‘Red en Defensa del Maíz’ : Sowing maize is political : Transforming the spheres of the political through collective action

This paper inquires on how the plural understandings of native maize advanced by the RDM contribute to alternative meanings and practices of the political. This paper refers to the discursive practices and organisational articulations of the social struggle advanced by the RDM as the units of analysis. And follows a case study and semi-structured interviews methodology. This research focuses on how their discursive practices and organisational articulations challenge the normative understandings of political formations and political engagement in Mexico. This work departs from having certain general ideas on the conflict of maize contamination mainly anchored in IPE, IR and SSK perspectives. But its theoretical framework is redrawed once interviews are held with the activists of the RDM. Then Post-development and Social Movements theory is used to better facilitate the translation, to the academic language posed herein, of the RDM’s main practices and meaning-makings. The theories used, together with the practices and meaning-makings of the RDM aim to elucidate the manner in which the latter destabilise the normative understanding of ‘the political’ in Mexico (e.g., by entailing political participation that transcends electoral politics) while being inherently grounded in the defense of native maizes in Mexico.