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Chapter Two explains how maize has been racialized in two distinct manners: singularly as “la raza maíz,” an emblem for indigenous or marginal peoples in Mexico, and in the plural, as with the fifty-nine “razas de maíz” that are a current popular and scientific concern in that country.

Chapter Six offers tours of the three gardens’ living collections, as well as discussions with taxonomists about how they decide what plants to display and how they organize their field collecting projects. Their representational challenges are immense—in the field and in the garden—and these botanists are well-aware they contend with a public whose attention is notoriously limited and generally not oriented towards encountering vegetative life forms.

Chapter One relates the history of maize genome sequencing projects, highlighting the competition between researchers in the U.S. and Mexico, then explaining how they combined to hone an “intimate knowledge” of the species. I introduce the lab space of LANGEBIO and the races of maize growing there, but also the mechanics of plant science generally.

Chapter Three examines racial thinking from a number of angles, beginning with the nativist anxiety over transgenic threats to the razas de maíz that has pulsated through Mexican public discourse over the last decade; then shifting to agronomic efforts to survey the condition of the razas in the state of Guanajuato, specifically.

Chapter Four goes inside the lab, examining the genetic techniques by which the razas de maíz are broken down into mapping populations—more manageable samples of genetic structure and material. The initial focus is on the technique of selfing plants and the recent sexual history of maize, using these as the basis for transposing “care of the self” to “care of the species.”