UCLA

The fungus huitlacoche moves across knotted semiotic, agroecological, and political economic relations through which its meaning, value, and subjectivities—as a being, relative, food, pathogen, commodity, and others—are continually negotiated. Drawing from five years of ethnographic research with diasporic Indigenous organizers of the San Diego-based People of Color Fungi Community, interviews with scientists, farmers, and chefs, and analyses of digital content, regulatory policies, and archival materials, this dissertation follows the fungus (and thus the abovementioned negotiations) throughout discursive, spatiotemporal, and institutional sites in the U.S. and Mexico. Within, between, and across these sites, the dissertation asks how the identities, mobilities, and pasts and futures of huitlacoche, maize, and people are entangled, and what these entanglements reveal about knowledge, authority, and multispecies belonging and survival. More specifically, it asks: how do epistemic practices of naming, classifying, archiving, and storytelling produce different ways of knowing and being with huitlacoche? How do relationships with huitlacoche and maize mediate the formation of individual subjectivities and collective identities? How do histories of land, movement, colonialism, and interspecies survival shape the terms of belonging, and what spatiotemporal possibilities assemble in different ontologies of belonging? Finally, how do political economic regimes, institutions, and infrastructures shape the qualitative evaluations through which huitlacoche comes to be recognized as different things; and how do these evaluations, in turn, reproduce, contest, or transform the systems that organize the fungus’ value, mobility, governance, relations, and survival? These questions weave in and out of chapters as huitlacoche gets drawn into different configurations of bodies, histories, institutions, infrastructures, ideologies, semiotic associations, and forms of expertise, making particular qualities and relations more perceptible and consequential than others. With this, one of the project’s primary contributions to anthropological conversations is developing a methodological framework that attends to how material-discursive qualitative evaluations mediate relations of power between people, species, and institutions.