Thinking with Maíz: A Conversation with Vick Quezada and Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra

This podcast interview is the seventeenth installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey

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I recently had the pleasure of bringing performance artist, theorist, and sculptor Vick Quezada (they/them) into conversation with Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra (he/him), a genomics researcher at U.C. Davis who studies the genetic basis of adaptation in maize and its wild relatives. Through the lens of art, science, cultural history, and language, we explore the co-evolution of maíz and humans.

Our conversation ranges from the name of the plant across contexts (maíz/maize/corn), to the materiality of maíz as a template for queer survival, to the possibilities for generative thinking across disciplines as distinct as performance practice and plant genetics, to the radical shifts in attention necessary to dismantle colonial notions of separate-ness. We find a very satisfying commonality in understanding the interdependence of people and maíz over thousands of years as an intimate dialogue between plants and people.

Stream or download our conversation here.

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Interview Highlights

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

M. Hamilton: Vick, I’m curious about the different ways that you relate to maíz in your performances. Can you please describe the ways that you think of maíz, the ways you relate to maíz, and how you conceptualize working with it?

Vick Quezada: Maíz is far more than a material or a medium in my work. It is an ancestor, a kin, a site of historical trauma, a template for queer survival. But also, it is the way that plants and humans learned to talk to each other and come together.

In Mesoamerican cosmology, maíz possesses its own deep temporal memory and historical agency. When I work with it, I’m entering into a reciprocal dialogue with a consciousness that predates colonial borders.

For example, the reality that maíz is monoecious, meaning a single plant containing both male and female reproductive organs, is central to my exploration of queer, trans ecology. Western colonialism imposed a strict, rigid gender binary on the Americas, using it as a tool of discipline and assimilation. By highlighting the monoecious nature of maíz, I am unearthing a pre-colonial reality where fluid, non-binary, and multi-gendered existence is entirely natural, sacred, and foundational to sustenance itself.

Then, weaving together corn with rope to fashion a tool of pleasure reclaims the plant from the violence of a heteronormative, colonial history. It merges erotic liberation with ecological indigeneity, demonstrating that queer and trans realities are not modern Western inventions, but are literally rooted in the ancient flora and soil of this continent.

Another work that I did was Harvest of 1519. The year 1519 marks the arrival of Hernán Cortés in Mexico and the beginning of the violent disruption of Mesoamerican life. The Harvest of 1519 combines classical portraiture with modern mestizos and the subject and presence of maíz. In doing so, it disrupts the Euro-centric archive. In the Harvest of 1519, maíz functions as a historical witness to the Mestizaje identity, the mixing of European and Indigenous lineages, by juxtaposing the European artistic tradition with a sacred Indigenous staple. The piece confronts the structural violence of colonization, while asserting that our survival, like the cultivation of maíz, is an ongoing act of resistance.

MH: You talk about working with maíz as a collaborator. For example, in your Seed-Unseed performance pilgrimage, the planter, the tiller, and the maize precede you, and your legs are providing the power. Would you say you are performing with the plant and the ancestors?

VQ: Sure, absolutely. I think that that’s a fair thing to say.

For me, the wording had changed from “humans had genetically altered” maíz to “humans were listening.” Humans were listening, and the plants were talking. I think that this was probably that moment when they began to communicate. There had to have been a communication for humans to be able to go from point A to point B with the plant.

So, I think that we are in dialogue.

My grandmother used to talk to plants, and I think that her grandmother used to do that. I think that it’s just something that capitalism and patriarchy has severed.

MH: Jeff, how does your lab consider the mutuality between corn and people?

Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra: Broadly speaking, my lab uses computational approaches to look at DNA sequence data of plants to learn about their evolutionary history. We spend a lot of time thinking about maize and human coevolution.

I really love the metaphor of a dialogue between maize and humans. I tend to think of that dialogue in terms of allele frequencies and selection coefficients—so, in terms of evolutionary models where changes in one will affect changes in the other. But I very much agree that there’s a dialogue.

Maize and many crops simply can’t exist without human existence, right? If you leave a maize field alone for ten years, it’ll essentially go extinct. It can’t keep itself going without humans. And similarly, many peoples around the world now wouldn’t be around or couldn’t survive as well without maize. There really is this interdependency. Maize couldn’t move across the Americas or move places without people, and societies are dependent on having a staple crop like maize.

But I think the interrelation is, as Vick alluded to, much more intricate than that. Farmers selecting for specific varieties or different culinary or cultural uses have an impact on the evolutionary trajectory. Changing or selecting for plants that are a particular color or a particular type of grain changes allele frequencies over generations.

It really is a dialogue, and it goes both ways. Humans adapt their cultural practices. People adapt how they’re cooking and processing the food based on the biochemical properties of the plant. The plant is requiring changes in human activity. And certainly cultivating a maize field required changes in human settlement and culture, etc.

What we do to plants affects their evolution, but the plants that we live with and work with and depend on on a day-to-day basis are also impacting our evolution as humans.

MH: We, human people, and our ecological partners are facing social environmental pressures that threaten our futures. Borrowing from scholar Tina Campt, from your perspective as a researcher and a teacher, what action is necessary in the now to make human and plant futures more possible?

JRI: Broadly speaking, we need to preserve diversity.

Some of our best approaches to preserving biodiversity is conserving land. For maize in particular, that’s important because it’s also people’s relationship to the land that is important.

For maize, because it’s an important, agricultural commodity, there’s what is referred to as ex situ conservation, where people have collected maize seeds and put them in germplasm banks in refrigerated conditions. And that has important uses, but it’s not the best way to preserve diversity.

There’s some really wonderful work by plant evolution and maize biologist Mauricio Bellon, who talks about the role of traditional farmers in Mexico in continuing to evolve maize. Diversity isn’t a snapshot. We can’t just grab a million maize seeds and we’ll be done. Farmers continue to evolve maize to new pathogens, new climates, new adaptation, new uses, new environments, etc. They play an important role in continuing maize evolution.

This starts getting at more socioeconomic questions than biological. How do we convince traditional smallholder farmers to use traditional varieties instead of something that might have higher yield or greater ability to sell on the market? Or, how do we convince somebody to continue a smallholder farm when they could move to the city, get a job, and earn more money? So, we need to encourage in situ conservation—conserving maize diversity in the places where it was developed and is continuing to evolve. How we continue to foment, encourage, and allow smallholder, traditional farmers to continue evolving and working with their crops is what we need to focus on and think about.

VQ: The labor of the now requires for us to have a radical shift in attention. I think that active listening is important—not just to human narratives, but also to plants, to animals.

These conversations need to continue in order to dismantle Western capitalism and colonial illusions of separation.

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Featured image: Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra examines maíz. Photo by Sasha Bakhter, 2023.

Vick Quezada (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist exploring Indigenous-Latinx histories and contested lands, particularly the U.S.-Mexico Border. Using ceramics, sculpture, and performance, they merge Indigenous knowledge, queer histories, queer ecologies, and Rascuache—a Nahuatl term embodying survival and liberation through repurposed objects. A fellow at Socrates Sculpture Park (2024-25), Quezada received prestigious accolades, including the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship (2021-22) and recognition as a Yale Fellow (2022). Their work has been featured in The New York Times, Art News, and El Museo del Barrio’s La Trienal (2020). At Stony Brook University, Quezada teaches sculpture. Website. Contact.

Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra is a Professor in the Department of Evolution and Ecology at the University of California, Davis. His research focuses on evolutionary genomics, with an emphasis on understanding the genetic basis of adaptation in plants, particularly maize and its wild relatives. By integrating computational genomics with field and experimental approaches, his work explores processes such as domestication, natural selection, and the impact of human activity on plant evolution. His research often bridges disciplines, collaborating with breeders, archaeologists, and ecologists to connect genomic patterns with environmental and historical change. Website. Bluesky. Contact.

M. Hamilton is a researcher and artist, a dissertator in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a 2025 graduate of the Studio Art M.F.A. program at UW-Madison in the performance and time-based media area. Hamilton earned their B.A. in art history with minors in sculpture and intermedia and Appalachian studies from Berea College in 2021. Hamilton’s research focuses on trans methods in ecological art practices, on land-relations in capitalist ruins. They are a co-founder of the Borghesi-Mellon workshops project Trans NatureCultures. Contact.