# And Wheat Completed the Cycle: Flour Mills, Social Memory, and Industrial Culture in Sonora, Mexico

"The abandoned flour mills throughout the region," said a Mexican researcher interviewed during fieldwork in northern Mexico, "are the equivalent for Sonorans of the pyramids in Central Mexico." In this talk about her research as a Fulbright Fellow in Sonora, Mexico for the last nine months, folklorist and anthropologist Maribel Alvarez explores the role of wheat - a grain introduced by the Spanish to Mexico in the 16th century - as a central element in the construction of a distinct regional identity that prides itself on a simultaneous, and often contradictory, association with tradition AND modernity. As an alternative to the corn-based cultures of Mesoamerica and the ancient Southwest, Alvarez's work interrogates the role of social memory, desire, and nostalgia in relationship to the invention of patrimony. Her research on wheat embraces a multidisciplinary approach that illuminates in both scholarly and popular ways the existence of a "wheat-based worldview" in Sonora expressed through what Sonorans eat, how they talk, how they labor, and what they deem to be the greatest contribution of Sonoran farmers to humanity.

- Kind: Talk
- Year: 2010
- By: American Folklife Center
- Genres: Science, Industrial and advertising
- Archive: [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/item/2021688434/)
- Licence or status: Rights statement at the Library of Congress (as the archive states it)
- Credit: Library of Congress
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/loc/2021688434?play=1)