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Paper short abstract:

Mexican native maize disregards human-made and imagined boundaries: its genes flow to other plants, its animated mobility creates desired inter-species relationships and identities. GM maize, by venturing outside labs, disrupts relationships and boundaries through its unruly,unwanted mobility.

Paper long abstract:

According to traditional Mexican farmers (and to some genetic and crop scientists) native maize has a healthy habit of disregarding human-made and imagined boundaries. Maize is an out-crossing, wind-pollinating plant, whose genes flow and cross-pollinate specimens in both close and distant fields, and can even mix with teosinte, maize´s wild ancestor. Maize "naturally" travels across individual plants, species´ genomes, farmers' properties, local communities, and regional and national borders, and thus its animated mobility creates relationships not only between plants, and between plants and humans, but also between humans themselves (for instance, through seed exchange). Furthermore maize, through its freewheeling or managed movement, co-creates geopolitical, social, cultural, and ethnic identities and boundaries.

On the other hand, crop biotechnologists see transgenic maize as obedient and predictably (in)mobile, with genetically modified genes which do not venture outside the secure boundaries of laboratories or experimental fields. However, after DNA from US-grown GM maize was found in native crops (Quist and Chapela 2001), this techno-scientific discourse on the impossibility of transgene boundary crossing was challenged. The unruly flow of transgenes was considered by many farmers, scientists, activists and a large part of the wider society as a form of malefic mobility, a kind of pollution that disturbs the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, safety and danger. The unwanted mobility of genetically engineered constructs not only remakes intra and inter-species relations between plants and humans, but also reconfigures geopolitical, social and cultural boundaries and entanglements between different forms of human agency (scientific and otherwise).