16 Creole Interferences: A Conflict over Biodiversity and Ownership in the South of Brazil Ana Delgado and Israel Rodríguez-Giralt Back to Place: On How Creole Seeds became Public Entities In Latin American history, the term creole ( crioulo in Portuguese, criollo in Spanish) stands for “person native to a locality” and has been used to designate the descendants of those who emigrated from Europe. 1 It refers to those who were born here. Thus, creole evokes colonial stories of displacement, delocalizations, and relocalizations, stories of the coexistence of different worlds that occurred as encounters in the “contact zone” (see Cukierman in this volume). Although the history, experience, and meaning of the creole in Brazil has been much discussed and even questioned (Ribeiro 2000), less has been written about how Brazilian law has been a pioneer in the acknowledgment of creole seeds ( semente crioula). As defined by the new Brazilian Act on Seeds, creole seeds are those seeds that have been developed, adapted, or pro- duced in situ by local farmers and by landless and indigenous people over the years. In this context, creole thus refers to a set of relations and practices that are anchored in a certain space (here) as well as referring back to a certain time (tradition). Unlike commercial seeds, creole seeds are presented as embodying diversity and being old. Yet, in a sense, they are always new entities, as they are endlessly adapting to local environmental conditions, always in a temporary state, waiting for their next realization. In this chapter, we explore how the once neglected local seeds have been called back into being as legal and public entities under the name of “creole” and how they have coexisted with an already present legal entity, the commercial seed. As we shall see, this coexistence developed as a conflictive situation in which creole seeds, despite being diverse and temporary entities, had to be stabilized somehow. Attempts at integrating the creole seeds into national legal, scientific, and bureaucratic systems resulted in a number of interferences, in-between zones in which new ways of identify- ing, classifying, and registering the seeds had to be produced and new forms of owner- ship recognized. This chapter tells the story of those encounters and generations. It does so by evoking the idiom of displacement, conviviality, and disruption that is,