Translating Maize into Corn: The Transformation of America's Native Grain

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by Betty Fussell

Despite the fact that maize hybridizes more rapidly than any other food plant and so can grow almost anywhere, maize took over a thousand years to spread north and south from Mexico. In contrast, wheat spread rapidly because it moved laterally, east and west, in the same temperate zone. Maize spread longitudinally through a much greater variety of climates and soils. Initial races had to develop "day-neutral" varieties before maize could flourish in the shorter growing seasons and colder temperatures north and south of the equator.

In neither Mesoamerica nor the Middle East did the first settlements coincide with the first domestication of grain. Mesoamerica didn't settle into villages until long after it domesticated maize and the Middle East settled long before it domesticated wheat. Population difference was less important than difference in land use. In the Middle East animals had been domesticated as early as grain--sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs. In the Americas, where the only domesticated animal was the dog in the north and llama and cuy in the south, hunting and foraging continued to coexist with planting and people continued to think of settlements as mobile as well as fixed. This proved to be a crucial difference.

Another problem in tracking maize is that there were so many varieties of it and so many indigenous languages, around two thousand, to describe it. There was never a common maize language until the food crises of World War II stimulated a group of American crop scientists to team up with Mexican government officials in 1943, under the sponsorship of the Rockefeller Foundation, to inventory all existing maize varieties in the Western Hemisphere and Europe. They decided to group them by genetic characteristics like kernel shape, ear shape, and number of rows, and then classify them according to "races." Thirty years and twelve volumes later, they had settled on 280 races: 210 unique to South America, 40 to Europe, 30 to Mexico, 20 to the US and Canada.(4) They further grouped these races into five family trees and created names for them: Ancient Indigenous, Precolumbian Exotics, Prehistoric Mestizos, Modern Incipient, and Poorly Defined. Later, these racial complexes were revised and renamed to admit the influence of geographic locale, so that Poorly Defined, for example, was renamed Unaffiliated.

The first important variety to reach the United States from Mexico was an eight-rowed flour variety, from the race Chapalote-Nal-Tel, which appeared in the Southwest around AD 700 and moved north into Ohio and further East around AD 1040 to become the ancestor of what we call Northern Flints. The ancestor of Southern Dents was from another Mexican race, Palomero Toluqueno, which arrived much later, around AD 1500, by way of Florida. These ancestors are important because the world's commercial corn is a hybrid of a hard-starch flint and a soft-starch dent, roughly 25% Northern Flint and 75% Southern Dent. Sweet corn is from another race entirely, Chullpi, which detoured into Peru before it came back through Mexico and into our Southwest by AD 1200.(5)