Doga Tekin

Huitlacoche, a fungus that has long coexisted with teosinte grasses and corn, holds diverse meanings across communities: an ancestrally significant food and medicine for some Indigenous peoples of North America (Villagrán et al. 2023), a “traditional food” in Mexico (Castellanos & Bergstresser 2014), a corn pathogen for U.S. agricultural institutions, and a “foreign delicacy” for U.S. restaurateurs. This linguistic anthropological project follows huitlacoche as a material and sign across sites in the U.S. and Mexico to examine how its political-economic entanglements and meanings are transformed discursively. Through ethnographic research with San Diego’s People of Color Fungi Community (POCFC), interviews with mycologists and huitlacoche producers, and archival research, I examine how huitlacoche’s value is negotiated through qualia (embodied, culturally mediated sensory experiences) that emerge across interconnected nodes, including agricultural markets, culinary industries, scientific institutions, and grassroots cultural organizations. This research contributes to scholarship on semiotics, political economy, and multispecies studies by developing the concept of “qualic assemblages” to analyze how material-semiotic interactions shape identity-making, knowledge production, and commodification. It further illustrates how Indigeneity is negotiated through dynamics of im/mobility as organizers navigate, resist, and transform huitlacoche’s market dynamics, and supports POCFC organizers’ efforts to share the “Indigenous story” of huitlacoche.