Sodbusters and the 'native gaze' - Part VII

Diversity: The key to resilience

I conclude with a photograph and accompanying epigraph: “Diversity is the key to resilience.” This photo shows some of the heirloom land race maize harvested from our Culebra bottoms in September 2007. The rainbow bundle of maize includes many “chimeras” and represents 25 years of collecting and seed saving of Zea mays.



I should clarify the first statement and note that my acequia-hood vecinos harvested the seed corn. That single act of tequio demonstrates the importance of collective community work in sustaining a local food system.

All my neighbors wanted to see my corn harvested. They appreciated the fact that one of the heirloom lines I have collected is a drought-resistant white flint from the Seri people in Baja California. This white corn is a lot like our heirloom concho varieties, a local white flour corn that also comes in dent and flint iterations and is the basis of our annual oven-roasted chicos production. Both the Seri white flint and the concho are short-season varietals and do not require a lot of irrigation.

This motivated everyone and so Joe Gallegos organized much of the harvest work. Indeed, I was at the time preoccupied with arranging for my Father’s funeral and also engaged in a wearisome, stressful battle to redefine my future not only as a member of an embattled Department but indeed as an activist-academic.

I will always connect the three events: Death; Rebirth; Survival.

I am bound to reflect not just on the diversity of our corn, but on the diversity of other plants including the many beneficial weeds that co-inhabit our field crop, orchard, and meadow landscapes. These “beneficial weeds” include the edible and medicinal wild relatives of cultivars that prefer to grow alongside the corn, bean, and squash trinity.

Certain “weeds” are essential to our local heritage cuisine. One should not have a Lenten meal in La Plaza de San Luis de la Culebra without freshly sautéed quelites (Lambs Quarters) to give you one interesting example.

I sort of feel that way sometimes: Like a weed, not yet proven beneficial, that has to survive by negotiating some level of acceptance and co-existence within the given association of “Native” plants to find solace in the soil medium of the modern western university.

I know I am often seen, or even see myself, as an exotic weed that refuses to be naturalized to these soil conditions. I am immutable in resisting academic monocultures of the mind. I imagine that perhaps I might sometimes even be misconstrued as a noxious weed according to someone else’s framing of my intellectual being and my presumed “faculty politics.”

Such feelings born of misrecognition or narrow, even fear-based, ideological proclivities are really not my concern. I am concerned with what I perceive as the structures of knowledge production that academic communities are sometimes prone to engage and reproduce, and which can indeed constitute acts of epistemological violence since they force the Other into the kind of troubling genuflection we have had to endure over the past hour or so.

I can’t say I always relish the challenge of presenting a parallax-shifting vantage point epistemology. My family’s acequia farm in Colorado constantly tugs at me, filling my mind with the presence of a place that zigzags me between Seattle and San Acacio. These thoughts are the liminal result.

Closing now with a brief lesson from linguistics or if you prefer semiotics: The word “weed” is variously defined in Spanish as 1. mala hierba (bad herb or plant); or 2. debilucho,-a (bad person). It can also be used in a transitive verbal and figurative sense as escardar (to weed out). I have learned through my own experiences that academics are prone to engage in the weeding out of the soil of knowledge production. That itself is the most demanding epistemological contradiction of our time and place. Perhaps to rebuke all that and signal some semblance of audacious hopefulness, I want to close with a poem I improvised to end this paper:

I am a weed

Soy hierba;
I am a weed
Unwelcomed; exotic;
soiling the ground
Bringing unwelcome thoughts…
Soy debilucho,
soy una amenaza
I am a threatening Other:
Porque creo en las instrucciones originales
I believe this place teaches me
Sacred ground of all my being
Epistemology does not beget ontology
Being here in place
Blesses me with the knowledge
Of inhabiting not conquering
Of coevalness not greedy usurpation

Translation plantation
Homogenization
Fast food for all
GMOs will be your fall!
The hunger is not
In the eyes of the child
It is in vacant hearts
Yearning to find freedom
From deconstructed
Onco-burgers
And napalmed Freedom fries
The thirst is not in our bellies
It is gnawing away inside our souls
Exhilio, memorias de pérdida
Los buitres sobre vida muerta

The thirst for justice
Against the aridity
Of capitalist desire
Is a burning that leaves
Not even figurines etched
Under the heat of nuclear-blasted
Walls in Nagasaki
It is, I am a weed:…A hunger that thirsts for justice.

This is Part 7 of 8 of an original as yet unpubished essay prepared by invitation for the Department of Anthropology, Spring 2008 Colloquium, “Epistemologies of Anthropological Research,” University of Washington, May 23, 2008. It is presented here free of the footnotes in the original. Sources cited in the text will be posted at the end of the series of 8.

This is a work in progress; please do not quote, cite, or circulate without the author’s permission. Send inquiries to: dpena@u.washington.edu. The author thanks Elaine H. Peña and Mario Montaño for comments on earlier drafts.