If you grow up in South Dakota,
If you listen to the winds of the high and windy plains,
You know things
That people don't tell you.
This is not one of the old stories from the people of the South where the sun is different. This is what the wind whispers where there are freezing North winds and the Earth grows so cold that it becomes like stone and water stops.
Zea is a genus of grasses in the family Poaceae. Several species are commonly known as teosintes and are found in Mexico, Guatemala, and Nicaragua.
There are five recognized species in the genus: Zea diploperennis, Zea perennis, Zea luxurians, Zea nicaraguensis, and Zea mays. The last species is further divided into four subspecies: huehuetenangensis, mexicana, parviglumis, and mays. The first three subspecies are teosintes; the last is maize, or corn, the only domesticated taxon in the genus Zea.
Teosinte, a word created in the Mother of Corn, Mexico:
Origin of TEOSINTE
Mexican Spanish, from Nahuatl teōcintli, from teōtl god + cintli dried ears of maize
First Known Use: circa 1877
Teotl: "a single, dynamic, vivifying, eternally self-generating and self-regenerating sacred power, energy or force...":
At the heart of Nahua philosophy stands the thesis that there exists a single, dynamic, vivifying, eternally self-generating and self-regenerating sacred power, energy or force: what the Nahuas called teotl ... Elizabeth Boone (1994:105) writes, “The real meaning of [teotl] is spirit — a concentration of power as a sacred and impersonal force”. According to Jorge Klor de Alva (1979:7), “Teotl …implies something more than the idea of the divine manifested in the form of a god or gods; instead it signifies the sacred in more general terms”. The multiplicity of gods in official, state sanctioned Aztec religion does not gainsay this claim, for this multiplicity was merely the sacred, merely teotl, “separated, as it were by the prism of human sight, into its many attributes”
Teosinte is a good word to say for corn, or maize. It speaks to the multiplicity of maize, to its many attributes as it traveled through the prism of seven thousand years.
The winds told me how a squatty, seemingly insignificant plant:
... Maize was developed from a wild grass (Teosinte) originally growing in Central America (southern Mexico) 7,000 years ago. The ancestral kernels of Teosinte looked very different from today's corn. These kernels were small and were not fused together like the kernels on the husked ear of early maize and modern corn.
I know that a woman saw teosinte and noticed the kernels and decided to taste them. She liked the taste of the seeds, thought they had a great deal of potential, and gathered the seed heads. Generations of women then gathered the seed heads of teosinte and selectively gathered the stalks with the larger and more close placed kernels. I also think that these women whispered to the teosinte, "You can be better, you can be bigger, you can be many things."
The women also learned to plant some of the kernels of teosinte, as they learned how to plant and grow many things. For seven thousand years they gathered the kernels of teosinte and planted its kernels and taught it to grow in many different ways, to grow tall and quickly in the long days of the sun of the North, so quickly that the eye actually thinks it can see corn grow, that farmers in South Dakota would says things like "Knee high by the 4th of July" in reference to their corn crops.
Because the women of corn loved beauty they created corn in rainbow colors, bright yellow, white as snow, red of many hues, blue, purple, black, multi-colored kernels on a single cob. The women created kernels that exploded into popcorn when heated, dent corn, flint corn (the hard-surfaced corn of many colors), sweet corn, flour corn.
The kernels of teosinte traveled everywhere in the Western Hemisphere, even to the islands of the Caribbean where it was named mahiz by the Taino people on what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and the Spanish took the word and the kernels to Europe where it was called maize to distinguish it from the native grains known as "corn".
I know, when as a child I walked within the jungle of the cornfield, the winds, intermingled with the whispers of the Corn Maidens, told me so, that the women, the Corn Mothers, the Corn Maidens, counseled the teosinte to be brave in the North wind, to learn to grow in the cold North with its long days of sun in the summer, just as they coaxed many kinds of beans and squash and potatoes and peppers and tomatoes and so many other things to grow in places where these things were not used to growing, those early and skilled geneticists, the "Corn Whisperers", the Corn Maidens.