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Translating Maize into Corn: The Transformation of America's Native Grain
Author(s): BETTY FUSSELL

Source: Social Research, Vol. 66, No. 1, FOOD: NATURE and CULTURE (SPRING 1999), pp.
41-65
Published by: The New School
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40971301
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Translating Maize
into Corn:
The Transformation
of America's /
Native Grain /
BY BETTY FUSSELL
With our first infant wail, we establish that intimate lin
between food and language on which our lives depend. You cou
say that ingesting food is our primary act of translation, in wh
the mouth is a portal for both eating and speaking, for ingesti
the world of things and articulating the world of ideas. That
have but the one orifice for these opposite actions is a curious f
of human engineering that may cause some to dismay,1 but t
fact helps explain why the foods of a particular culture cannot
separated from the language of that culture. The simple act o
translating the name of a food from one language to anoth
transforms not just our response to that food but often the su
stance of the food itself. Food, then, is a good medium in wh
to demonstrate how much language preconditions percepti
and how often we eat first with our heads and then with our stom-
achs, so that we can no more taste with an innocent palate than

we can look with an innocent eye.
Among the world's major foods, corn is a prime example in

both its botanical nature and its cultural history of the ways in
which language shapes perception and history genetics. As long
as we view corn as a typical domesticated wild grass, a cereal
grouped with wheat and rice as one of the world's three basic sta-
SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Spring 1999)
42 SOCIAL RESEARCH
pie crops, corn is appropriate for

But the moment we translate "corn" back into "maize" and exam-
ine this language shift and its meanings, we find that maize/corn
is in no way typical. No other human food plant has undergone
such extraordinary changes with such far-reaching results, most
of them within the last two hundred years as a result of the clash
between indigenous and European languages that began with

Columbus' arrival in the Americas.
To say the word "corn" is to plunge into the tragi-farcical mistranslations of language and history. If only the British had followed Columbus in phoneticizing the Taino word mahiz, which the
Arawaks named their staple grain, we wouldn't be in the same linguistic pickle we're in today, where I have to explain to someone
every year that when Biblical Ruth "stood in tears amid the alien
corn" she was standing in a wheat field. But it was a near thing
even with the Spaniards, when we read in Columbus' Journals that
the grain "which the Indians called maiz... the Spanish called
panizo.9' The Spanish term was generic for the cereal grains they
knew - wheat, millet, barley, oats - as was the Italian term polenta,
from Latin pub. As was the English term "corn," which covered
grains of all kinds, including grains of salt, as in "corned beef."
French linguistic imperialism, by way of a Parisian botanist in
1536, provided the term Turcicum frumentum, which the British
quickly translated into "Turkey wheat," "Turkey corn," and

"Indian corn." By Turkey or Indian, they meant not a place but a
condition, a savage rather than a civilized grain, with which the
Turks concurred, calling it kukuruz, meaning barbaric. Wherever
this barbaric grain was carried, and it went quickly around the
world in the sixteenth century on the ships of Portuguese explorers, it was given different names. When Linnaeus tried to establish
a universal plant language in the seventeenth century by giving

plants Latin names, he called it redundantly Zea mays, adding
Greek zea9 meaning "life-giving," to Latinized mahiz, which in
Taino meant "life-giving seed."
Maybe we're lucky that the English language ended up with two
different words for the same thing, because the connotative dif-
TRANSLATING MAIZE INTO CORN 43
4 Fntmt*t*mtnduiml*tt*m.
YclloirTtirky Wheat.
Figure 1. John Gerard's influential Herball, or Generali His

names three colors of Turky Wheat: yellow, "blew," and
ference between maize and corn names the jun

between two different worlds, the Old one and the New. Rather
than a case history of change, the subject maize/corn furnishes a

nexus study of the conflict between these worlds that we can view
only from the perspective of our own culture and the inherited
predispositions of our own palates.
The Nature of Maize
Whenever food is the subject, like poetry or music or art, we

should begin with the concrete and particular reality of the foodstuff, on the plate, in the hand, in the mouth. As a subject for the
mind, food should not be divorced from its sensate existence and
our sensuous experience of it - sight, smell, touch, taste, and even

sound, as in the sizzle of bacon or the pop-pop-pop of one of our
favorite kinds of corn. Let's begin, then, with the translation of
the raw foodstuff into two culinary artifacts, a loaf of bread and a
disk, which the Spanish called tortilla, or "little cake," to name the
commonest form of bread in Mexico, the place where maize
44 SOCIAL RESEARCH
began. But when we say "bread
descendants understand as bread i
mean dried grain, ground into
water, and leavened by yeast. Yea

we read other breads.
The tortilla, in contrast, presents us with dried grain that has

been processed before it is even ground. The kernels have been
boiled with an alkali {cai, or slaked lime from limestone) that

removes the skins of the kernels, which makes the grain easier to
grind, adds a slightly different flavor, and changes its nutritive

substance. While still wet, these boiled kernels {nixtamal) are
ground and shaped into a dough {masa) to cook flat on a griddle

{comal) or hearthstone. But the dough stays flat. It doesn't rise
even if we add yeast because maize has no gluten to respond to
the chemical changes wrought by yeast. Corn bread is by nature
flat and has symbolic value as such. Mexicans call the Zcalo, that
vast central square in the heart of Mexico City, "el gran tortilla."
In terms of sensation, we see a high white loaf instead of a flat
yellow disk, we smell yeasted grain instead of roasted grain. We
taste texturally the soft sponginess of the loaf in contrast to the
dense chewiness of the disk. As for flavor, language fails: one
tastes yeasty and wheaty and the other corny. If we turn to biochemistry to define the difference in taste, we find that while
wheat and corn both contain starch, protein, fiber, and oil, corn
of every variety contains about twice as much oil as wheat and
some proportion of sugar. Its high oil content gives corn a more
pronounced flavor than wheat and the sugar gives an underlying
sweetness.
Their different chemical natures require different metho
cooking and keeping. A corn dough, because it has no g
will never become gummy or tough, unlike a wheat paste of

and water or fat, which can easily be overworked. A corn d
on the other hand, will easily crumble and dry out. Whol
meal, because of the quantity of its oil, will go rancid more qu
than wholegrain wheat and must be toasted or parched to

serve it well. A yeasted wheat dough to maintain its struct
trapped air bubbles requires an enclosure to p

around. Wheat requires an oven. Unyeasted d
a hot stone or hot ashes, a campfire. An oven
focus for hearth, a fixed place. A campfire, o
mobile.
Basic differences between the two grains begin in planting and
harvesting. With wheat, historically, the plow prepared the

ground for sewing seed "broadcast," whereas with corn the planting stick was used to put three or four kernels in a small hill.
While hilling disturbs the earth very little, plowing transforms it.
Most importantly, while a wheat plant can seed itself, corn cannot.
Without help from the farmer, the seeds of corn are so tightly
wrapped in their husks and so tightly compacted on the cob that
corn cannot reproduce itself. Even if a husked ear fell on fertile
ground, the sprouting seeds would kill each other off from over-
crowding. Botanists call corn a "hopeless monster" because in

nature it is helpless.
As in planting, so in harvesting. With wheat, threshing, mowing, and winnowing lent themselves to mechanical aid, like the
McCormick Reaper. Because ears of corn had to be plucked,

husked, and shelled by hand, corn resisted machinery. Not until
after World War II were wheat combines fully adapted to corn and
then only because the plant had been altered genetically to produce uniform ears at a uniform height.
Botanical differences created cultural differences in the rela-
tion of man to plant. Among cereals, only the corn plant stands
taller than the grower, only corn bears a seed pod so large and
fleshy that it can be eaten fresh as a vegetable or fruit, only corn
is edible from root to tassel as a whole plant, at least for animals.
As fodder, corn revolutionized the world's diet, post Columbus,
when corn was converted into chickens, cows, and pigs.
Such differences instruct us in the importance of context. Too
often, in describing the effects wrought by the Columbian

Exchange after 1492, historians have listed foods serially like a
shopping list, which loaded the New World supermarket basket
with maize, potatoes, tomatoes, chiles, cacao, beans, squashes,
46 SOCIAL RESEARCH
and so forth. But all foods are no
maize, chile, and cacao in the h
maize, potato, and quinoa in that

tance of locating historical synta
ulary. Only by uncovering the
planter, cook, and eater in relatio
can we begin to see why and h
migrates, assimilates, mutates, an
Even in its emergence, maize

einkorn wheat evolved into domesticated races 10,000 to 8,000
years ago at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Perennial

forms of "wild" rice evolved into the domesticated races of indica
2nd japnica some 8500 to 6500 years ago in the Hupei Basin and
Yangtze Delta. Maize, by contrast, remains a mystery because we
know it only as an already domesticated plant, a human artifact.
No wild maize exists today and its nearest morphological kin,
teosinte, a grass that still grows wild in Mexico, is so unlike the ear-
liest known fossil maize that geneticists cannot explain how the
one got translated into the other.
Everything about the emergence of maize is speculative not
only because of the missing links in its evolution, but also because
plant domestication is not the same as settled agriculture. You can
have "incidental dispersal," as archaeologist Bruce D. Smith calls
it, without regularized "planting" or settled habitations.2 While
there is some slight evidence of maize in soil samples from the
coast of Ecuador, dating back to the Valdivian period of 5200 bp,
there is no evidence from that date of settled agriculture. The two
characteristics that archaeobotanists look for as evidence of planting, "manipulated environment" and "lessened diversity of wild
plants," suggest that the first regularized agriculture in this hemi-
sphere began around 4300 bp and that it began with maize in

Mexico.
All we know about early maize comes from only six sites. The
main find is 24,000 specimens, uncovered as recently as the 1960s
by Richard MacNeish in caves in the Tehuacan Valley in the high-
lands of Puebla. The earliest fossil maize is from this site and is
now dated (by accelerator mass spectometry
Today, however, researchers believe that the m

the beginnings of maize is the central Balsas R
aca because it is richest in the variety of teosin
be the closest ancestor of maize {Zea mays, subs

other words, it may be that even Tehuacan is
than a primary site. The scenario proposed by B
maize spread from the Balsas in southwestern
can by 4700 bp, along the Gulf and Pacific coas

northward into southwestern United States by
same date, into the highlands of South Americ
Despite the fact that maize hybridizes more

other food plant and so can grow almost anyw
over a thousand years to spread north and sout
contrast, wheat spread rapidly because it moved
west, in the same temperate zone. Maize spr
through a much greater variety of climates an
had to develop "day-neutral" varieties before m
in the shorter growing seasons and colder tem
and south of the equator.
In neither Mesoamerica nor the Middle East did the first set-
tlements 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 domesti-
cated 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 cru-
cial 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 lan-
guage until the food crises of World War II stimulated a group of
48 SOCIAL RESEARCH
American crop scientists to team

officials in 1943, under the spons
dation, to inventory all existing
Hemisphere and Europe. They de
characteristics like kernel shape,
and then classify them accordi
twelve volumes later, they had se
South America, 40 to Europe, 3
Canada.4 They further grouped t

and created names for them: An
Exotics, Prehistoric Mestizos,
Defined. Later, these racial comp
to admit the influence of geog
Defined, for example, was renam

The first important variety to
Mexico was an eight-rowed flour
Nal-Tel, which appeared in the

moved north into Ohio and further East around AD 1040 to
become the ancestor of what we call Northern Flints. The ances-
tor of Southern Dents was from another Mexican race, Palomero

Toluqueo, 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
byAD1200.5
Similar problems arise in trying to track how maize was grown
in ecologies as varied as the woodlands, deserts, bayous, rainforests, marshes, lakes, and highlands of the three Americas.
Farming methods that created the cities of Tenochtitlan and
Cuzco were entirely unlike the methods used in the boondocks all lands north of what is now Mexico City. At the time Cortez
arrived, the raised-field system, chanampas, built in the swamp-lake
of Tenochtitlan supported an urban population of a million and

a half people, larger than Henry VIII's London. There the Aztec
had devised a system of dams, aqueducts, dikes
vide irrigation, cultivation, and transport all a

is still in use today in the "floating gardens" of
With a similar bent for organization, the Inca
gated the inhospitable mountains of the Andes

and hostile peaks as Machu Picchu. By successf
steepest lands arable, they extended their emp
central Ecuador and as far south as Bolivia.
graphic isolation, "the Valley of Cuzco," Paul W

"was the center of the greatest diversity of m
most highly specialized agriculture to be foun
New World."6
The difference between desert farming in th
United States and woodlands farming in th

extreme. Where the Hohokam in Arizona had built a network of
canals, over 1750 miles of them, to exploit the floodplain of the

Gila River, the Hidatsa of North Dakota used "cultivated fire" to
clear their woods. They then distributed the ash, hoed the earth
into small hills, planted corn in rows with beans and squash, and
took off for the summer buffalo hunt, returning in time for the
green-corn harvest of August.7
The Conquest of Maize by "Corn"
Amerindians, despite their differences, shared certain assumptions about the land where they lived, just as Spanish conquistadors and English settlers shared assumptions about the land they
were invading. Whether they were Cortez and Pizarro or John
Winthrop and Captain John Smith, they were Christians whose
duty was to redeem fallen nature - human, topographical, and
culinary. All found maize in abundance, but they contemned

"Indian corn" as a type of inferior wheat. This "Salvage trash," the
colonists moaned at Jamestown in 1609, until they had either to
eat this trash or starve. That Turkey corn was not wheat was a les-
son English colonists had to learn repeatedly when they tried to
50 SOCIAL RESEARCH
elevate "pone," "hoe cake," "ash
higher state by adding wheat or r

yeast could make it rise and they
Colonists also learned to redeem
ders, to open a new world of qui
alkali compound. We know from
the Zuni how frequently wood as
four-winged saltbush, and also
saliva was added to finely ground

called both additions "lime-yeast
sweetness of the cakes made from
had applied the same adjectives

same "leavenings."9 The English
wood ash in a pot to make lye, "

and substance into "pearlash" and
bicarbonate that today we call ba
Even the simplest form of porr
translation before it was palatab
gansett nokehick, Anglicized to "
pudding" before this mush could
meant a porridge stirred in a pot o
more refined "puddings" that we

bag, as in Christmas puddings. B
hasty pudding came to stand fo
sound to every Yankee dear," wro

low in his epic poem of 1793 dev
pudding" over low mush.
When the French explorer Dum
Mississippi in 1753, he gave unus
and vocabulary of the natives, ci
which has its special name."10 Ev
century, Frank Hamilton Cushin
ent Zuni dishes made from distin
own name: on the cob, in the gr

fermented, broken into coarse
ground to exeedingly fine flour.
far from the center of the elaborated corn cuisine of Moctezuma's
court, where Bernardino de Sahagn, translating Nhuatl into

Spanish, reported hundreds of dishes based on maize. In Mexico,
where Spaniards intermarried to create a mestizo culture, these
dishes formed the matrix of a criolla cuisine. In the States, how-
ever, the English resisted intermarriage in every way and elimi-
nated what they couldn't translate. They continued to use

culinary corn as a wheat substitute.
After translating rockahominy into "hominy," however, colonial
English did retain the native process of skinning whole corn with
the alkali of wood ash. Tragically, corn migrated to Europe without this craft. When Columbus returned to Europe with maize
kernels, he knew nothing of maize preparation. Northern Italy

treated cornmeal as a substitute for wheaten pasta, developing
rich sauces for their polenta. In 1771, when the wheat crop failed
and Italian peasants were forced to eat a diet solely of corn, they
came down with the "corn sickness" they named "pellagra," which
meant literally "rough skin." No known Amerindian group devel-
oped this disease because alkali-processing made available the

amino acids that maize lacks: niacin, tryptophan, and lysine.11
Since these are the same proteins that beans are rich in,
Amerindians had a double dose of these nutrients. While corn-
meal became the poor man's staple everywhere - mamaliga in

Romania, puliszka in Hungary, sofld in Ghana, mealies in South
Africa, fungie in Zaire - it lost an important source of nourishment in the translation.
The process of milling tells a similar story (see Figure 2). The
wooden samp mills and hominy blocks of the Northeast, the stone
metates of the Southwest, were barbaric to colonial women accustomed to taking their wheat to a professional miller at his gristmill.
In Europe the method of grinding grain between a pair of circular stones had been in place since the rotary querns of Ancient
Egypt. Although the source of power changed, the principle of
rotary stone wheels held firm until the first iron rollers were devel-
oped in England in 1878 for wheat but were soon used for corn as
well. These rollers fragmented the grain and processed its parts by
52 SOCIAL RESEARCH
Figure 2. Girolamo Benzoni, who travele
1541 to 1555, depicts the three stages of n

boils corn with powdered limestone, the
a metate to make fresh dough, and the th
cook on the griddle over an open fire.
shearing the kernel open, scrapin

the germ for oil. Without oil, c
wheat flour, but at a far greater cos
If the staple grain of the America
by English colonists as a foodstuff

which it grew. Because the Englis
bandry, they misunderstood com
on native grounds. In the East,
woman's work, the work of "lazie

off hunting and fishing. In Engla
sports of country squires, not t
wresting food from the earth

Amerindians neither plowed nor
was a method Squanto had learn
Hariot expostulated in 1585 that t

enrich the soil with refuse, dung,
plough or dig it as we do in Engla
Figure 3. Jacques Le Moyne, a Huguenot colonist in Flo

reveals his European perspective when he draws native
muscles and women with Botticelli hair. The men cult
European manner and the women strew corn kernels
berries.
that the natives got prodigous crops without having to work for
them.12
To Europeans, "land" meant "use," and "use" meant European

agriculture (see Figure 3). They were blind to the ecological balance Amerindians had achieved by burning the undergrowth of
their forests once or twice a year to improve the habitat for
wildlife, like small game and wild edible plants, which also kept
down insects and weeds and disease. In Vestal Fire, Stephen Pyne
has revealed in global detail what a difference a fire makes in the
meaning that different cultures attribute to it.13 The Amerindians' use of "cultivated fire" was in fact a form of "husbandry" that
turned forests into parks in order to sustain the wild game they
harvested as a foodstuff. Europeans misunderstood these methods because their own template of planting fields with crops to
feed flocks to supply fields with manure for more crops was a
closed and fixed system. While Amerindians followed their food
54 SOCIAL RESEARCH
across the land in the rhythm of

imagine food and land in terms
divide pasture from non-pasture.1
For colonists and conquistadors a
due, improve, bring under contr
cited Genesis 1:28 to justify thei
automatically forfeited by their f
them, and God said unto them, B
replenish the earth, and subdue

fish of the sea, and over the fowl
thing that moveth upon the eart

fit European notions of dominio
Amerindian property rights shif
owned the land but families, communities, or confederacies
might use what was on the land at different times of the year.
What was traded or sold were usufruct rights, the rights of "use,"
and these were a matter of trade and negotiation between groups
whose political structures were based on kinship rather than on
the relatively fixed and institutionalized power structures of the
Europeans. In "deeding" lands to the colonists, the Indians

thought they were making political deals, not economic ones.
Translating these lands into their own agricultural language of
mixed crops and animals required the colonists to establish

boundaries between pasture and non-pasture. The need for more
pasture mandated burning forests entirely, not just the undergrowth, then planting corn and rye to ready the soil for planting
English grasses to provide hay for livestock. Their agricultural language required the plow, which both compacted the soil and created a monoculture that exhausted it. For the colonists, "natural
resources" meant commodities that were measured by an abstract
equivalence - money.
Land itself was the basic commodity, a form of capital which
had to be consumed to produce more capital, to increase wealth.
The context of John Locke's often quoted statement that "In the
beginning, all the world was America" implied his conclusion:
"The staple of America at present consists of Land, and the imme-
diate products of Land." In changing the mean

"staple" from a cereal grain to land and its cash
ica's colonists commodified the earth.
The Commodification of Corn
That is the process by which maize became corn. The premise

didn't change, only the techniques did. The industrial, the petrochemical, the bioengineering age: the goal throughout has been
to control nature in order to transform it into capital. In this
rapid transformation, native populations killed off by disease
were replaced by livestock, while campfires were replaced by the
fixed hearth, which evolved into the stove, the furnace, the
foundry, the factory. Since the goal was to increase yield in order
to increase capital, when maize with its innate potential for kernel
volume turned into corn, it proved to be a goldmine for the

industrial age.
"Decade after decade, beginning in 1780," Henry Wallace

wrote in Corn and Its Early Fathers, "the progress of American civi-
lization was measured by the western expansion of the corn

acreage." In the middle of the nineteenth century, four tools
came together to produce industrial corn: John Deere's "singing
plow," the railroad, a new form of milling, and a new technique
of hybridization. With the steel plow, vast areas could be planted
at once on an industrial scale. With the railroad, corn converted
into livestock could be mass produced and distributed in the

industrialization of husbandry. With steel roller-mills, corn could
be separated into its chemical components. With the new science
of genetics, corn could be crossbred for volume and uniformity.
Henry Wallace's methods of controlling pollination by a dou-
ble-cross hybrid produced today's high-yield commercial field

corn, once called Corn Belt Dent and now called "#2 Yellow, or
Commodity Corn." Each ear is the offspring of two pair of grandparents and one pair of parents, a system that transformed 8rowed Indian maize into 24-rowed hybrid corn. The seed of this
56 SOCIAL RESEARCH
ear, however, is infertile, so that

repeated with each new crop. In
specialty commodity, patented a

Wallace's original company now
applying the principles of mass
the plant world, Wallace turned a
the landscape of the Midwest int
This transformation demonstrat
word to thing. The sudden rise o
falo plain, as Daniel Boorstin puts
ments to a priorism in all human
nation's need to make a commodit
and sell it, even before it was
became the language of a new nat

crowned King in city after city f
South Dakota in palaces modeled
chies except for the materials th

corn husks, corn stalks, corn silk
assorted prairie grasses. Corn no

but an all-American grain that r
1893 World's Columbian Expositi
Agricultural Conquest of the Eart
Control of pollination was follo
With wet-milling, the new indus
were petroleum. "Anything mad
the National Corn Growers Assoc
be made from corn," and has bee

applied to corn the syntax of nin
lyze, fragment, quantify, synthe
oil. The milling that fragments k
starch and oil enables cornstarch to be converted into industrial
starch, then transformed into dextrin for glues and dextrose for
sugars and syrups (Figure 4) .
The Corn Products Refining Company International that

began with edible products like Kingsford's Cornstarch, Karo,
and Mazla, soon synthesized these elements into an invisible and
Figure 4. The Sioux City Corn Palace of 1891 was the fifth and
corn palaces before Mitchell, South Dakota enshrined the glor
The World's Only Corn Palace, which anyone may visit today
inedible network of corn. Today there is corn oil

corn syrup in rubber tires, cornstarch in shotgun
alized corn, which touches everything from talcu
embalming fluid, is an essential part of our lives
grave, and it gets us from one to the other by et
mere five or six decades at the turn of this cen
became the first country in the world to turn an org
a fully industrialized commodity.

Genetic manipulation at the microbiotic level is s
extension of this kind of conversion. At this very m
biologists are producing transgenic hybrids to
protein value and its resistance to insects or disease
name of "improvement." Each improvement, h

farmers here and elsewhere ever more depend
smaller seedbank. The fact that the internal st
organism, plant or animal, can now be patente
turned into cash gives new meaning to Adam's
58 SOCIAL RESEARCH
nature, just as the cloning of Dol
Exchange."
The Cultural Symbolism of Maize
The greatest difference between corn and maize, however, lies

in the symbolic freight that each word carries. If north of Mexico,
European immigrants built an industrial kingdom and a global

empire on the economic power of corn, in Mesoamerica the
Olmec a thousand years before Christ founded a complete universe - a language, calendar, mythos, and cosmos - on the symbolic power of maize. If the one culture diminished a staple food
to merchandise, the other sanctified it as divine.
In the New World, the growing cycle of maize furnished a root
metaphor for ordering the universe, a metaphor that made all
forms of life organic and made man "blood-kin" to maize. Maize
furnished not only literal life-giving seeds but also symbolized all
those generative forces of matter and energy that connect sky and
earth to the vegetative world of which man and all created beings
are a part. The Maya-Aztec calendar, which began with Olmec and
Zapotee, elaborated this metaphor of cyclic growth and decline to
order, by analogy, historical and astronomical time, integrating
both into a single comprehensive system. Thus the dynastic succession of kings was related directly to the pattern of agricultural
seasons and to the cyclic movement of the heavens. This extraor-
dinary calendar was incorporated into the complex language by

which the Maya in their glyphs could map simultaneously both
human history and the constellations in a constantly mutating
universe.16
Europeans spoke a radically different language of time and history, based on a radically different mythos of separation and loss.
God created and man Fell - out of timeless Paradise and into
time. In contrast, the New World focused not on a Fall but an

Emergence, through successive creations, in cyclic time. Their
universe was dynamic, in process, constantly being recreated
through the powers of the shaman. Again, Eur

ically different language of space. In the fixed
the Christian image of the Great Chain of Bei

ation vertically in a hierarchy. The way to go
earth at the bottom, the "dregs of the universe,"
of God at the top. In the Amerindian cosmos, o
all motion was circular with no moral and spir
"up" over "down," or of the heavens over the e

for time and space, heaven and earth, was a fla
which life, like a sprouting seed, matures, die

earth to be reborn. That field gave shape to th
In the creation myth recorded in the sacred b
the Popol Vuh, First Father in the beginning ra
enough above the sea to place in the earth's

stones of creation" and to light the First Fire.
then measured out the four corners of "sky-ear
measuring a maize field, flat like "el gran tort
hyphenated word because sky and earth are
each other, both flat fields connected by the W

with its roots in the sea below the earth and its crest in the heav-
ens. In the center of each field, sky and earth, the three stones of
creation are imaged by the three stones of an ordinary hearth fire
in an ordinary house (Figure 5). Even today, every time a Maya
housewife in the Yucatan or in Chiapas or in Huehuetenango
cooks a tortilla on her comal she is linked to the twin hearths of

creation, one in the earth's navel and the other in a constellation
of stars.
Sky-earth is also linked linguistically by the two Maya names of
The Maize Tree: Na-Te-K'an ("First Tree Precious/Yellow") and

Wakah-Chan ("Raised-up Sky"). The first name includes the kan
glyph, which images a symbolic corn kernel at the top of the glyph
and which means "bread, precious thing, sacred, blood." The sec-
ond name includes its homophonic glyph chart, which means

both "sky" and "serpent." One glyph echoes the other in the man-
ner of poetry. Because Maya script is logographic (syllabic, pho-
60 SOCIAL RESEARCH
Celestial Bird
^8BJF*^PB^y/* ear ' corn 8s a human head
Figure 5. The most sophisticated Maya ve

ing at Palenque (c.690 AD), which archae
analogy, "The Foliated Cross." Linda Schel
plant, which is at the same time the Youn
bearing godheads as ears of corn, rooted
Water-lily Monster, and crowned with
shamanic power of the king-priest in com
ancestors and gods.
netic, and pictorial) each glyph en

ing, like a tamale, in a language th
The tamale itself elaborates the f
The tamale is a festal and sacred b
enriched with fat or with filling
might include anything from p
vanilla flowers. As such, the tamal
ing to the gods of all that is most p
bond between man and gods. For t

sacrifice was a daily event, which
their priests when they were off
blood of human sacrifices. They did not see t
the Christian Eucharist, since the Old World

laid vegetal symbols with pastoral ones. Chri
had obscured his ancient lineage as a wheaten
For the New World, the idea and the actual
embodied in the maize plant. Because the

Olmec and Maya represented Maize Gods
blood from their vital organs, their penises a
regenerate the sources of life by acting out

in the sacred precincts of their temples. On
calendar, the Aztec carved out the hearts of l
similar enactment of metaphor that they

heart." That they did so on a scale we call ge
the meaning of the action: to keep the fire of
the sap of the Maize Tree flowing.

If we return to our two kinds of bread, the
we see how the Old and the New World a

their doughs in order to better register th
ings. When the Pope ruled in the fifteenth ce
bolic bread of the Eucharist was the actual

specified that the wafer be made of unleav
it was purer. The result, ironically, was a thin
the Hebraic matzoh, or the Maya tortilla.

other hand, when they wished to represen
most fully, they transformed the flat tortil

or cylinder to make a small "loaf," stuffed or
ous ingredients, enclosed it in a protective w

it tamal
The tamale also modeled the sign for the fourth day in the
twenty-day Maya calendar. Here the entire kan glyph stands on a
tripod, like the three stones of the hearth. This glyph is a pictorial abstraction of the two parts of a tamale, a ball of dough and a
wrapper.17 The word embodies the thing, just as the tamale

embodies the idea of the sacred. The historic question of Christian theology - were the bread and wine of the Eucharist "real" or
62 SOCIAL RESEARCH
Figure 6. The kan sign is shaped like a rou

nel embedded in the top and a stylized w
tom. When the sign rests on a tripod, kan
day of the 20-named-day calendar. Th
means "sky." Another homophonic glyp

more elaborately, means "serpent." The r
with aural puns.
symbolic? - was impossible to the

bol were inextricably joined.
If eating food is our primary ac
most complexly civilized one in r
the portal of the mouth (Figure 6
was both hell-gate, when Eve ate t
God was eaten in bread and wine.
of the mouth was analogous to
mouth of a jaguar, of a mountain

this world to the Other. Poetry too
for poetry meant flower song, eac
creative force of maize shaped f

mouth, in eating and speaking an
the heart of reality, as in this st
translated from Nhuatl into Span
"As white and yellow maize I am born,
The many-coloured flower of living flesh ri
and opens its glistening seeds before th

mother."
The poet ends with this refrain:
"My song is heard and flourishes,

My implanted word is sprouting,
our flowers stand up in the rain."
That's the kind of meaning that the New World attributed to

the word "maize," which makes translating food and language
from one culture to another as necessary as it is difficult.
Notes
xElias Canetti in "Crowds and Power" writes: "...does this mixing tell
us that language and eating forever belong together, that we can never
be nobler and better than we are, that basically, however it's disguised,
all we say is the same terrible and bloody thing, and that revulsion and
our gorge only rise if something is wrong with our food?"
2In The Emergence of Agriculture (Scientific American Library: 1995),

Smith puts maize in the context not only of wheat and rice, but also of
other early domesticates such as quinoa, beans, squash, potatoes, millet,
sunflowers, goosefoot.
^Because he is knowledgeable in both botany and archaeology,

Smith's narrative of the origin and spread of maize in The Emergence of
Agriculture (Chapter 7) is usefully authoritative in revising earlier theo-
ries.
4For a full account of this and other matters relating to the botanical
nature of corn, see the classic work of Paul C. Mangelsdorf, Corn: Its Origin, Evolution, and Improvement (Harvard University Press: 1974).
5Corn geneticist Walton Galinat has traced the spread of corn in several works, among them "The Origin of Corn," in Corn and Corn Improve-
ment (American Society of Agronomy: 1977) and "Domestication and

Diffusion of Maize," in Prehistoric Food Production in North America (Uni-
versity of Michigan: 1985).
64 SOCIAL RESEARCH
6Weatherwax in Indian Corn in Old

of the first scientific writers, while
corn plant, to include its historic an
tures.
7The Hidatsa farmer Buffalo Bird Woman gave a delightfully detailed

account in 1917 to the ethnobotanist G.L. Wilson: Buffalo Bird Woman's
Garden: Agriculture of the Hidatsa Indians (Minnesota Historical Society
Press: 1987).
8A remarkable proto-ethnographer, Cushing led a Smithsonian expedition to the Zuni pueblo in 1879 and stayed on. In the process of translating and recording the Zuni language, he has left us a unique account
of daily life among the Zuni at the turn of the century. See his Zuni
Breadstuff (reprint of 1920 edition by Museum of the American Indian
Heye Foundation: 1974) and Zuni: Selected Writings of Frank Hamilton
Cushing (University of Nebraska Press: 1979).
^he Franciscan priest Bernardino de Sahagn, who reached Mexico
in 1529, learned the Nhuatl language and spent the rest of his life
chronicling in Nhuatl and Spanish (in double columns on each page)
everything he heard and saw. His work, La historia general de las cosas d
Nueva Espaa, written in 1558-69, was first published three hundred
years later in 1829, as The Florentine Codex, The only document at all comparable north of the border was Roger Williams' A Key into the Languag
of the Natives in That Part of America Called New England, written in 1643
in which he attempted to translate the language of the Rhode Island

Narragansett into English, unaware that even New England had multiple native languages.
10J. R. Swan ton in The Indians of the Southeastern United States cites hun-
dreds of first-hand accounts in an encyclopeadic fashion, but for a general narrative description of early witnesses, see John Bakeless, America
as Seen by its First Explorers: The Eyes of Discovery (reprint by Dover Publi-
cations: 1961).
nSee the report of S. H. Katz, M. L. Hediger and L. A. Valleroy in

"Tradional Maize Processing Techniques in the New World," Science 184
(17 May 1974).
12The 1590 edition of Hariot's A briefe and true report of the newfound land
of Virginia (reprint by Dover Publiscations: 1972) included Theodore de

Bry's engravings made from the drawings of John White, which neatly
demonstrate how impossible it is to look with an innocent eye.
13Pyne expanded the scope of Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wild-
land and Rural Fire (University of Washington paperback reprint: 1997

in his comprehensive Vestal Fire: An Environmental History, Told through
Fire, of Europe and Europe's Encounter with the World
ington: 1997).
14The essential book on this subject is William Cro
Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New Engla
(reprint by Hill and Wang: 1997).

15 The Americans: The National Experience (Random
16Linda Schele 's star maps in Maya Cosmos: Three Th
Shaman's Path (William Morrow: 1993), written w

Joy Parker, furnish persuasive evidence for her cl
image for Maya cosmic symbolism literally maps the s
17Karl Taube, "The Maize Tamale in Classic May

and Art," American Antiquity 54:1 (1989).
18Gordon Brotherston, Image of the New World: The
portrayed in native texts (reprint by Thames and Huds

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

Author(s): BETTY FUSSELL

With our first infant wail, we establish that intimate lin

to demonstrate how much language preconditions percepti

achs, so that we can no more taste with an innocent palate than

Among the world's major foods, corn is a prime example in

SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 66, No. 1 (Spring 1999)

pie crops, corn is appropriate for

between indigenous and European languages that began with

1536, provided the term Turcicum frumentum, which the British

quickly translated into "Turkey wheat," "Turkey corn," and

a universal plant language in the seventeenth century by giving

TRANSLATING MAIZE INTO CORN 43

Figure 1. John Gerard's influential Herball, or Generali His

ference between maize and corn names the jun

than a case history of change, the subject maize/corn furnishes a

The Nature of Maize

Whenever food is the subject, like poetry or music or art, we

our sensuous experience of it - sight, smell, touch, taste, and even

commonest form of bread in Mexico, the place where maize

began. But when we say "bread

descendants understand as bread i

mean dried grain, ground into

water, and leavened by yeast. Yea

The tortilla, in contrast, presents us with dried grain that has

boiled with an alkali {cai, or slaked lime from limestone) that

grind, adds a slightly different flavor, and changes its nutritive

ground and shaped into a dough {masa) to cook flat on a griddle

Their different chemical natures require different metho

cooking and keeping. A corn dough, because it has no g

will never become gummy or tough, unlike a wheat paste of

meal, because of the quantity of its oil, will go rancid more qu

than wholegrain wheat and must be toasted or parched to

TRANSLATING MAIZE INTO CORN 45

trapped air bubbles requires an enclosure to p

Basic differences between the two grains begin in planting and

harvesting. With wheat, historically, the plow prepared the

crowding. Botanists call corn a "hopeless monster" because in

McCormick Reaper. Because ears of corn had to be plucked,

often, in describing the effects wrought by the Columbian

with maize, potatoes, tomatoes, chiles, cacao, beans, squashes,

and so forth. But all foods are no

maize, chile, and cacao in the h

maize, potato, and quinoa in that

ulary. Only by uncovering the

planter, cook, and eater in relatio

can we begin to see why and h

migrates, assimilates, mutates, an

Even in its emergence, maize

years ago at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Perennial

sphere began around 4300 bp and that it began with maize in

TRANSLATING MAIZE INTO CORN 47

now dated (by accelerator mass spectometry

Today, however, researchers believe that the m

be the closest ancestor of maize {Zea mays, subs

can by 4700 bp, along the Gulf and Pacific coas

Despite the fact that maize hybridizes more

tlements coincide with the first domestication of grain.

cated 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

Another problem in tracking maize is that there were so many

varieties of it and so many indigenous languages, around two