Commodity or Kin: Corn, Sovereignty and Habitable Futures in Mexico

Abstract

The food sovereignty movement offers both practical and ideological solutions to the social and ecological harms of industrialized food systems. In Mexico, civil society organizations work toward goals of food sovereignty through the ‘defense of corn,’ aiming to both prohibit transgenic corn on a policy level and support campesino (farmer, peasant) preservation of native varieties. This research highlights civil society networks as intermediaries in the distinctive but interacting claims to (food) sovereignty made by the state and campesino communities. By exploring the role of corn as both an economic and relational entity, in the lives, livelihoods and cultures that surround it, this study aims to take food seriously as a site through which sovereignty is claimed. Sovereignty is revealed to encompass not only interactions between the state, its citizens, and transnational actors, but also the assertion of community agency over their bodies, environments, and community dynamics. This builds upon decolonial conceptualizations of sovereignty, brought forth by Bonilla (2017) and Bryant and Reeves (2021), further moving toward a multispecies approach in which affective relationships to corn are centered in campesino claims to sovereignty. The propensity of civil society networks to connect traditional knowledge systems with science offers a vision through which food sovereignty might answer calls from anthropologists and Indigenous academics to hold these worldviews together not only for a just future of food, but for a more meaningful ideal of sustainability.