
Culture & Community | Food Justice | Arts & Culture | Arts & Anti-racism | Semilla Collective | Mazorca Mexican Cuisine
Lucy Gellman Photos.
The lyrics floated out over the floor, vocalists bathed in blue and pink light. Tortillita de maíz! Que viene de mis ancestras! Footfalls rang through the space, certain and succinct. Jarana and requinto did a musical two-step. Que viene de mis ancestras! Across a wall, five gem-colored ears of corn rested in a woman's cupped palms. Tortillita de maíz! Back onstage, the music flowed into a second verse.
It marked the Semilla Collective's fourth annual Festival de la Resistencia, held Saturday at Mazorca Mexican Restaurant in Hamden. A commemoration of the National Day of Corn (el Día Nacional del Maíz) fêted across Latin America, it became a celebration of migration, indigeneity and rootedness, from the Conchera dance tradition and on-the-fly zapateado workshops to husk-wrapped tamales with cheese and vegetables waiting inside.
"More than a meal, corn is part of our cosmology, the way that we understand the world," said Javier Villatoro, a founding member of the Semilla Collective and co-founder of Tortilleria Semilla. "We think of ourselves as people of the corn, and what we are doing today is not just feeding people with cornmeal, but also sharing a little bit about the tradition, the cosmology."
Traditionally, El Día Nacional del Maíz is celebrated in Mexico on the 29th of September, recognizing the significance of corn in the country that has cultivated it for millenia. While the official date itself is a relatively recent development, the history of corn, and its pre-colonial roots, go back thousands of years, with native varieties that are still grown in Tehuacán and Oaxaca.
Documents from the Aztec period, written in Náhuatl, chronicle the use of corn (or Cintli) before Spanish contact, showing how the food is not just a staple in the Mexican and Latin American diet today, but has been a source of spiritual and physical nourishment for thousands of years. Today, there are 64 varieties of corn in Mexico alone, according to the country’s National Commission on Human Rights (Comisión Nacional de los Derechos Humanos or CMDH).
The spirit of El Día Nacional del Maíz is not limited to Mexico, Villatoro added: similar celebrations exist in Guatemala, El Salvador, Venezuela, Colombia and Honduras among other countries. Corn is essential to Indigenous foodways, known as one of the Three Sisters with staple dishes that transcend man-made borders across South and Central America. In Spanish, there are at least six words for corn (maíz may be the most common term, but mazorca, elote, choclo, jojoto and marlo all refer to specific aspects of corn, from the fibrous cob to the size and sweetness of the kernel to its provenance).
Sandra Trigueros serves pupusas and atol de elote.
Maybe for that reason, Mazorca—which means “cob” or “ear of corn” in Spanish—seemed like exactly the right spot for Saturday’s festivities to unfold. On a stage drenched in flashing, neon light, musicians Maria Puente Flores and Mateo Cano of Pulso de Barrio gave an impromptu masterclass in son jarocho and zapateado, setting boards across the floor so attendees could follow along. On stage, Puente Flores tapped out a staccato rhythm—cha cha cha cha cha cha—and the room followed along, shoes tapping the floor until the room had exploded in sound, percussion heartbeat-like and coming right from attendees.
They were just getting started. Clapping along from onstage, Cano slowed down the beat—buh buh buh—and then increased it just as quickly, watching as Puente Flores lifted her skirts to show her feet, tapping along. On a platform at the front of the room, Ambar Santiago Rojas fanned herself with one hand, laughing as she lifted an imaginary skirt and danced along. When Cano began to sing from the stage, the whole room exploded into song with him.
Beside the restaurant’s far wall, dancers took the time—without missing a beat—to admire a new mural from artist Mauro Carrera, who is based in Philadelphia but hails from Veracruz. After a series of community meetings in September, Carrera painted the mural with the help of over 20 community collaborators, working over five days. In the finished work, a woman holds five ears of corn, each a mosaic of brilliant color, in her upturned palms. There is gray and red corn studded with pearlescent kernels, green and pink corn, corn that glows garnet red and sapphire blue.
Above the ears, the woman’s black dress bears the outline of a stalk, the silk and tassel pulsing blue over her heart. At her neck, vines spread out from thick, intricate black lines; yellow flowers bloom at her forearms and elbows. Around her, the wall splits into two thick, even halves of blue and orange. A halo of burgundy, the same red as the corn, surrounds her and encases a background of sky blue.
There Saturday for the festival, Carrera said that painting “fulfills me in a spiritual way”—as does his connection to Veracruz through his son jarocho practice. When he arrived in New Haven and Hamden last month, he was surprised by how welcomed he felt by members of the Semilla Collective, he said.
“To show up to a community I didn’t know and didn’t feel invited in … it feels like I’m at home and in the right space,” Carrera said Saturday night, a jarana hanging on a thick strap around his neck. “Corn unifies. It was the main nourishment of our ancestors, and it’s connected to the community.”
New Havener Lucia Nuñez del Prado, who was born in Bolivia and came to the U.S. to escape persecution (her mom is the human rights activist Tamara Nuñez del Prado), admired the finished work, for which she was the model. Growing up in Bolivia, she said, corn was integral to her daily life, from the sweet corn cake huminta to a hot, fragrant corn mash (usually it is made with purple corn) called api morado that greeted her with empanadas on cold days after school.
Api is a kind of comfort food, like an embrace in drinkable form. When it greets a person—especially after a long day, but also on a cold morning—“you feel warm,” she said. Of the mural, she added that “it was very fun and interesting—a lot of people think the corn is a simple thing,” and it is in fact anything but.
Around the room, food vendors, artists and musicians alike echoed that deep, reverent belief that corn is not just a form of physical sustenance, but also emotional and spiritual wellbeing. Framed by the street-facing windows, Daniela and Anna Gomez doled out steaming, husk-wrapped tamales from Tortilleria Semilla, a worker-owned cooperative that uses the indigenous practice of nixtamalization in its heirloom corn tortillas.
Their mom, Anabel Hernandez, is one of the co-founders of the tortilleria and a small business owner for soaps and wellness-based products that were also for sale. Hernandez, who lives in Meriden, hails originally from Tamaulipas, Mexico: food is part of how she keeps her culture alive hundreds of miles from home, and passes it on to her four kids.
“It makes me happy!” said Daniela. “It’s a celebration of people having an interest in my culture. Corn is something I eat every single day. To me, it’s very important—lots of my family’s meals would not exist without corn.”
Across the room, La Cocina de Sandra’s Sandra Trigueros served up her signature Guatemalan pupusas, just-thick corn cakes with beans and cheese, chicharrones and chicken. Beside the warming dishes and a large, bright bowl of pickled cabbage, she ladled butter-colored, steaming cups of atole that left sweet, carmelly notes of corn, sweetened milk and panela hanging in the air.
“Ohhh!” she said when asked about corn, bringing both hands to her heart. She burst into a smile, radiant. At the mic, Puente Flores had lifted a quijada and begun to play. “Corn is everything to me!”
Back onstage, members of Son Chaneques Rebeldes (an outgrowth of the Semilla Collective) crowded shoulder to shoulder, some cradling their instruments as others hopped up on a wood board in front of the stage, and prepared to dance. Just as they did last year, members wrote a song collectively, building off the traditional son jarocho folk song “La Indita.”
Tortillita de maíz/Que viene de mis ancestras/Que viene de mis ancestras /Tortillita de maíz, they began, members stepping up to the mics arranged onstage to add their voices to the mix. Tu sabor a deleitado/En todititas las fiestas/Tradición de lo sagrado /Que viene mis ancestras!
The verses carried attendees over the hundreds of miles that stand between them and the birthplaces of corn, the man-made borders and reliance on monoculture that has threatened forms of cultivation and preparation. Mi abuela de mañanita/Molía su nixtamal/Para hacer las memelitas/Con la leña en su comal, artist-activists sang.
On a wooden platform at the front of the room, collective members Fatima Rojas and Enedelia Cruz kept time, swinging at the hips with the sound of voices and instruments. Holding her mother’s hands as she two-stepped in tiny sneakers, Itandehui Foran-Cruz lifted her arms to her mother and settled immediately in her arms.
When Cruz headed toward the stage, restaurant co-owner Maricruz Hernandez took her place, beaming. From the stage, lights bathed everything in a fiery red light. Attendees listened from their seats, some rising to dance along the restaurant’s bright walls. The lyrics wrapped them in the sound of home, wherever it was to them.
Madre tierra celebramos tres hermanas que nacieron
Las semillas y los granos que con amor florecieron
Madre tierra celebramos tres hermanas que nacieron
Mother Earth we celebrate three sisters
The seeds and grains that blossomed with love
Mother Earth we celebrate three sisters
It also showed how the Collective, has continued to flower in its fourth year in existence. Throughout the night, Mazorca’s Maricruz Hernandez buzzed between vendor stations, restaurant tables and the stage, occasionally slowing down to serve up drinks at the bar.
As the child of Mexican immigrants, she said, she’s found a home in Semilla. Two years ago, she became close with members of the collective after the second annual Festival of Resistance at Bregamos Community Theatre. But she was often unable to make their events, because she was running the restaurant.
They ultimately brought those events, including their weekly meetings, to her. A year later, she’s so glad they did.
“Corn for me, it means family,” she said. “It’s symbiosis, right? It’s fortaleza! And—” she beamed “—it’s the name of my restaurant!”
As they tucked in to tamales from Tortilleria Semilla, artist Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez and her mom, Leticia, agreed and took it all in. Gonzalez Hernandez, who grew up Oaxacan in Fair Haven, likened the crop to a beloved ancestor. Over millennia, it has outlasted multiple forms of enslavement and colonization, including the Spanish in the 16th through 19th centuries and the French in the 19th century.
In the second half of the 1800s, Gonzalez Hernandez said, the French attempted to shift the cuisine—meaning the patterns of cultivation and agriculture—from corn to wheat. They were unsuccessful (she shouted out the book Que vivan los tamales!: Food and the Making of Mexican Identity). As she chatted, she nibbled at Semilla’s spin on elotes, a corn cob dressed with cheese, mayonnaise and crushed up hot cheetos.
For her family, it’s also a personal history: her mom makes tamales de rajas for holiday gatherings and special events, like birthdays and exhibition openings (her favorites, meanwhile, are traditional Oaxacan tamales, served in green banana leaves). Each year, they make the trek to Poughkeepsie for an annual Guelaguetza, a celebration of Oaxacan culture and heritage at which there are dozens of tamale vendors.
“Since we were babies, we were raised with corn,” said Leticia as her daughter translated from Spanish. “There are a million things you can make with corn.”
Gonzalez Hernandez smiled. “It’s so special that thousands and thousands of years later, we’re still celebrating eating it.”