Centli Grinders In Chile

Food is an essential resource for the survival of civilizations. For the women who took on the task of feeding their people, it would lead to some unintended consequences. Centli grinders would become enslaved by their own creation of domesticated centli. As a patriarchy started to develop, women were left with the backbreaking tasks. In order to cope with the difficulty, they employed methods of resistance and informal control.
The domestication of Centli or corn was all thanks to the women who had the ingenuity to make a small plant, roughly the size of an acorn, larger through means of selectively planting, or adding other ingredients. They figured out how to make a meal worthy of feeding their peoples by using their skills as planters. …show more content…
The spicy ingredient allowed for the disguise of other, less edible additions to food. In other words, women could add fecal matter, spit, and menstrual blood to the dough of the tortilla without having to worry of detection since the chilis were so strong in flavor the extra ingredients would go unnoticed. Much like the herbs used these same centli grinders, this was a form of resistance that somewhat undermined the health of those who ate the tortilla. Although it was not as effective as the poison meant specifically for undermining health, it was a way to get back at ungrateful children and useless husbands. When the Spanish came and introduced the smallpox epidemic, women who got the disease found a new ingredient for their tortillas. This new ingredient was put to use when women grew tired of the Spanish men that came in and demanded food. Not only did they have to feed more people, but they had to put up with the overall repulsiveness of the Spanish.
The informal power of centli grinders through the use of La Llorona, and resistance in the form of adding otherwise inedible foods to the tortilla were psychological relief and forms of control that helped centli grinders deal with their tasks. Ungrateful children who often wasted food by playing with it, and men who avoided helping to feed their communities in fear of losing masculinity were a great burden. Without the centli grinders that put up with all of this, their civilization would have easily fallen apart. It is thanks to them that there was land for the Spanish to