With trepidation, I slowly put one foot in front of the other. I could barely keep up with my new friend. People affectionately call her Mamita Rosa. She was taking me to the small plot of corn that she tends on the outskirts of her village. We walked alongside an ancient terraces that the Incas built. Today, people living in the Andes have repurposed these old raised agricultural beds into footpaths to navigate the steep terrain more easily. Rosa's feet had already memorized how to grasp the ground below.
Rosa cultivates corn for chicha, a fermented drink beloved by the people living in Peruvian highlands. She brews chicha for her family, neighbors, and foreign visitors. Her chicha flows at markets, weddings, baptisms, festivals, funerals, and the sowing and harvesting of crops.
What people make to drink is a perennial fascination of mine. My curiosity seems to have no end because there are countless stories to discover and tell. For millennia, humans have been foraging and domesticating the seeds, fruits, roots, and barks of a vast array of plants to make beverages. Those potable concoctions have helped shape the cultural, political, and economic spheres of society. And structure quotidian existence and the rituals and celebrations that punctuate life's arch.
Corn is ubiquitous in North America. In 2020, farmers planted 92 million acres of corn. For me, the large-scale industrial production of hybrid cultivars renders the crop mundane. In the highlands of Peru, corn nourishes people and enriches culture. Chicha is not just a beverage; it is also a sacrament. Fermenting corn kernels into chicha produces a liquid that helps people connect to the divine through the fertility of the Earth.
Rosa served me my first glass of the frothy sour-sweet corn beer in her kitchen, which doubles as a daytime bar. Over several weeks, I learned more about her operation through participant observation. Rosa starts making chicha before sunrise. When the morning light has fully flooded the small alleyway in front of her house, she ties a red plastic bag to the end of a broomstick and places it above her front door. This signals to passersby that she is open.
People trickle in and out of her kitchen bar between morning and noon. When someone enters, she rises from the fire that she is tending in the corner of the room. This fire serves the dual purpose of heating her house and simmering the corn mash that she will ferment into chicha. She uses the leftover seed-less dried cobs as kindling. Nothing goes to waste. She stands up from squatting, pushes her heavy black braids behind her ears, and walks towards the two waist-high ceramic vessels sitting on the other side of the room. She ladles out a serving of chicha into an oversized glass and hands it to her patron. He fishes for a few coins in his pocket, hands them over, and then sits down and quietly imbibes.
At midday, her chicheria reaches a full occupancy of five people. Men on their lunch break rest on wooden benches that line the wall opposite the chicha vessels and fire. The quiet morning suddenly erupts into storytelling, gossip, and laughter. Her pace quickens, and she moves swiftly around the room to refill the oversized glasses. Then, at the sun's first hint of winding down, Rosa removes the broomstick above her door and closes for the day.
Learning about chicha production in Peru opened my eyes to a far more exciting story about corn's historical and contemporary use. Coming soon, in part two of this blog post series, I weave together three threads to tell how the humble seeds of a wild grass plant helped catalyze the building of empires while continuing to play a role in maintaining ancient traditions in the face of cultural infiltration. Please subscribe, and I will let you know when it is published.
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