Our Sacred Maíz Is Our Mother: Indigeneity and Belonging in the Americas by Roberto Cintli Rodriguez (review)

OUR SACRED MAÍZ puts into practice a “decolonial” turn for those who work in Indigenous and Chican@ studies to consider the survival and legacies of cultures and communities grounded in what Dr. Rodriguez calls the “resilience of Maíz cultures,” or corn cultures, among Indigenous communities in the United States, México, and the Amerícas. His book offers six chapters plus an introduction and epilogue. The book is written in a very clear and succinct style, and thus it will be very useful for classroom adoption. As a whole this book will help us in Chican@ studies have an epistemic frame to discuss issues of decolonization, resistance, and persistence of layered Indigenous generative practices that undergird visual languages and sustained cultural practices: food, rituals, dance, and ceremonies. His look at the corn cultures (maize cultures) provides a lens to look at a range of historical events and an interesting way to look at Mexican and Chican@ history, and includes a section on the history of Aztec dance traditions and how they were brought to the Southwest. His book will have a large readership inside and outside of the academic community. The book’s design aesthetics are elegant, and the reader is presented full-color illustrations that highlight Maíz cultures from precolonial codices to murals in barrios.

To keep my enthusiastic review concise, I highlight a few points from chapter 3 and the epilogue. Chapter 3 provides an elegant, well-argued, and well-researched look at maps and narratives that represent and discuss origins and pilgrimage of the Mexica peoples from what many call Aztlán. The issue of the origins for Mexica peoples is highly debated among scholars, and is a source of creative and political inspiration for many Chicana and Chicano writers and artists. It also provides a politically charged counternarrative to nativist anti-immigrant views of Mexicans and other Latinos in the U.S. nation-state. This chapter performs an overview of how Aztlán—the homeland of the Mexica peoples—is understood in different political imaginaries, and then it looks at several codices including the well-cited Boturini Codex and several maps to query the location of Aztlán. He provides a discussion on the 1847 Disturnell Map that claims to show the Hopi as having never “surrendered their sovereignty to anyone” and that the “Antigua Residencia de los Aztecas” lay north of the Hopi (81).

The epilogue in this powerhouse and beautifully written book is a must-read for those who are outraged by how the state of Arizona outlawed the teaching of ethnic studies in the Tucson Unified School District and practiced an auto-da-fé on creative and scholarly works by and about Chican@s and Native American peoples and nations in the borderlands. Dr. Rodriguez clarifies that the curriculum and pedagogical systems are rooted in Maíz-based concepts and philosophies. He clarifies seven principles of Maíz-based philosophy including La’kech (Tú Eres Mi Otro Yo or You Are My Other Self) and Panche be (Buscar la Raíz de la Verdad or To Seek the Root of the Truth) (176). The chapter argues that the battle over the curriculum and the practice of a decolonial pedagogy in Arizona is really about the state trying to “de-Indigenize Mexicans and Central and South Americans living the United States.” The chapter posits that this ban attempted to force Indigenous communities to assimilate fully into a Greco-Roman worldview and set of cultural practices and contributed to the “demonization,” erasure, and “de-humanization” of communities that are original denizens of the borderlands (178).

In light of the cyclic spectacles of violence directed at Mexicans and other Latin@s in the U.S. nation-state, where human beings are seen as “invaders” and “illegals” and treated as abjects, the political stakes of Our Sacred Maíz are resplendent. The consequences for Mexicans and Central...