Species Don’t Exist

Chapter Seven samples my various discussions with botanists about how the species concept holding up. Their answers are consistently surprising, provocative and insightful. Taxonomists, I learn, are radically constructivist in their approach—though their work involves highly detailed and exacting identification of species. They increasingly vie against geneticists who promote identifying species by molecular analysis.

Racial Thinking

Chapter Three examines racial thinking from a number of angles, beginning with the nativist anxiety over transgenic threats to the razas de maíz that has pulsated through Mexican public discourse over the last decade; then shifting to agronomic efforts to survey the condition of the razas in the state of Guanajuato, specifically.

Epilogue

Conveys the threats facing taxonomy today, while making the case for its fundamental importance for addressing issues of biodiversity.

Follow the Species

Chapter One relates the history of maize genome sequencing projects, highlighting the competition between researchers in the U.S. and Mexico, then explaining how they combined to hone an “intimate knowledge” of the species. I introduce the lab space of LANGEBIO and the races of maize growing there, but also the mechanics of plant science generally.

Living Ethnographies

Chapter Six offers tours of the three gardens’ living collections, as well as discussions with taxonomists about how they decide what plants to display and how they organize their field collecting projects. Their representational challenges are immense—in the field and in the garden—and these botanists are well-aware they contend with a public whose attention is notoriously limited and generally not oriented towards encountering vegetative life forms.

Interlude

On one of my last days in Guanajuato, I visit the botanical garden and nature reserve, El Charco Ingenio, outside San Miguel de Allende. Driving from Ciudad Guanajuato, I climb up from the city (2,000 meters), through the mountains, rising up into the woodlands of pine and live oak (2,500 meters). This is likely the route Sessé and Mociño followed as they searched these mountains for plants they had not yet collected. The scent of pines is strong and sweet, the road narrow and twisting. I catch glimpses of the rocky soils of eroding lava cores until, once through the high pass, the terrain slowly morphs into savanna plains starting back around 2,000 meters. My colleague, geographer Karl Butzer, described this terrain as “Rough hill country and uplands, normally formed by ignimbrites tuffs with duricrusts, or lavas, appears to have had a medley of vegetation types, with scattered woodlands of mesquite or acacia, probably open” (1997, 162). Along the way, the car radio crackles with ...

Maize

Chapter Two explains how maize has been racialized in two distinct manners: singularly as “la raza maíz,” an emblem for indigenous or marginal peoples in Mexico, and in the plural, as with the fifty-nine “razas de maíz” that are a current popular and scientific concern in that country.

Care and Its Publics

Chapter Eight shifts gears to consider how publics are engaged by the gardens. This chapter shows how people varyingly interact with and respond to botanical knowledge as they encounter plants along branching garden paths. But it also examines important sites that are not open to the public—seedbanks, crucial sites for discussions of biodiversity but that also challenge our basic understandings of gardens.

Selfing

Chapter Four goes inside the lab, examining the genetic techniques by which the razas de maíz are broken down into mapping populations—more manageable samples of genetic structure and material. The initial focus is on the technique of selfing plants and the recent sexual history of maize, using these as the basis for transposing “care of the self” to “care of the species.”

How to Interview a Plant

Chapter Nine details my efforts to shift the ethnographic focus of this work onto the plants themselves. I narrate this through a nine-step, “how to” process, one that deploys “thin description” while confronting the problem of “plant blindness” and considering the ideal of “living thinking” as a means of knowing life forms.