Taxonomy, Race Science, and Mexican Maize technology in Latin America have also been among the most

rica have also been among the most persuasive contributors to the

Helen Anne Curry literature that reveals how racial thinking still informs human biological research, especially
Department of History and Philosophy of Science
University of Cambridge studies of population diversity, even as its biological reality is rejected. As they show, human
Cambridge CB2 3RH
United Kingdom race science has certainly not disappeared, despite some claims to the contrary.4
[email protected]
Taxonomy, the science of classifying living things, has also had its historians—though
Accepted for publication in Isis, August 2020
perhaps not as many—and has similarly attracted incorrect assertions that it is a dead or

Abstract: This paper explores the intersection of race science and plant taxonomy in the dying enterprise.5 Modern taxonomy traces its intellectual roots to the same starting point
creation of evolutionary taxonomies (phylogenies) of populations of Zea mays, also known
as maize or corn. Following recent work in the history and sociology of race, it analyzes as human race science: the sweeping classification project of the eighteenth-century
maize taxonomy as technology. Through an analysis of successive attempts to classify
diverse maize varieties, especially those originating in Mexico, it shows that taxonomy Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus.6 The historiography of taxonomy (and the linked enterprise
created possibilities for researchers to intervene in commercial agriculture, state
development projects, biological conservation, and domestic and international politics and of systematics, which studies the relationships among groups of organisms) has at times
policy. It further underscores that the modern science of maize taxonomy was distinct but
never inseparable from assessments of maize's human cultivators. Attending to suggested a rising trajectory into the nineteenth century and a subsequent decline. The
particularities of this relationship is crucial, because it reveals the application of maize
taxonomy as a technology for ordering human diversity, and intervening in human lives, as decline is not attributed to its basis in a false idea, as with human race science, but instead
well as managing the impressive diversity of Zea mays.
taxonomy's being sidelined in favor of new areas of biological investigation.7 Historians and

Many scholars have grappled with the histories of race and race science. An early sociologists of science have charted the succession of techniques and technologies that

narrative arc in the historiography of race traced its invention as a way of understanding transformed taxonomy and systematics over time while the goals of carving up the natural

human difference in Enlightenment Europe to its rejection by scientists as a category devoid world into defensible categories and teasing out the relationships among these remained

of biological meaning after World War II.1 Historians and other scholars have subsequently the same.8 In tracing their application to new social concerns and adoption of cutting edge

demonstrated the tenacious hold of race in biological and biomedical science, in everything technologies, scholars have also shown these to remain lively sciences in the twenty-first

from disease treatments to genomic databases.2 They have also developed varied culture-, century.9

time- and place-specific accounts, which consider factors that shaped local or national In this paper I explore a project at the intersection of race science and taxonomy: the

variants of race science and thought. Latin America has been a particularly fruitful site for creation of evolutionary taxonomies (phylogenies) of the races of Zea mays, also known as

such accounts, perhaps as a result of what Peter Wade and his colleagues characterize as maize or corn, in Mexico. Since the 1940s, with little modification, plant scientists have

the "deep-rooted ambiguity" of race in Latin America, where today this is often both identified a race of maize as "a group of related individuals with enough characteristics in

"erased and denied, and yet present in an everyday sense."3 Scholars of science and common to permit their recognition as a group."10 In contemporary maize biology, the

1 2
category of race is distinct from that of landrace. The latter label typically refers to a locally deeply troubled biological concept) and taxonomic (and therefore too old fashioned to

adapted and recognized variety that is created and maintained through farmers' seed continue as cutting-edge science), not only survives but thrives.

selection. A race encompasses a number of landraces and, depending on the race in My approach aligns with current scholarship on race and race science that

question, may also include cultivated varieties developed by breeders.11 In Mexico, the interrogates race as technology. In discussing this analytic, the media studies scholar Wendy

place of origin of domesticated maize, researchers have identified fifty-nine races, or razas, Hui Kyong Chun emphasizes that seeing "race as technology shifts the focus from the what

of maize.12 Novel applications of genetic and genomic analysis have promised more exact of race to the how of race, from knowing race to doing race." In this framework, writing the

determination of the number of races and their relationships, but the limitations of history of race is not about revealing the historical construction of racial categories (thereby

collections, extent of continued genetic mixing in maize, and contradictory results produced questioning their basis in biological fact) but examining the work these categories have

by different techniques suggest that this taxonomy will remain open to revision.13 done, and still do. It is, Chun writes, "an analysis of race's utility, regardless of its alleged

My account of maize taxonomy traverses eighty years of research into the deep essence."15 The historian of science Staffan Müller-Wille similarly urges scholars of race to

history and present extent of diversity of Zea mays in Mexico. As with others engaged in consider its history as a tool, one used to order or effect change in the world.16

taxonomy and systematics in the twentieth-century, researchers who studied maize Taxonomists, and historians who have studied them, are well aware that systematic

diversity relied on a changing repertoire of methods and tools, from the observation of classifications do work, for example in advancing or foreclosing possibilities for species

morphological characteristics in the field to the study of chromosomes in the laboratory to conservation.17 However, in the case of maize taxonomy, the comparison to human race

the tallying of molecular markers in silico.14 However, I find other transformations to be of science is also apt, because races of maize have been used to organize and manage human

greater interest, in particular the changing applications of the same taxonomic project as well as plant diversity.18 To phrase this another way: the elaboration of races of maize

across different institutional contexts and successive generations of researchers. Instead of has at times instrumentalized ideas about human races. As such, this work shares in the

looking at technologies in taxonomy, therefore, I consider taxonomy as technology. As I history of (human) race as technology.

show, since the 1940s, the designation of races of maize in Mexico has created possibilities This connection is, perhaps obviously, a consequence of the status of Zea mays as an

for researchers to intervene in commercial agriculture, state development projects, agricultural crop, in this case a species whose entire evolutionary history is predicated on

biological conservation, and domestic and international politics and policy. Understanding human intervention. It is itself profoundly technological in nature, in a way that wild species,

these varied uses of the races of maize reveals heterogeneity of purpose within a research and even some domesticates, are not.19 To talk about maize is therefore always to talk

program ostensibly unified around a single aim. This in turn explains how a project that about people. Despite this entanglement, there are reasons to consider the race sciences of

should be doubly doomed, by dint of its being both racial (and therefore premised on a each separately. The anthropologist John Hartigan, Jr. points to the 600-year history of

3 4
distinguishing breeds of plants and animals as razas in his study of the contemporary project puzzles for a botanist, but, as Anderson readily acknowledged, it was equally inspired by the

of analyzing races of razas de maíz (races of maize) in Mexico, and suggests this is one demands of commercial corn production. It also encouraged Anderson to see the human

reason to maintain analytical distance between maize razas and human razas.20 This sciences as an essential resource: among the many fields on which his early maize research

acknowledgement of the long and (mostly) distinct history of the idea of razas as applied to drew, physical anthropology and studies of human race featured prominently. I elaborate

plants and animals in European and subsequently Mexican culture is appropriate. It is also on these aspects of Anderson's maize research here, to demonstrate that modern maize

potentially misleading, in part because Hartigan's account does not include the mid- taxonomy gelled amidst specific technological ambitions and human racial ideas.

twentieth-century development of maize taxonomy. As I show through an analysis of four Anderson launched his maize research already boasting significant experience in the

episodes in the history of efforts to classify the maize of Mexico, the modern science of genetics and evolution of both wild plants and domesticated crops. As a graduate student

maize taxonomy was distinct but never inseparable from assessments of maize's human working under Edward East, he had studied hybridization among Nicotiana (flowering

cultivators. Attending to particularities of this relationship is crucial, because it reveals the tobacco) species. East is often remembered for his contributions to the study of hybrid vigor

application of maize taxonomy as a technology for ordering human diversity, and human in maize and its application in corn breeding, and several of the students who gathered

lives, as well as the impressive diversity of Zea mays. around him during Anderson's graduate years went on to become prominent maize experts.

Initially, Anderson was not one of them. Instead, after arriving at the Missouri Botanic

The Origins of a Race Science Garden in 1922, he turned to the genetics and evolution of the wildflower Iris versicolor; a

Contemporary maize systematics—delineating races of maize and the relationships among decade later, he began applying techniques and ideas developed in the Iris research to the

these—has its roots in the work of the American botanist Edgar Anderson. Trained at genus Tradescantia, the spiderworts. In both areas of research, he sought (among other

Harvard University's Bussey Institution in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Anderson spent things) to understand hybridization under "natural conditions" and the role it played in

most of his career after 1922 at the Missouri Botanical Garden. He integrated various speciation—and therefore its importance to taxonomic analyses.23

subfields of biological research in his botanical investigations, including genetics, What prompted Anderson to take a similar set of research interests to maize? One

morphology, physiology, and taxonomy. His proclivity for synthesis was especially evident in spur was the 1939 publication of a theory of origin for Zea mays, co-authored by his

his use of population data and genetic thinking to improve taxonomic categorization.21 In graduate school roommate, the botanist Paul Mangelsdorf.24 Anderson felt too little was

1941 Anderson began an ambitious taxonomic project on maize, then (as now) the leading known about maize and its relatives to determine with confidence their origins and history

economic crop of United States. This research ultimately sustained his interest for more as Mangelsdorf claimed he had done; in Anderson's opinion, a thorough taxonomic analysis

than two decades.22 The topic posed difficult and absorbing genetic and evolutionary was needed to point the way.25 An additional motivation came from the imperatives of

5 6
maize breeding. Although as "Geneticist to the Garden" he had landed a job that did not At the time Anderson launched his maize research, the immense morphological

demand an agricultural focus (unlike his many of his Harvard classmates now working at diversity of Zea mays was only just beginning to be charted by scientists in the United States

state experiment stations), Anderson had nonetheless forged an association that and Europe. Plant hunters who travelled to Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Brazil, and other Latin

encouraged it. From the late 1930s onward, he carried on an informal partnership with the American countries in the 1920s and 30s regularly identified locally adapted varieties

country's first hybrid corn seed outfit, Pioneer Hi-Bred Corn Company. For years, he (landraces) they considered novel. In the early 1940s, as his maize project got underway,

regularly drove north to Iowa to talk with Pioneer breeders and look at their corn, and in Anderson attempted to gather as much of this diversity as he could. He collected specimens

exchange Pioneer occasionally provided Anderson and his students with research funds and of maize varieties from the US, Mexico, and Guatemala from colleagues and through his

technical support.26 own travels; he also had access to the extensive maize herbarium of E. Lewis Sturtevant, an

As a geneticist with interest in population dynamics, it was a unique moment to turn agronomist whose 1899 maize classification system, based chiefly on kernel type, was a

to the study of maize. Farmers of the US Corn Belt were in the midst of a mass transition prime target of Anderson's revised approach.30

from open-pollinated to hybrid maize, swapping out freely interbreeding (that is, open- Anderson wanted to impose order on the barrage of morphological diversity

pollinated) populations for ones created through the controlled crossing of multiple inbred apparent in collections of maize varieties like his own. As distinct types of a single

lines. Anderson described this transition in 1944: "In terms of gene combinations and their domesticated species, these specimens demanded intraspecies classification to an extent

distributions, the whole genetic pattern of Zea Mays in the United States has been rarely broached in botanists' taxonomies of wild species. Anderson did have experience in

catastrophically overhauled in the last two decades." He was convinced that understanding distinguishing among "races"—a category that designated distinct subpopulations that did

this new "genetic pattern"—an appreciation that depended in part of reconstruction of not possess the taxonomic rank of species—in his studies of flowering plants.31 However,

what had come before it—would be essential for the future of corn breeding.27 For when it came to his maize work, he looked elsewhere for inspiration. One place he found it

example, as he became more familiar with the recombinations of distinct maize populations was in studies of human race. "The problem of races and their recognition is indeed almost

that had produced the preferred corn type of the US Midwest—"Corn Belt Dent"—he made the same in Zea Mays as in mankind," he wrote with a collaborator, the plant explorer and

a case that a sound evolutionary taxonomy would provide a guide to breeders hoping to ethnobotanist Hugh Cutler.32 In the early 1940s, Anderson and Cutler engaged with the

create similarly productive combinations in the future.28 In short, Anderson saw his genetic human race science of preceding decades in developing a "natural" classification system for

and taxonomic investigations as immediately relevant to corn breeders' decisions about maize based on its evolutionary history. In search of instruction in how to divide a freely

what kinds of maize to combine to achieve specific breeding goals.29 interbreeding species into subpopulations, they studied the methods and definitions used

by physical anthropologists such as Earnest Hooton and Carleton Coon for determining

7 8
racial groupings among human populations.33 Hooton's racial studies provided a model of and statistical analyses, applying ideas developed in his earlier botanical research, in order

the measurement and statistical analyses of multiple non-adaptive characteristics in order to group them into subpopulations whose defining "complexes" of characteristics emerged

to accurately aggregate humans into groups of common descent.34 Meanwhile Coon's Races from the analysis.38

of Europe outlined the need for flexibility rather than certainty in bounding human Taking this approach with varieties he assembled from his own and others'

populations as races, an approach that resonated with Anderson and Cutler's observation of collections, Anderson attempted to create a natural classification of Mexican maize types in

the challenges confronting them with respect to maize.35 the mid-1940s, first in conjunction with Cutler and later on his own. Through his

The precedent for delineating races in physical anthropology also provided a handy measurements and analyses, he identified races whose genetic commonalities within-group

way for Anderson and Cutler to explain this program of research to others. In their study of suggested shared descent, while their distinctiveness to other types warranted

"Races of Zea mays" they explained the difference between "natural" and "artificial" demarcation. For example, corn typical to central Mexico with broad leaves, hairy leaf

methods of classification of corn and their usefulness by reference to human classification. shanks, and shallow roots (among other qualities) he dubbed "Mexican Pyramidal" in light

The earlier artificial system of classifying corn by kernel texture and color was like trying to of its short, tapered ears. This form was easily contrasted to the typical form of the western

classify people based on hair color alone. As Anderson and Cutler warned, "Such a part of the country, which had narrow leaves, smooth leaf shanks, and strong roots.

classification would be rapid and complete and would, to a certain extent, group like Anderson called the latter "Mexican Narrow Ear." (Farmers in Mexico of course had their

peoples together, but it would separate a black-haired Norwegian from his fair-haired own names for these and other types of maize.) Anderson knew that his work was

relatives and put him in the same class with Sicilians and gypsies."36 They suggested that the preliminary, not definitive, as he was aware of other types yet-to-be studied, and he no

classificatory methods of physical anthropology offered a means of arriving at a "natural" doubt entertained the possibility of those yet to be noticed by US and European

categorization that would better differentiate among types. The main obstacle to this researchers.39

approach was assembling sufficient data. "It is as though the physical anthropologist were Anderson envisioned the end goal of his "simple and fundamental work" of creating

called upon to classify the races of man with no published data except those concerning eye an evolutionary taxonomy of maize as providing "a broad but objective picture of Zea Mays

color and hair color," Anderson lamented in drafting a subsequent classification study.37 as a whole."40 Fundamental did not mean without application, however. Expanding the

In his collaboration with Cutler and later analyses, Anderson advanced a method for classification of Mexican maize types was essential, he insisted, because otherwise "[s]ome

classifying races of maize that relied on collecting measurements of a defined set of of the problems of commercial maize breeding in the United States... cannot be solved."41

heritable morphological characteristics of individual maize plants constituting a single He appears to have thought this true in general. In his field studies of Guatemalan maize,

sample (for example, coming from one field or one farm). These he subjected to graphical Anderson noted that surveying the crop "systematically and comprehensively" across

9 10
Guatemala would lead to knowledge essential to better corn breeding in that country and through a discussion of Razas de Maíz, maize taxonomy in Mexico ultimately aligned with

also to the identification of "useful genes for modern corn-breeding" in the United States.42 these narratives, asserting the possibility of racial improvement through population mixing,

The business of breeding demanded the tool of taxonomy. and pointing the way to the efficiency and productivity in agriculture that Mexican leaders

Taxonomy, in turn, both demanded knowledge of people and could be used to desired.

distinguish among them. As Anderson reflected in his studies of Guatemalan maize, "Maize In the 1940s, a key site for maize research in Mexico, and the place where the study

is a sensitive mirror of the people who grow it. It is so highly heterozygous that good or bad Razas de Maíz en México was produced, was the Ministry of Agriculture's Office of Special

management and careful or careless selection leave their imprints upon the character of the Studies (Oficina de Estudios Especiales). This had been created as a cooperative agricultural

[maize] population... One cannot interpret population samples of maize efficiently without research venture of the Rockefeller Foundation, a US-based philanthropy, and the Mexican

understanding as much as possible about the people who grew that maize."43 As his government. It was tasked with enhancing agricultural productivity through research,

accounts from Guatemala especially show, by the late 1940s the anthropological especially breeders' development of "improved" crop varieties that would replace farmers'

dimensions of his taxonomic thinking had expanded, from a borrowing of statistical local types, understood to be inferior.44 The origins of this program are often traced back to

methods to the incorporation of ethnographic field research. The insights of this research, US geopolitical concerns, namely securing stable, productive neighbors friendly to US

moreover, seemed to teach him as much about types of people as about types of corn. interests. However, agricultural change was also sought after and embraced by Mexican

leaders and scientists, many of whom saw a need to align the country's agriculture with its

The Races of Maize in Mexico hoped-for industrial trajectory. They believed that investment in science and technology

In classifying maize, Anderson, Cutler, and their collaborators drew in part on methods and would help Mexican farms produce more with less labor, feeding urban workers and

ideas forged in the study of human populations. As researchers developed these into maize- creating new ones by "freeing" peasants from working the land.45 In general, most foreign

specific methods, and configured them still more explicitly as indispensable aids to experts and Mexican agronomists agreed that achieving this goal entailed transforming the

breeding, they continued to align the projects of sorting maize and sorting peoples. This is methods and varieties used by most farmers—especially those associated with cultivating

especially evident in the first attempt at a country-wide taxonomic assessment of maize, the Mexico's staple crop, maize.46

1951 study Razas de Maíz en México. This ambitious effort to produce an evolutionary This vision had a significant human racial component, given that many peasant

account of maize was nestled within a research program that shared in the Mexican farmers in Mexico were identified as Indigenous—and that Indigenous inferiority had long

government's ambitions for agricultural modernization and in an evolutionary national been identified with the inferiority of maize and maize based diets.47 In forging a new

narrative that emphasized national progress through racial mixing, or mestizaje. As I show nationalist narrative in the 1920s, influential Mexican thinkers had rejected an earlier elite

11 12
perspective that saw little room for Indigenous peoples—who constituted a large, visible, Razas de Maíz appeared to deliver on Mangelsdorf's promise that classification

and diverse part of the national population—in a modernizing, Europeanizing Mexico. Many would be an aid to the breeding program. The contributing researchers gathered and parsed

espoused indigenismo, celebrating Indigenous cultures (but focusing mostly on pre- agronomic, morphological, cytological, and geographical data in order to group samples

Columbian attainments) and articulated a vision in which contemporary Indigenous peoples from the collection into twenty-five "more or less well-defined natural races."53 Having

would be integrated into a unified mestizo nation. Through educational and economic produced what was, to their minds, a "natural classification" of Mexican maize types into

programs, including agricultural extension, diverse Indigenous peoples would become loyal races, they then proceeded to arrange the races in terms of their evolutionary relationships

Mexicans.48 to one another, and to hypothesize their origins. Their evolutionary tree identified four

In this context, maize taxonomy was caught up in the application of racial ideas in major clusters of races: "Ancient Indigenous" (Indígenas Antiguas) races, which had arisen

the management of peoples. At the most fundamental level, the raw material and directly from a "primitive" corn in Mexico; "Pre-Columbian Exotic" (Razas Exóticas Pre-

motivation for classification arose directly from the imperative of "improvement" in both Colombiana) races, introduced from Central and South America; "Prehistoric Mestizo"

crops and people. From its founding in 1943, staff associated with the Office of Special (Razas Mestizas Prehistóric) races, the products of prehistoric hybridizations between

Studies had collected maize from farmers across the country, hoping to identify promising Ancient Indigenous and Pre-Columbian Exotic races; and "Modern Incipient" (Modernas

landraces as the bases of their breeding projects; within a few years, they had amassed Incipientes), variable races that had "developed since the Conquest and which ha[d] not yet

some 2000 samples.49 In 1948, this collection became the foundation of a classificatory reached a state of racial stability." Recent origin was not a defect. On the contrary, the

effort along the lines pioneered by Anderson and Cutler. Mangelsdorf, who was a consultant authors noted that Celaya, a landrace crucial to production in the Bajío, "Mexico's

to the Rockefeller Foundation and had been a co-architect of the Office of Special Studies' counterpart of the Corn Belt," was one of the "incipient" types.54 As this suggests, the

maize breeding program, explained to the head of the Mexican agricultural ministry that evolutionary taxonomy of maize provided a way to organize diversity and also to trace the

understanding the origins of contemporary maize varieties would inform breeders' selection origins of productivity in particular combinations—with the latter suggesting where further

of the initial lines for inbreeding and enable "a more intelligent combining of inbred strains" efforts to increase productivity ought to be directed.

in making hybrids.50 Mangelsdorf joined Edwin Wellhausen, the head of the maize breeding The overarching evolutionary narrative of Razas de Maíz en México had still other

program, and Wellhausen's colleagues Lewis Roberts and Efraím Hernández Xolocotzi—plus advantages. It told a story of early, stable indigenous races, transformed by racial mixing

more than a dozen Mexican agronomists, Vivian Wellhausen and Betty Roberts—in with newly arriving populations from other geographical regions, giving rise to valuable new

preparing the 1951 taxonomic study Razas de Maíz en México.51 An English translation, The "incipient" but as-yet-unstable racial types. This seemed to fit the available data and might

Races of Maize in Mexico, appeared in 1952.52 prove useful in breeding. It also aligned with Mexican racial politics. Under President

13 14
Manuel Ávila Camacho, the government's nationalist rhetoric continued to emphasize the between the two. They wanted their taxonomic study to enable the conservation and

integration of Indigenous communities into the social and economic life of the country. management of "indigenous strains" without the labor or knowledge of Indigenous peoples.

Mestizaje was one hoped for outcome of this integration process, and it was seen as However, as more scientists came to participate in the project, especially some who worked

contributing to a stronger, more unified nation: the integration and assimilation of Mexico's closely with maize farmers in Latin America, this separation came under increasing scrutiny.

Indigenous peoples meant their improvement and in turn that of the country as a whole.55 Subsequent studies of races of maize contributed to a new appreciation of local and

The account of maize's history produced at the Office of Special Studies dovetailed with this Indigenous knowledge, and ultimately to a transformation in conservation strategies.

dominant narrative about human mixing in Mexico. It offered more than a simple parallel in The initial impetus for a hemispheric maize conservation initiative came to the

evolutionary narratives, however. To the extent that the classifications would help maize National Research Council via Friedrich Brieger, a German-Jewish emigré geneticist working

breeders "improve" corn, as Mangelsdorf had suggested it would, it also was also a tool for in Brazil. Brieger reported that the diverse corn varieties of Central and South America were

enacting the evolutionary narrative imagined for humans, making "modern" farmers, and rapidly vanishing. In ten years, there would be "practically nothing left of these strains."

ultimately Mexican citizens, of Indigenous cultivators. Corn varieties "developed in various civilized areas" had been brought into these regions

and, according to Brieger, "the natives are taking to these strains and abandoning the ones

Indigenous Strains of Maize they have grown for countless centuries."56 In other words, as agricultural practices

A subsequent phase of maize taxonomy focused on classifying and conserving "indigenous "modernized", the highly variable landraces of corn found in many places were

strains" of maize in the Americas. In the 1950s, partly inspired by the publication of Razas de disappearing, replaced by more uniform "improved" varieties. In response to this concern,

Maíz en México but equally driven by concerns about the future production of commercial the National Research Council supported the creation of the Committee on Preservation of

maize, a group of American biologists (including Anderson, Cutler, and Mangelsdorf) Indigenous Strains of Maize, which in its initial phase mobilized collectors across the

organized a hemispheric collecting corn collecting and classification effort. This was Americas to seek out "native" or "indigenous" corn varieties.57

overseen by a new Committee on Preservation of Indigenous Strains of Maize, created As Brieger's analysis indicates, the work of the "Maize Committee" was motivated by

under the auspices of the US National Research Council. Its members maintained that the a belief that Indigenous farmers in rural areas were moving inexorably toward the style of

survival of local maize diversity, potentially valuable for breeding, was threatened by the agriculture practiced in "civilized areas." In adopting this view, the committee recapitulated

industrialization of agricultural production. As the following analysis of the activities of this existing settler colonial narratives, declaring Indigenous peoples and their crops to be slated

"Maize Committee" shows, its members recognized a connection between diversity in for inevitable extinction in light of the inexorable expansion of "superior" cultures.58 The

human groups and diversity in maize, but nonetheless sought to maintain a distinction extinction of "indigenous strains" alone might not have been worrying to scientists, were it

15 16
not for the genes of potential interest to biologists and breeders that were thought to exist corn of the Paraguay-Paraná Basin.61 The extent to which the Maize Committee prized

in the maize varieties still cultivated by farmers across Latin America. As the Maize collections made directly from Indigenous peoples was also evident in the United States and

Committee described, the disappearance of these varieties would mean the loss of Canada. Here Committee members understood Native American farmers to be the only

"essential raw material" ripe for scientific study and needed to continue enhancing the key ones in possession of varieties of possible interest to the project. As a result, nearly all of

economic crop of the United States.59 Formulating their ideas amidst rising Cold War their samples from these countries came from Native farmers or reproduced earlier

tensions, and especially new articulations among US policymakers of the national security collections of the same.62

threat posed by hungry populations worldwide, the Maize Committee also proposed The slippage in the Committee's use of "indigenous"—sometimes meaning "local"

conservation (and the future breeding it would enable) as tool in forestalling the and sometimes "from Indigenous peoples"—to describe the varieties of greatest value to

destabilization of states across Latin America.60 their mission produced various problems. This included induced blindness among collectors

What, exactly, did the Maize Committee hope to conserve, however? "Indigenous who fixated on finding farmers conforming to their ideas about "primitive" peoples.63 It also

strains" proved to be a slippery object, an ostensibly botanical category that in practice was rendered whole regions (such as the Caribbean) of lesser interest due, as one researcher put

inflected by ideas about Indigenous peoples. On paper, the Maize Committee members it, to the "mongrelization" of their maize amidst changing social conditions and especially

typically interpreted the remit of "indigenous strains" as including all the landraces of maize social integration and human population mixing.64 Confusion over the nature of a maize

grown in a country, leaving aside only commercial hybrids or very recently imported sample's status as "indigenous" also arose in relation to technical aspects of conservation. In

varieties. In this view, "indigenous" meant something like "originating in a particular area." 1951, Brieger asked the chair of the Maize Committee about the methods that would be

On the ground, however, collectors often interpreted the task of collecting "indigenous used to regenerate the seeds in the collection. This would have to be done at regular

strains" explicitly as collecting corn from Indigenous American communities. The collecting intervals in order to maintain seeds' viability and was therefore an essential component of

work carried out by Friedrich Brieger, the geneticist from Brazil whose correspondence had long-term conservation. Brieger wondered whether and how the "technique of the Indians"

sparked the Maize Committee's formation, offers a useful illustration. Not only did he target in maintaining their own varieties ought to be perpetuated in regenerating samples. For

Indigenous communities when collecting, he also consistently identified corn that he example, he knew that Guaraní farmers relied on three plots, one to maintain their typical

collected as coming from peoples and not just places. For example, in 1956 he offered the field corn, a second for a popcorn, and the third for ceremonial corn. The last of these

following categories to encompass all the material under examination at his laboratory in involved planting two distinct strains of the ceremonial corn, in order to obtain the

Piracicaba, Brazil: races of the Guaraní people, races of Humahuaca (a region in Argentina), particular color pattern of the mixed offspring each year. "In such a case…, it would be

races of the Kaingain people, races of the Calchaquí tribe (Diaguita people), and commercial advisable, to maintain the two ceremonial races in the same way, and not in separate lots,"

17 18
Brieger suggested.65 The Committee evidently disagreed. Guaraní knowledge was not This taxonomic endeavor was the focus of a second phase of the Maize Committee

needed to conserve Guaraní maize. project that officially began in 1955, also sustained by US foreign aid dollars. In this second

As this last example suggests, although on the ground the Maize Committee's phase of the Committee's work, it generated successive national and regional maize

collectors sought Indigenous peoples as known stewards of corn diversity, back in the office taxonomies through a book series on "The Races of Maize." Individual numbers followed the

diverse varieties were no longer the products of human ingenuity and effort but simply model established in Razas de Maíz en México, itself derived from Anderson's earlier

samples reflective of the botanical diversity of a region. Realizing this separation of methods: researchers studied as many examples of the variations of maize in a particular

indigenous maize and Indigenous people was essential to the Maize Committee's long-term country or region, measured or otherwise gathered data about a range of characteristics

goal of conserving diverse varieties in perpetuity without the aid of their cultivators. Relying thought to be important in distinguishing related populations, and then analyzed these data

on (for initial identification) but then stripping away the human or cultural component of and geographical information to delineate races.66 From 1957 well into the 1960s, the

crop diversity generated samples that could be preserved without recourse to particular National Research Council published volumes covering Bolivia, Brazil and eastern South

peoples and distinct agricultural practices. With good recordkeeping the historical specificity America, Central America, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Peru, the Caribbean (West Indies), and

of the collection could be perpetuated indefinitely: a seed regenerated by a technician at an Venezuela.67

experimental station in Mexico City would still count as "Guaraní" or from "the Paraguay- The taxonomic research produced challenges to the Maize Committee's founding

Paraná Basin" so long as that label traveled with seeds from one generation to the next. assumptions. Echoing existing concerns about the lack of biological bases of race in humans,

Racial classification was a still more powerful tool for achieving this separation and least one contributor came to question the biological reality of races in maize.68 A larger

thereby enabling conservation. Through systematic taxonomy, individual maize samples number of contributors engaged in debate over the relationship between Indigenous

initially identified by time, place, and local name were subsequently tagged with a racial knowledge and the Committee's work. Some contributors dismissed the idea that

designation that situated them within a millennial, continental history and a broad scientific Indigenous groups had the knowledge and skill needed to consciously create new strains of

project. Once this racial taxonomy was established, samples tied to singular moments and corn. In Races of Maize in Central America, one of the first of the studies to be published,

places could be reorganized into a single generalized framework. The completeness of a Edwin Wellhausen, Alejandro Fuentes Orozco, and Antonio Hernández Corzo reported on

collection—and therefore its conservation value—could be judged by its representativeness the close correlation of the extraordinary diversity of corn in Guatemala with the presence

in terms of agreed races, and distinct collections in different locations could be made of many distinct Indigenous groups. They nonetheless downplayed the significance of this

comparable and interchangeable. correlation. "That the Guatemalan Indian also played a conscious role in the creation of new

races of maize is doubtful," they contended.69 Other accounts challenged such assessments,

19 20
elaborating on the methods and aims of pre-Colombian and more recent communities of account that maize researchers should rely on the breeding or seed saving practices and

Indigenous Americans, thereby affirming the link between human creativity and maize naming conventions of local farmers as guides to classification.73 This caused a hang-up in

diversity. The lead authors of Races of Maize in Peru, Alexander Grobman, Wilfredo publication, when the geneticist William Brown of Pioneer Hi-Bred, who had been collecting

Salhuana, and Ricardo Sevilla, counted among those who held a different view. Describing maize elsewhere in the Caribbean for the Maize Committee, objected that, in his

the Incan Empire at the height of its agricultural attainments, they identified this as a period experience, the vast majority of farmers "knew very little about their maize."74 The races

in which the farmer "exercised his best breeding ability, which was manifested in an picked out by scientists did not need to match up with the types recognized by farmers,

orientation of the evolution of maize, through selection, towards larger yield per unit because scientists had greater knowledge, in this case of the traits with "true diagnostic

area."70 Brieger and colleagues who conducted the studies of maize in eastern South value" in racial analyses and of the range of possible variation.75

America similarly contended that the skills of "the Indian" in developing types ought not to The work of the Maize Committee was built around hierarchies of peoples, and

be dismissed, referring to the "efficient breeders" and "breeding programs" found among especially of the quality of knowledge and technical capacities they were thought to

Indigenous peoples past and present. They also pointed out that the task of "preserving and possess. It could hardly have been otherwise, given that the project emerged out of a

perpetuating strains," which had been casually dismissed in Races of Maize in Central concern for "modern" agricultural technologies born of "civilized" areas—including

America as a routine task, in fact "requires a considerable skill" which "has been carried out breeders' crop varieties—overtaking the tools and practices of Indigenous farmers and

and maintained successfully and constantly through many hundreds or even thousands of driving their "primitive" crop varieties from existence. This story recapitulated narratives of

years."71 "the vanishing native" unable to resist a more advanced Euro-American culture and drew on

The reliability of the knowledge of present-day Latin American farmers, Indigenous the entrenched association of Western technologies with cultural superiority.76 Yet, as the

or not, was also debated. The two US scientists tasked, separately, with preparing the Races debates about Indigenous and local knowledge indicates, the Maize Committee's taxonomic

of Maize of Cuba and Races of Maize of the West Indies openly disputed this subject. While project also generated challenges to the very hierarchies on which the Committee was

collecting in Cuba, the Harvard graduate student William Hatheway had had his initial idea premised. As I discuss below, these would go on to influence subsequent applications of

of locating "primitive" maize or "pure old races" grown by Indigenous cultivators upended. taxonomic knowledge in participatory breeding conservation programs, activities in which

Although he occasionally encountered "people of undoubted Indian blood," he inevitably farmers featured as central, and knowledgeable, contributors. Initially, however, the

found that "they were growing the same mongrelized corn as everyone else."72 A better taxonomic project that facilitated the Maize Committee's conservation project worked to

approach turned out to be talking to farmers, and using their networks to locate individuals make the knowledge and labor of farmers, especially Indigenous farmers, superfluous—with

still cultivating older varieties. Based on his experience, Hatheway argued in his final the effect that domestic or foreign-imposed efforts to transform, displace, assimilate,

21 22
modernize, or otherwise disappear those farmers need not be worrying to science or aimed to obtain new materials for its maize breeding program. In 1968, Hernández Xolocotzi

industry. presented an account of five additional races of maize found in the region of the Sierra

Madre Occidental during the trip. He also suggested a revised methodology of collecting,

Races Revisited and Revised one centered on the role of Indigenous cultivators as creators of and guides to diversity.78

The National Research Council's maize research program came to an end in the early 1960s, According to Hernández Xolocotzi, earlier methods of collecting used by the Office of

but the wider project of classifying maize types into races continued. Subsequent decades Special Studies and the Maize Committee missed maize diversity because they did not

saw its diversification along various axes. These included the expansion of taxonomic systematically incorporate farmers' knowledge or acknowledge cultural diversity. Improved

activities to include other geographical regions, for example Portugal (1971), India (1977), methods—that is, the methods he and his colleagues employed to discover new races—

Japan (1979), and Yugoslavia (1989). It involved the application of new technologies for considered farmers' assessments of different soil types and other ecological requirements

characterizing diversity and aggregating samples into races, such as isozyme and DNA as well as the culinary or ceremonial uses of maize in a particular cultural setting. Such

microsatellite analyses.77 In some cases, maize taxonomy also incorporated greater ethnobotanically informed collecting was sure to lead collectors to distinct maize types that

appreciation of local knowledge, for example that possessed by peasant and Indigenous had been crafted to meet these needs.79 In short, according Hernández Xolocotzi,

farmers or by the agronomists who worked with those farmers. In Mexico, where new lines acknowledging human cultural diversity and appreciating local and Indigenous knowledge

of research followed this trajectory, maize taxonomy was a tool for reclaiming crop diversity produced better taxonomy.80

as a sovereign resource, available for local or national development but not foreign Taxonomy, in turn, was also a tool for generating social change. As he wrote up his

exploitation. As I show here, by following the a few of these lines of research, this revised five new races, Hernández Xolocotzi was formulating principles of ethnobotanical and

approach to maize taxonomy also recognized and valorized the capacity and authority of the agroecological investigation that would subsequently influence a generation and more of

peoples of Mexico in governing maize diversity. agronomic and botanical researchers, in Mexico and beyond.81 His ethnobotany centered on

The first significant revision to Razas de Maíz en México came nearly two decades understanding and appreciating peasant and Indigenous crops and agricultural methods,

after its initial publication. This revision was led by the botanist and agronomist Efraím and on recognizing this local knowledge as the most effective for particular social and

Hernández Xolocotzi, formerly a member of the Office of Special Studies staff and a co- ecological conditions. From the early 1970s onward, this approach formed part of an ever-

author of Razas. His revision followed on from a collecting mission that he and a team had sharper critique of imported agricultural solutions such as those that had been promoted by

undertaken for the successor organization to the Office of Special Studies, the International the Office of Special Studies.82 In forming this critique, Hernández Xolocotzi shared ideas

Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat, also known as CIMMYT. This mission with a larger group of Mexican or Mexico-based social scientists who, like him, saw

23 24
campesino, or peasant, agriculture not as a problem to be solved through "modernization" distinct races.87 The expanded collections and improved systematic knowledge created new

but "modernization" as a project that had created the problems faced by peasant and possibilities for breeding. According to Mexican scientists in charge of the national

Indigenous farmers.83 This perspective pushed Hernández Xolocotzi to a transformed collections, they also shed light on "the socio-cultural evolution of our nation, as well as the

politics of taxonomizing maize. In his hands, and those of his colleagues and students, it was unity and the variation of the cultures that have developed in our current territory."88 In

no longer an instrument of US researchers, motivated by US political and economic other words, maize taxonomy also revealed and reaffirmed Mexico's history of cultural

interests, but instead a project of recognizing the ingenuity of Mexico's smallholder and diversity and its contemporary national identity.

subsistence farmers, whether campesino, Indigenous, or both, and positioning their Research on maize diversity took on increasing political significance from the 1980s,

knowledge as that best suited to address Mexico's agricultural needs. first as a result of international debates about the ownership of plant genetic resources, and

In part thanks to the influence of Hernández Xolocotzi, the next decade saw a boom second in light of international trade agreements, most notably the North American Free

among Mexican researchers in the collection and study of maize types native to Mexico. Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. NAFTA enabled a flood of subsidized (and therefore

This activity was linked to immediate agricultural concerns as well as ethnobotanical cheap) US grain into Mexican markets, simultaneously disadvantaging Mexican growers and

interests. For example, in the late 1960s, Mexican agronomists at the National Institute for introducing transgenically altered (genetically modified or GM) varieties into Mexican

Agricultural Research (Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Agrícolas) sought resources for markets and fields.89 In this context, the races of maize of Mexico represented a valuable

the development of more drought-resistant maize in locally adapted varieties.84 In the national resource threatened by multiple forces: their appropriation by foreign

1970s, thanks in part to institutional changes and an influx of funding, public plant breeders governments and especially transnational seed companies, their disappearance from farm

in Mexico had greater opportunities to address the needs of regions and peoples left out of fields as poverty-stricken peasant farmers abandoned cultivation, and their cross-pollination

the industrial development-driven research agenda of preceding decades. Many saw maíces with GM varieties which would irreversibly alter their genetic constitution.90

nativos (maize varieties native to Mexico, sometimes referred to as criollo maize) as These concerns are evident in the most recent comprehensive revision of the races

possessing qualities that would better serve the needs of poor farmers.85 of maize in Mexico: Origen y Diversificación del Maíz: Una Revisión Analítica. This 2009

Ultimately, both ethnobotanic and agronomic enterprises (categories not neatly study emerged from a government-sponsored research program on the history and

separated) led to the accumulation of new maize samples, especially in the national contemporary status of maize diversity in Mexico, the "Proyecto Global de Maíces Nativos."

collection.86 The additional samples in turn encouraged new efforts to delineate and Policymakers had required an up-to-date analysis of native Mexican maize to inform the

organize the races of maize of Mexico. By the 1990s the number of defined races had regulatory regime for maize required by a 2005 biosafety law, La Ley de Bioseguridad de

increased from the original twenty-five set out in Razas de Maíz en Mexico to forty-one Organismos Genéticamente Modificados (introduced, in theory, to govern the introduction

25 26
of genetically modified organisms).91 The product of collaboration among several Mexican making Latin American resources available for US exploitation. By comparison, the maize

scientists, Origen y Diversificación assessed competing theories of the origin of Zea mays studies of Origen y Diversificación aimed at resisting US imperialism in the form of a flood of

and offered an overview of known races, which had increased from the forty-one described cheap, subsidized, transgenic maize and regulations that advanced the interests of

by 1991 to fifty-nine in 2009. According to the authors, detailed knowledge of Mexican transnational corporations over those of Mexican citizens. In recent years, many Mexicans,

maize diversity, such as the study's account of its evolution and its classification into distinct with strong representation from Indigenous communities, have rallied against free trade

races, provided compelling grounds for resisting the importation of GM maize varieties to and the importation of transgenic maize. As one collective has insisted, "Sin Maíz, No Hay

Mexico. Among other responses, the authors called for revision of Mexico's biosecurity law País"—without maize, there is no country.94 This declaration, and the movement that insists

that would bring it into line with the "scientific evidence developed through more than 100 on it, is informed by centuries of maize cultivation and its imbrication with Mexican culture,

years of research on maize."92 but also by decades of taxonomic analysis that sustain claims to the distinct identity and

The authors additionally recommended that, for the sake of conserving the valuable history of Mexican maize.

genetic diversity of maize, it was necessary to protect Mexico's "small-scale or marginalized"

farmers: "They are the guardians of the native germplasm of maize: they retain, maintain Conclusion

and even modify the genetic diversity present in their territories through exchange, gene Reading the politics of maize taxonomy is anything but straightforward. The very idea of

flow, and the testing of new seeds."93 They argued for government resources to support establishing an evolutionary taxonomy of maize types came from the US botanist Edgar

these farmers as part of a program of in situ, or on farm, conservation. The reversal of the Anderson, who in the 1930s found inspiration for his work in the problems of commercial

ideas espoused by the Committee on Preservation of Indigenous Strains of Maize could maize production in the United States and sought guidance for methods in the studies of

hardly be more stark. Not only did the taxonomic endeavor captured in Origen y human race conducted by physical anthropologists in preceding decades. When researchers

Diversificación value the knowledge of peasant and Indigenous farmers in cultivating maize based in Mexico, tasked with "improving" crops, and by extension farmers, too, conducted a

diversity, it insisted that these farmers must play a central role in conserving it, too. study of Mexican maize landraces in the late 1940s, they produced an evolutionary tree that

The difference in politics extended beyond valorizing the knowledge of farmers to mapped on to mid-century thinking about the mixing of peoples in Mexico. In the 1950s and

encompass a more general assertion of national sovereignty. This is arguably the most 60s, when a group of US maize experts decided to collect "indigenous" maize landraces of

influential application of maize taxonomy in Mexico today. The classification of maize as the Western hemisphere for conservation and categorization, they relied on but also

carried out at the Rockefeller Foundation and later by the Maize Committee is best effaced local knowledge, to support a project that would in turn facilitate the elimination

understood as part of a Cold War ambition of "modernizing" Latin America while also (through assimilation or "modernization") of peasant and Indigenous cultures. In each of

27 28
these cases, ideas about human diversity informed the taxonomic study of maize. In the highlighted the knowledge and contributions of the farmers who created and maintained

hands of scientists associated with the Office of Special Studies and the Maize Committee, maize landraces. In subsequent decades, this critique went from being the subversive view

taxonomy in turn provided a tool for dealing with human diversity. to the dominant narrative. In Mexico, maize taxonomy became a tool for defending peoples

Conscious of the potential for contemporary researchers to misapply current, and and the nation from unwanted impositions.

especially US-based, concepts of human race to Mexican maize science, the anthropologist Scholars of race have observed that human racial classifications are not just ideas

John Hartigan urges analytical separation between the two, as I described in the but also instruments, tools that carve up humanity to achieve specific ends. In agriculture,

introduction. By comparison, the American studies scholar Aaron Eddens insists on their taxonomy was and is similarly instrumentalized. Some of these applications are obvious, for

being collapsed. Referring to the involvement of the Rockefeller Foundation in collecting example, to conduct breeding experiments or to sustain intellectual property rights.97 My

and describing Mexican maize in the 1940s, Eddens argues that human "racial logics… were analysis suggests still other purposes: extracting resources for development, imposing

central to the collection and appropriation of Mexican landraces" and maintains that these hierarchies of agricultural peoples and practices, championing Indigenous knowledge, and

logics continue to shape agricultural projects based on those activities.95 They are, as he resisting threats to national sovereignty. These uses of maize taxonomies were all the more

says, "embedded" in the "'modern' seeds" that later agricultural development programs still powerful because they aligned with ideas about human races, and with efforts to intervene

push today.96 By situating the maize taxonomic project within the context of a larger project in societies along perceived human racial lines.

informed by white supremacy, and insisting on the endurance of this association, Eddens Recognizing this flexibility, this amenability to different aspirations and applications,

collapses human racial, and racist, science with racial studies of maize. in turn suggests a reconsideration of the notion of plasticity with respect to ideas about

Informed and inspired by the literature on colonialism and the construction of race. Hartigan reminds readers of the plasticity that inheres in categorizations of the races

human racial hierarchies, Eddens correctly identifies these at work agricultural of maize of Mexico, which for him contrasts to ideas of racial fixity prevalent in the United

development. But he does not account for the possibility that a racial science of maize could States.98 Meanwhile, scholars of race in Latin America, and the Global South more generally,

be—and has been—put to many different ends. As I have described, even as the US-led point to the plasticity of human racial categorizations, again contrasting these to notions of

maize collection, conservation, and categorization program begun in the 1950s imposed a racial fixity in the United States and Europe.99 Attending to race as technology challenges

hierarchical vision of agricultural achievement that placed white farmers and breeders from these static dualisms (US/Mexico and North/South) by exploring a different plasticity: that

the United States at the apex and Indigenous cultivators of the Americas at the bottom— of purpose. Successive mobilizations of the same research program, centered on an

and sought to remake the latter into the former—scientists working in Mexico, Brazil, Peru unchanging and mostly uncontested concept of biological race in maize, supported strikingly

and other Latin American countries contested this vision. Their taxonomies of maize different social and political projects. In other words, it was not the plasticity of razas that

29 30
defines the history of the racial science of maize in Mexico (although races of maize were,
1
As summarized in Staffan Müller-Wille, "Race and History: Comments from an Epistemological Point of
and are, entities in continual motion) but rather of the reasons for creating taxonomies in
View," Science, Technology, & Human Values 39, no. 4 (2014), pp. 597–606. General accounts of race science

the first place. If we are to understand what the races of maize are, and the politics they in Europe and the United States include: Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain, 1800–1960

embody, we need first to account for these recurrent retoolings. (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1982); Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in

Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Ivan

Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).

2
Biography: Helen Anne Curry is University Senior Lecturer in the history of modern science e.g., Donna Fullwiley, "The Biologistical Construction of Race: 'Admixture' Technology and the New Genetic

Medicine," Social Studies of Science 38, no. 5 (2008), pp. 695–735; Jenny Reardon, Race to the Finish: Identity
and technology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge.
and Governance in an Age of Genomics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Michael Montoya,
She is the author of Endangered Maize: Industrial Agriculture and the Crisis of Extinction
Making the Mexican Diabetic: Race, Science, and the Genetics of Inequality (Berkeley: University of California
(forthcoming) and Evolution Made to Order: Plant Breeding and Technological Innovation in
Press, 2011); Anne Pollock, Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference

Twentieth-Century America (2016). Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Free (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

3
School Lane, Cambridge, CB2 3RH, [email protected]. Peter Wade, Vivette García Deister, Michael Kent, María Fernanda Olarte Sierra, and Adriana Díaz del Castillo

Hernández, "Nation and the Absent Presence of Race in Latin American Genomics," Current Anthropology 55,

no. 5 (October 2014), pp. 497–522, on p. 497. Histories of race in Latin America include: Richard Graham, ed.,

The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); Nancy Stepan, The
Acknowledgements: I thank Jenny Bangham, Vivette García Deister, Matthew Holmes, Kim
Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Nancy P.

Kleinman, Diana Méndez Rojas, and Staffan Müller-Wille for their comments on earlier Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin A. Rosemblatt, eds., Race and Nation in Modern Latin America

versions of this paper, as well as the two anonymous referees and the editors of Isis for their (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Marisol de la Cadena, ed., Formaciones de Indianidad:

Articulaciones Raciales, Mestizaje y Nación en América Latina ([Colombia]: enVión, 2007); Peter Wade, Race
feedback and advice. This research was made possible by a Pro Futura Scientia Fellowship I
and Ethnicity in Latin America, 2nd edition (London: Pluto Press, 2010); Laura Gotkowitz, Histories of Race and
held from 2017 to 2020. I am grateful to the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (Sweden) and the
Racism: The Andes and Mesoamerica from Colonial Times to the Present (Durham: Duke University Press,
Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, as well as the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social
2011).

Sciences, and Humanities, Cambridge, for their generous support. 4

Luciana Bastos-Rodrigues, and Sérgio D. J. Pena, "Color, Race and Genomic Ancestry in Brazil: Dialogues

between Anthropology and Genetics," Current Anthropology 50, no. 6 (2009), pp. 787–819; Carlos López-

Beltrán and Vivette García Deister, "Aproximaciones Científicas al Mestizo Mexicano," História, Ciências, Saúde

– Manguinhos 20, no. 2 (2013), pp. 391–410; Peter Wade, Carlos López Beltrán, Eduardo Restrepo, and

31 32
 13
Ricardo Ventura Santos, eds., Mestizo Genomics: Race Mixture, Nation, and Science in Latin America (Durham: J. J. Sanchez G., M. M. Goodman and C. W. Stuber, "Isozymatic and Morphological Diversity in the Races of

Duke University Press, 2014). Maize of Mexico," Economic Botany 54, no. 1 (2000), pp. 43–59; J. C. Reif, M. L. Warburton, X. C. Xia, D. A.

5
e.g., Lisa W. Drew, "Are We Losing the Science of Taxonomy? As Need Grows, Numbers and Training are Hoisington, J. Crossa, S. Taba, J. Muminović, M. Bohn, M. Frisch, and A. E. Melchinger, "Grouping of Accessions

Failing to Keep Up," BioScience 61, no. 12 (2011), pp. 942–946. of Mexican Races of Maize Revisited with SSR Markers," Theoretical and Applied Genetics 113, no. 2 (2006),

6
Staffan Müller-Wille, "Names and Numbers: 'Data' in Classical Natural History, 1758–1859," Osiris 32 (2017), pp. 177–185.

14
pp. 109–128. Joel B. Hagen, "The Introduction of Computers into Systematic Research in the United States during the

7
Keith Vernon, "Desperately Seeking Status: Evolutionary Systematics and the Taxonomists' Search for 1960s," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C 32, no. 2 (2001), pp. 291–314; Bruno J. Strasser,

Respectability 1940–60," British Journal for the History of Science 26, no. 2 (1993), pp. 207–227; Jim Endersby, "Laboratories, Museums, and the Comparative Perspective: Alan A. Boyden's Quest for Objectivity in

"Descriptive and Prescriptive Taxonomies," in H. A. Curry et al., eds., Worlds of Natural History (Cambridge: Serological Taxonomy, 1924–1962," Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 40, no. 2 (2010), pp. 149–182;

Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 447–459. For an analysis that emphasizes peaks and troughs of activity, Mary E. Sunderland, "Modernizing Natural History: Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology in Transition,"

see Robert Kohler, "Reflections on the History of Systematics," in Andrew Hamilton, ed., The Evolution of Journal of the History of Biology 46, no. 3 (2013), pp. 369–400.

15
Phylogenetic Systematics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), pp. 17–46. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, "Introduction: Race and/as Technology; or, How to Do Things to Race," Camera

8
e.g., Joel B. Hagen, "Experimentalists and Naturalists in Twentieth-Century Botany: Experimental Taxonomy, Obscura 70, vol. 24, no. 1 (2009), pp. 6–35, on pp. 8–9. See also, in addition to contributions to the Camera

1920–1950," Journal of the History of Biology 17, no. 2 (1984), pp. 249–270; Christophe Bonneuil, "The Obscura 70 special issue on Race and/as Technology, Ruha Benjamin, "Innovating Inequity: If Race is a

Manufacture of Species: Kew Gardens, the Empire and the Standardisation of Taxonomic Practices in late 19th Technology, Postracialism is the Genius Bar," Ethnic and Racial Studies 39, no. 13 (2016), pp. 2227–2234;

Century Botany," in M.-N. Bourguet, C. Licoppe and O. Sibum, eds., Instruments, Travel and Science: Itineraries Sareeta Amrute, "Bored Techies Being Casually Racist: Race as Algorithm," Science, Technology, & Human

of Precision from the 17th to the 20th Century (Routledge, 2002), pp. 189–215; Müller-Wille, "Names and Values 45, no. 5 (2020), pp. 903–933.

16
Numbers." Müller-Wille, "Race and History."

9 17
Christine Hine, Systematics as Cyberscience: Computers, Change, and Continuity in Science (Cambridge: MIT Stephen T. Garnett and Les Christidis, "Taxonomy Anarchy Hampers Conservation," Nature 546, no. 7656

Press, 2008); Claire Waterton, Rebecca Ellis, and Brian Wynne, Barcoding Nature: Shifting Cultures of (2017), pp. 25–27. For historians' views, see Peter S. Alagona, "Species Complex: Classification and

Taxonomy in an Age of Biodiversity Loss (London: Routledge, 2013). Conservation in American Environmental History," Isis 107, no. 4 (2016), pp. 738–761; Elizabeth Hennessy,

10
Edgar Anderson and Hugh Cutler, "Races of Zea Mays: I. Their Recognition and Classification," Annals of the "Saving Species: The Co-Evolution of Tortoise Taxonomy and Conservation in the Galápagos Islands,"

Missouri Botanical Garden, Vol. 29, No. 2 (1942), pp. 69–86, 88, on p. 71. Environmental History 25, no. 2 (2020), pp. 263–286.

11 18
For a useful discussion, see H. Perales and D. Golicher, "Mapping the Diversity of Maize Races in Mexico," For a related reflection, see Elaine Gan, "Sorting Seeds into Racialized Futures and Pasts," Catalyst 5, no. 2

PLOS ONE 9, no. 12 (2014), e114657. (2019), https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i2.32834.

12 19
The number varies depending on the researcher and research methods; this is the most recent agreed On crop plants (and industrial animals) as technology, see contributions to Susan R. Schrepfer and Philip

number. Takeo Ángel Kato Yamakake, Cristina Mapes Sánchez, Luz María Mera Ovando, José Antonio Serratos Scranton, eds., Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History (New York: Routledge, 2004).

20
Hernández, and Robert Arthur Bye Boettler, Origen y Diversificación del Maíz: Una Revisión Analítica (Mexico John Hartigan, "Mexican Genomics and the Roots of Racial Thinking," Cultural Anthropology 28 (2013), pp.

City: UNAM, 2009). 372–395; John Hartigan, "Translating 'Race' and 'Raza' between the United States and Mexico," North

33 34
American Dialogue 16, no. 1 (2013), pp. 29–41; John Hartigan, Jr., Care of the Species: Races of Corn and the animals; see Edgar Anderson and Ruth Peck Ownbey, "The Genetic Coefficients of Specific Difference," Annals

Science of Plant Biodiversity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). of the Missouri Botanical Garden 26, no. 4 (1939), pp. 325–346, 348.

21 33
Kim Kleinman, "His Own Synthesis: Corn, Edgar Anderson, and Evolutionary Theory in the 1940s," Journal of This analogic thinking built on a real biological similarly (freely interbreeding populations) that would not

the History of Biology 32, no. 2 (1999), pp. 293–320; Kim Kleinman, "From Geneticist to the Garden to Senior have been true for all crops. I thank Staffan Müller-Wille for this observation.

34
Botanist: Edgar Anderson and the Study of Plants in the 20th Century," unpublished manuscript, June 2019. Anderson and Cutler, "Races of Zea Mays," p. 77. See also E. A. Hooton, "Methods of Racial Analysis,"

See also Kim Kleinman, "'Bringing Taxonomy to the Service of Genetics': Edgar Anderson and Introgressive Science, New Series, 63, no. 1621 (1926), pp. 75–81.

35
Hybridization," Journal of the History of Biology 49, no. 4 (2016), pp. 603–624. Anderson and Cutler, "Races of Zea Mays," p. 71. See also Carleton S. Coon, The Races of Europe (New York:

22
Kim Kleinman, "Edgar Anderson: Interdisciplinary Authority on What Was Not Known About Corn," Macmillan, 1939).

36
Endeavour 23, no. 3 (1999), pp. 114–117. Anderson and Cutler, "Races of Zea Mays," p. 71.

23 37
Kleinman, "His Own Synthesis." Edgar Anderson, "Races of Zea Mays II: A General Survey of the Problem," undated typescript copy, Carl

24
P. C. Mangelsdorf and R. G. Reeves, "The Origin of Indian Corn and Its Relatives," Bulletin of the Texas Ortwin Sauer Papers (Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley), Box 6, Folder Anderson, Edgar 1948–

Agricultural Experiment Station, no. 574 (monograph) (1939). 1964.

25 38
This despite the fact that the evolutionary narrative proposed by Mangelsdorf and the cytologist Robert On Anderson's pictorial analyses, see Kim Kleinman, "How Graphical Innovations Assisted Edgar Anderson's

Reeves had been inspired by Anderson's own speculations. See Kleinman, "Edgar Anderson." Discoveries in Evolutionary Biology," Chance 15, no. 3 (2012), pp. 17–21.

26 39
Edgar Anderson, "What I Found Out about the Corn Plant," Missouri Botanical Garden Bulletin 57, no. 5 Edgar Anderson, "Maize in Mexico a Preliminary Survey," Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 33, no. 2

(1969), pp. 6–9. (1946), pp. 147–247.

27 40
Edgar Anderson, "The Sources of Effective Germ-Plasm in Hybrid Maize," Annals of the Missouri Botanical Anderson to Mangelsdorf, undated draft, Edgar Anderson Papers (Missouri Botanical Garden Archives, St.

Garden 31, no. 4 (1944), pp. 355–361, on pp. 355, 360. Louis, MO), RG 3/2/4, Series 3, Box 11, Folder 1.

28 41
William L. Brown and Edgar Anderson, "The Southern Corn Dents," Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden Anderson, "Maize in Mexico a Preliminary Survey," p. 147.

42
35, no. 3 (1948), pp. 255–268. Edgar Anderson, "Field Studies of Guatemalan Maize," Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 34, no. 4

29
For a detailed account of Anderson's interests in maize, see Kleinman, "Edgar Anderson." Anderson made (1947), pp. 433–467, on 447 and 449.

43
similar claims about the practical lessons to be derived from earlier research; see, e.g., Edgar Anderson, Anderson, "Field Studies of Guatemalan Maize," p. 435.

44
"Recombination in Species Crosses," Genetics 24, no. 5 (1939), pp. 668–698. There are many accounts of the Office of Special Studies, which offer diverging assessments of its activities.

30
Kleinman, "Edgar Anderson," p. 115. See also E. L. Sturtevant, Varieties of Corn, USDA Office of Experiment A sampling of the range of views (in addition to other texts cited below) includes: E. C. Stakman, Richard

Stations Bulletin No. 57 (Washington DC: GPO, 1899). Bradfield, and Paul C. Mangelsdorf, Campaigns Against Hunger (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967);

31
For an example of Anderson's use of "race" in earlier botanical studies, see Edgar Anderson, "Cytology in Cynthia Hewitt de Alcantara, Modernizing Mexican Agriculture: Socioeconomic Implications of Technological

Relation to Taxonomy," Botanical Review 3, no. 7 (1937), pp. 335–350. Change, 1940–1970 (Geneva: UNRISD, 1976); Gustavo Esteva, La Batalla en el México Rural (Mexico: Siglo XXI,

32
Anderson and Cutler, "Races of Zea Mays," p. 71. An earlier publication compares the assessment of 1980); Bruce Jennings, Foundations of International Agricultural Research: Science and Politics in Mexican

diverging characteristics among races in humans with that of species and populations of plants and other Agriculture (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988); J. H. Perkins, Geopolitics and the Green Revolution: Wheat,

35 36
Genes, and the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Karin Matchett, "Plant Sciences Research and American Studies 30, no. 2 (1998), pp. 279–308; Rodolfo Stavenhagen, "La Política Indigenista del Estado

Agriculture in Mexico: Tensions and Collaboration Among Mexican and U.S. Scientists, 1935–1965," Ph.D. Mexicano y los Pueblos Indígenas en el Siglo XX," in Bruno Barronet and Medardo Tapia, eds., Educación e

thesis, University of Minnesota, 2002; Ana Barahona, "Mendelism and Agriculture in the First Decades of the Interculturalidad: Política y Políticas (Cuernavaca: CRIM-UNAM, 2013), pp. 23–48.

49
XXth Century in Mexico," in A Cultural History of Heredity IV: Heredity in the Century of the Gene, Preprint 343 Helen Anne Curry, "Breeding Uniformity and Banking Diversity: The Genescapes of Industrial Agriculture,

(Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science 2008), pp. 111–126; Netzahualcóyotl Luis Gutíerrez 1935–1970," Global Environment 10, no. 1 (2017), pp. 83–113.

50
Núñez, "Cambio Agrario y Revolución Verde: Dilemas Científicos, Políticos y Agrarios en la Agricultura [Mangelsdorf], report to Ing. Marte Gómez, 15 April 1946, Mangelsdorf Papers, HUG(FP) 37.51, Box 1, Folder

Mexicana del Maíz, 1920–1970," Ph.D. Thesis, Colegio de México, 2017. Rockefeller Foundation - PCM papers/reports.

45 51
Joseph Cotter, "The Origins of the Green Revolution in Mexico: Continuity or Change?" in David Rock, ed., E. J. Wellhausen, L. M. Roberts, and E. Hernández X., in collaboration with P. C. Mangelsdorf, Razas de Maíz

Latin America in the 1940s: War and Postwar Transitions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. en México, su Origen, Características y Distribución, Folleto Técnico No. 5 (Mexico City: Oficina de Estudios

224–241. See also Tore C. Olsson, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Especiales, Secretaría de Agricultura y Ganadería, 1951).

52
Countryside (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Matthew Caire-Pérez, “A Different Shade of Green: E. J. Wellhausen, L. M. Roberts, and E. Hernández X., in collaboration with Paul C. Mangelsdorf, Races of

Efraím Hernández Xolocotzi, Chapingo, and Mexico’s Green Revolution, 1950–1967,” Ph.D. Thesis, University Maize in Mexico: Their Origin, Characteristics and Distribution (Cambridge: Bussey Institution of Harvard

of Oklahoma, 2016. University, 1952).

46 53
For the perspective of US scientists, see, e.g., "Agricultural Conditions and Problems" (1941), Report of the Wellhausen et al., Races of Maize, foreword.

54
1941 Survey Commission of the Rockefeller Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation Archives (Rockefeller Archive Wellhausen et al., Races of Maize, discussion of Celaya on pp. 161–162.

55
Center, Tarrytown, NY), RG 1.1, Series 323, Box 1, Folder 2. There were exceptions to this view among Mexican Anne Doremus, "Indigenism, Mestizaje, and National Identity in Mexico during the 1940s and the 1950s,"

agronomists, but Cotter suggests they did not predominate; for perspectives in Mexico, see Cotter, "The Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 17, no. 2 (2001), pp. 375–402. For an overview of mestizo identity in

Origins of the Green Revolution in Mexico"; Joseph Cotter, "Cultural Wars and New Technologies: The Mexico, see López-Beltrán and García Deister, "Aproximaciones Científicas al Mestizo Mexicano."

56
Discourse of Plant Breeding and the Professionalisation of Mexican Agronomy, 1880–1994," Science, Cleland to Mangelsdorf, 20 September 1949; Mangelsdorf Papers, HUG(FP) 37.10, Box 5, Folder:

Technology & Society 5, no. 2 (2000), 141–168; Joseph Cotter, Troubled Harvest: Agronomy and Revolution in Preservation of Indigenous Strains of Maize – letters.

57
Mexico, 1880–2002 (Westport: Praeger, 2003), ch. 3. J. Allen Clark, "Collection, Preservation, and Utilization of Indigenous Strains of Maize," Economic Botany 10,

47
Jeffrey M. Pilcher, Que Vivan Los Tamales! Food and the Making of Mexican Identity (Albuquerque: no. 2 (1956), pp. 194–200. See also Curry, "Breeding Uniformity and Banking Diversity"; Diana Alejandra

University of New Mexico Press, 1998). Méndez Rojas, "El Programa Cooperativo Centroamericano para el Mejoramiento del Maíz: Una Historia

48
Claudio Lomnitz, "Bordering on Anthropology: The Dialectics of a National Tradition in Mexico," Revue de Transnacional de la Revolución Verde desde Costa Rica y Guatemala, 1954–1963," Master's Thesis, Instituto

synthèse 4, nos. 3–4 (2000), pp. 345–380; Roberto J. González, "From Indigenismo to Zapatismo: Theory and Mora, 2018.

58
Practice in Mexican Anthropology," Human Organization 63, no. 2 (2004), pp. 141–150. See also Alan Knight, Patrick Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native," Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4

"Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo," in Richard Graham, ed., The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940 (2006), pp. 387–409; Lorenzo Veracini, “Introducing Settler Colonial Studies,” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1

(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), pp. 71–113; Alexander S. Dawson, "From Models for the Nation to (2011), pp. 1–12.

Model Citizens: Indigenismo and the 'Revindication' of the Mexican Indian, 1920–40," Journal of Latin

37 38
59 70
For instructive comparative cases in which scientists have viewed the genetic materials of Indigenous Alexander Grobman, Wilfredo Salhuana, Ricardo Sevilla, in collaboration with Paul C. Mangelsdorf, Race of

peoples (rather than crops) as a valuable and endangered resource for biological research, see Kim TallBear, Maize in Peru, Publication 915 (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences–National Research Council,

Native DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 1961), p. 38.

71
Press, 2013); Joanna Radin, Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Bold (Chicago: University of Chicago F. G. Brieger, J. T. A. Gurgel, E. Paterniani, A. Blumenschein, M. R. Alleoni, Races of Maize in Brazil and Other

Press, 2017). Eastern South American Countries, Publication 593 (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences–National

60
National Research Council, Committee for the Preservation of Indigenous Strains of Maize, "Proposed Plan Research Council, 1958), pp. 4–5, 56–57.

72
for the Collection and Maintenance of Native Races of Maize," sent 3 February 1951 to Warren Weaver, Hatheway to Mangelsdorf, 2 May 1953, Mangelsdorf Papers, HUG(FP) 37.10, Box 3, Folder: Hatheway, Wm.

Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RG 1.2, Series 300, Box 1, Folder 2. On US policymakers' characterizations of H.

73
peasants as a threat to national security, see Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America's Cold War Battle William H. Hatheway, Races of Maize in Cuba, Publication no. 453 (Washington, DC: National Academy of

Against Poverty (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). Sciences–National Research Council, 1957). See also Mangelsdorf to Hatheway, 21 November 1955,

61
[Brieger], "Program of the Brasilian Corn Center 1956–1957," [n.d., ca June 1956], Mangelsdorf Papers, Mangelsdorf Papers, HUG(FP) 37.12, Box 7, Folder: Hatheway, W. H.

74
HUG(FP) 37.12, Box 9, Folder Maize Committee. Mangelsdorf to Hatheway, 21 November 1955, Mangelsdorf Papers, HUG(FP) 37.12, Box 7, Folder:

62
NAS-NRC, Committee on Preservation of Indigenous Strains of Maize, Seventh Report, October 1953, Hatheway, W. H.

75
National Academy of Sciences Archive (Washington, DC), B&A Division Files, Folder: B&A Agricultural Board Brown, Races of Maize in the West Indies, p. 13.

76
Com on Preservation of Maize: Reports, Progress, 1952–1954. Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan

63
See, e.g., correspondence from William Hatheway to Paul Mangelsdorf in Mangelsdorf Papers, HUG(FP) University Press, 1982); Russell McGregor, "The Doomed Race: A Scientific Axiom of the Late Nineteenth

37.10, Box 3, Folder: Hatheway, Wm. H. Century," Australian Journal of Politics and History 39 (1993), pp. 14–22; Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings:

64
William L. Brown, Races of Maize in the West Indies, Publication no. 792 (Washington, DC: National Academy Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Michael

of Sciences–National Research Council, 1960), pp. 1–2. Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca:

65
Brieger to Cleland, 10 February 1951, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RG 1.2, Series 300, Box 1, Folder 2. Cornell University Press, 1989).

66 77
For a description of the project from the grant proposal, see Clark to Harrar, 31 March 1954, Rockefeller Many subsequent Races of Maize studies have been digitized by the USDA; see

Foundation Archives, RG 1.2, Series 300, Box 1, Folder 5. https://www.ars.usda.gov/midwest-area/ames/plant-introduction-research/docs/races-of-maize. A

67
These have been digitized by the USDA, along with other taxonomic studies of maize: bibliography of the past twenty years of maize diversity research is provided by the Panzea project; see

https://www.ars.usda.gov/midwest-area/ames/plant-introduction-research/docs/races-of-maize/ http://www.panzea.org. I thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing the latter resource to my attention.

68 78
See e.g., Hatheway to Mangelsdorf, 29 June 1953; Mangelsdorf Papers, HUG(FP) 37.10, Box 3, Folder: Efraím Hernández X. and Glafiro Alanís Flores, "Estudio Morfológico de 5 Nuevas Razas de Maíz de la Sierra

Hatheway, Wm. H., and subsequent letters in the same folder. Madre Occidental de México: Implicaciones Filogenéticas y Fitogeográficas," Agrociencia 5, no. 1 (1970), pp. 3–

69
E. J. Wellhausen, Alejandro Fuentes O., Antonio Hernández Corzo, in collaboration with Paul C. Mangelsdorf, 30.

79
Races of Maize in Central America, Publication 511 (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences–National Hernández X. and Alanís Flores, "Estudio Morfológico de 5 Nuevas Razas de Maíz," p. 28.

Research Council, 1957), p. 29.

39 40
80
Soto Laveaga recounts the history of an earlier Dioscorea research commission in which Hernández Xolocotzi Haight, eds., Subsidizing Inequality: Mexican Corn Policy since NAFTA (Woodrow Wilson International Center

was involved; under the guidance of the botanist Arturo Gómez Pompa, the commission adopted the same for Scholars, 2010).

90
stance to local expertise. See Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects, Stephen B. Brush, "Bio-cooperation and the Benefits of Crop Genetic Resources: The Case of Mexican

and the Making of the Pill (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), ch. 4. Maize," World Development 26, no. 5 (1998), pp. 755–766; Maurico R. Bellon, "Traditional Mexican

81
Efraím Hernández X., Apuntes sobre la Exploración Etnobotánica y su Metodología (Chapingo: Colegio de Agricultural Systems and the Potential Impacts of Transgenic Varieties on Maize Diversity," Agriculture and

Postgraduados, Escuela Nacional de Agricultura, 1970). Human Values 23, no. 1 (2006), pp. 3–14; A. Keleman, J. Hellin, and M. R. Bellon, "Maize Diversity, Rural

82
Caire-Pérez, “A Different Shade of Green." Development Policy, and Farmers' Practices: Lessons from Chiapas, Mexico," Geographical Journal 175, no. 1

83
Caire-Pérez, “A Different Shade of Green," pp. 281–283. (2009), pp. 52–70. See also Elizabeth Fitting, The Struggle for Maize: Campesinos, Maize, and Transgenic Corn

84
Hermilo H. Ángeles Arrieta, "El Maíz y el Sorgo y sus Programas de Mejoramiento Genético en México," in the Mexican Countryside (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Abby Kinchy, Seeds, Science, and Struggle:

February 1968, SOMEFI, Chapingo, Mexico, pp. 390–391; José de Jesús Sánchez González and Lorenzo Ordaz The Global Politics of Transgenic Crops (Cambridge: MIT, 2012).

91
Suarez, "Reestudio de las Razas Mexicanas de Maíz," March 1984, Zapopan, Jalisco, INIA, p. 11. Fitting, The Struggle for Maize, pp. 72–73.

85 92
Joaquín Ortíz Cereceres, "Antecedents de la Investigación Agricola en Mexico y sus Repercusiones," Germen, Kato Yamakake at al., Origen y Diversificación del Maíz, p. 99.

93
no. 3 (1985): 1–17; Rafael Ortega Paczka, "Reorganización del Mejoramiento Genético del Maíz en el INIA," in Kato Yamakake at al., Origen y Diversificación del Maíz, pp. 10, 12.

94
Efraím Hernández Xolocotzi, ed., Agrosistemas de México: Contribuciones a la Enseñanza, Investigación y Gustavo Esteva and Catherine Marielle, coordinators, Sin Maíz, No Hay País (Mexico City: Culturas Populares

Divulgación Agrícola, 2nd ed. (Chapingo: Colegio de Postgraduados, 1981), pp. 369–390. de México, 2003). See also Analiese Richard, "'Sin Maíz No Hay País': Citizenship and Environment in Mexico's

86
Rafael Ortega Paczka and Hermilo Angeles Arrieta, "Maíz," in Tarcicio Cervantes Santana, ed. "Analisis de los Food Sovereignty Movement," in Alex Latta and Hannah Wittman, eds., Environment and Citizenship in Latin

Recursos Genéticos Disponibles a México," Sesiones de Trabajo Organizados por la Sociedad Mexicana de America (Amsterdam: CEDLA, 2012), pp. 59–76; Ana de Ita, "La Defensa Internacional del Maíz contra la

Fitogenética, Chapingo, México, 10–12 May 1978, pp. 75–84. Contaminación Transgénica en su Centro de Origen," El Cotidiano, no. 173 (2012), pp. 57–65; Joaliné Pardo

87
Rafael Ortega Paczka, J. Jesús Sánchez González, Fernando Castillo González, and Juan Manuel Hernández Núñez, "Identidad, Organización y Estrategia en Dos Movimientos que Pugnan por la Soberanía Alimentaria en

Casillas, "Estado Actual de los Estudios sobre Maices Nativos de México," in R. Ortega P., G. Palomino H., F. México," Descatos 55 (2017), pp. 152–171.

95
Castillo G., V. A. González H., and M. Livera M., eds, Avances en el Estudio de los Recursos Fitogenéticos de Aaron Eddens, "White Science and Indigenous Maize: The Racial Logics of the Green Revolution," Journal of

México (Chapingo: SOMEFI, 1991). Peasant Studies 46, no. 3 (2017), pp. 653–673, on p. 655.

88 96
INIA, Unidad de Recursos Genéticos, Banco de Germoplasma de Maíz y Sorgo, "Informe de Actividades Eddens, "White Science and Indigenous Maize," p. 655, 667.

97
Desarrolladas Durante 1978," p. 23. Staffan Müller-Wille, "Early Mendelism and the Subversion of Taxonomy: Epistemological Obstacles as

89
See, e.g., Oxfam, "Dumping without Borders: How US Agricultural Policies are Destroying the Livelihoods of Institutions," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological

Mexican Corn Farmers," Oxfam Briefing Paper no. 50 (August 2003); Commission for Environmental and Biomedical Sciences 36, no. 3 (2005), pp. 465–487; Bronwyn Parry, "Taxonomy, Type Specimens, and the

Cooperation, Maize and Biodiversity: The Effects of Transgenic Maize in Mexico; Key Findings and Making of Biological Property in Intellectual Property Rights Law," International Journal of Cultural Property 19,

Recommendations (CEC Secretariat, 2004); Norbert Fiess and Daniel Lederman, "Mexican Corn: The Effects of no. 3 (2012), pp. 251–268; Matthew Holmes, "Changing Techniques in Crop Plant Classification:

NAFTA," International Trade Department, Trade Note 18, 24 September 2004. See also Jonathan Fox and Libby

41 42
Molecularization at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany during the 1980s," Annals of Science 74, no. 2

(2017), pp. 149–164.

98
Hartigan, "Translating 'Race' and 'Raza,'" p. 37–38; Hartigan, Care of the Species, pp. 56–57.

99
Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, pp. 39–40; Warwick Anderson, "Racial Conceptions in the Global

South," Isis 105, no. 4 (2014), pp. 782–792.

43