Sitting on a stump beneath the jocote tree in his nursery, Don Fausto explains how he learned to graft trees. As he speaks, his hands and eyes move gently over the dozens of citrus and avocado rootstock seedlings in his care. He prunes some, repots others. We are his visitors today, so his attention is divided, but these young plants are his regular conversation partners. When the saplings have grown sturdy enough, he will cut in shoots from mature trees and transplant them in his milpa. There, intercropped among corn, squash, and beans, planted between felled trunks, they will produce fruit in years rather than decades.
To make room for new life requires utmost attention and tenderness. This recognition has turned Don Fausto and other native seed guardians into careful students of generations of wisdom. Evidence suggests their ancestors began cultivating corn on the Yucatán Peninsula some 6,000 years ago. So intimate has been the joining of their lives to the lives of wild seeds that now the existence of each is inseparable from the other. Maya scriptures explain that the first humans were made not of mud but of corn. The seeds’ presence sustains them at every meal, whether in the salted tortilla in times of scarcity, in festive tamales, or in the most lavish of feasts.
Through millennia in the land, Maya people have patiently grafted themselves into the life of these seeds. Seeds and people have become family. Don Fausto belongs to a peasant collective that honors this relation in its name: Colectivo In Laak Le Ixiimó—Our Sibling, Corn. The Indigenous farmers joined together several decades ago to form a regional mutual aid network with similar groups. When extreme weather caused crop failures in one area, the network provided affected farmers with seed corn to replant. Now, the groups host seed festivals across their ancestral territory to celebrate abundance and cultivate Maya self-determination.
