2023 MIT
I look at the ‘hybrid’ as the categorical focus indexed by maize within the captivating intersection of magical realism and modernity as depicted in the 1949 artwork ‘Río Revuelto’ by the Mexican artist José Chávez Morado. Embraced as a symbol of the ‘natural’ and the anthropological, the trace of maize harkens back to its lineage of simultaneous domestication between the grain and the human. Continually re-transforming, the dissection of maize goes from the micro into the macro as a dominant agent and embracing symbol. Using the ‘hybrid’ as a continuous model of interaction that opens into kaleidoscopic multiplicity, humans and maize have developed as symbionts with each other 1. Situated in the particular context that overlapped with the involvement of the Rockefeller Foundation in the Mexican agricultural landscape, maize was an object of study that would lead to the project of food sustenance for rapid population growth in different countries and would later become the base for the Gene Revolution (GMO)2 3. Maize embodies (parallel to its industrialization) the potential for disruption of nationalist fixing representations by allowing an ongoing process of readings and transformations.
This research paper looks into the hybrid, as a term borrowed from scientific botany/animal husbandry, and how, as a categorical understanding, extends into other lenses, as depicted by Chavez Morado’s ‘Río Revuelto.’ Threading from plant/crop disciplinary methodologies into cultural hybridity (considered through the work of Homi Bhabba and Bruno Latour), I examine the hybrid as a fundamental subject in artistic representation movements throughout the 20th century in post-revolutionary Mexico. Maize, as an object of study for both the artwork ‘Río Revuelto’ and the Mexican Agricultural Program, becomes a ‘cash crop’ for my dissected interpretations of transformed nationalisms, emphasizing how the idea of the hybrid is eternally under construction.
[full essay available upon request]
Notes:
1 Using symbionts as “a simultaneously cultural and biological condition.” Caroline A. Jones, “Symbiontics: A Polemic for Our Time,” in Jones et al., Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere, 13.
2 Hamdan MF, Mohd Noor SN, Abd-Aziz N, Pua TL, Tan BC. Green Revolution to Gene Revolution: Technological Advances in Agriculture to Feed the World, 1, 2022.
3 The period from 1940-1970 is dubbed as the ‘Mexican Miracle,’ in which the country’s development strategy produced sustained economic growth (the national economy growing over 6% each year).