Corn Is Our Blood: Culture and Ethnic Identity in a Contemporary Aztec Indian Village

by Alan R. Sandstrom

Book by Sandstrom, Alan R.

Genres: Anthropology

420 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Justinian · Rating 4 out of 5]

2018-07 – Corn is our Blood: Culture and Ethnic Identity in a Contemporary Aztec Indian Village. Alan R. Sandstrom (Author) 1992. 448 Pages.

This book is on round two of my guided study of Mesoamerican thought. This book looks at isolated Indian communities in rural Mexico. The book is the result of an anthropological study conducted over a 10-20 year period. The author focuses on religion and belief. He aims to discern what in the people’s religious beliefs and practices are Christian and what are pre-Columbian. By making these discernments it allows the author peer backwards through time to see aspects of pre-Columbian Aztec life. I personally find the transition from fully Aztec beliefs to nominal Christian beliefs very interesting. A veneer of enforced colonization adopted to shield what lays beneath. That is a very interesting story of adaptation and survival. Because there has been over 400 years of Christian missionary work and discrimination against native beliefs … natives tend to be reticent to share below the veneer with outsiders. Identity is a question of survival and for almost 500 years it has worked. Though the visible markers of identity are actually more rooted in colonial society than pre-Columbian culture. I have also been reading several professional journals and watched several talks he has given on YouTube. So for me … reading this book was more like getting reacquainted with the familiar than first contact. I will say … this author does a much better job than most in this field of explaining the cultural differences between a Christian formed culture and a culture that derives the majority of its beliefs and practices from non-Christian, non-monotheistic, non-written sources. The role of the shaman and the role of the ritual are very important in these communities. The author does allow himself to make several observations. He seems to come down on the side that the Aztecs were and are pantheistic. They did not have Gods in a way that the Spanish and by extrapolation moderns understood/understand them. The whole idea of “Aztec Gods” is a very contentious issue in the field. Good book. Some of the longer transcripts of conversations seem filler … but dealing with a culture that operates indirectly ..it does give the reader a taste of the effort required for understanding.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

“That’s a weird name for a book,” said the bookstore cashier where I purchased Corn Is Out Blood by Alan R. Sandstrom. Of course, things that are unfamiliar are thought of as weird by default. And there is nothing more unfamiliar than a culture you know nothing about. Besides, the title is an idiom and, linguistically speaking, an idiom is a metaphorical phrases that makes no sense when translated into another language. Only those fluent in the language and culture will understand what it means. That is the value of the social sciences and, in this case specifically, anthropology. The author of this book did fieldwork in Mexico for the purpose of being able to explain a foreign culture to those from outside that culture. His intention is to prove that, contrary to what outsiders say, the people he studied are making effective rational choices in the maintenance of their ethnic identity given the living conditions they are faced with.

Sandstrom spent several years off and on over two decades with Nahua Indians in Mexico located in the Amatlan region of Veracruz state. The Nahuas are contemporary descendants of the pre-colonial Aztecs and speak Nahuatl as their language. Very few of them are fluent in Spanish. They mostly survive by subsistence farming, largely maize and beans, although they sometimes take surplus produce to market. Through language, religion, and clothing, they maintain a fiercely independent ethnic identity that is remote from the dominant mestizo identity of most Mexican citizens. Loyalty to their traditions and identity has caused many mestizos to call them irrational, especially because they live so precariously, being marginalized socially and economically, when they could join modern society and live more comfortably with greater wealth. Sandstrom therefore desires to prove that their supposedly irratoinal clinging to tradition is actually a strategy for survival in a host culture that is hostile to them.

The book starts out with a brief history of the Indian people in Mexico beginning with the pre-Conquest Aztec empire up to contemporary post-Mexican Revolution times. The Nahuas have suffered persecution and marginalization all along the way from the conquistadors, the Catholic church, and the modern mestizo state. They are therefore relegated to remote ejidos, or communally owned farmlands, and have little contact with the outside world. But they aren’t hostile people at all. Sandstrom describes them as gentle, quiet, good natured, and avoidant of conflict. The opening chapters are useful, interesting, and informative. The biggest problem is that some of the personal testimonies are dry and a little difficult to follow. However, they do illustrate the types of problems the Indians have with government officials and law enforcement that is corrupt, violent, and exploitative.

The book progresses into chapters on daily life for the Nahua people. Since they are subsistence farmers, agriculture plays a central role in their lives. Their milpas, or farming territories, are arranged according to ownership and, after a chapter describing those ancestral categorizations of geneologies and familial structures that anthropologists love so much, we learn that the Nahuas are patrilocal with groupings of brothers being the central building block of social organization in their society. The distribution of milpas is based on this form of social organization. They also use slash and burn techniques of agriculture and crop rotations that are loosely related to their sometimes unpredictable rainy seasons. All of these horticultural realities have a direct influence over the Nahua’s world view and religious practices. When they say that “corn is our blood” they literally mean that without corn they would die. As a source of food, health, income, and meaning it is the most important thing to them. In America we might think of money in a similar way since, like it or not, we can’t live without it within the context of our culture.

At one point, Sandstrom argues his case that Nahua people are highly rational even though mestizos insist they aren’t and just blindly follow traditions even though it would make more sense to modernize and join the market economy. One claim they make against the Nahuas is that they inist on making maize their staple crop even though beans fetch higher prices at the market. Sandstrom points out that maize is more cost effective, less labor intensive, and easier to grow in high quantities on a regular schedule. Beans on the other hand require higher monetary investments, grow irregularly, and are more likely to get eaten or contaminated by vermin. Beans are also more difficult to harvest and transport to the market. Maize is simply more efficient and more reliable. The mestizos could always ask the Nahuas why they prefer it, but they are human and that means it is better to live in the certainty of their own illusions than to find out the truth.

After describing the material culture of the Nahuas, Sandstrom goes on to examine their religious practices, most of which revolve around their horticultural cycle. They believe in a type of animism or pantheism that is similar to what Hindus and Buddhists believe. There is one unifying spirit permeating the entire world and we only see it in fragments because of our own natural limitations. Like other Aztec derived cultures, they believe in wind spirits that cause illness, accidents, and death. During ceremonies, they attract and then banish them through the use of figures made out of colored paper. Their religious rituals are performed to maintain a balance in the interaction between the material and the spiritual world. Shamans are the religious authorities of the Nahuas and aside from performing rituals, they also act as doctors, fortune tellers, and politicians in the ejido.

By the time Sandstrom returns to Amatlan in the 1980s, the Nahuas have begun to change. The government has built roads into Amatlan along with sturdy houses. They are in the process of bringing in electric power. More Nahuas are learning Spanish and going into the cities to work. American missionaries have also discovered them and done some damage too. A rift in the community happens as Protestant converts refuse to interact with the other Nahuas and the missionaries insist that vaccines are evil so a portion of the converts die from an outbreak of measles that could easily have been prevented.

The end of the book is a thorough examination of how the Nahuas benefit from having a strong ethnic identity that sets them apart from the mestizos in the surrounding areas of Veracruz.

Alan Sandstrom has written a fascinating book about the Nahua people. He advocates for them by making and defending the claim that Nahuas are rational despite what others think. There is one point where he drops the ball in his argument. He addresses the reason why Nahuas keep farm animals even though they don’t eat meat, don’t use them for farm labor, and don’t see them as status symbols. They are economically inefficient because they cost a lot to feed, but he claims the Nahuas keep them so they have something to use their unusable milpas for. But if those milpas are unusable, why have them in the first place? Despite this one weak point, the other arguments he gives are sufficiently strong enough to support his claim. Even without the theoretical argument he makes, this book would still be interesting as it gives such a clear impression of what it is like to live in this culture. And it seems like the ultimate work on anthropology since it is so accessible to lay people without losing its value for professional anthropologists. It isn’t bogged down or made confusing with abstract theories and endless references to other scholars in the field the way a lot of anthropology books tend to be. Better still, the author doesn’t glorify the Nahua people by making them look quaint or by turning them into noble savages of the 20th century. He makes them out to be ordinary people living ordinary lives in a way that is outside the ordinary for most of us.

I’m no expert in the social sciences, but if anybody ever asked me to recommend books from that field Corn Is Our Blood would be one of the first suggestions I would make. Humanizing people in other cultures isn’t a task that should have to be done, but unfortunately it is and this book does a good job of it. It also adds another dimension to whatever it is you know about Mexican society and culture. Like anybody else, I love Mexican food, but there is so much more to this fascinating country and its richly layered culture that should be learned about. You might as well start by letting Alan Sandstrom point you in the right direction.

[Aurel Mihai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not only is this accessible to a non-specialist, it is surprisingly engrossing. It is well written with an eye for appropriate detail without getting lost in the weeds and covers a large swath of what was contemporary Mexican Indian villager life in the 1970s and 80s in a remarkably efficient way, hitting the highlights and getting bogged down only briefly when discussing religious rituals, which are clearly the author's main interest.

I don't normally read books on anthropology or Mesoamerican natives so I find it somewhat hard to judge this work in the superlative, meaning to me that it belongs in any well read person's library. I don't know how it compares to others of its kind. There are two other points that make it stand out in such a way that I doubt most of its peers would compare favorably. First, there is that balance I just noted that makes it both well paced and relatable, but there is something more to it that is difficult to describe. It is written in such a way that, at least when I read it, makes it difficult for me to refrain from drawing parallels between the traditional Huasteca people and every other minority ethnicity I can imagine - the meta minority, if you'll permit. The author himself invites this in his closing arguments, but it is evident throughout the work. This point makes this particular book invaluable as a looking glass upon ethnicity as a whole and perhaps upon understanding the habits of minority groups elsewhere and the resulting conflicts. Perhaps this is an unfair conclusion and I'm sure that each situation has its own specific details that make it unique, but on the whole it seems appropriate, if not inevitable.

Lastly, there is the coincidental timing of the author's travels to the Huasteca. I do not want to give away too much, but I think this work represents a contemporary snapshot of a dying tradition. The author hints strongly at this point as well. In this way the work captures a unique moment, like the exact moment a star goes nova, which may be applicable to other situations, and it is complete in the sense that, even if one were to return to this area to recreate this study, it would be impossible to experience this situation again or to write this book again with anything like the kind of insight that the author has into the situation.

[Emily Eck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three times I walked out of a class with Dr Sandstrom and realized in 90 minutes I'd had an explosive epiphany and that my view on life and the world had been irrevocably altered. For that, I feel blessed and grateful to have been his student.