The University of Arizona Press

November 27, 2024

Embodying Biodiversity: Sensory Conservation as Refuge and Sovereignty, by Terese Gagnon, harnesses a myriad of methodologies and research spanning multiple continents. This volume delves into the power of everyday forms of biodiversity conservation, motivated by sensory and embodied engagement with plants. Through an array of interdisciplinary contributions, the authors argue that the vast majority of biodiversity conservation worldwide is carried out not by large-scale, hierarchical initiatives but by ordinary people who cultivate sensory-motivated, place-based bonds with plants.

Acknowledging the monumental role of everyday champions in tending biodiversity, the contributors write that this caretaking is crucial to countering ecological harm and global injustice stemming from colonial violence and racial capitalism. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

I recently had a flashback of refugia. The memory was intimate, painful, and brimming with agrobiodiversity. The vivid image was triggered when I heard an ophthalmologist say the word “scarring.” She was gazing into my eyeball, and her assistant diligently wrote down my maladies. As a participant observer, I had, five years earlier, written my own field note after hacking into the soil with a sickle: “As I chopped at the dirt, some dirt flew in my eye. And it made me think almost immediately about what was in the dirt—were there any chemicals in it that I should be worried about?”

I remained silent as this memory passed through my mind, and my silence yielded the unintended consequence of no further investigation by the ophthalmologist despite the everyday hypothesis that was now spinning in my head: Those agrichemicals did something to me. Agrichemicals do a lot of things to a lot of bodies of people who rarely complain but frequently wonder about them. Agrichemicals contaminate soils that plants nonetheless find ways to grow in. From 2015 to 2020, I conducted fieldwork in and around Chalatenango, a rural northern region of El Salvador, where agrobiodiversity is found in small subsistence farms, and where farmers narrate and remember stories of agrichemicals entering the region. My flashback of refugia is not traumatic, because it is overpowered by the intimacy of cultivating maíz capulin (capulin corn) and maíz blanco (white corn) from soil that was and will continue to be contaminated with agrichemicals. It was one fleeting reassembly of refugia, memory, and embodiment.

This chapter is concerned with epistemic entanglements amid the everyday farming practices of subsistence corn farmers who live in, emigrate from, and send parcels to and from rural El Salvador. I first provide some context regarding the transnational and affective processes implicated in this agrarian assemblage, and then describe a minor intervention that slices, pokes, and pulls at imbricated knowledges therein. Findings from this small and nongeneralizable process concern soil chemistry in relation to local farming techniques, calling attention to epistemic entanglements in the material world of subsistence farmers, as well as the methods that social scientists rely on to examine them.

Corn and a Rural Salvadoran Diaspora

In the creation narrative of the Popol Vuh, grandmother Xmucane grinds white corn and yellow corn to make the flesh of the first humans. Corn is also the plant that Xmucane’s grandchildren (Hunahpu and Xbalanque) use to provide a sign to their grandmother of their death and life before they embark on their journey to Xibalba (Tedlock 1996). While this narrative is almost never discussed among the subsistence farmers with whom I farmed corn in Chalatenango, its absence did not preclude our kneeling before every planted seed and manipulating the terrain to aid its growth in the twenty-first century.

In the second decade of this twenty-first century, the harvested corn will be brought to a Chalateca grandmother, who will compile maíz blanco seeds into a woven sack, which she will send to her migrant kin living in Colorado. She will send them by means of a courier, who will examine them for narcotics before packing them into a polypropylene-lined carboard box, which is one of multiple layers of protection for what will soon become airborne corn seeds. Eventually, the corn seeds will be stripped back down as an isolated parcel presented to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent in Houston who wants to know what this is. The corn seeds will be used to make atoll or nixtamalized tortillas in a place far away from the location in which the corn was grown. If I turn on a tape recorder and ask the parcel’s recipient questions about why she requested the seeds, she might start by making comparisons between nation-states, people, sounds, and spaces. She might also perform nostalgia for my audio recorder. If in Chalatenango I ask her father to show me how he cultivates maíz blanco, he may choose to show me only parts of the process. He might secretly set fire to the weeds, producing an ash residue on the topsoil, after I leave because he knows that gringos do not like it when campesinos use fire to farm their food. He will smother his testimony simply because I am present, watching and observing (McKinnon 2016). The farmer and I might later talk until we are lost in wonder about what is really happening in the soil beneath our feet from which the maíz blanco grows. We might again kneel down on the soil before each seed in the coming rainy season, an act that clears the weeds but nonetheless causes us to genuflect before these signs of life and death.