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This story appeared in the Fall 2019 Letters & Science magazine.

At the center of the Mayan creation story is the teaching that human beings were fashioned by the gods from corn. Corn holds significance for the Aztecs, too, who dedicated festivals and rituals to this all-important grain. First cultivated in Mexico around 10,000 years ago, corn holds a very special place not only in Mexican cuisine, but in Mexican culture.

So when U.S. corn flooded Mexico’s marketplace under the North American Free Trade Agreement, the idea of corn as an import prompted massive demonstrations. Tens of thousands of Mexicans marched in the streets of Mexico City in 2007 under the banner “sin maiz no hay pais” (without corn, there is no country).

The uprising wasn’t triggered by pure economic necessity. Rather, says political scientist Erica Simmons, who studies social movements in Latin America, it was triggered by a threat to people’s sense of who they are. With more and more corn coming from outside Mexico and prices reaching unprecedented levels, many Mexicans felt they were losing a critical piece of their identity.

Political science associate professor Erica Simmons.

“It matters enormously in Mexico—the idea that Mexicans are producing less and less of the corn they consume,” she says.

Simmons’ work uncovers the deeper meaning of protest movements that center around subsistence goods with powerful cultural significance. Along with street demonstrations against rising corn prices in Mexico, she has studied water privatization in Bolivia. In both places, market forces threatened people’s access to a specific good that they saw as central to their culture.

In researching her book, Meaningful Resistance: Market Reforms and the Roots of Social Protest in Latin America, Simmons went door to door in Mexico and talked to strangers about the connections they felt between corn and their own “Mexicanness.”

“Even in Mexico City, there is a narrative about the Mexican countryside that continues to exist around corn that is very powerful,” Simmons explains. “You still have the ideal of the Mexican grandmother who hand-grinds the corn and makes tortillas.”

Simmons points out that the Mexican government was quick to grasp the significance of the issue, and responded by making a pact to cap the price of corn in government-run stores. That satisfied the protesters enough that the demonstrations stopped within a month.

But there were no universal price controls, and the price of corn continued to rise even as the protests waned. Simmons found that the key to resolving the issue was not so much the material matter of corn prices as it was the government's acknowledgement of the importance of corn in Mexicans’ daily lives.

“The state effectively communicated, ‘We care about this issue, and we’re looking out for you,’” Simmons says.

In Bolivia, by contrast, the federal government failed to take seriously the concerns of protesters who kicked off what came to be known as the Cochabamba Water War in April 1999.

The public uprising over a privatization plan that dramatically increased water rates led to violent clashes with police between 1999 and 2000. Finally, after months of protest, during which tens of thousands of marchers fought with police and one protester died, the national government reached an agreement with community activists to reverse water privatization.

Part of the reason for the different ways in which these conflicts unfolded, Simmons says, is that federal government officials in Bolivia lived far away from the water protesters, and failed to grasp their deep cultural attachment to water.

In order to understand that attachment, Simmons immerses herself in the places she studies. The most profound experience she had as a researcher was accompanying Cochabambans as they created irrigation channels to water their fields.

“They had communal events around opening and closing waterways, giving thanks to the Pachamama (the earth goddess),” she recalls.

“The idea that we interpret our politics through the lens of where we are living, and through the sense of self produced by our local community, is similar. People’s sense of self really matters in how they organize collectively.”

Simmons was fascinated by the intricate community notebooks Cochabambans used to keep track of whose turn it was to open or close an irrigation channel.

“Very meticulous regulation was intertwined with a very spiritual connection,” she says.

She sees a connection between the water protesters of Cochabamba and other indigenous water-rights activists, including opponents of the Dakota Access Pipeline who feared it would pollute drinking water for the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota.

“The message is not just about water as something physical that is necessary to survive, but a powerful piece of Native American identity,” she says. “It goes beyond the actual physical presence of the pipeline."

Simmons points to the work of her colleague Kathy Cramer, the UW political scientist whose book The Politics of Resentment helped illuminate a growing sense of alienation among rural voters in Wisconsin.

“The idea that we interpret our politics through the lens of where we are living, and through the sense of self produced by our local community, is similar,” Simmons says. “People’s sense of self really matters in how they organize collectively.”