
Can Corn Do More Than Feed Us?
Hear how this popular crop is helping craft a more sustainable future in Mexico.
Fernando Laposse
Apr 9, 2024
What do corn, craft, and Mexico have in common? The answer to this question comes in the form of Totomoxtle, a project and materials created by designer Fernando Laposse in collaboration with the village of Tonohuixtla. On view through July 7 in the exhibition Life Cycles: The Materials of Contemporary Design, Totomoxtle is an example of how good design can do more than please the eye—it can offer new pathways to preserving cultures, supporting local communities, and bringing balance to an ecosystem that has been exploited for far too long. In this Earth Month edition of the Magazine Podcast, we sat down with Laposse to discuss the origins of his Totomoxtle project and how corn is helping build a more sustainable future for people and planet.
See below for a transcript of the SoundCloud audio.
Fernando Laposse: You can’t talk about Mexico without talking about corn. We would have never had the amazing civilizations of Central Mexico and Guatemala—like the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Olmecs—without this plant. It guaranteed an abundance of food, which led to an abundance of stability, which was the only way to grow the culture and scale of these wonderful civilizations.
Narrator: Hi, my name is Arlette Hernandez. I’m an educator and audio producer here at The Museum of Modern Art. And that voice you just heard belongs to Fernando Laposse.
FL: I am a designer. But I also consider myself a craftsperson. Craft has to do with working with your hands and the power of one action that gets repeated over and over to create something truly beautiful.
Within the context of where I am situated in Mexico, craft is also much more than that. I think craft is what brings, in many cases, people out of extreme poverty. It’s about ingenuity and it’s about simplicity. You can make extraordinary things with very poor materials just through the power of making.
Narrator: On this episode of the Magazine Podcast, we’re celebrating Earth Month with a plant that’s been around for centuries. And we’re asking the question, “Can it do more than just feed us?”
FL: Corn is this wonderful crop that produces some of the most abundant sources of carbohydrates and energy, pure energy—starches, sugars. But it’s also a man-made crop. It’s an invented crop. The closest relative to corn is something called teosinte, which is a lot more like wheat, in a way.

Fernando Laposse doing marquetry with Totomoxtle material

Selecting seeds for next season
When we look at how we went from teosinte to modern-day corn, it’s a wonderful kind of story of collaboration between men and nature. It’s been estimated that this began 9,000 years ago in the central valleys of Tehuacán in the state of Puebla in modern-day Mexico. Basically, some ancient Mesoamerican found a teosinte that had both the male and female organs, and it could self-pollinate. This ancient Mesoamerican was like, this is super interesting, took a grain of that freak teosinte and planted it. By doing that, he or she started this incredible process of selective breeding, which led to the diversity of all the varieties of corns that we have nowadays.
What’s really fascinating to me is that there’s no way for corn to live by itself in nature. It needs people. And that’s another big component of my work.
Narrator: When I think of design, I think of things like furniture. So I asked Laposse, how is it that a designer gets interested in plants and farming?
FL: My family has always been involved in making and in being creative in a way. My father’s side of the family, they have been bakers for generations. I’m actually the first non-baker in five generations.
On my mom’s side, my grandfather was an architect. My mom became a painter. So I grew up between flour and eggs and watercolors and oil paints. It was a house that was always about being very appreciative of good food and of culture.
Narrator: But the seed for his fascination with farming can be traced back to a specific place.
FL: Tonahuixtla is a small farming community deep in the mountains of what’s called the Mixteca mountain range. Mixtecos are one of the many Indigenous groups of Mexico that are still present today. They speak their own language, and they have their own traditions that are still very much alive.
I have a personal connection to Tonahuixtla because of this man called Delfino Martinez. Delfino used to work in my dad’s bakery when I was a child, and he became really, really close to my father. So much that Delfino and Maria, his wife, would take care of me and my sister in the house, and they became almost like part of the family.
One summer they decided to invite us to their village. I was six years old at the time and my sister was four. We spent two incredible weeks with them. And I think It was the first time where I realized how different Mexico is and how much diversity of people we have. For me, it was really shocking as a young boy to see how much knowledge they had of nature and how they really managed to collaborate with nature and to understand nature.
For years and years, I went to Tonahuixtla and I was seeing this change in the system.

Fernando Laposse and his sister, Sofia, with Delfino Martinez in Tonahuixtla, 1995

Traditional bull plough
Tonahuixtla, up until the mid-’90s or the late ’90s was very, very traditional. They had a bartering system. They traded with crops, with animals, with services. But the whole farming structure of the country changed after 1994, after the North American Free Trade Agreement.
This completely turned agriculture on its head in Mexico. Because it was the introduction of large-scale agro-industrial operations to the country, subsidized by the government. They would give these agricultural packages, and they started to spray herbicides everywhere, and they started to plant these really nitrogen-consuming crops. And that put an end to the thousand-year-old system of the milpa.
Narrator: The milpa is a traditional agricultural system that worked around some of the issues that came with planting corn. Namely, its tendency to erode the soil.
FL: Corn needs to be accompanied by other plants to remain fertile, for the soil not to be eroded. And this is something that the ancient Mesoamericans figured out. The way they learned to harvest corn is by combining it with two other key plants. One is black beans and the other one is pumpkins.
Black beans have this ability to fix nitrogen back into the soil. That balances out the consumption of nitrogen of corn. Indigenous people found out that if you simultaneously plant pumpkins at the base of the corn and the beans, what the pumpkins do is they start to spread out really quickly, producing these really lush, big leaves. This allows for humidity to stay on the ground, which helps the other two plants. But most importantly it blocks sunlight from reaching the ground, which means it effectively acts as a weed control system, as a weed killer.
Narrator: So what happened when Mexican agriculture adopted industrial corn and abandoned the milpa system?
FL: That, in turn, started to eradicate all the fragile balance that these people developed over 9,000 years. It started to erode the soil to the point where you couldn’t grow anything anymore.
This happened all over the country, but I think it’s particularly sad how I saw it in Tonahuixtla because Tonahuixtla is 80 kilometers from the oldest archaeological site that evidences the beginnings of corn domestication. You’re really talking about the epicenter of corn. So losing corn there is just so tragic.
But also it had devastating social consequences. Because of the implementation of this new agricultural system, you destroyed the soil, and the destruction of that soil led to the inability for them to feed themselves. This is a community that has always been extremely poor, but at least they could feed themselves. When you take that away from them, there’s nothing left there.
What happens? It causes migration. The town was abandoned, the fields were abandoned. And it just goes to show how this concept of one solution fits all can be so disastrous. Instead of really taking a look at, okay, what is this region about? How are they practicing agriculture? How can we maybe potentialize this, still playing within the system that works? No, they try to force them to grow corn as they do in the American Midwest, with big tractors, with a lot of chemicals.
The chemicals ruin the soil, the tractors roll down the mountainsides because it’s such a mountainous place. It was just a completely ridiculous switch, and we’re still paying the consequences of that 35 years down the line.

Eroded fields in Tonahuixtla
Narrator: All this was on Laposse’s mind when, at the age of 25, he decided to move back to Mexico after years of studying and practicing design in London.

Peeling corn husks
FL: In Mexico, we have a really important legacy of agricultural development. We still have traditions that are alive, that are not things that you find in anthropology books. This is how things are still made here. There’s a proximity to the land, to natural materials, to raw materials that I think leads to a completely different way of designing and producing.
I decided to apply to this residency that was about looking at food and design. This residency was in Oaxaca in Mexico. Basically, we had three months to come up with a project that was commenting in some way about the culture of food.
Coincidentally, at that point, this was in 2015, Mexico was about to make a very important decision, which was whether to instate a permanent ban on GMOs or not.
Narrator: GMO stands for “genetically modified organism.” More than 87% of corn produced in the United States is genetically modified, and this is done to increase growth and also resist pests.
The topic of GMOs was highly politicized in Mexico during this time because the thought was that if more of these genetically modified plants entered the nation’s agriculture, it would threaten Mexico’s rich biodiversity.
FL: I knew that the GMO ban was probably going to go ahead, but we would still have what’s called the F1 hybrids, which is industrialized corn. That wasn’t going to get banned, and that’s what most of the corn of the world is.
Corn prices are fixed. In this country, you can’t charge more than a certain price, which is fixed by the government, for a kilo of tortilla.
Tortilla here has always been an indicator of the economics of the country. Mexico is a bit like France. If people in France can’t afford a baguette, there will be a revolution. And the same thing happens in Mexico. So the price of corn is always artificially kept low by the government.
What started happening in the late ’90s is that the government allowed for the global trade of seeds, which effectively cut down the prices of corn by two-thirds from one year to the next. So imagine that you could barter with your corn and you could change it for a lot of products because it was worth quite a bit, and from one year to the next, it was worth nothing.
So if you wanted to produce and to have the same money as the year before, you literally had to grow three times more corn, and the only way of doing that was using chemicals and using GMO seeds. And this is exactly what the government started to encourage.
What I realized was the situation of heirloom corn was really, really desperate, really dire. Almost no one was planting heirloom corn anymore.

Saúl Peralta in the cultivating field
Narrator: Heirloom corn is grown from seeds that have been handed down for hundreds and even thousands of years. Losing this plant is a big deal.

Heirloom corn husks for the Totomoxle assembly process
FL: The loss of this biodiversity is detrimental to our cultural heritage because it affects, for example, the amount of recipes that we can make. There’s certain foods that can only be made with heirloom corn. But it’s also a big loss of culture, agricultural culture. It’s an offense as well to our Indigenous communities, because corn is still considered a sacred plant.
So how do you protect your heirloom corns? You have to look at the economics. You have to look at the challenges that small-scale family farming and Indigenous farming faces in Mexico. They just simply cannot make a living out of their crops now. And unfortunately planting and harvesting the Indigenous way has become expensive. You see it when you go to the supermarket. The organic stuff is always more expensive. This is exactly what happens here.
The way for me to find a way to finance their traditional system was to create Totomoxtle.
Narrator: Totomoxtle is a design project that Laposse developed in collaboration with the Tonohuixtla community.
FL: Totomoxtle effectively means corn husks. The word itself is one of the words used to describe the husks of the corn in several of our Indigenous languages. When you’re talking about totomoxtle, people here immediately know what part of the corn you’re talking about, and I thought that was really poetic.
What Totomoxtle is is a new material. It’s a veneer made with the husks of the corn, and it’s using specifically heirloom corn. Heirloom corn from Mexico has all of these wonderful colors that are present on the grains, but they are also present on the leaves.
The Totomoxtle technique is essentially like making a jigsaw puzzle. What we do is we take the leaves at the end of the life cycle of corn, once they’re fully dry, and we work with it as if it was wood veneer. We flatten it, we iron it, and we glue it to be able to be worked in. We laminate it onto paper, and then we have a variety of methods to cut it into shapes and to reassemble it to create continuous surfaces.
Narrator: Picture a lightweight sheet with a smooth surface, like the kind you’d find on a wooden table. But instead of being a single color, you have this dazzling array of geometric shapes varying from honey yellow to salmon pink to a dark purple-brown, all fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle.
FL: That’s what Totomoxtle is in a nutshell. But it’s also a social project and a project about biodiversity. We really focused on creating a self-sustaining system, which looks into small-scale farming economies, Indigenous rights, land rights, erosion, and trying to really talk about diversity.
We give economic incentives to start preparing land the traditional way, meaning you have to turn the soil, you have to do it with bulls and plow, because tractors just cannot navigate these lands, it’s too steep. You have to use manure from animals to fertilize instead of chemical fertilizers. We pay for all of that.

Totomoxle assembly process

Planting seeds by hand
We’ve created seed stock that we give to new members of the project for free. They plant those seeds with the help of this initial economic incentive that we give to them, and then towards the end of the season, once the corn is reaching its full maturity, we’ve developed a tool to cut the leaves really cleanly. It’s like a bench that you can sit on and it has this circular blade. You can turn the corn around this blade and it separates the leaves really cleanly. We lend these machines around the whole town with all the farmers that are part of the project, and then we buy the leaves from them.
There is a third source of revenue, which is we’ve established a local workshop in this building that was completely abandoned and disused. We brought this building back to life. That’s where we have our workshop where people can come and get trained, and within a couple of days, they’re part of the team. That’s where the transformation happens from raw leaves to final Totomoxle.
Narrator: Process and collaboration are key to Laposse’s work.
FL: Most of the work that I’ve done as a designer is not really the material or the end product. A lot of it has been designing all the tools and the processes to ensure a consistent quality control, but also to allow anyone in the village to become an artisan or a new craftsperson within two or three days and to be producing to the same standards as someone that has been there for years.
I think a lot of Mexican designers nowadays have this thing about going to communities that are already practicing a craft, and quote-unquote “elevating” their craft through this design. But that’s a model that I’m really against, because it’s appropriating an existing craft.
In this case, we’re not appropriating anything. We are empowering traditional agricultural practices by creating a new craft, a craft that did not exist. No one there was producing corn veneer. So it’s creating a new craft and it’s creating a new relationship between the farmers and the craftspeople, which are the same people. But by doing this, there’s a new interest in planting corn.

Cutting Totomoxtle on the handpress
Another thing that we’re really looking at is how to use the pre-existing social arrangement that they have. For example, the project was started with almost no money, but the way that we’ve managed to rally all these people behind the project, was to tap into their social structures.
Tonahuixtla is what’s called an ejido, which means all the lands are communally owned. The town’s decisions are made through a structure of what’s called the Indigenous Assembly, which is a council of elders that comes together to come up with decisions about what’s the best for their village.
These assemblies were not practiced anymore because of this hardcore migration and the social erosion of the village. With the construction of this new workshop, we are creating space for them to have their assemblies again and that was thanks to Delfino. Delfino became one of the elders of the assembly, and he was the spokesperson that really managed to amplify my ideas and convince everyone to get behind the project.
This project belongs to Delfino and the community as much as me.
Just before the pandemic, we were invited to the World Economic Forum and there was an opportunity for Delfino and Nicolás, another one of the farmers, to take to the stage and speak about their reality, and I think that is part of the power of design. You can really start to create these interactions between people that would never cross paths.

Delfino Martinez in the Totomoxtle workshop
Narrator: Laposse’s project is deeply tied to a concept called circularity, and this is an important part of sustainable practices. Circularity aims to reduce waste as much as we can while ensuring the products we make last for as long as possible.

Lucía Dimas Herrera with corn harvest and colored leaves
FL: Circularity is not a new concept, but regeneration is becoming this kind of new mainstream idea. Effectively, I’ve been practicing regeneration for the last eight years, but it wasn’t a term that was recognized within design, so my project was always thrown into this idea of waste. It’s so much more than that. We’ve gone through such pains to reintroduce these varieties of corn, to create a whole system. It’s not about waste.
People in this village are planting these corns to produce Totomoxtle. The main goal of these crops are now to produce the veneer. The waste, if you want to see it as waste, is the grain. How many projects can say that the byproduct of their production is food?
We’ve created a system where we’ve produced a new product, which gives complete financial independence from a market in which they will always lose—the industrialized corn market. They can’t compete with an industrial farm. So this is a way for them to meet all of their economic needs for their families, and eat well.
Narrator: But Totomoxtle is doing something even bigger than that. It’s giving a way to preserve and revive a culture that might otherwise be lost.
FL: Most of the stakeholders of the project right now in this village are returning migrants. These are all people that spent decades working in the fields in the United States—illegally, of course. A lot of the people that left in the late ’90s from Tonahuixtla are back, and it was a really important moment for me to be able to say, “Okay, let’s make the situation where they don’t feel the need to migrate again.” And this is what we’re achieving with this.
But also, it’s about reclaiming all of the knowledge that we lost. We lost our best farmers through this change in the system, and a lot of them are coming back now. It’s about finding alternative ways for them to see a future back in Mexico.
For me, the biggest legacy and the biggest achievement of our Indigenous communities is the legacy of working with nature to create a wealth of biodiversity.
In a time where we’re completely lost about what’s going to be the future of humanity in relationship to nature, if we are looking to create a future where we’re going to live in harmony with nature, we have to look at how our Indigenous communities live. We have to look at how they structure their communities because they are the most radical, alternative people right now.
I always draw a comparison with the punk movement. Punks were always about the anti-system, and obviously, the punk movement got completely swallowed by capitalism. But, I think the most punk thing you can do nowadays is to be an Indigenous farmer. It’s completely going against the system. It’s completely renouncing capitalism. It’s completely renouncing consumerism. Part of the project is this. It’s giving visibility to these alternative ways of living.

Ancient Mixtec pyramid stones found in one of the Totomoxtle fields
This episode was produced and edited by Arlette Hernandez, with mixing and sound design by Brandi Howell and music by Chad Crouch.
MoMA Audio is supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies.
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