MAÍZ, ORIGEN Y DESTINO

Year: 2013 | Country: Mexico | Duration: 52’ | Director: Alberto Cortés

Since a long time ago, the history of corn and of human beings run parallel in these lands.The milpa, which is a community of crops, taught humans to live in community.

With this vital impulse of 10 thousand years of antiquity, today these communities are those that keep alive the vital character of the corn and proposes to the peasant societies (women and men) a mutual upbringing.

The corn and the milpa, are the sustenance of the community. Without corn, the communities would not have the slightest autonomy, nor the self-governments that exist today. Only because they have milpa can they defend their territories.

Peasant life is a passion for care and detail: how to recognize the signs of the weather, the moon, the wind, the clouds to sow, weed and harvest; how to promote the presence of water in certain places, and the fullness of the springs, the punctuality of the rain. How to feed the soil, select the best seeds, plants and animals.

To be peasants is to value the community and, collectively, to relate to the land, and to the territory. The conversation held by the human communities and the milpa also collective. The knowledge of the milpa is the very experience of maintaining it, it is collective and eternally changing, like conversations, which are shared and never repeated.