Broken By Bread

In the small population where I grew up, characteristics that seemed apparent were that people with education had status, argument was solicited, repair and reuse were ubiquitous values. Domestic spaces were kept pristine. We practiced Hinduism.

My country had four people in it. It was my parents’ house. I was born into a Midwestern culture that saw my family as a single thing: Indian. And we are a single thing, just not that thing: we’re us.

It took me a long time to understand that my parents’ house did not represent all of India and that although my face is quite Indian, there are critical ways in which I’m not Indian.

Having created a personal history of being from a tiny foreign country within the US, of course, the context I had invented for that country was far from objective. I am forever searching for an actual place, not only imaginary, where I belong. Professionally, I create plays and installations, fashioning worlds whose stories I determine. I have lived in many places to get to know a plethora of stories, looking for one that fits.

In the Southwestern United States, I’ve found a place where migration itself is a story of belonging. Origin stories of the Hopi people are defined by constant movement. I have a particular and personal excitement about the existence of these stories. Migration does not signify distress or discomfort; the world is paradise, and moving through it is a pleasure. Checking in on things is a way of keeping things in check: stewardship means using things within limits and then moving on. Taking care of this world is the greatest joy of being alive, and to do that, you have to keep seeing, asking, moving. “A time came when the Hopi were scattered across the land, one group separated from another, but all looking for a place whose name they did not yet know.” (Courlander, 1987) Some Hopi stayed put for 300 or 600 years, but this was still considered temporary, because the goal – nebulous but sacred – was to keep looking for the others, kin in other places. These stories help me make sense of my own amorphous sense of place and time, talking about how being from somewhere can be temporary but also deep, and being recently arrived can mean a few years or a few centuries.

“We are moving now. We have always been moving. Life is not still.” (Swentzell & Perea, 2016)

Excited that my diasporic unrootedness has landed me inside the stories of this place, I have dug deeper: into the soil. Many people do this in New Mexico: looking for roots in the arid desert, we turn to the ground itself. In searching, I’ve found a greater sense of belonging because of a privileged crop that grows here: corn.

“Corn is Mother … Corn in the Southwest is the essence of life.” (Frank, 2002)

What is readily available to eat here aligns me in kinship with New Mexico. This is a corn-centric culture. Unlike in more European-influenced places, corn is featured more in New Mexican cuisine than wheat. Corn represents values that I hold dear: a convivial, we’re-all-here-to-help-each-other style of planting where the seed is combined with other plants; its many nestled kernels getting along side by side feels polytheistic, like me. Corn feels like my gateway drug, my welcome mat to New Mexico. Just as I did in Ohio, I locate myself by defining which values belong and do not belong to my idea of New Mexico. Here, I belong through my gut. I’m intolerant of gluten. Corn soothes my identity; wheat makes me tense. While cultural debates abound in this state, one I want to address here is the one that most troubles my sense of belonging: the friction in New Mexico between the culture of wheat and the culture of corn.

There is a perceived increase in wheat sensitivity, but because of the amorphous and undiagnosed nature of the complaint, it’s hard to get accurate statistics: between .5 and 6% of people experience sensitivity to gluten. It’s commonly believed increased sensitivity has developed because there’s been a rise in the proportion of gluten in cultivated wheat. (Igbinedion et al., 2017) Although the language we often use is that people are intolerant of wheat, there is another framing. If I can go ahead and assign the wheat plant as representative of a cultural perspective, I might accuse wheat of being intolerant of people!

I recently co-authored a book chapter called “Pedagogy of Mess.” (Cadieux & Ranpura, 2025) It’s about asking students to work in conditions of messiness, allowing them to practice acting amidst the messiness of real-world ecology. They have to parse what at first is a tangle and join ideas that seem quite dissimilar in order to move forward through mess. This teaching method trains students in adaptive strategies and resilience.

Comparing how wheat and corn are grown, in traditional co-planting of corn, miscegenation is a strength. The history of wheat planting, on the other hand, tends to sharpness: wheat has a forceful history in New Mexico. Pueblo peoples, already farmers when the Spanish colonizer Oñate came in 1598, were made to grow wheat as a new crop so European missionaries could make communion wafers. Oñate’s expedition was focused on spreading Catholic missions, so the communion wafer was central to the colonizing objective. (Trigg, 2004) Wheat was used in a military manner during the Long Walk of the Diné people from eastern Arizona to eastern New Mexico in the 1860s. Their lands were scorched so as not to produce food, buffalo were killed, and people were rationed wheat flour, lard, coffee, sugar, tinned meat, and, over time, other staples (Frank, 2002) that did not support traditional ways of using knowledge and aborted curiosity and roving as food-finding strategies. Yet these were the strategies that naturally maintained a healthy ecological relationship with the land. Fried wheat dough, called frybread or sopapillas, evolved at this time.

Now we come to corn, a plant that’s been a staple in New Mexico for a thousand years. (Roos, 2021)

Corn was incorporated into the Pueblo Food Experience project, an experiment in which Roxanne Swentzell, permaculturist and cultural advocate, of Santa Clara Pueblo organized twelve participants to spend three months eating only pre-contact foods, meaning foods that were growing in New Mexico prior to the arrival of the Spanish in 1598. Participants’ health improvements were significant: “Two people had lost over fifty pounds each, one woman with severe arthritis could close her hands fully again, and each had far more energy than before.” (Withnal, 2024)

Was all of this due just to corn? Surely not. But corn is a whole culture, and it is a key part of the culture Swentzell was defining with her experiment. Another New Mexican food expert, Lois Ellen Frank, explains how corn is grown: “Corn, beans and squash, called the Three Sisters by many tribes, serve as key pillars in the Native American diet and are considered a sacred gift from the Great Spirit. Together, the plants provide complete nutrition, while offering an important lesson in environmental cooperation. Corn draws nitrogen from the soil, while beans replenish it. Corn stalks provide climbing poles for the bean tendrils, and the broad leaves of squashes grow low to the ground, shading the soil, keeping it moist, and deterring the growth of weeds.” (Frank, 2020) How corn grows is a cultural metaphor. Corn and the people who have lived on this land a long time have evolved together – they are co-adapted. Swentzell explains this idea:

“Putting the environment and us together created a profound thing. Some unexpected ‘fit’ started a domino effect of health, not just in our physical bodies but also in our spiritual lives and lifestyle. I realized that we, the people of this landscape, needed to find our right place again in the system. I once read that it takes twenty generations in the same location for a species (humans included) to genetically adapt to that environment. The Pueblo Food Experience was the result of this experiment.” (Swentzell & Perea, 2016)

I’m not from here. But I like this idea of co-planting so as to make corn grow, co-adaptation so that some foods “fit” better with some human microbiomes — I just know that I can eat well here. If I step around sopapillas and flour tortillas, which annoy my gut, I can easily eat corn tortillas, tamales, tacos, tostadas, posole, chicos, champurrado …

I notice other wonderful features that corn and I have in common, features not shared by wheat. Corn is a kind of symbol of many-ness. Look at all the kernels nestling together: corn and I are polytheistic. The manyness of being Hindu pairs well with like-minded Pueblo spiritualities. And leaving aside the forced adoption of the communion wafer, Catholicism in New Mexico honors saints in a dramatic riot of images whose worship makes me feel at home.

On the other hand is the culture of wheat, insisting on singularity.

Wheat adoption was accelerated by a transition away from subsistence mixed-plot farming. Amaranth, a component of standard mixed cropping in New Mexico and based on Pueblo cultivation, was outlawed in order to promote wheat use. (Nowell, 2021) By the 1930s the typical landscape was wheat and barbed wire; both were imported habits that delegitimized the prior norms of growing amaranth and corn and using shared fields. Wheat became established as symbolizing being well off and modern. (deBuys, 2015)

With increased industrialization, corn became a monocrop. Wheat did this to corn!

Holding onto corn as a support in my argument of personal belonging, I feel satisfied to note all the ways that corn clearly belongs here. Corn cultivation started in New Mexico at least 600 years ago, which is well before the twenty generations Swentzell names as the time span for co-adaptation. Corn arrived in the region – the valley of the Rio Grande – earlier still: around 700CE. Twenty generations is about 500 years, so twenty generations back is around 1500.

Wheat, the interloper, only arrived …

Well, wheat arrived around 1598.

That’s actually not too far off twenty generations ago. So – could wheat be co-adapted to this place, too?

Frank makes an argument about local identity and wheat: “Bread made from wheat was introduced to the New Mexico pueblos in horno ovens, constructed from adobe and earth, further changing the corn-based diet. Once these foods were woven into the Native American diet, in many instances, they became inseparable from the identity of the People.” (Frank, 2023)

But there’s the explicit forceful introduction of wheat for communion wafers, there’s the prohibition against amaranth – which was and is called pigweed – and there’s the colonial disrespect for corn-eating peoples —

Catholic history in New Mexico causes tension, and at the same time Catholic faith is very much embedded here. Syncretism is typical of New Mexican culture; it’s a source of resilience. Pueblo religions and Catholicism are intertwined. If I throw in my own Hinduism, or any other more recently transplanted religion, could I consider that spiritual culture here is co-planted? Is it possible to change the Three Sisters into the Trinity and back again? And if we look closely, isn’t wheat, too, made of many clustered seeds, cute and cuddling godheads?

The amorphous forms that represent Pueblo spirituality feel familiar to me. Architect Rina Swentzell, also from Santa Clara, explains the importance of a simple gray stone in the pueblo: “That place out of which the breath flows, it is the place that we flow in and out of to connect with the other levels of existence that are there simultaneous to this one, but usually all that marks that very incredible place in the earth is a gray stone that is not even special-looking.” (knmedotorg, 2009) In my father’s village in Gujarat, there is a mound on a corner that gets bathed in milk, garlanded, kum kum applied. I asked my mother what it was. She said she didn’t know, maybe Hanuman, maybe Ganesh, maybe Kali — I like the polyphony of interpretations. To me, this is what polytheism means, this cacophony of immanence. Like with corn, being able to use that lens in the pueblos here makes me feel a certain sense of being understood — the same reassurance I get from corn culture.

When I ask my mother, the arbiter of my understanding of my own Indianness, how a polytheistic viewpoint can be the source of so much sectarian violence in India, she explains Hinduism by breaking it down into a lot of categories. She ends by saying, “And Krishna will rebalance dharma and kill the bad people.” This was not what I, with my starry-eyed vision of tolerant multiculturalism, was hoping to hear.

A structure that dots the landscape, that I thought had one assigned function, has a more layered meaning than I have been telling myself. Hornos are earthen egg-shaped ovens visible in many yards and especially noticeable within pueblos. They are used for pueblo bread: a lofted, round, white loaf. I have wondered at their ubiquity: aren’t they signs of cultural capitulation? Ole Bye, who builds hornos in New Mexico, wonders the same thing. (Bye, 2024) It turns out hornos are actually extensions of the technique of pit fire cooking that was already in use pre-contact; in local Tewa language the ovens are called pantes. (Swentzell, 2008) They are not, in fact, strictly for pueblo bread. They are used to cook game and to dry corn for chicos, a food of dried corn kernels that has been eaten for centuries. They are also used for pizza, which has nothing one way or the other to do with the battle of belonging that I am fighting with history, reminding me that history is in a constant, dynamic interaction with the present. Belonging is an evolution. It may not be a fixed state that I will one day, imagining crossing a finish line, achieve.

In fact, the soil here in New Mexico, the ground itself, is being restored and renewed by small farmers up and down the Rio Grande and around the state, many of whom are new here. They are working on soil enrichment and heritage seed renewal, correcting past use that depleted soil due to short-term tactics like overgrazing and monocropping. There are local bakeries where I live, like Bread Shop, Wild Leaven, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, whose owners are turning out breads made from carefully sourced, sustainably-farmed grains that are part of regional community networks.

It turns out my gut, which I rely on to guide me to comfort, may be wrong. Or at least how I’ve interpreted my gut is wrong. Research shows it’s not a gluten-heavy grain that causes indigestion but the fact that it is common to use short fermentation times for bread, times too short to break down sufficient amounts of gluten proteins and certain hard-to-digest carbohydrates. Long fermentation breads might go a long way in reducing the bloating and irritation I associate with wheat. (Suter & Békés, 2020) Fermentation, of all things! It’s what I’ve already written about: fermentation is messiness, it’s feisty. Its wildness is endemic to processing wheat. And being at ease with more mess is what increases the ability to problem-solve in real world ecologies: I am confronted with my own conclusion.

I have been looking for belonging, and as a result I’ve been telling myself a story about colonial oppression tied to wheat grain, the glorious correctness of corn, possessing a special understanding based in polytheistic logic, and migration as a form of belonging. My little story gives me a special sense of being in the right place.

But my story is wrong!

There are not camps of battle, wheat on one side, corn on the other. There’s just a messy field. Picking through a messy field is complicated, but if you take the time to learn what’s there and sort it out, you’ll eventually get what you need to eat.

A messy field within a messy story sounds about right for where I belong, where I feel understood. It’s even paradise just for a minute.

Thank you to Valentine Cadieux and Ole Bye for fecund discussions about the ideas in this article.

🔗 Broken by Bread – PechaKucha Presentation (https://www.pechakucha.com/presentations/broken-by-bread)

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Bye, O. (2024). Women, Wheat, and Wafers: the neglected story of the horno in New Mexico.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a6afcc3b078693423db26ad/t/66e34d4037041454d0ffa270/1726172481524/Slot4_019_Ole-Bye_2024.pdf

Cadieux, K.V., and Ranpura, J. (2025). Pedagogy of Mess: Taking action despite uncertainty. William Moseley, Dan Trudeau, and Paul Schadewald, eds., Gleanings from the Field: Food Security, Resilience and Experiential Learning, Lever Press.

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knmedotorg. (2009, November 30). COLORES | Rina Swentzell: An Understated Sacredness | New Mexico PBS. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zHAiOKN6Vo

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Nowell, C. (2021, August 6). “It could feed the world”: amaranth, a health trend 8,000 years old that survived colonization. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/06/ancient-grain-amaranth-food-trend-indigenous

Roos, D. (2021, November 11). 7 Foods Developed by Native Americans. HISTORY. https://www.history.com/news/native-american-foods-crops

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Swentzell, R. (2008, June). The History of Pueblo Pantes. Droppings; Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute. https://www.roxanneswentzell.net/Permaculture/Droppings062008.pdf

Trigg, H. (2004). Food Choice and Social Identity in Early Colonial New Mexico. Journal of the Southwest, 46(2), 223–252. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40170289

Withnal, E. (2024). Turning Toward the Taproot . El Palacio: Art, History, and Culture of the Southwest. https://elpalacio.org/2018/04/turning-toward-the-taproot