An interview with Keitlyn Alcántara, author of “An Archaeology of Milpa Cultures: Maize and Ecological Worldbuilding in Central Mexico”
Keitlyn Alcántara is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Indiana Bloomington. She is also the author of An Archaeology of Milpa Cultures: Maize and Ecological Worldbuilding in Central Mexico (University Press of Florida, 2026). She was kind enough to chat about her book and the links between culture and agriculture.
First question, a classic question. How do you describe your book to someone who hasn't read it yet?
My book is mixing narrative and archaeology and some ethnography. And I'm looking at how corn shapes our lives, how corn and other plants shape our lives, both in Indiana and in Mexico, and how plants can kind of help us to have less climate anxiety because they're constantly doing things that we as humans might not notice or pay attention to. And that's part of why humans and corn have co-evolved and have created this really close cultural tie.
What do you hope your book will achieve in the world? What's the impact you want it to have and do you have an ideal reader?
To be completely honest, it was a tenure book, but I also resisted that a little bit. I illustrated the book, as well, with the hopes that it wouldn't just disappear into some archive of books about archaeology and corn. I'm hoping that by having some narrative in there, by having images in there, it's something that will still get people interested and reading and engaging with it, even in this age of AI and nobody's reading anymore. And I think it will probably impact people who are interested in studying environmental studies, people who are interested in archaeology, people who are interested in Mesoamerica, Mexico, maybe people who have these kind of border backgrounds and histories of these two spaces.
I’m always interested in how, despite the struggles we’re having in higher ed with the liberal arts, the outside world is interested in these things. The Rest is History is one of the most popular podcasts in the world. And if you're on Twitter, there are all these random people who are pulling up stuff from Library of Congress and like posting regularly. There's a person on Twitter called MoundLore. His account is all about Indian mounds in North America. And he uses LIDAR images and things like that. And he has thousands of followers. There's this gap between what we're doing professionally and getting people in the room. But there are people who are interested in these things, if we can just somehow get to them.
I don't know if you mind if I like go off on a tangent. I think a lot about the book and about the things that I'm writing about and teaching, is about how much we've lost this ability to learn by feeling, doing, like experiencing. We're very focused on book learning and rote learning. And learning as a way to master something, instead of learning as a way to explore it. And I think that's something the book attempts to do. It started out as this archaeological project, but then in the experience of doing this archaeological project, I started meeting people, meeting plants, and that feeling of being outside, of tasting things, of smelling things, is what really transformed my experience in graduate school and as a professor now. And that's what I've seen is the thing that most gets students to not be intimidated by learning and to actually feel like they have something to contribute, because everybody is constantly sensing this world. You have information about the world in you. So it's just a way to remind people of that, right? We all know things. We all have the capacity to know things. It doesn't just exist in these academic spaces, but what we have in these academic spaces is maybe more like time and resources to really dive down these rabbit holes and study things really profoundly.
That's cool. All right, I want to get into some questions that kind of break down the book's title, but maybe moving in reverse order. So how do you define “world building?”
So I think about kind of our sense of crisis right now and fear of climate shifting and, you know, political order shifting and so many things that are changing right now and that people feel like we're in crisis and so many different levels of the term. But there's this other idea that sense of crisis comes with, this idea that it's inevitable, that we're heading linearly towards a path that we kind of don't have a way back from. But one of the things that I think is really prevalent in Mexico, in Latin America, is that through time people have built kind of alternative realities within whatever is going on at the state level or at the national level. There are little pockets of places where people are living their life in a different way, maybe not participating in the larger economic markets or maybe not participating in larger educational systems in the same way. And that allows you to realize that there's more than one way the future could go. There's more than one way that you can respond to crises.
The book really focuses on Tlaxcala, Mexico, which is a place that contemporarily is a center of seed sovereignty movements and protecting native seeds from Monsanto and Bayer and all these big corporations. But the people who are doing that protection work are really small-scale farmers who don't have a lot of economic capital. And so, they kind of push back at this idea of what's inevitable. “These companies are going to take over everything. This is our future. This is what we're stuck with.” And they're saying, no, if we change the way that we engage with one another, if we organize, if we change the way we're seeing, the way that plants shape our worlds, then we can create something that's different. So that world building is just having other possibilities present in our minds and then acting as if they were possible until they are possible.
Very cool. So, my next question, I think you've already partly answered, but why ecological world building rather than different type? Is it just because maize/corn is so important to the region and to the Americas, or do you think ecological is always the first way to do world building?
Yeah, that's a really great question. I think something that working with the farmers that I do has made me more aware of is that fact that we are in an ecological world no matter where we are. There are a lot of really cool people in Mexico City who are doing projects about all the wildlife and plant life that's even in the most—one of the biggest cities in the world, one of the most urban spaces in the world. And I do think that when we're able to notice, because it's there whether we notice it or not, but when we're able to notice these ecological worlds around us, one thing that they do is they kind of provide us with this kind of worldview that there's the earth is focused on reproducing life. And there are a lot of things that we try to control as humans, but plants and animals and other beings are also trying to reproduce life. And if you just kind of give them that space and pay attention and notice that that's happening,
then it's not all on us. It's definitely on us to like not destroy mass scale, but there are all kinds of things happening, even at the microbiome level that we don't see and understand. So the ecological is kind of a nod to the reality that we're part of a big system and humans are only one part.
That makes sense. Now, I know corn in the Americas, Central America especially, plays a really significant role. Are there other cultures that have a similar crop that's as central, you think, to identity? Or is this really just a “here” thing?
No… I'm trying to figure out how like deep into the corn narrative to go… but corn is something that I think is the most visible to us now because of the way that it was adopted into industrialization and the way that it was just taken all around the entire world. And it became this thing that was really legible across cultures because almost every culture had corn imposed on it once, you know, the Columbian Exchange started. But there are a lot of really interesting studies about all the things that corn actually pushed out that were like the local corns, like millet in West Africa and in North America, in the region where I am now in Indiana.
This area, the Midwest, had a lot of relationships with forests and wild plants. Things that were shaping daily life and seasonality and the way societies organized, similarly to corn. But because they were not seen as productive crops when industrialism started, we kind of lost that thread. There are a few archaeologists who are working in the region who I really admire, who are kind of re-exploring some of these things that now we would call weeds or that we would just think like, well, that's just a grove of trees, but really there are also plant relationships that were heavily tended and heavily influencing social life.
Your book also looks at how this type of agricultural system helps people kind of resist different empires. You've already said a little bit about it, but can you say a little bit more about how that works?
One of the main ideas in the Milpa is, again, this idea that there are your main crops, like corn, beans, squash, the things that you intentionally plant. And I think it's the most familiar to people who are in contemporary agricultural spaces in the global North. Like it's what you do when you plant a garden, when you plant fields. But in addition to that, they have plants that are cultivars. So these are things that will grow around your main crop and that you might protect or reseed. So maybe like medicinal plants or things that you use often. And then there are also wild plants, things that we think of as weeds. Lamb's quarters and purslane are some really big ones that reproduce really, really quickly. And they're constantly adapting to shifts in the climate. They're predicting whether there's going to be drought, etc. So they just survive everything. And they are just really adept at being able to adapt to different social and environmental changes. By having this three-part kind of organization, there's always food and there's always something there to support the community.
In Tlaxcala, it was a pre-Hispanic city that really wasn't studied or written about very much because of its alliance with the Spanish when they arrived. In Mexican history, it's been written out of history in a lot of contexts because it was seen as this traitor. So the idea of them being able to resist the Aztec empire that spread was always kind of this question mark. Like they were very close to the empire. The place where I work in Tlaxcala is only a two-hour drive from Mexico City, but somehow they were not part of the empire. Well, why? But also simultaneously, it’s like, well, don't worry about it. The Aztecs dominated everything else and this is just an anomaly. Part of my work has been to explore how, if they at certain points in time were completely cut off from that regional trade network, were they able to survive? One of the things is really adopting and leaning into this ecological system. They had a lot of resources that were rivers and lakes and trees, as well. And they just very quickly became experts in it and learned how to use everything that was around.
How did you become interested in this topic? How did you know this was the thing for you, that you wanted to study for a while?
Well, my family is from Mexico, from central Mexico. I ended up at this site, kind of, you know, graduate student things. My advisor knew somebody at the site. I ended up there, but it was also really close to my family. I kind of knew the region a little bit. I was doing isotope analysis for my dissertation, which is a very dry science, or it was when I was starting out. It was very much “collect the samples, take them to the lab, analyze them, and then you have a spreadsheet.” And as I was doing that, I was also really enjoying the opportunity to reconnect with Mexico and in new ways. I was also asking people about plants while we were excavating and going to meals that people would invite me to. And this kind of more embodied knowledge of food systems and ecological systems started to kind of take shape. My dissertation is still mostly focused on the isotopes. I was doing this kind of on the side as I ended. It was the last chapter of my dissertation. I just kind of wrote up a bunch of conversations, interviews that I had with farmers. But then once I graduated, that's when I really started to dig into how much local ecological knowledge can help us understand archaeological context because people who have been part of lineages of ecological care, they are connected to that past. Even if there have been ruptures, there are things that get passed down, orally, but also just by knowing the plants around you. If you know how to read a plant, you can see when the seeds are ready to fall out into your hand and then harvest them, or like you can watch how it spreads and where it likes to be. So that's another way that this history gets passed on. And I just thought that was really cool and really different from the way we think about plants in the US. It was a really good counterpoint to the academic world of being in an office and sitting and not using your body and not paying attention to like the physical world around you. I really embraced that part of being able to do field work and research that was very much about sensing and experiencing these ecological spaces.
I think a lot of people, especially in the United States, if we don't work in agriculture, we don't really think about agriculture or plants. Should we be thinking more about it, past and present? My guess is you're going to say yes, but maybe say why a little bit more.
The final chapter of the book is about a space that I created here at Indiana University called the Healing Garden. And it was an attempt to connect a lot of the things I observed in Tlaxcala to the ability to teach about them here. My classes, the undergraduate classes, tend to have a broad array of students. Some of them are never going to care about agriculture. It's not like they're all studying environmental science. But something that has been reiterated again and again by having classes that come and learn through the garden is how much it helps them feel connected to the place they are, how much it helps them feel less isolated, how much it helps them regulate their nervous systems and anxiety and depression and all these things.
I think that if you look at human evolution and our history and our relationship to plants, it's only pretty recently that we really stopped paying attention to them. We've spent thousands and thousands of years co-evolving with them. So it makes sense that when you shut down that line of connection, you're going to have physical and psychological results. I think something that should matter to everybody and not just people who are interested in farming or in planting plants is to be aware of how we're so interconnected to all of the living things that surround us. Violence towards those spaces and those things ends up impacting us as well, ends up impacting us physically through cancers and different things that can happen to our bodies, but also emotionally, what happens when you're in a space that has no trees versus if you're able to take some time and go walk in some trees and how that just completely changes the cortisol levels in your body, things like that. I think there's not a lot of infrastructure in the US right now, but there are sometimes in different places like different walking groups or libraries often have different groups or parks and recreation have different groups for going and exploring the place you live.
I think something that's been interesting with the students is that they learn to see plants. Like pawpaw season is the end of the summer and the pawpaws are going to be ripe and all of a sudden you're going to notice and be like, oh, a pawpaw tree. I didn't even know what that was before. So it just kind of builds this sense of connection to place that I think everyone can benefit from.
That especially is a fruit of the early Americas, I think that pawpaws were one of George Washington's favorite desserts. But most people, even where it grows, don't even know that it exists. But it's good.
Yeah, it's been cool to get to know Indiana because I moved here for work. But it's been this really interesting place to learn about what plants have moved between Mesoamerica and Indiana. So we have a passion fruit, adapted to the climate up here. It lasts until like November.
Was there anything I did not ask you that you were hoping I would ask you?
I don't know if it's relevant right now, but I think this defense of native corns is particularly important right now because there's a whole bunch of things happening globally about trying to impose US trade systems and especially corn on Mexico. It's always a theme that's coming up again and again, but right now we're in a particularly tense time. I think one of the things that I tried to do with the book was show how even just shifting the type of seeds, the type of relationships that you have with main crop in a culture completely shifts the culture, completely shifts the values and the way that you can shape your relationships to people through culture. A lot of the ways that the corn in Mesoamerica is grown is very relational. You have big feasts and festivals and parties to harvest and to eat it together. And one thing that I often talk about with my students is how we have some of those similar things like a county fair, where you might go and eat corn at a certain time of year, but the intensity with which it's a tool of kind of reinforcing relatedness and interconnection is something that's really stripped away when it becomes something you get at Kroger, you know, or something that you don't know where it came from, the care went into it, etc. I think that would be the final point.
Interview conducted by Elizabeth Stice
