Notes about Corn and Cultural Resistance, Gullermo Bonfil Batalla

Alberto de la Vega, Tortillera

"Many thousand years ago, the history of corn and human beings have run parallel on these lands. more than parallel: they are inextricably linked. Corn is a human plant, cultural in the deepest sense of the word, because it would not exist without the timely and intelligent intervention of a hand, as it is incapable of reproducing by itself. More than domesticated, the corn plant was forged by human labour.

By cultivating corn, human beings also cultivated themselves. The great past civilizations and the life itself of millions of Mexicans today, consider the generous corn as a root and basis of their lives. It has been a fundamental axis for cultural creativity of hundreds of generations; it demanded the constant refining of techniques for its development: cultivating, storing and transformation; it conducted to the creation of a cosmogony, set of beliefs and religious practices that make corn a sacred plant; it allowed the elaboration a culinary art of surprising vastness and wealth; it left a mark amongst the sense of time and ordered the space in terms of it's own rhythms and requirements; it became a motive in the most varied forms of aesthetic expression; and it became a necessary reference to understand social organization, ways of thinking, life and acting in the broadest popular layers of Mexico. That s why, really, corn is a basis of the Mexican popular culture."

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"There is imposition and stubborn resistance: I fall and I rise again, I stop being but I return to existence because I still am, I yield and I protest, I accept and I reject. Above all, I endure."

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"For the reason, it is impossible to separate ritual from physical effort, empirical knowledge from the myth that provides its full meaning within the Mesoamerican cosmic vision."

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Mexico Profundo, Reclaiming a Civilization, Guillermo Bonfil Batalla [book]