Cultivating Corn on Michoacán's Purhépecha Meseta: An Ancient Wager

Looking Across Fields on the Purhépecha Meseta,
or Highlands; at 2,200 meters (7,217 ft); the cerros, hills,
can rise another 900 meters (3,000 ft)

For our first three years in Mexico, we lived in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán. Our initial intent was to focus on improving our Spanish by living embedded among Mexico's people in order to experience as much as we could of daily life, customs and culture. Pátzcuaro was a fortuitous choice. As one of the country's 83 Pueblos Mágicos, Pátzcuarenses are accustomed to Mexican and foreign tourists. Our impression is that Patzcuarenses were touched by our genuine interest in daily life and customs.

We had help. CELEP, our language school, views the process of learning Spanish as one of opening a 'window on the culture'. Welcoming and engaging, CELEP's teachers enthusiastically embrace their role as cultural guides. Needless to say, we took advantage of all the school had to offer!

We choose not to drive in Mexico, relying instead on taxis. In Pátzcuaro, we were regular customers of Monarca, whose drivers came to know us because we invariably struck up conversations about almost anything as a relaxed, low-key way to practice our Spanish.

One of our favorite Sunday pastimes was to engage a driver for a ride up to the Purhépecha Meseta, or Highlands. In an earlier post, I described the countryside, which is stunningly beautiful. When we decided to move to Pátzcuaro, we had no idea that we would encounter Purhépecha culture, vibrantly alive in the region around Pátzcuaro, or that it would have such an impact on us.

So you can imagine the flood of memories let loose when I came across this article in the La Jornada newspaper.  The author is César Moheno,* recently appointed Technical Secretary of the National Institute of History and Anthropology (INAH). Moheno's essay is written in a lyrical, even poetic style, which I attempted to preserve in the translation.

Something to keep in mind is that corn was originally domesticated in Mexico's river basins. Corn is to the Americas what rice is to China and wheat is to the people in the Levant Region of the Middle East. The need to assure a good corn crop, essential for the people's survival, became an essential role performed by Mesoamerica's god-kings.

The current battle to prevent the cultivation of genetically modified corn in Mexico is being waged precisely to protect the multiple varieties of native corn that have grown up over millenia to adapt to Mexico's countless ecosystems ("Our Heart is Made of Corn").

With that context, here is César Moheno's essay, "The Blessings of the Dream" [Los beneficios del sueño]:

"Many days ago I walked along the road of Don Joel Equihua in one of the most remote parts of the forest on the Purépecha Meseta in Michoacán. Despite the many intervening years, he recognized my step and, as if time didn't exist, we sat on the path, resumed the conversation and began to recount the stories of the peoples. They might have happened yesterday or a hundred years ago. These stories serve to guide us in our world. So we are fortunate, he told me, that we never feel alone. 

"Waking early on a Wednesday morning in March of last year, he realized that the day would be warm, very suitable for planting. As he dressed, he remember his father and his father's father. Every year they had planted corn on the same land. He knew that his son would already be preparing the ox team, and his grandson would be pouring the fertilizer into the buckets. He remembered that it had always been so, and it would be so until the end of time. He knew his plot better than anyone, much better than his body, better than his hand, better even than his wife. All had changed over the years. Their lands and ways of relating to it would remain almost unchanged.

Milpa, Corn Field on Purhépecha Meseta, Michoacán
(Photo: Mexico Voices)

"Seeing him walk, step by step, through the newly opened furrow, one thinks of a dance learned at the beginning of life. He knows not to exaggerate his hopes, but he can never prevent yearning for the future ... that dream in which he sees himself walking in the middle of plants as tall as he. He knows that since October [harvest] the blessings of the land have been fulfilled, and he hopes that no late frost might occur. Following the team led by his son and his grandson sprinkling fertilizer into the furrow, he recalls that he had left the land fallow since late November. He sees himself and his neighbors plowing all the plots with a narrower plow. Everything seems like the needles of a large fabric. As in the second plowing of late December and early January, he hears once again the music of the cúrpites that is heard in all the fields as they are worked."

MV Note: Los cúrpites are unique in popular Purhépecha consciousness. Harbingers of spring, they are an awareness that is felt, impalpable. Los cúrpites appear to those who want them. They are pure, unrestrained, boundless fertility. There are no possible limits to their presence, no definitions, no borders. 

"When he had sown more than half the plot, that small twinge began, like every year, between his stomach and his heart. He never knows how to pinpoint it, but it is always present until the plant's 'little needle' sprouted. He remembers the first time he felt it was when his grandfather explained, with a very serious face, that he should put many stones at the foot of his land to prevent the birds and livestock from entering the plot if they tried to approach. He knew that with the first rains in late May and early June the plants would have already grown two hands [about eight inches] and then it was time for weeding, pulling all the weeds contrary to the corn. All this he knew, and he knew that I knew it, but he continued in his head with the benefits that you had to give your corn field in order to shoo away this pang of emptiness that continued between the stomach and the heart.

"Like any good farmer, after weeding he would have to hill up the corn. Many years ago, this work was tended to with his wife. He saw the muzzle made of cord that was put on the team of oxen to prevent them from satisfying their taste for eating the young corn, and he saw himself preparing the special plow for piling the earth against the seedlings so that, by remaining well repretada [hilled up], they could be protected from the wind and rain. This was the last benefit given to the planted corn. For the next three months, he would only watch it grow until toward the end of October the ears are full.

"On the way back to town, perhaps because his son and grandson walk in silence, or because of the late-afternoon light that lengthens their shadows and fades their colors, or simply to give wings to his innermost desire, he recalled that during the months of November and December, the pueblo [village] would be deserted, and he wondered why he felt like singing when, in the afternoon, returning with the caravan of harvesters, all sweaty and dirty, but with their chundes [huge baskets], gunny sacks and wagons full of corn to fill the stalls of the trojes [traditional Purépecha structures used as barns].

Drawing: Troje for Storing Corn

"The harvesters were men and women; young people, children and old folks. Everyone making jokes on the ride back to town, saying coarse things or simply smiling. Everyone was paid in kind: one chiquihuite of corn for each day worked. He smiles when he thinks that in this way those in the pueblo who have no land can have corn for themselves, since they are given preference. By this custom, at times the landless harvesters gather more corn than he himself.

Traditional Troje

"Arriving at his house and while removing the dirt from his feet, he turns to ask, as he does every year upon returning from cultivating his plot, if this time he'll be able to bear once again on his back the weight of a chunde full of fresh-picked corn. Following this unanswered question, as every year since he has worked the land, in that very instant, as always, hope returns.

"From this intensity—from the incandescent energy radiated by these men and women of the rural world in the theater of Michoacán's natural world; from this universe as close to Lorca as to Faulkner, to Berger as to Rulfo—comes the storyline of the times, paced by the pulse of harvest and sowing, of fiesta and challenge, cycles of life among those who plant. 

"So the campesinos of the Purepecha Meseta wager on what must be preserved in order to change. Of what must continue with the blessings of dream in order to preserve the culture and way of life until the end of time. This is the wager that the entire Mexican society should urgently join today. It is an invitation to recover the blessings of the dream." Spanish original

Postscript: I thought I would end this post with the translation, but I had the uncomfortable feeling of having left something unsaid, a sense that something was missing, an unarticulated message about the urgent need to develop sustainable ways of living on our Planet Earth. I never cease to be amazed by what Carl Jung termed synchronicity, or 'meaningful coincidence'—things that happen seemingly out of the blue.

Yesterday in Common Dreams this headline caught my eye: "Walk Softly. This is Earth. We Have Much Still to Learn." The author is Robert Koehler, Chicago-based Peace Journalist. Koehler begins his article by quoting the Arhuaco original people of Colombia:

"When you go to dig your fields, or make a pot from clay, you are disturbing the balance of things. When you walk, you are moving the air, breathing it in and out. Therefore you must make payments.”

Payments is simply another word for describing what Don Joel refers to when he speaks of giving benefits to his corn field. The article continues:

"Oh, unraveling planet, exploited, polluted, overrun with berserk human technology. How does one face it with anything other than rage and despair, which quickly harden into cynicism? And cynicism is just another word for helplessness. 

"So I listen to the Arhuaco people of northern Colombia, quoted above at the Survival International website, and imagine—or try to imagine—a reverence for planetary balance so profound I become aware that when I walk I disturb it, so I must walk with gratitude and a sense of indebtedness. Walk softly, walk softly . . ."

The ground of César Moheno's conversation with Don Joel Equiha is, quite literally, this same profound reverence for Mother Earth. Yes, we do indeed still have much to learn from the world's indigenous peoples . . . if we open our ears to hear.

*César Moheno, Technical Secretary of the National Institute of History and Anthropology [INAH], has extensive experience in the field of investigation; namely, Center of Rural Studies at the College of Michoacán; in the Department of Historic Studies at INAH; and Maison des Sciencies de l'Homme in Paris, France. Moheno's published works include "En la nostalgia del futuro: La vida en el bosque indígena de Michoacán" ("Yearning for the future: Life in the indigenous forest of Michoacán") and "Mayas: Espacios de la memoria" ("Maya: Spaces of Memory").  Twitter: @ cesar_moheno