A Brief History of Wheat
A poetic exploration of the colonialist legacy of bread.
Suggested soundtrack for this piece: Chan Chan — Buena Vista Social Club
Music echoes through the red clay wall. A pacific breeze dances with the sun setting, as the lights dim a summer evening is about to start in the little coastal Chilean town of Tongoy at our family restaurant Nuestro Mar (Our Ocean). Close to her side always I would carefully and thoughtfully watch my mother make dough, kneading it over and over again to make bread and empanadas for the busy and seemingly endless nights, as I hummed Buena vista social club unknowingly.
By looking at the history of wheat in my place of birth, Chile, bread became a map, a map to memories, love, family, religion, power, violence, displacement, distance, sorrow, and class. And to an awakening to the fact that food, scarcity, and malnutrition were weaponized against those of the working class for much longer than we are made to think. We see this exemplified in today’s food system with the exerting of foreign policy over governments and economies.
The last two years have put wheat in the minds and mouths of folks on a global scale. Locked in homes without the distractions of a day. Making bread felt cathartic, it helped pass the time, or metaphorically needed to ‘get that bread’ to pay for rent or feed our families.
What sort of questions rose to the surface while we waited for the bread to rise?
Hands sticky with dough, I spent a lot of time with uncertainty and wondered how scarcity plays a role in decision making . How memory also plays a vital role in the language we use to talk of the not so recent past.
In times of ongoing environmental crisis, violent border policies, violent land stealing, and a global pandemic that continues to impact us today, finding common ground around these topics continues to be equally awkward, difficult, and yet healing. Bread can be a common-ground vehicle. From Italy to Germany to the Middle East, everybody has a relationship to bread.
History at its best, they say, is the most subversive discipline, inasmuch as it can tell us how things that we are likely to take for granted came to be. Bread is the tool to examine and reflect on wheat’s history and relation to power, something deeply ingrained into our food systems. A tool to question coloniality by exploring wheat’s role as an economic agent, and the communal and social impact it has had for centuries. Wheat, The social and political agent since its cultivation, domestication, and commodification.
Working against colonialism, imperialism, and white heteropatriarchal supremacy takes many languages and vocabularies, and in the words of Audre Lorde, “As we come more in touch with our own ancient, non-european consciousness of living, as a situation to be experienced and interacted with… we learn more and more to cherish our feelings and to respect those hidden sources of power from where true knowledge and lasting action come from.”
Working against colonialism, imperialism, and white heteropatriarchal supremacy takes many languages and vocabularies.
Kneading it again and again, because with history there is also heartbreak, bread continues to mean security and comfort, and when we lack one we seek the other. It was incredible to see how bread spoke so many languages, how something so well ingrained in the backdrop of people's days was alive and well, full of complexities. It became an obsession to work through it, finding clues that connected wheat to a larger and much more violent system.
But where does it all begin? The impacts of the global land grab and current ecological crisis can be traced back as early as Ancient Mesopotamia, and the Roman Empire. Yet the first real accounts begin with the arrival of Christopher Columbus on the Island of Ayiti — known today as Haiti.
When he arrived on the shores of Haiti, Columbus met the Taino Arawak indigenous peoples. The journey across the Atlantic had left the colonizers in a state of weakness, hunger and homesickness. According to their ideals of living, what they required most was the importation of more European settlers and the cultivation of wheat fields and vineyards, cattle and hogs and draft animals. This was what the colony needed to “survive” in a Spanish manner in order to bring the ‘bounteous’ fertile land to social-historical life. What followed was a clear insertion of power through environmental degradation, lasting geological changes of land, and the brutal campaign of terror both to the land and to the Taino people.
Through this insertion of violence through power exhaustion what resulted was the growing proportion of labor from agriculture into an industry. This facilitated what came later known as the settler-colonial food regime.
The weaponization of agriculture, labor, and basic needs like food is what continues today in the form of systemic racism in our food systems that begin with agriculture, which is the product of labor and knowledge of enslaved Black people and displaced Indigenous people.
Land means power, and the respective descendants of stolen land are continually barred from land ownership– the means of production and the fruits of their labor.
Earth knowledge and practice were stripped as environmental and human degradation continued. Wheat became weaponized once again when it was introduced by the Spanish to Mexico with the arrival of colonizer Hernan Cortez in the Yucatan peninsula, Mexico.
The development and growth of wheat was closely associated with the religious mission system and the crown. Thus, while bread was fed to the most pious, in Mexico it was having profound effects on the environment, contamination of water, air and the reduction of biodiversity. Implementing racial superiorities and a hegemonic vision of who was in charge.
The land that previously served to nourish indigenous peoples and communities was now organized to meet the raw materials for export back to Europe, and the colonial conquest of Abya Yala continued. European colonizers spread from the north to south ensuing assimilation, displacement, disease, and genocide over native indigenous communities.Then, in 1687 a large-scale earthquake and a pest fungus ruined all the wheat crops in Peru, the largest wheat exporter at the time, the result was a severe tipping point for exportation and economic growth. This led Chile into its first economic boom, known as the first Cycle of Wheat.
La trilla, 1872 Chile. Trigo ilustrado
As the race for natural resources continued wheat became the leading grain in the economic market, capitalism had been centered by an emergent framework as the primary systemic determinant with profits to be gained overseas. Two cycles later and after 20 years had passed, agricultural competition coming from the United States, Canada, and England brought these booms to a halt. This was quickly followed by the Long Depression, a worldwide price and economic recession.
Yet the fractures, loss, grief, heartbreak and displacement exist presently as the ecological crisis unfolds, the hunger for power and the food for thoughts that exist in dreams and nightmares.
Wheat as an agent and conductor of dialogue, the tangible and material representation of imposition, loss, chaos, resilience, resistance, security, comfort and power still remains.
The body transformed in all its imperfections carved from the grain that travelled seas into the hands and mouths of the oppressor and the oppressed.
Fuelled with significance, it feeds all who humble themselves to its warmth and feeds the minds who question it.
It is imperative that this artistic research investigation is ongoing and with unanswered questions. Along with increased efforts to take into consideration and reflect; land-rights, place-based indigenous knowledge, alternative paths to understanding the role of food as a tool for power and our bodies and land as maps to tell these stories.
Full video of A Brief History of Wheat
