Corn Patches and Dispatches
Notes on a recent trip to Mexico
By Tom Philpott

In Mexico, a milpa is a garden patch, usually kept by several families, to grow a substantial portion of a year's sustenance. Milpas are typically dominated by corn -- first domesticated in present-day Mexico thousands of years ago -- but also contain stunning agricultural and nutritional diversity.

In addition to corn for tortillas, traditional milpas grow squash and beans of many varieties, avocados, melon, tomatoes, chile pepper, sweet potato, jicama, amaranth, and a medicinal herb called mucana, claims journalist Charles C. Mann in his 2005 book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. "Milpa crops are nutritionally and environmentally complementary," Mann writes. "Maize lacks the amino acids lysine and tryptophan, which the body needs to make proteins and niacin ... Beans have both lysine and tryptophan ... Squashes, for their part, provide an array of vitamins; avocados, fats." Agriculturally, beans fix nitrogen from the air into the soil, helping fertilize corn, which requires large amounts of nitrogen. Quoting H. Garrison Wilkes, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, Mann calls the milpa "one of the most successful human inventions ever created."

The great invention is increasingly marginal to modern Mexican life. The Revolution-era land-reform programs that once gave rural life a measure of stability have been gutted over the past 20 years. Promising a manufacturing boom and a new era of prosperity, Mexico's leaders beckoned campesinos (smallholder farmers, mostly ethnically indigenous) from the countryside into the cities. The boom never quite materialized, at least not in powerful enough form to provide sufficient jobs for the rural exodus. As a result, the country now has a devastated rural economy and swelling shanty towns on the edges of its cities, housing millions of workers in the "informal economy" (i.e., chewing gum salespeople, windshield washers, etc.). It has also, of course, exported millions of excess farmers north of the border, where they staff our farms, meatpacking plants, restaurant kitchens, and construction sites.

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