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Maize in Mexico a Preliminary Survey

1946; Missouri Botanical Garden; Volume: 33; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2394428

2162-4372

Edgar Anderson,

Crop Yield and Soil Fertility

Mexico, even more than any other country of the New World, is the land of maize.There it is the actual staff of life, directly, as well as indirectly, for the vast majority of the inhabitants.Today, as in pre-historic times, the state of the maize crop is the commonest subject for conversation throughout the Republic.Maize is so thoroughly identified with Mexico that a survey of the varieties grown there might be useful to historians, geographers, and anthropologists, as well as to agronomists and geneticists.To students of maize in the United States the Mexican varieties have a special significance.Nearly all of the maize now being grown here must trace back, though often by very complex routes, to varieties once grown in Mexico.Some of the problems of commercial maize breeding in the United States and some of our archaeological problems cannot be solved until we have a more complete understanding of the maize of Mexico.Any attempt to get a general over-all picture of Mexican maize is a difficult problem.Maize in Mexico is extremely variable; it not only varies in the same way that it does in the United States and with greater magnitude; in Mexico there are further patterns of variation.In the corncrib or the field it varies from plant to plant as do our open-pollinated (1.е., non-hybrid) varieties, but the variation is nearly always greater than in an American cornfield or corncrib.In one Mexican village it often varies widely from field to field for the same variety.Unlike American maize, there are, in addition, great differences between varieties and from region to region.There are frequently as many major kinds of maize in one Mexican village as in the entire United States, yet when one goes to a village in another part of Mexico he may find quite another set of varieties.For instance, there are shown in figure 1 the varieties grown by two Mexican families; one (above), in Toluca near Mexico City; the other (below), from west of Autlan in Jalisco.It is unfortunate that photographs of the plants could not have been included in the picture since variation in plant type was even more extreme than that in ear type.A careful comparison of these two pictures will show that several quite distinct varieties are being grown by each family.Yet none of those grown in Toluca are found in Autlan or vice versa.As a matter of fact, progressive farmers and agronomists in either of these regions know little or nothing about the types of maize grown in the other.The ear at the left in fig. 1 (No. 1 below) belongs to an ancient, well-established type of maize widely grown ШЕТ нн dedicated to the maize growers of Mexico who received me with uniform courtesy and furthe de these dowd in their Арт: т and store-34 Much of the work reported herein was carried o M the author was a Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation.