by Tracy L. Barnett
At a noisy back entrance to one of Oaxaca City’s oldest markets, not far from one of the sites where corn originated some 9,000 years ago, muralist Mariel Garcia stood on scaffolding in the sun for three weeks. and painted his heart.
“When you turn the daily news into a mural, you turn it into a legend to be admired by history students in the future… this mural tells the story of how all of Mexico came together to save the culture of the milpa,” she explained. Chris Wells, founder of the All Species Project, the driving force behind the mural and Garcia’s inspiration.
The milpa, the ancient and complex agricultural system that has supported life for millennia throughout Mesoamerica, is much more than corn, Wells explained. Recent studies have documented up to 191 different edible plants in a traditional milpa, including beans, squash, various varieties of chili peppers, tomatoes, edible vegetables, and even medicinal plants. It is also a habitat for a wide variety of animals.
“The milpa is Mexico’s gift to the world,” Wells said.
In the best tradition of Mexican muralism, Wells, a former native corn farmer, worked with Garcia for a year planning the mural and the unveiling and raising the money to cover expenses. Garcia and other members of the collective donated her time.
The mural, the backdrop for the entire event, features a lush, green cornfield. Superimposed on that vegetation is a biodiverse cast of characters. To the right are the deer and the jaguar and the red-tailed hawk; there is the monarch butterfly and other pollinators; there are corn, beans, and quelites, or edible vegetables that have evolved among the dozens of different foods and medicines that have evolved from this ancient agroecology.
Also represented in the middle of the milpa are the human elements behind that ecosystem: the peasants who for millennia have developed more than 1,000 varieties of maize, each one specific to a particular bioregion.
