El Maíz del Abuelo: Fidel Márquez Sanchez’s Legacy and Mexico’s Historical Maize Agriculture

The Green Revolution was an era of scientific development in productive agricultural methods and technologies in the mid-twentieth century. High-yielding seed varieties, artificial fertilizers, irrigation infrastructure, pesticides, and herbicides all developed from this period. Texcoco, Mexico was the center of much of the Green Revolution's education and research from the 1940s onward at the Autonomous University of Chapingo, a prestigious agricultural school, with funding from the US-based philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation. Powerful consequences in the globe's agriculture emerged from the Green Revolution, including the production of maize, a staple crop in Mexico, especially for Indigenous and campesino populations. My abuelo, Fidel Márquez Sanchez was an agricultural science professor and researcher of maize breeding at the Autonomous University of Chapingo with the support of his wife, Elvira Ortiz Cereceres. In this thesis, I interview former colleagues, conduct archival research, and examine literature of the period to understand my grandparents' contributions to the Green Revolution and use their stories to add depth to historical narratives about this period. I argue that my abuelo's research, despite its funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, strived to empower Mexican campesinos with plant breeding methods in the face of commercial and genetically modified intensive maize agriculture.