— I know she had 9 children and raised them as a single parent. She worked at a molino grinding maíz by hand and she supported her family after that by selling pozole from a restaurant set up in her front yard on a loose dirt lot compacted everyday with water and a broom by one of her children before the lunch rush.

Maíz literally sustained my mother and her mother. I was born in Nayarit, land of the longest corn cobs in the world.

Since moving to California when I was six, there has been one singular thing that makes me feel the deepest connection to my ancestral home: hominy. Although I have never physically gone through the process of taking maíz from grano to pozole, I’ve heard the stories so often it’s become a seminal point in my history: the weekly trip to el mercado to buy grain (usually 10-15 kilos); returning home and soaking it in cal, waiting for the boiling liquid to turn each kernel yellow and watching for the outer layer to shed; draining that and then rinsing it in a chiquigüite by hand until it was completely white; and then, finally, boiling that until the kernels popped and looked like the ready-to-cook hominy you and I buy at the store. This wasn’t an episode of Chef’s Table, this was a way of life and a poor one at that. “Hija de Pozolera” was not a term given to people of high-society.

The romanticization of this process and the ‘discovery’ that “genetic diversity and regenerative farming practices produced the most delicious flavor and texture,” is what allowed the Universe, today, to place in my Instagram feed an ad for “heirloom white corn masa,” urging me to “make tortillas at home.”

To understand my outrage lets take a huge step back because the most major thing lacking in the MASIENDA story is historical and socioeconomic context (except in some cases where the CEO acknowledges Mexican economic policies of the 1990s that left smallholder farmers without structures of support).

IT’S CORN, A HISTORY

Historians generally accept that the word “maize” originates with the Arawac of the Caribbean and that the origin of the crop can be traced back 7000-10,000 years ago in what is now Mexico and its current border with Guatemala (Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru are also contenders in the origin story of maize, but the most widely accepted proof points to Mexico). General consensus is that maize came from a wild grass called teosinte, and was transformed by the indigenous population of the area into maíz over a 1000 year span through an acquired knowledge of collecting and cultivating specific plants that were the best for sustaining human life. As the grain evolved to have larger cobs with more rows of kernels, maíz became the bulk of their yearly diet and allowed groups to switch from nomadic to more sedentary living. Indigenous travelers took maize pa’l norte and also to the Caribbean and then, of course, colonizers took it back to Europe and Africa.

What these colonizers didn’t know, however, was that maíz contains niacin (an important vitamin) and that in order for it to be released it needs to go through a process called nixtamalization— a process which the native people of what is now Mexico/Guatemala figured out at some point early on in their maize consumption. Without knowing how to create nixtamal, the Europeans experienced problematic levels of pellagra (a terrible sounding disease with 3 major symptoms: dementia, diarrhea, and dermatitis) in their colonies and at home. It was when they finally figured out the nutritional properties activated by nixtamalization that maize began its journey to the GMO crop that allows the US to produce 31% of the world’s corn.

What is now fairly common knowledge in the colonized world is that “maize” is one of several cereal grains that provides humans with more nutrition than any other food class. There are approximately 12 cereal crops used for food, but “maize” is part of a trio (along with rice and wheat) that accounts for 94% of all cereal dietary intake. (Aid organizations ship corn and rice to fight famine in the global south).

It is because of its nutritional properties, that maíz has a central role in industrialization and colonization. Under European colonialism and capitalism, the production of maize enabled imperialist endeavors to find success in far off territories. Maize became a commodity that fortified the transatlantic slave trade by allowing for relatively cheap sustenance for the transportation of enslaved bodies and, later, also allowing that North American westward expansion we are taught to celebrate in US k-12 education.

Corn was everywhere and became the organizing axis of pioneer agriculture and pioneer subsistence. Corn set precedents for the sequence and style of work and served as a bridge for the transformation of agriculture. Corn was the foundation of the household economy and allowed for the preservation of a high degree of self-sufficiency. Corn was also the basis for the realization of surpluses and participation in a wider market. Corn was the means that permitted successive waves of pioneers to settle new territories. Once the settlers had fully grasped the secrets and potential of corn, they no longer needed the Native Americans. Indigenous peoples were wiped out, scattered, or relocated as settlers penetrated even further inland - Arturo Warman

MAÍZ EN MÉXICO

After the Mexican revolution, Mexico enacted right-to-land entitlements for the lower classes and created two property types: ejido, or communal plots, that cannot be purchased by outsiders or developed as viable commercial farms, and privately owned land that could be open to large scale development. Ejido plots were distributed on assumptions about a single family’s subsistence rather than commercial possibility and as such tended to be much smaller, generally never over 24 acres, but usually a lot smaller than that.

Policies enacted in the 1990s pushed more heavily towards the growth of larger scale agribusiness and programs have been created to provide income support for farms that participate in commercial sales. For smaller farms, those that provide crops primarily to their families and community and only sell the surplus, access to these governmental support programs means surmounting Mexican bureaucracy and for many rural ejido farmers, the costs are too steep.

Nevertheless, in terms of land area, maíz continues to be Mexico’s most important crop and still is indeed a “timeless staple” of Mexican diets (198 pounds of tortillas per capita per year!). However, the implications of globalization and climate change along with rural welfare and migration have created an agricultural economy that places Mexico 4th in overall production, under the US, Brazil, and China. And herein lies the problem with a company mission predicated on a disbelief in an inability to find non-GMO masa in the US: when globalization has made it no longer sustainable to farm an heirloom crop and the market is flooded with GMO corn from the imperialist power to your north, it’s undoubtedly going to be more difficult to find “cleaner” more flavorful masa.

JORGE GAVIRIA + MASIENDA

This is not the part where I discuss Jorge’s place in phenotypic hierarchy of privilege, but it is where I discuss the problematic admission that his own corn rabbit hole began in the higher echelons of the culinary world at places like Blue Hill at Stone Barns (one family meal experience? $145 per person). It was there that he realized the food of his childhood was missing from the farm to table conversation and so he became determined to bring masa from “milpa to mesa.” It seems counterproductive to make this an attack on a single person, despite him also admitting to taking tortillas for granted in his childhood and never realizing that the traditional process of making them was so intense. An argument can probably be made that his ancestral rights connecting him to maíz are as the same as mine, given his ethnic background (narrator voice: the argument was made… by her husband).

Nationalistic conversations and verifiable lineage notwithstanding, Masienda is asking us to reconcile— one instagram ad at a time— a world where globalization and gentrification (and in some cases a mutant combination of the two that yields $95 molcajetes) continue to allow the exploitation of historically marginalized and oppressed people. We are watching and condoning in real time a visible and aesthetic-heavy exclusion of those who cannot afford to “reconnect” with a world that was taken from them and I’m just not down with that.

More Reading:

Chicago Tribune, in which Jorge identifies his role to save small scale farmers that faced peril after the reforms of the 1990s. Also in which Rick Bayless claims social justice as part of the reason he invested in Masienda (I was really hoping there would be no white savior in this story).