In the midst of the current globalized ideology of commodification of food and natural resources, maize —the basis of the Mexican diet—has become both the most valuable agrarian product of the 21st century and a major actor in the creation of the socio-spatial apparatus of national agro-production. The study of the concept of the plantation as an apparatus of control, as well as the dichotomies it produces. The study of the concept of the plantation as an apparatus of control, as well as the dichotomies it produces —urban-rural, monoculture-policulture, wild-domesticated—, guarantee an effective exploitation of the land, and establish the contemporary ideological parameters of the maize industry, as well as of its global commodification.

Replicating Resistance carries out a typological study of diverse agricultural systems, different modalities of land tenure, social dynamics and cultural economic models that have developed historically in Mexico -calpulli, hacienda, ejido- based on social property, and communal tenure. This unique model of fragmentation of the Mexican countryside, constituted of small territorial units or “patches”, occupies altogether an ample space in the national geography. Its preservation contributes culturally and symbolically to the generation of small resistances that offer a real opposition to the great capital, and its technical arguments that seek to question its viability as a unit of agricultural production. The historical-cultural understanding of maize as space and sustenance, materializes an argument for a retroactive critique that vindicates it as a habitable space and a viable future.