CORN: A SACRED LINK BETWEEN THE ANDEAN AND THE GUARANÍ PEOPLES

Cars, equipped with loud and low-quality speakers, selling food around the residential neighborhoods, are still common in many Latin-American cities. We are able to recognize a jingle, just by listening to the first part of the lyrics, like this one from Brazil: "Olha aí, olha aí, freguesia! São as deliciosas pamonhas. Pamonhas fresquinhas, pamonhas caseiras, é o puro creme do milho-verde. Temos curau e pamonhas. Venha provar, minha senhora. É uma delícia! Pamonhas, pamonhas, pamonhas." When listening to these words, about one of the most traditional desserts in Brazil, it's impossible not to make our mouths water. The most varied corn-based dishes have something in common: it is very difficult to find someone who doesn't like at least one of them. Sweet corn pudding, salted corn pudding, curau, corn cake, tortillas, tacos, cooked corn, popcorn, canjica, mungunzá, corn cake, couscous, Paulista couscous, corn juice, corn ice cream, corn soup, green corn angu, fried polenta... the list is endless, such is the versatility of this millennial food. Now, have you ever wondered what your life would be like without corn? If you, like me, can't do without this delicacy that we associate with everyday life and with varied festivities, it is time to celebrate the encounter of the Guaraní with the Andean peoples, which gave us access to the edible gold.

In the Brazil before Brazil, whose name Pindorama gives the tone of the place, many indigenous groups contribute at the cost of much bloodshed, to this nation we know. Today, in the coastal region are still the most populous capitals of the country such as Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, Recife and São Paulo. The most expressive ethnic groups who live there are the Guaranís, from Espírito Santo to Rio Grande do Sul, and the Tupinambás, from Rio de Janeiro to Paraíba. It is noted here, that the Cidade Maravilhosa and the Christ Incarnate in Us are the indigenous coastal Babylon. This coastline of green, yellow and blue immensities of the most diverse shades, occupies the Atlantic Forest biome, which today, after 523 years of colonization and extractivist and developmental logics, has lost more than 87% of its original vegetation. Therefore, when I talk about the Guaraní and the Tupinambás in the present tense, using verbs such as give, contribute, and live, thus going against the traditionalist and Eurocentric history books that insist on placing the indigenous people in the position of mythological beings, inhabitants of the past, I am not only recognizing the resistance of these ethnic groups that are still alive in their villages and also in our veins and collective memories, but I am also doing it as a political act, rescuing the importance of "learning to be Indians," advice brilliantly presented by anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. If today only 12.4% of the most violated forest in the world is standing, this sad fact is a direct result of the fact that we, Atlantic foresters from Pindorama, did not learn from our ancestors who emigrated from the Amazon thousands of years ago, that a standing forest is the true wealth of a people.

Perhaps you, the reader, are not familiar with the word Pindorama, the name given by the Guaranís to this coastal region, blessed by God and beautiful by nature. The word comes from the terms pind'ob (palm tree) and orama (spectacle). Here we already have relevant information about the cosmogony of the original peoples, and how it totally diverges from the interests of the colonizers who arrived here. If for the natives Pindorama is the spectacle of the palm trees, where our home is to be admired and consecrated just as it is, for the conquerors, this land of inexhaustible natural resources is to be cut down and commercialized. The Pau-Brasil, the first tree to be considered merchandise, named Brazil.

THE GUARANÍS

Approximately 400 AD is the most accepted date among anthropologists and archaeologists about the birth of the Guaraní culture as it is understood, in the Amazon region that today corresponds to the state of Rondônia. They migrated first to the Chaco region, a region that corresponds to Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina, and reached the Brazilian coast, where they continued to divide and spread until they occupied a vast territory that today corresponds to the southeastern, central-western and southern states of Brazil, entering where today is Uruguay. Bolivia is the country where contact between the two peoples is supposed to have happened, making the exchange of foodstuffs possible. The Peabiru Trail, an enigmatic network of trails that for its amazing 4,000 kilometers crossed and connected the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans without causing any damage to nature, would have been the link between the peoples. This path, filled with legends, myths, and stories, dates back 500 to 400 years to the Christian era, according to some historians, while others suggest a much more distant year, 10,000 years ago, in the Paleolithic period. One of the most interesting and curious myths is that the path would have been designed in imitation of the paths of the Milky Way. We won't know until we cross it while watching the stars, but one concrete fact is that the 1975 LP Peabiru, a collaboration between artists Zé Ramalho and Lula Côrtes, is to this day the most valuable record in all of Brazilian music history.

For both the Guaraní and the Andean peoples, corn is considered a sacred food and must be treated with great care, respecting the best time to plant it and the rituals surrounding its harvest, baptism, and consumption. In the Southern Hemisphere, the Guaraní plant corn between August and September, to get the best out of the harvest, while in the Northern Hemisphere, the Andean, Mesoamerican and North American peoples plant it between February and March. Avaxi Ete'i in the Guaraní language means 'real corn', and its grains are much more nutritious than the transgenic ones present on Brazilian tables. Within this large denomination, there are also the species avaxi ovy (blue corn), avaxi ju (yellow corn), avaxi ü (black corn), avaxi pyta (red corn), avaxi xi (white corn), and their mixtures, when the cobs contain more than one color. In cultures that perceive the earth as a living, sacred entity, offerings are a fundamental part of giving thanks for food. Once the avaxi ete'í are ready for harvest, the next step is to consecrate it by preparing the mbojape, a corn dumpling made from the grated kernels and baked inside the leaf of the cob itself. This cookie, made by the women of the community, represents their work inside the houses of prayer. Finally, the shaman, or spiritual leader of the community, blesses the avaxi ete'í with smoke from the petyngua (the sacred Guaraní pipe) and then the corn can be prepared in any way desired: boiled, baked, in a cake, pie, mashed, and whatever else the community's creativity comes up with.

LER: NOSSA SENHORA APARECIDA, UM SÍMBOLO NACIONAL ALÉM DE RELIGIÕES

Corn is a millennial food dating back approximately 7 thousand years B.C., where today is Mexico. Fruit of human ingenuity, the food was genetically developed by the Mesoamerican Indians, by crossing different plants. This means that, long before the genetics corporations, corn was already an object of experimentation. If today we have access almost exclusively to yellow transgenic corn, planted on a large scale in gigantic monoculture farms, this is the result of many decades of planning, with the direct influence of US billionaires, among them Nelson Rockefeller. The Rockefeller family, owners of large oil companies such as ESSO, came to Brazil proposing to help the productivity of Brazilian corn, which was then very diverse and difficult to produce on a large scale. With years of genetic modifications in the grain, today the corn seeds produced in Brazil are practically patented and sold by giant North American genetic laboratories, making the producers their hostages. It is estimated that 93% of all the corn produced in Brazil is transgenic seed, and of all the corn produced in the country, 70% is intended to be sold as animal feed. Unfortunately, our grain does not come from Pindorama. But don't despair, there is hope. EMBRAPA (Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation), our state company responsible for, among other things, preserving our biodiversity, keeps in its building in Brasília about 4 thousand corn species, among which 300 are directly linked to indigenous cultures. Moreover, in the Guaraní and other ethnic villages, the millennial tradition is maintained of cultivating corn in the season that nature asks for, respecting the sacred procedures of planting, harvesting, and preparation, and also of preserving the greatest possible diversity of this sacred vegetable. Our impediment is that Brazil was founded on a productivist logic, in which there are too many latifundia, too many huge monoculture farms, and too little space for indigenous people, quilombolas, and farmers, those who preserve traditions and really care about food.

WE NEED TO LEARN HOW TO BE INDIANS

The first step in demystifying the way indigenous people think, feel, and act is to understand their relationship with nature. The word indigenous, of Latin origin, means "native of that place", that is, a person who has not been expelled from his native land. Many Native Americans, although not completely eliminated by the colonizers, were expelled from their lands. Today, in the middle of the city of São Paulo, the M'Bya Guaranís, who have occupied Jaraguá since the 17th century after being expelled from their lands, suffer with the pressures of real estate speculation that puts men, women, the elderly and children under constant risk. The positivist and developmentalist vision of Brazilian politicians, with greater force in the Southeast, is the explanation for the Guaraní presence in the backlands of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Goiás and Mato Grosso. Until today, the Guaraní and many other ethnic groups fight for the right to preserve or return to their original lands.

The second step is to stop framing Indians in one big, homogeneous group. The word Indian, for a long time used to designate all the original peoples of the Americas, refers to the inhabitants of India. As wonderful and deeply pluralistic as the Indian people are, this term would not fit with the meaning we seek, explained in the paragraph above. Each people have its own customs, language, worldview and even among the Guaranís themselves, who in Brazil are divided into three large groups: M'Bya, Nhandeva and Kaiowá, there are notable differences in customs, spirituality, rituals and even in language.

"When Ruth gleaned singing in the fields of Boaz

and Jesus was blessing the ripe wheat fields

I was just the native bró of the Amerindian tabas.

I was the slave's heavy and constant angu in the exhaustion of the hayloft.

I am the coarse and modest bread of the small farmer.

I am the economic flour of the proletarian.

I am the polenta of the immigrant and the CRUMB

of those who begin life in a strange land.

Food for pigs and for the sad MOO of cargo.

What I plant does not raise commerce, nor does it advance money.

I am only the generous and carefree abundance of the storerooms."

Prayers to Corn, Cora Coralina

The poetess from Goiás, Cora Coralina, published her first book at the age of 75, 61 solar cycles after she started writing. She was a lady who knew how to respect life and the demands of time. A lady who knew that the basic food of humanity should not be for the enrichment of people. Sadly, to our melancholy of a possible Brazil, there is no respect for cycles in the market logic, only unbridled profit. With the excuse of productivity, supposedly in favor of feeding more people, just as they had already done with wheat, corn is modified so that companies make more money while they sell most of their production to cattle farmers, when only their surplus, a grain of very low quality, is destined for consumption by the population that the producers claim to prioritize.

Between 2016 and 2017 on the country's largest television network, Rede Globo, a propaganda about agribusiness said, "Agribusiness is tech, agribusiness is pop, agribusiness is everything." However, according to a survey by IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), family agriculture represents 70% of the food consumed in Brazil, so it is not agribusiness, but rather small producers, who really feed the Brazilian population. The advantage that agribusiness has is money to invest in advertising, such as this one on Rede Globo, which curiously stopped supporting soybean and cattle producers, to show a more progressive face towards indigenous peoples. Could it be that the owners of the large land properties were more pro-Bolsonaro than the broadcaster expected?

Reconnecting with the land is essential for humanity, so the protagonism in the 21st century must belong to the indigenous peoples, who know how to respect the natural cycles of plants and animals. The corn, multiplying and sacred, has become a symbol of friendship and solidarity among the peoples of the American continent, reminding us that these new times must be collective, collaborative, and participative. In this virtual reality, where what we really seek is connection with other humans and nature, we know that sharing publications can be cool, but sharing corn is more than that, it is divine. Now tell me, before traveling these 4,000 kilometers and these 2,500 years, who would have imagined that in a simple tamale, a pamonha or a tortilla, the history of humanity was hidden?

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